Our Love for ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ Is Stronger Than Death

Thirty years ago today, Dracula rose from the dead yet again, this time with hairy palms, a prune face, and buns in his hair like Princess Leia. Gary Oldman’s version of the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t so much chew scenes as swish them before gulping them down like blood. (At the beginning of the movie, he drinks some from a chalice after he renounces God in Romanian.)

As Oldman’s Dracula stabs a stone cross and it bleeds, falls from the altar, and breaks, he becomes the very thing he fought on the battlefield: a force “threatening all of Christendom.” Note the Academy Award-winning costume design by Eiko Ishioka; Dracula’s red armor, which is textured almost like a diagram of the human muscle system, would become the suits of suspended dreamers in the 2000 sci-fi serial killer thriller The Cell.

People used to rag on Keanu Reeves for his accent as Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Francis Ford Coppola himself has called it “stilted,” but Reeves is such a beloved figure now that you just have to roll with it and accept the accent as good ol’ Keanu. Any way you slice it, there are still hints of xenophobia — the white European’s fear of the unknown foreign Other — as Harker takes the Orient Express to Transylvania and narrates, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East.”

Strangest Storm on Record

Bram Stoker’s Dracula came two years after The Godfather Part III, and in my humble view, it remains Coppola’s last gasp of greatness as a filmmaker. The movie has been called operatic, and while it might be overcooked in parts, it’s hard not to get caught up in the feverish intensity of it all. Monica Bellucci’s bride of Dracula rises up out of the bed between Harker’s legs — so hot she can melt his cross necklace before licking it off — and we’re off to the races. Bellucci and Reeves would later reunite in The Matrix Reloaded in another scene involving vampires.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula works itself up into its biggest frenzy during the tempest of Dracula’s arrival in England during the “Strangest Storm on Record.” The camera gets herky-jerky as Lucy (Sadie Frost) and Mina (Winona Ryder) run through a hedge maze in the rain, kissing each other full on the lips. Blood splashes on the Demeter’s sails, while Tom Waits raves in a straitjacket as Renfield, and Richard E. Grant shoots up morphine in the surrounding lunatic asylum. Pretty soon, the movie devolves into straight-up bestiality, as Lucy becomes “the devil’s concubine” and Dracula ravishes her in his wolfman form.

As Dracula and Mina walk the streets of London, there’s an Easter egg (or vampire egg, as I like to call them) of a human billboard advertising Sir Henry Irving in Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre. Irving is the real-life actor who may have inspired Dracula, with Stoker having served as his personal assistant—or his Renfield, if you will.

Exorcist and Vampire Hunter

I’ve always wondered about the supernatural trickery that Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) seems to demonstrate in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. At one point, he’s listing off “things in this universe which you cannot understand,” like materialization and astral bodies, when suddenly he disappears, then reappears behind a statue as if he teleported.

Hopkins, fresh off an Oscar win for The Silence of the Lambs, adds a dose of gallow’s humor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula as his character manifests poor table manners and funeral manners. Given that Hannibal Lecter despises discourtesy, he and Van Helsing probably wouldn’t get along very well. Then again, someone asks Van Helsing if he's going to perform an autopsy, and he gives a very Hannibal answer, saying, “No, not exactly. I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart.” Later, he actually does decapitate a vampire in an Elizabethan collar, before the film cuts to him cutting off a slice of red meat at the dinner table.

With Van Helsing, there’s also more than one homage to The Exorcist (helmed by Coppola’s ‘70s Director’s Company co-founder, William Friedkin), like when he arrives at the house where Lucy is and stands there in his hat, holding his bags and looking up at the place through the fog and light of an open door. Instead of pea-green soup, Lucy projectile-vomits blood in Van Helsing’s face, and we hear him say things like, “Let the exorcism begin,” and, “Christ compels you!”

Love Never Dies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula goes the reincarnation and romance route, similar to the 1932 version of The Mummy, turning Mina into Dracula’s long-lost love from a past life. It’s not a perfect movie, but when I first saw it in junior high school (probably too young to be watching an R-rated horror flick with bestiality), I was so into it that I remember standing up and cheering during the climax, as the vampire hunters race against the setting sun and Dracula explodes out of the top of his carriage, right before Harker slashes his throat.

At least Oldman’s Dracula doesn’t just crawl into his coffin and die like Bela Lugosi’s does. When push comes to shove, this is probably my favorite film adaptation of Dracula, so as my year of blogging about vampire movies nears its end, it’s only appropriate that I should save the best for last.