Cult Movie Reviews: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992

It might be an unconventional view but I consider Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula to be his best and most interesting movie. It was originally titled simply Dracula but apparently legal reasons compelled the title change to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Coppola was obviously well aware that there had been countless previous Dracula adaptations, including some of the most iconic horror movies of all time. And those adaptations had taken varying approaches. Coppola was determined to make his Dracula movie something quite different. And he certainly succeeded.

This movie adds a few things to the story but mostly it takes things that are implied or hinted at in Stoker’s novel and gives them much greater emphasis.

The movie starts with an origin story. Origin stories have since become a tedious cliché but in 1992 that was not yet the case.

That Stoker was partly inspired by accounts of the 15th century Wallachian ruler Vlad Tepes has usually been assumed. Coppola’s movie makes it explicit and makes it the basis of that origin story.

Vlad, known as Dracula (the son of the dragon), has just won a great victory over the Turks but his triumph is about to turn to ashes. He returns to his castle to find that his beloved wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder), having been falsely informed of his death, has killed herself. The priests assure him that because she was a suicide her soul is damned for all eternity. Dracula, enraged, curses God and vows to return from the dead to have his revenge.

Four hundred years later, in 1897, young lawyer Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is sent to Transylvania to finalise the purchase of a property in England by Count Dracula (Gary Oldman). Poor Jonathan finds himself a prisoner, at the mercy of the Count. And his is also a plaything for Dracula’s women, three hot sex-crazed vampire babes.

Jonathan’s fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder again) is worried sick about him but at least she has her friend Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) to keep her company. Lucy has three suitors for her hand, young psychiatrist Dr Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant), Texan Quincey P. Morris (Bill Campbell) and Lord Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes).

The way Lucy strings her three suitors along shocks Mina. Mina is also shocked by Lucy’s very overt sexuality.

Strange things start happening to Lucy, she becomes ill and Jack Seward calls in his old teacher and mentor Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Van Helsing realises he’s dealing with a vampire.

Dracula how now arrived in London and he’s met Mina. Jonathan Harker had already shown him Mina’s photograph. Dracula is convinced that Mina is his beloved wife Elisabeta come back to life. He does not intend to lose her a second time.

The movie’s plot follows that of the novel reasonably closely, but with major changes in emphasis. The movie is a love story, the story of a love that spans the centuries.

Dracula is no longer simply the villain, the monster. He is to a large extent the hero. He has been humanised. He has emotions. He can love. He can feel emotional pain. He has motivations that make sense, and that are in some ways admirable.

The movie’s tagline was Love Never Dies and that sums up its wildly romantic approach. We are on Dracula’s side because he is on the side of love. We want love to triumph. If anything it’s Van Helsing who is the villain. He even goes close to admitting this at the end when he describes himself and his band of vampire hunters as God’s madmen.

The movie ramps up the eroticism a great deal. The erotic dimension to vampirism is already there in the novel. It’s implied, but it’s obvious enough. It’s also very obvious in the book that Dracula’s pursuit of Lucy and Mina is more in the nature of a seduction than a hunt for prey, and that the two girls are not entirely unwilling. The movie makes these erotic aspects absolutely central.

The idea that for a woman being transformed into a vampire is a kind of sexual awakening had been explored in previous movies, most notably (perhaps surprisingly) in Hammer’s 1966 Dracula Prince of Darkness. It’s an idea that is given plenty of prominence in Coppola’s film.

Gary Oldman is odd but very effective and most importantly he’s like no other screen Dracula. Winona Ryder is surprisingly good and handles the transformation in Mina very adeptly. Anthony Hopkins was a very obvious choice to play Van Helsing and he’s in fine form. He plays Van Helsing as an obsessive, and obsessives are always frightening. Tom Waits makes a suitably creepy Renfield. The other players in the movie are quite OK but they’re relegated to the background and don’t make much impact. Sadie Frost is quite good as Lucy, especially when she gets to overact as the transformed Lucy.

Which brings us to the movie’s potential weak link, Keanu Reeves. I was a bit concerned that he’d transform the movie into Drac and Jonathan’s Excellent Adventure. In fact he’s reasonably adequate. Not that it matters. The movie is all about Dracula and Mina, it’s the performances of Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder that count, and they deliver the goods.

I love the fact that this movie is so aggressively unrealistic. In fact it’s anti-realist. Coppola emphasises the artificiality of everything. He wanted surrealism, not realism. He also wanted a visual style radically different from previous horror movies. The costumes, the makeup, the sets, everything had to have a fresh and different style. Of course it’s not enough to have a different visual style. It has to be a style that works, that suits the material and fits the mood of the film. In this case all that is achieved beautifully.

I also love that this movie was made in 1992. There’s no CGI. The special effects are all old school special effects, achieved with makeup, miniatures, glass shots and with many of the effects done in camera rather than in post-production. In fact the effects were achieved in ways that were deliberately old-fashioned in 1992. This movie looks nothing like the movies of the CGI era and that’s a good thing. Coppola made the decision to shoot the entire movie on a sound stage, a very sound idea which allowed him to have complete control over the look of the film.