Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has always proven a particularly rich seam for filmmakers hoping to develop their own interpretation of his story. Thus, Dracula has been a rat-like creature, a suave nobleman, an aged warlord, and all manner of subtle variants of same. By no means is every interpretation going to please all of the people, all of the time. I happen to love the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula for instance, a film which was a formative influence on me (it came out when I was twelve). Many other film fans take serious issue over its claims to be in any way ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. And so, it was with mixed feelings that I saw the BBC were about to screen a brand-new interpretation of Dracula, penned by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. Whilst I have nothing but respect for Mark Gatiss’s lifelong love and support of horror cinema, where his frequent co-writer Moffat is concerned, I’m rather warier. To use the word of the age, in his case I often find his re-tellings ‘problematic’. Thus we come to Dracula 2020, an at times reasonably diverting, but far more frequently exasperating skit on the novel which doesn’t seem sure it wants to play for laughs, shock with gore or – most appallingly of all – play to the Twitter choir, the sorts of people with thumbs primed to send out tweets which begin, ‘Well, actually…’ into the echo chamber, having usually decided to share with the world the factoid that ‘Stoker waz gay’; the same people who will already have stopped reading here, were they to find their way here at all, believing somehow that I’m a right-wing Daily Mail reader for daring to quibble. Well, actually…
In this version of the plot, Jonathan Harker is still going to Transylvania to sort out the paperwork for Count Dracula’s property purchase in England, though here we dispense with the ‘stranger in a strange land’ element of the initial journey which is so integral to creating the initial unease in the novel, and in many of the greatest film adaptations; we essentially start with Harker knocking at the castle door. Count Dracula (Claes Bang) is at first aged and enfeebled (why?) but soon begins to feed on Harker, who spends much of his time on-screen steadily weakening; the make-up SFX for this process is admittedly very good. Dracula, by nature of feeding on Harker, is instantly privy to his knowledge and understanding, though he seems to acquire a Cockney accent despite Harker’s own RP accent; anyway, after a disastrous sequence where Harker eventually tracks down the other person in the castle he’s certain he’s seen scuttling around, there’s a vampire baby sequence and a ‘bride’ who seems to live in a Skinner box; Dracula, by now a cruel, wise-cracking, charming arsehole, allows Harker to see one more dawn before breaking his neck and chucking him off the parapet. Harker is sort of undead, though, and able to make his way to a convent in Budapest, where he is cared for.
There he meets an irreligious nun (!) called Agatha Van Helsing; after the twist where she asks outright if Harker has had sexual intercourse with the Count, well, before the opening credits roll as a matter of fact (‘Well, actually…’) Van Helsing being a woman is, I’m sure, intended as another fist-bump twist. When seismic changes are made in a BBC drama, they always follow a reliable pattern – a bit like making a collage by chopping the existing material to pieces, but then laying out the strips in an instantly recognisable pattern. All told, Agatha (Dolly Wells) does well with what she’s given and is able to generate a largely likeable character, but the emphasis on droll one-liners quickly becomes an irritant; hers is not so much a script as a set of slogans, and the same goes for her adversary. Harker is reunited with a disguised Mina, whose wimple is made of far nicer fabric than her wig (seriously, could they not find an actress with their own hair?) but he’s beyond saving, and as Dracula tries to game his way into the convent with its array of armed nuns, Harker eventually revives and invites him in. Cue some nun-centred, and Harker-centred grue.
Agatha seemingly survives, however, and is shown chatting through events with Dracula, as they enjoy a game of chess which leads to one of the three-parter’s most enjoyable about-face moments, though first you have to wait for Gatiss and Moffat to dispense with yet another frightening, brooding sequence (the voyage of The Demeter) which seems now to have turned into Murder on the Varna Express, with a lot of new characters who don’t make it beyond the episode. We have the aged woman of means, the deaf-mute Indian child and her doctor father, the black servant who conveniently manages to verbally challenge on-screen those who would judge him on his race, the nasty young, rich white guy (natch) and his duped bride (nearly all female sexuality here is the province of dreams, memory, or otherwise thwarted through things like ‘fiance being undead’, ‘husband being secretly in love with his African manservant’ or ‘being a nun’). We also have characterisation of all the crew, oh and Dracula is on board, not concealed in monstrous form beneath deck, but striding around eating people ad hoc, something which takes them a while to notice as they seem to be stuck in the 19th Century equivalent of Big Brother, with all the petty interactions this brings.
This is frustrating, as the next episode then seems to feel it has to shoehorn in all of the characters from the book who have been MIA until this point – characters who then get lip service, but little more. There simply isn’t time. Still, Agatha manages to survive long enough to almost off the Count, but can’t, and dies, though getting a grudging respect from Dracula for almost achieving her aim. But he ends up sinking to the bottom of the sea where, in modern Whitby, he finally revives and gets taken to a specialist research centre for study by Zoe, a descendant of Agatha’s (also played by Wells). With me so far?
