Dracula MoviesVisit The Internet
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- Bram Stoker's Dracula: 1992; dir. Francis Ford Coppola, with
Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Sadie Frost,
Richard E. Grant, and Tom Waits. Faithful to the structure if not
exactly the spirit of the novel, this casts the Count as a vengeful
Romanian knight undone by the reincarnation of his lost love. Oldman is
more impressive in fright-wig, red robe and stiletto nails as the old
vampire than as the long-haired, sentimental young prince, but plays the
part to the hilt all the way, and so has the perfect adversary in
Hopkins. Everything about this grandly overheated romantic drama looks
wonderful, especially Eiko Ishioka's symbolic costumes, and bear in mind
that Coppola uses fairly old film techniques and shot the whole thing on
a soundstage. The soundtrack is excellent.
- Nosferatu: 1979; dir. Werner Herzog, with Klaus Kinski,
Isabelle Adjani, and Bruno Ganz. This seems to take a lot of liberties,
transposing the Lucy and Mina characters, eliminating the suitors,
synthesizing the Seward and Van Helsing figures, and shifting the locale
from England to the Netherlands. But Herzog's homage to F.W. Murnau's
landmark 1922 Nosferatu (both films influenced Coppola's version)
is a breathtakingly gorgeous movie, at once eerie, erotic and darkly
humorous while staying faithful to two elements of the text: the
mysterious otherness of the vampire, and his lack of romantic power over
the mortals. There's a scene in which Lucy wanders through a
plague-ridden town that's straight out of a Brueghel painting. Kinski is
a worthy successor to Max Schreck; he invests his hideous count with
horror, pathos, and even a weird sort of humour and majesty. Ganz and
Adjani are creepily gorgeous as the doomed couple: at odds with their
sunny little house, they seem more like your neighbours in a suburb
designed by Edgar Allan Poe. The ending is a jolt! The text changes
reflect Murnau's original film, which altered the setting and some story
elements, renamed the Count and took its title from a word possibly
meaning "undead" (the relationship between Murnau's film and Stoker's
estate is chronicled in David J. Skal's book Hollywood Gothic).
See the Herzog film in German with subtitles if possible (the dvd has
both English and German versions); almost everyone, especially Ganz and
Adjani, speaks more naturally in this one.
- Dracula: 1979; dir. John Badham, with Frank Langella, Kate
Nelligan, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Eve, Donald Pleasance, Jan Francis,
and Tony Haygarth. I blush to admit it, but I read the novel because of
this movie, which makes some unfortunate changes to the plot, but
intriguingly pits Dracula as Byronic antihero against a strong-willed
feminist Lucy (the heroines' names are swapped and several relationships
redefined, so that the sickly Mina is Van Helsing's daughter, and Lucy
is Jack Seward's daughter; the only non-Dracula suitor is Jonathan
Harker, Lucy's fianc�). The coastal locations are stunningly
photographed, and Langella looks great in black.
- Count Dracula: 1977; BBC TV 2-part series (4 hours in total),
with Louis Jourdan, Judi Bowker, Frank Finlay, Susan Penhaglion and Jack
Shephard. This has fairly cheap production values, but is well-acted,
appropriately creepy and atmospheric, and faithful to the original
novel. It's also been released for sale by BBC Worldwide,
though for the moment is not available outside the UK.
- Horror of Dracula: 1958; dir. Terence Fisher, with
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Michael Gough. All right, so I
wasn't impressed with Dracula turning into what appears to be dust at
the end, but this is arch British theatrical horror acting at its best.
You might know Cushing better as the tight-lipped and sarcastic Grand
Moff Tarkin in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and Gough as
Alfred in the Batman movies 1989-97; Lee is still going strong
past 80, recently providing magnificent turns in Gormenghast,
Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the
Clones.
- Dracula: 1931; dir. Tod Browning, with Bela Lugosi, Dwight
Frye, and Helen Chandler. This film put Dracula in evening clothes,
defined his Transylvanian accent, and popularized him in the 20th
century imagination. Those of you who might think this rather quaint,
and who might only think of Lugosi as the dignified yet pathetic figure
Martin Landau played in Tim Burton's Ed Wood should go back and
have a look at this: it has its undeniably chilling moments, especially
at the castle.
