31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 23: Bram Stoker's Dracula

Day 23: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), dir. by Francis Ford Coppola

Streaming Availability: Rental

This not merely another Dracula movie. This is BRAM STOKER’S Dracula, motherfucker. Francis Ford Coppola is promising the definitive story, the truest adaptation from the text. And I believe he has earned that swag because Bram Stoker's Dracula may very well may be the greatest Dracula movie ever made. This movie brings all the power of practical movie effects at their very zenith (no CG, no compositing) to tell a classic gothic tale.  

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a rare thing. It’s a full-on AAA prestige film in the horror genre. It had a budget of $40 million, a fortune even now for this genre, starred the hottest actors of time, and was directed by one of the greats of the New Hollywood era. It won three Academy Awards, all technical, yet should have been nominated for more. I had seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula once in high school and I am amazed how much better it looks in my Thirties. I knew this was going to be one of the high points of what has been a great Spooky Month. It vastly exceeded my expectations.

I could write 5,000 words about the opening ten minutes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula alone. However, I do need to reach Halloween with my body and mind still intact, so I will not do that. There's eight other reviews to write, I’ll keep this (relatively) brief. Just know that this movie opens with what can only be described as a feast of cinema. It is astounding how many tricks, how many effects, how many creative shots, how many ideas are going on even before the full vampire form of Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) walks on screen. Coppola had made great films before, including some gangster movies that I hear are very nice. But I’ve never seen a movie directed by him this dense with imagination and technique before.

The movie opens on this backstory for Count Dracula, tying him in to his historical inspiration, Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia. It is the only vampire film to open on the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans that I know of. The art design is already top-notch, wonders upon wonders. We see the human Dracula wearing this red sinewy suit and holding a matching cat-like helm. There’s a battle scene against the Ottomans shot all in silhouette against a bleeding red sky.  When his beloved dies tragically, Vlacula declares himself an enemy of God. He stabs a cross with his sword, causing the stone monument to gush out a waterfall of blood.

Cutting to 1897, Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is en-route to Castle Dracula, choosing the enticements of petty capitalist gain over the screaming warning signs all over the place. There are so many fun effects in this journey. The sky outside of the train is impossibly deep colors of orange and red. Out in the twisted landscape, all miniature of course, we see Dracula’s eyes fill up the sky. An awful, Nazgul-like creature drives Dracula’s stagecoach. The camera's angle makes it seems like the driver's bladed fingers lift Keanu Reeves weightlessly into the carriage. Once Dracula is on camera, there’s a dozen fun tricks with his shadow, which is out of sync behind his body. Coppola has seen Vampyr, I gather.

One of the greatest effects though is a shot where Harker’s journal is superimposed with the train passing over the top. This was all done with miniature, so that the train’s smoke actually passes a shadow over the cursive handwriting in the foreground. It is a needlessly elaborate and time-consuming project for an effect that’s in the movie for like mere seconds. It would have been far easier to just composite the two images any number of ways. However, it looks amazing. Movies are a ton of hard work, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula is fighting so hard to impress.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula there is this wonderful mixture of reverence for Old Hollywood filmmaking and also practical cutting-edge monster effects. Coppola is willing to employ obvious matte paintings and fantastic miniatures to create a gothic reality. Some places look like a grounded recreation of Victorian London, some are so arch and twisted they belong in Bloodborne. I’m thinking of the Asylum guarded by men wearing iron cages around their heads. Coppola is not rushing out to the jungles of the Philippines again for realism. The mountains and castles are clearly a soundstage. But so much of this movie is theater, it does matter, the staginess is perhaps a positive.

Dracula has a dozen faces in this film, none of which look like the Bela Lugosi classic. Sometimes he’s a hairy wolf monster, sometimes an ancient powdered man, sometimes a gargoyle-like bat creature, sometimes a distressingly hot Gary Oldman with an incredible wig and blue sunglasses. Oldman’s performance varies from awful cackling crone to grounded romance to the operatic gestures of a silent movie monster. He's really playing six different characters here. Sometimes Bram Stoker’s Dracula is going full Evil Dead with a zooming low POV shot. Sometimes it is all formalism, with a dinner date full of a collage of images and dancing shadows through a window. When Dracula finally kills the ever-doomed Lucy (Sadie Frost), we get an entirely metaphorical scene of buckets of blood filling her bedchamber.

As an adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is largely faithful to the novel, but still goes off in its own direction multiple times. Stoker gives no human backstory for Dracula, and he has no lost star-crossed romance between his vampire and Mina (Winona Ryder), who is not a reincarnation of Vlad's lost love. (Did they steal that idea from Blacula, by the way?) In the novel, the vampire was purely a creature of evil, not a tragic antihero. Mina definitely did not love him back. Also, I’m pretty sure Stoker never had Mina and Lucy kiss during a delirious thunderstorm sequence, and that's where ol' Stokey went wrong, I say.

The film does however feature many characters we almost never see in Dracula films. It’s a stacked cast, maybe too stacked as many actors have little to do. All of Lucy’s paramours, Dr. Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant), the Texan, Quincy Morris (Billy Campbell), and Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes) are featured in this movie. All them are overshadowed by a very hammy Professor Van Helsing, played by one of the great lords of ham, Anthony Hopkins. Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker got a ton of shit at the time for his English accent, and yeah, he his Ted Theodore Logan surfer dude creeps in too often, but I’ve heard worse. (Remember in the 1931 movie, they did not even try to do the accent.) Tom Waits as Renfield is out-hamming them all, which is an achievement. Renfield is always fun.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a feverish erotic nightmare of a movie. It’s so stuffed with beautiful things, beautiful ideas, I could not hope to cover everything. Dracula is wearing a golden robe based on Gustav Klimt's painting, The Kiss. There’s a fair full of classic silent film clips and puppetry which were clearly a beloved inspiration for this film’s production staff. Dracula fucks a chick on a bench while a werewolf. An evil vampire bitch bites Keanu Reeves’ dick. 

I rarely have my classy film snob needs met at the same time as my dirty horror exploitation needs, but here you go. Bram Stoker's Dracula is damned amazing. Top to bottom, amazing. Nobody has tried to make a prestige Dracula film since, and I think they're afraid. This movie scares off the competition.

Next Time: Well, I pity the movie that has to follow this one up. Luckily, next movie is no lightweight either. Go go into Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.