Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) 🩸
Where to start with this oeuvre? Is it brilliant? Yes. Is it coherent? Absolutely not. Am I obsessed with it now? You bet.
While filming Godfather III, Francis Ford Coppola jumped at the chance to adapt this script once Wynona Rider brought it to him. A huge fan of the novel, he wanted to create a film that visually mimicked the styles of early cinema. He was still burnt out from shooting Apocalypse Now on remote location, so he shot Dracula on a soundstage and hired his 20-something year old son Roman, who liked practical magic tricks, to supervise the visual effects. They used all kinds of fascinating techniques to create the final visuals, including rear projections, matte paintings, miniatures and multiple film exposures. Add to that a dramatic, epic score by Wojciech Kilar, and the ornate, luxurious costumes of Eiko Ishioka. The results are wild, bizarre and hypnotic.
The cast is also… interesting. Americans Keanu Reeves and Wynona Rider try so hard to play wholesome british romance. British actor Gary Oldman performs in some epic costumes while doing a “Romanian” accent. Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins is truly living his best, campy life in a vague Germanic accent as Van Helsing. And then you have Carry Elwes, playing the exact same role he played all throughout the 90s.
Though the father-son team created some truly breathtaking visuals and transitions (things I haven’t seen on film since the 1940s era) narratively this movie is wonky. Coppola said in multiple interviews that he was drawn to this project because it was a return to the original Dracula book, but his version creates an actual romance between Mina and Dracula, whereas the text has her fighting his advances constantly. He also turns Lucy into a boy-crazy socialite, instead of the young prim & proper girl from the book.
He was especially squeamish about directing the women in the erotic scenes. He told EW at the time “I brought in Greta [Seacat, an acting coach] because I don’t feel comfortable talking about a lot of sexual stuff to young girls… I very much wanted Greta… to help me ask these girls to perform in more erotic ways”. In another interview he talked about not wanting to ask the women (not girls 😑) to take off their clothes for the scene, and trying to get his son Roman to tell them instead. To which I say — Sir, vampires are a metaphor for sexuality. You are adapting DRACULA, which you’ve said is your favourite book. Maybe put your Catholic-Italian dad vibes aside and do your job, Frank, which is to direct your actors!? The result is some soft-core “eroticism”, lots of women writhing around, and sometimes a wayward boob pops out. Which fits right in with all the other wild choices, I guess.
This movie is a masterful… something. I’m so glad it exists.
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