Other Vampire Movies
- Shadow of the Vampire: 2000; dir. E. Elias Merhige, with John
Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Udo Kier, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack, Aden
Gillett, Eddie Izzard, Ronan Vibert. A gorgeously scored and
photographed film, which takes on the story of the filming of F.W.
Murnau's Nosferatu (see above), and proposes that Max Schreck's
eccentricities (only appearing in character, only filming at night)
weren't just method acting, while addressing the way that both film and
the vampire myth deal with a desire for immortality and an escape from
"reality."
- Interview with the Vampire: 1995; dir. Stephen Frears, with
Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Antonio Banderas, Stephen Rea, and
Christian Slater. As gorgeous in its own way as Coppola's film, this
might be quite jarring to fans of Anne Rice's novel but grows on you.
Pitt finds the nobility and ambiguity in Louis, and Cruise the sardonic
humour and the pain, in Lestat; Dunst is a revelation in the difficult
role of the child-vampire Claudia.
- From Dusk Till Dawn: 1996; dir. Richard Rodriguez, with
Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, and Juliette Lewis.
- Tale of a Vampire: 1992; dir. Shimako Sato, with Julian
Sands, Suzanna Hamilton, and Kenneth Cranham. A quietly creepy,
impressive little film about a shy, scholarly vampire and the brash,
defensive young woman who befriends him. The conceit is that she's the
image of Edgar Allan Poe's teenaged bride, and just who is that
mysterious man in the black hat hanging out at the library of the
occult?
- The Hunger: 1983; dir. Tom Scott, with Catherine Deneuve,
David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon. Visually elegant, if emotionally cold,
but undeniably striking, this tale of the mid-80s New York demimonde
never uses the term vampire; John and Miriam Blaylock smoke cigarettes,
drink tea, wear neutral colours and tolerate daylight, though they do
need blood to survive. Also, only one at any given time seems actually
to be immortal.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 1992; dir. Fran Kuzui, with Kristy
Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Luke Perry, Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens
(Pee Wee Herman). Not perhaps as meaningful as the current TV spinoff,
but a smart teen flick with elements of satire, and a cast to die for.
- The Lost Boys: 1987; dir. Joel Schumacher, with Jason Patric,
Keifer Sutherland, Dianne Wiest, Corey Haim, Edward Herrmann, and Jami
Gertz. Some elements of trendy cleverness and a good soundtrack
featuring Echo and the Bunnymen's cover of the Doors' People are
Strange; Sutherland, Wiest and Herrmann are all good: otherwise,
completely forgettable.
- House of Dark Shadows: 1970; dir. Dan Curtis, with Jonathan
Frid, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Grayson Hall, John Karlen, Thayer David,
Nancy Barrett and Joan Bennett. Some details of this don't bear very
close inspection (are those silver crosses the police brandish standard
issue?), but this is a well-paced and actually quite scary chiller which
makes good use of its autumn setting at an old New England mansion, as
well as its talented cast, even when they're not acting particularly
well. Frid's melancholic splendour is intact from the TV series though
he actually seems to be enjoying himself here.
- Love at First Bite: 1979; dir. Stan Dragoti, with George
Hamilton, Richard Benjamin, Susan St. James, and Arte Johnson. You'll
hate yourself in the morning, but this has such moments as the good
count's riposte to the villagers driving him out of Transylvania, and
Johnson's ratophiliac Renfield.
- Vampire's Kiss: 1989; dir. Robert Bierman, with Nicolas Cage,
Jennifer Beals, Maria Conchito Alonso, and Elizabeth Ashley. All right:
as a vampire movie, this is in the eye of the beholder, because arguably
overstrung yuppie literary agent Cage never really becomes one of the
undead: he just thinks he does after a particularly bizarre encounter
with singles-bar pickup Beals. One of the strangest, and perhaps most
apt, metaphors for the work/sex ethic of the 1980s; watch this to see
why Cage became famous not for the stuff he does now, but for things
like Wild at Heart.
