The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 6: Bram Stoker's Dracula

I am always at a loss whether Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula is the best horror film I hate, or the worst horror film that I love.

A superlative visual experience, equally abstract and theatrical, with some of the most striking imagery to be found in a horror film, Bram Stoker's Dracula somehow also manages to serve as perhaps the gauchest movie ever made. It is a film that maddeningly manages to be equal parts inspiration and grave miscalculation. At times it seems like a film not merely at odds with itself, but one that is actively trying to destroy itself.

Dracula was not Coppola’s first foray into horror (nor alas, his last). That would be the Corman produced Dementia 13, a Psycho rip off set on a family estate in Ireland, that involves a contested will and an ax murderer. Coppola was able to give the film a neat little gothic twist. Adding a sense of baroque decay to what was essentially just another AIP cheapie. Moments in the film, such as when the would be Janet Leigh of the picture discovers an underwater shrine have an eerie resonance that belie Coppola’s natural talent and genuine affinity for the genre.

Dracula strives for a similar sense of gothic operatics. When it achieves this, the results are downright exhilarating. When it falls short- well everyone just looks more than a little bit silly.

It all starts off splendidly though. With a prologue charting Dracula’s origin that neatly sums the movie up. With sumptuous career best cinematography by Michael Ballhaus the prologue is strikingly abstract, in part designed like a shadow play with dark silhouettes pantomiming in front of a blood red backdrop, before it explodes into full blown baroque operatics with Dracula renouncing God and an entire church bleeding with the force of his rage. Wojciech Kilar’s haunting score rises to a crescendo and we are threatened with something not seen since Kubrick’s The Shining, a truly horror epic.

Truly one really cannot oversell how startling the visual style of the film is. Particularly the excellent Special Effects, made before the era of CGI inflicted apathy on the audience. All of the effects are practical, most of them are done in camera, silent movie style. Not only does this approach showcase Coppola at his most appealingly movie geekish, it also gives the supernatural in the film a skin crawlingly organic feel (Witness the backwards contortionist crawl of two of Dracula’s brides) not often achieved in horror and not at all in this more fantastic subgenre. (The film even incorporates the advent of silent cinema in its plot, in one of the best sequences Oldman stalks Ryder through an early cinema. An old form of immortality bowing to a new one.)

It’s a daring opening that marries high style and high emotion, a horror film done with only slightly less formalism than Kabuki presented on the level of Shakespearian tragedy.

And then as if to let us know not to get our hopes up, after the credits we launch almost directly into one of Keanu Reeves many, many monologues.

Now as someone who has on occasion unironically enjoyed Keanu Reeves (Seriously, A Scanner Darkly is a very underrated film) it give me no pleasure to say that it is difficult to accurately judge how bad he is in the film. It makes the casting of Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone look like a stroke of genius. It makes Keanu’s work in Even Cowgirl’s Get The Blues look like his turn in My Own Private Idaho. He is saddled with the worst English Accent since Dick Van Dyke croaked out, “Gorry Jee Merry Poakins” and is forced to spend half of the film in a white fright wig that makes him look as though he has mistakenly wandered onto the set from an Andy Warhol Biopic. He also ends up being responsible for what is undoubtedly the worst reaction shot of all time in which when faced with the sight of Dracula feeding an infant to his vampire brides gives an expression that does not communicate terror, revulsion and existential distress so much as it does a severe harshing of his mellow.

Indeed when Keanu arrives at Castle Dracula and begins his scenes with Oldman (now sporting his iconic blood red robe and decrepit snake like old age makeup) The viewer is presented with the uncanny sight of two actors who genuinely seem as though they are acting in separate films.

It is a schism that does not heal for the rest of the film. On one side of it lies Oldman, Tom Waits as a hauntingly desperate Renfield and the film’s effects, costumes and music. On the other side lies Keanu, Anthony Hopkins in what is perhaps the broadest hammiest performance of his career (let that seep in for a second) an equally listless Winona Ryder (who manages to deliver the line “Take me away from all this death.” As though she’s asking her boyfriend to drive her away from a Goth Nightclub) and some moments that can only be described as supremely silly.

