Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Or really, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, for even though Coppola at the time insisted on pretending this to be a close adaptation of the Stoker’s novel, this runs as roughshod over the original as is the norm for movie Draculas. This isn’t a bad thing, I believe – I, for one, don’t need a one to one adaptation of a Victorian novel, as much as I like that particular example of its form. This one is about as close to the original as Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Where Hooper chose to retell Dracula as a Quatermass movie, Coppola’s Dracula is the Dario Argento version of Dracula that Argento’s actual Dracula isn’t.

The main project of Coppola’s version appears to be a bit of projection: of the director’s own middle-aged horniness on the novel, overplaying the sexual subtext of a novel that does indeed have rather a lot of sexual subtext so intensely, one repeatedly wants to recommend cold showers to the filmmaker as much as to his characters. Some study of the dictionary entries for “sledgehammer” and “subtlety” might have been of use, as well. All of this has something of the air of watching a high budget Jess Franco movie without the crotch shot obsession but it with even more sexy (and “sexy”) writhing.

That’s not a bad thing in my book, mind you, but rather is an inherent part of what has turned this initially often maligned film into a bit of a classic: sex – eroticism tends to be subtler – is absolutely and always at the core of Dracula’s aesthetics, created out of thin air and celluloid, through the operatically overblown and utterly beautiful production design, the incredible number of bad accents by hot actors who should have known better (as well as Keanu Reeves), and Coppola’s insane/awesome decision to only use effects and filmmaking tricks reproducible on set and in camera (actual theatrical magic).

Thus, Coppola manages to create a mood of highly artificial, overheated and oversexed beauty that never lets up for a single shot – the film’s aesthetics are its actual point, its mood irreproducible and uncreatable by any other means. This may very well be the best possible example of the cinema of style as substance not made by an Italian.