Vampire Novels: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles
- Interview with the Vampire
- The Vampire Lestat
- Queen of the Damned
- Tale of the Body Thief
- Memnoch the Devil
- Pandora
- Vittorio the Vampire
- The Vampire Armand
- Blood and Gold
- Blackwood Farm
- Blood Canticle
The Original TV Vampires
- Dark Shadows: The cult-item bargain-basement goth soap of the
1960s, which introduced Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, the
guilt-ridden but still dangerous vampire, freed from his coffin by a
handyman at a spooky old mansion in New England. The smouldering,
black-eyelinered Grayson Hall played the doctor who tries to make him
mortal when she isn't avenging herself on him for pursuing a younger
woman (Kathryn Leigh Scott) who resembles his long-lost bride. Frid was,
like Leonard Nimoy, one of the unlikeliest male cult icons of 1960s TV:
a 40-something stage actor with a sonorous voice, a haircut that might
best be called Napoleonic Mod, lean craggy features and sad dark eyes.
Remade unsuccessfully around 1990 with Ben Cross and Barbara Steele:
this new version predated the late-90s vogue for fantasy TV and was
cancelled unresolved, though it really did have its moments.
- Forever Knight: Canadian series (with Geraint Wyn Davies,
Nigel Bennett, Catherine Disher, and Deborah Duchene) about a
13th-century vampire atoning for his sins by fighting crime in Toronto:
on the night shift, of course. He is assisted by a sympathetic
pathologist, Natalie Lambert, who befriends and attempts to "cure" him,
but Toronto is also now home to his longtime companions, the beautiful
Janette, now owner of a nightclub called the Raven, and master vampire
LaCroix, host of an all-night radio show: he'd have Howard Stern for
lunch. This show at first split the Barnabas Collins type (rather as
Anne Rice did with Louis and Lestat), so that the guilt and the desire
to be human were housed in Nick Knight, while the malevolence and
deviousness were transferred to LaCroix, though the two began to mesh
and merge as the series progressed to its tragic conclusion. Budget
limitations and constant threats of cancellation meant the show had to
remake itself every year, which got in the way of story arc development,
though the various history flashbacks did much to establish convincing
backstories and complex motivations for the vampires. Overly talky and
an uncomfortable mix of genres by times, but with some wonderful
episodes, and very well acted by a cast with a great dynamic. Some
notable Canadian actors, such as Colm Feore (Trudeau,
Titus, The Red Violin, Thirty-two Short Films about
Glenn Gould), did guest spots.
- The Little Vampire: Inexpensive-looking but quite nicely
plotted series about a little boy who befriends a vampire named Rudiger,
and discovers a world of vampires who get to choose the age and
appearance they'll hold through eternity. Now a feature film with
Richard E. Grant and Alice Krige as the little vampire's parents.
Music to Read Dracula By
- The Cure: Robert Smith dons the cape and fangs for the Why Can't I
Be You? video by these masters of melancholy
- Siouxsie and the Banshees: the inspiration of a generation of
post-punk goths
- Bauhaus: especially Bela Lugosi's Dead (undead, undead, undead)
- Depeche Mode: especially Black Celebrations and
Violator
- Concrete Blonde: especially Bloodletting, whose title track
was inspired by Anne Rice (as was Sting's Moon Over Bourbon Street on
Dream of the Blue Turtles)
- Echo and the Bunnymen: especially Ocean Rain, and its tracks
Nocturnal Me and The Killing Moon
- Alice Cooper: check out Love It To Death for The Ballad of
Dwight Frye, an ode to one of the more memorable Renfields on film,
though the one in Herzog's Nosferatu gives him a run for the
money in the mad laugh department
- Lost Highway: All right, this soundtrack to David Lynch's
film is stretching it, but it is produced by Trent Reznor, and Nine Inch
Nails' video for The Perfect Drug is so obviously inspired by Bram
Stoker's Dracula, even to the absinthe bottle. Tracks by NIN, David
Bowie, Rammstein, the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and Lou Reed, so
full of edgy angst and melancholy: leave your nightlight on....
- The Art of Darkness: This makes a clever literary pun in its
title, and is a surprisingly lively collection of 1980s and 90s
techno-gloom by such goths and industrials as the aforementioned Nine
Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Sisters of Mercy,
Peter Murphy, Skinny Puppy, etc. etc. Put on your purple lipstick and
black nail polish, and play this at your Hallowe'en party.
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Come one come all Mortals who are willing to stick their neck out for a vampire to feed upon. We will be willing to share our Dark Gift to you mortals if you pass our test.
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