Dracula (1979)

A word of warning: for quite some time, director John Badham insisted on having the home video versions of the film at hand released in a colour-“corrected” version that borders on the monochrome. By now, there are fortunately versions of the film available that give it back the rather gorgeous colours of its initial theatrical run. I suggest anyone interested in viewing (or re-watching) the film to pick up one of those colourful, aesthetically much more pleasing and visually effective, versions. I have no idea what Badham was thinking.

It’s particularly exasperating in a film whose main qualities are visual, namely the incredible art direction and production design, and camera work. These elements of the film create a lush world of fog, picturesque ruins and asylums, and some of the most attractive rot and decay ever to grace a cinema screen. In combination with a somewhat pompous but gloriously, loudly, moody John Williams score, there’s something to be said for just letting those beautiful Gothic pictures wash over one while one is dreaming of dying roses or something equally appropriate.

It’s all the more important to focus on this aspect of the film because its script certainly isn’t great. By now, we’ve all grown used to cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s “Dracula” (and that cursed play) wildly mixing up elements of the original, removing important bits and keeping less interesting others. Often, this sort of thing makes sense when going from one medium to the next, so I’m all on board with the film making one of the female main characters the daughter of Dr Seward (Donald Pleasence), and putting the doctor’s asylum thusly much more front and centre. Why you’d swap the roles of Mina (Jan Francis) and Lucy (Kate Nelligan), on the other hand, I have no idea. But then, this may very well have something to do with the misguided decision to cast Dracula as a “great lover” character and pose Lucy’s attraction to him and all that he stands for as some sort of attempt to escape the stifling Victorianism of her surroundings. Which is all well and good, until you remember that this Dracula is still a mass murderer who turns women into baby-drinking monsters; not exactly a romantic proposition where I come from. And how much a woman liberates herself by just tying herself to a different, objectively much more horrible, guy then her fiancée is a question that comes to mind as well. Unless, of course, you want to argue that Badham is on the side of Victorian paternalistic repression, something that works with what we got on paper, but seems rather not at all like the director.

It doesn’t help that Frank Langella is just not up to the task, neither as a romance character or as a vampire. Sure, his hair is great in a disco era idea of great, and he’s doing his best to smoulder through the overblown, overdirected romantic sequences, but he mostly ends up looking like he is trying hard instead of achieving. When it comes to the character’s cruel side, he’s simply not convincing at all; he kills his victims with all the conviction of a politician.

Still, even with its limp Dracula, whenever the film goes fully into Gothic horror mode, it becomes much more convincing and interesting. The sets and Badham’s direction come to the sort of fake, stylized un-life I love so much about this kind of horror. The actors – particularly Pleasence and Olivier but also Nelligan who is also much better at pretending that Dracula is incredibly hot than Langella deserves – play things up very nicely indeed. From time to time, Dracula even finds a moment of true horror or two – particularly Van Helsing’s encounter with his undead daughter is wonderful, as is the early sequence in which the vampire murders the crew of the Demeter during a particularly dramatic looking storm.