For example, what to make of the moment where Dracula transforms himself into an ape creature in order to ravish Sadie Frost? And no, don’t tell me it was a wolf. Later in the film he turns into a wolf. You know what he looks like then? A Wolf. That’s an ape creature.

On the other hand one is given such sights as the remarkable shot where a malformed Dracula forces a crucifix to burst into flames, moans “Look at what your God has done to me.” Ducks into a pool of shadow and is instantaneously transforms into a pile of ravenous rats. This is Coppola’s Catholic Imagination come out full force. 2000 years of imagining the worst case scenario combining to make on indelible moment.

Indeed the film’s preoccupation with Catholicism and Dracula’s rejection and reconciliation with The Church marks it as perhaps the most personal film of Coppola’s career on this side of One From The Heart. Coppola’s Dracula is essentially an old guy who gets mad at The Catholic Church and then comes back to it in a time of need. Needless to say this is a reinterpretation of the text.

Nor is it the only alteration. Despite it’s title Bram Stoker’s Dracula pays its source material no particular fidelity. Coppola’s main innovation is to take all of the novel’s sexual subtext (of which there is an ample amount) and make it text. This has decidedly mixed results. When it works you have scenes such as the sequence where Reeves first encounters The Vampire Brides, which crosses the line from sexual fantasy to sexual nightmare so gradually that it’s tough to pinpoint just where it happens. When it doesn’t you are presented with scenes such as the aforementioned encounter between Ms. Frost and the ape creature.

The film also takes the step of making Dracula the film’s romantic lead, a prospect that Stoker would have found fairly galling to say the least. Though thanks to Oldman’s remarkable performance Dracula manages to be romantic without being robbed of his danger. Oldman’s is a great Dracula, with neither Lee’s Aristocratic entitlement, nor Lugosi’s sinister otherness. Oldman’s is a creature of passions. Driven either by feral rage, deep hunger and intense anger. When he sucks blood he feasts on it, when he turns someone its nothing less than an act of vengeance. With Oldman it is always personal.

Though not as ubiquitous an archetype then as it is today. Coppola was hardly the first to feature the vampire as a romantic figure. The film came out during Anne Rice’s heyday. He’s not even the first to turn Dracula into a romantic figure, that would be John Badham’s miscalculated 1979 version of Dracula which cast Frank Langela as a brooding darkly handsome Dracula. (One could go so far as to claim that Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was in a romantic vein, though his portrayal feels much more in the line of “Sinister Foreigner” than “Exotic Lover”). No version of Dracula has ever been so obsessed with sex and love, though somewhat perversely, rarely at the same time. 

At the end of the film the movie tries to live up to it’s authored title, following Dracula back to his castle for the final pursuit (and larger supporting cast entailed by this) where few adaptations dare to tread. Things climax in a sentimental ending that Coppola cheekily punctuates with the most explicit gore shot in the film.

I end my viewing puzzled as ever. Should Bram Stoker’s Dracula ambition, scope and visual imagination and virtuosic stretches of filmmaking earn it a pass? Is it a silent masterpiece that simply has the misfortune to contain a soundtrack? Could some judicious editing of the sound track and some intertitles reveal it for the work of art it truly is? Is it a brave reinterpretation or just a bunch of hogwash which crassly tries to break the record for number of breasts exposed in a period film? Is it a diamond that I’m being too hard on? Or is it simply a very bad movie that looks very very good?

 I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. All I can say is that I keep trying to find out. I saw the film at fifteen and swore I would never watch it again. Since then I have seen it perhaps over a dozen times. Each time I’m left with the feeling of befuddled wonder at this, this thing. I don’t know what it is. I only know I cannot stop watching it.