There’s just about time to get a Lucy Westenra, a Jack Seward, a Quincey Morris and a Renfield (Gatiss) into the final proceedings; once Dracula has mastered WiFi and has a lawyer to get him out, he can handle a mobile phone and so he intercepts a conversation between Jack and Lucy, arranging to meet her. Her utter fearlessness about death assures him that she will make a good new bride, but the intercession of her family choosing cremation puts the kibosh on her being an eternal beauty; it’s not clear to me why Lucy would know and use the archaic word ‘bloofer’ to describe her beauty (or her hallucination of her beauty) but there we go, this is what I mean: when running out of time, pack in those references. Dracula has moved to London; Zoe, Agatha’s relative, drinks a sample of Dracula’s blood, absorbs Agatha’s knowledge, and works to discover what Dracula is afraid of. Turns out, it’s death, and when he has this represented to him, he opts to throw in the towel by feeding on her conveniently diseased, and therefore poisonous blood, because there’s nothing like a bit of narrative expediency.
Along the way, proceedings pause multiple times to offer the audience various ‘Easter eggs’, as nods to existing projects have come to be known. That there is such a term says a lot about how screenplays are written today, as there has been a massive proliferation of Easter eggs, and by the by that is not a sentence I saw myself typing today. I understand this urge to show a bit of group solidarity, and I know that many viewers really enjoy being the first to spot these references; I do, though, feel that a little goes a long way.
Modern horror almost falls over itself to tip the hat to older horrors; Stephen King adaptations are some of the worst offenders here, to the point where it often feels as though the references pre-date the new script. This telling of Dracula was partly filmed at Orava Castle in Slovakia, where (actually) Nosferatu (1922) was filmed almost a century ago; this is impressive, sure and something which was always going to impress horror stalwarts, in I’m sure the same way it made horror stalwart Gatiss go giddy. There are also clear links to Hammer, not least via the blood-red contact lenses used on Claes Bang in some shots. Fine. But did we need the Lugosi ‘I never drink…wine’ line quite so many times? The Cushing/Van Helsing ‘curtains’ reference? And perhaps least forgivable, links to Moffat’s own Doctor Who and Sherlock? I’m not sure if this is pure vanity, or just what constitutes acknowledging one’s fans, but given that it seemed a panic and a rush to end the story in Episode Three, perhaps more time could have been spent on doing that. As it stands, by the time the end credits roll, there are a number of questions and issues which don’t quite bear up, and all the distractions of other references will never cover up for that.
Tonally, this was a hard pill to swallow. Dracula has always been able to withstand a certain amount of camp; you could argue that, between Van Helsing’s phonetic English and Dracula’s rather verbose grandstanding in the novel, Dracula was camp from the very beginning. Claes Bang has some panache here, and he is entertaining on screen. But he goes from moments of deliberate camp to gut-churning cruelty in ways which feel rather unconvincing. I understand that the aim is to show just how little he cares about lives; he likes people, but he doesn’t respect them on any level, and simply wants to drain them for sustenance. Doing this via enforced laughs works in a piecemeal fashion, often breaking the spell of cruelty, or vice versa – rendering the cruelty a little thin, a little rushed, as all things seem rushed, swept along in a race to fit in everything which is deemed necessary.
But I think, for me, the thing which most derails this version is its disposal of subtext. All of the queasy, barely-expressed ideas in Dracula (1897) about sexuality, race, imperialism…you know, the academic Easter eggs, which people still use to write journal articles – they’re there to reap and critique precisely because they aren’t overt. If they were, there’d be nothing to decode. It’s the inability, or refusal to tackle eroticism head on in Dracula which lends the novel its rare power. We can unpack Dracula’s line concerning Harker which reads,’This man belongs to me!’ and, if you like, ponder whether it means sexually, spiritually, proprietorially, or otherwise. The brides are malign and terrifying because Harker is as fascinated with them as he is repulsed. Lucy Westenra as the ‘Bloofer Lady’ is appalling because she uses her sexuality to manipulate the man who would free her soul. It’s a book which absolutely creaks with subtext, and the best films and adaptations retain this unseemly, secret aspect.
The BBC Dracula, in its rage to pander to a generation of short attention spans and worthy agendas, brings the subtexts out into the light, where true to form, they burn away to nothing. The one-liners and modern social mores render it down into a vaudeville Dracula yarn, occasionally funny, splattery entertainment – again, fine – but splattery entertainment which fancies itself as doing something rather radical and profound, really sticking it to those social conservatives, but in fact just whirling through a mess of ideas before finally just copping it. I don’t think I’m a social conservative of any stripe, but – sadly – I felt talked down to by this version throughout. Yes, this version is energetic; yes, it is ambitious in its way, but it still comes across as constructed to satisfy agendas I’m not interested in. I know I’m very much in the minority with these opinions. Ultimately, though, I don’t think this show was ever made for me; having only just got over The War of the Worlds, I will tread with care from now on.