Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

7 months ago

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

THE FIRST RULE OF VAMPIRISM

by Emily Yoshida

When it comes to art, I’m a big fan of rules – always have been. While it’s certainly fun to see wild displays of creative abandon done well by filmmakers I admire, it is just as equally a joy to see an artist shine from within the confines of a game they did not invent. Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to be such a television enthusiast in the past few years: TV operates in such a defined structure. Granted, that results in a lot of stillborn duds of shows, but there are always those exceptions that become the reason we tune in in the first place. If someone is able to jump through all the hoops of getting a show onto the air, maintain a strong artistic identity and capture an audience from within the confines of a medium whose very structure is dictated by networks and advertisers, that’s pretty remarkable.

Genre films are a set of rules unto themselves, a framework of cliches and predetermined plot devices just waiting to be tinkered with and riffed on. Think about the last time you raved about a genre film to a friend. Chances are the word “but” was in there somewhere. “It’s a monster movie – BUT - it’s filmed like a documentary.” “It’s a vampire movie – BUT – it’s also a coming of age story.” “It’s a horror movie – BUT – it’s really good.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a vampire movie. But nothing. I’m pretty sure it has to be the most unapologetic, balls-out vampire movie ever filmed – the sheer volume of blood on the screen throughout its 128 minutes speaks for itself. There are rivers of blood in this movie. Oceans. Have you ever laughed out loud because of how much blood you were looking at? No? Then you haven’t seen this film. But, in a way, that is what makes it unusual, and worthy of a revisit in our current vamp-saturated yet essentially fangless pop cultural landscape. Bram Stoker’s Dracula knows what it wants to be and doesn’t take any shortcuts. It adheres to convention and well-worn myth, but does so with such bravado that we barely notice.

The prologue gives us fair warning, all groaning cellos and portentous imagery. Smoke billows around the dome of a church. A stone cross falls and smashes into pieces. An armored hand holds up a sword before rising flames. We have not yet seen a single human face, but already Dracula is terribly, brashly alive. It’s laying all of its stylistic cards on the table and saying “Hey, this is what kind of movie I am. If this isn’t your jam, now’s your chance to leave.”

We are given the backstory in broad, bold strokes: Romanian knight Vlad Dracula (the awesomely game Gary Oldman) defends Constantinople against the the Muslim world, deservedly earning the nickname The Impaler and leaving a field of skewered Turks in his wake. Some surviving Turks decide to get revenge by sending back word to his bride Elizabeta (Winona Ryder, who is noticeable kissing with tongue in this movie) that he has died. She kills herself, the church says she’s going to hell, and Vlad freaks out and renounces God. He tells the church that he is going to come back and haunt the fuck out of them, then makes it so by stabbing the cross on the altar and drinking the blood that starts pouring out of it. “The blood is the life, and it shall be mine,” Oldman growls in Romanian. Yes. It’s that kind of movie, bless its soul.

Aside from its more visceral qualities, what makes me love Dracula, what makes me defend it time and time again, are the rules it sticks to - how bound it is to vampire lore. I won’t get too into it, but suffice to say there was a period of my life where I spent a LOT of time thinking about vampires. What appealed to me about vampires was how particular their powers and weaknesses were, how theoretically simple it was to kill them given the right circumstances and tools. Vampire mythology had all the comfort of physics or mathematics: a world in which there are infallible truths and certainties. And the way I see it, if a vampire story doesn’t care to stick to some iteration of these rules, then what’s the fun of it being a vampire movie? Superman needs his Kryptonite. House needs his Vicodin addiction. Achilles needs his heel.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a vampire movie from a simpler time, before all the bloodsuckers became conventionally sexy eternal twentysomethings who could walk around in daylight and pass for halfway normal human beings. Jonathan Harker’s (Goddamn Keanu Reeves) first night in Dracula’s castle is one long namecheck of every Vampire Thing in the book – animal transfiguration, manipulation of shadows, general incompatibility with reflective surfaces. Oldman plays the iconic character as genteel and essentially well-intentioned, but also completely single-minded and insane in a sneakily human way. His Dracula’s madness is that of a guy who has had to stay alive for four hundred years and has spent most of that time dwelling on the past, and in particular, on a girl. He can’t pass for normal because he isn’t – even when he ships himself to London and enyouthens himself for his dead wife’s doppelganger Mina (who also happens to be engaged to Jonathan), he’s handsome in a completely anachronistic way, and justifiably creeps her out at first (We are to deduce that Mina’s taste in men is a little milquetoast.) The film’s explorations of Dracula’s strange powers and specific limitations, not to mention the toll that 400+ years will take on a man, are half of its joy.

The other half, of course, is the fact that it is completely and utterly batshit crazy. This is one of those films you can promote simply by stating things that happen in it: A vampire harem eats a baby! A girl gets raped by a wolf! Tom Waits is there! Dracula is positively giddy with over-the-top imagery; every single frame somehow strikes a beautiful balance of high-school-literary-magazine-earnesty and complete self-awareness. There are no throwaway moments here.

There are very few throwaway performances, either. Though I like Ryder, she and Reeves are the dull center in the eye of a storm of seriously memorable Acting with a capital A. I could take or leave Anthony Hopkins’ choice to play Van Helsing as a mad genius with a bad German accent and Robin-Williams-on-coke mugging (he humps Cary Elwes’ leg in one particularly ecstatic moment.) However, Sadie Frost plays big in all the right ways. Her character is Lucy, Mina’s best friend and Dracula’s concubine of choice, and it’s hard not to see her performance as a mini verson of the film itself: insatiable, ecstatic, freaked-the-fuck-out. Frost lights up every scene she is in; like the film’s aforementioned abundance of blood there is just so much of her, filling the screen, a bundle of coos, wails, and wiggles even before her character becomes possessed. The fact that her breasts have a pesky tendency to pop out every five minutes makes complete thematic sense: she, and the film, are incontainable.

And Tom Waits as Renfield, in a half-undone straitjacket, wailing prophetically in that unmistakable voice that “the master is approaching”, while brass and timpanis clang and his fellow asylum residents get hosed down? That moment is a goddamn gift from the movie gods.

So in case there was any lingering doubt, Yes, this is that kind of film. It’s the film you make after finally shrugging off the last of your ardent defenders with The Godfather Part III, after the critics have taken away your Important Filmmaker card, after you’ve spent a decade in the long shadow of work you did fifteen years ago. What do you do at that point in your career? If you’re Francis Ford Coppola, you quit that game and try another, giving in once more to the allure of genre pictures, of the rules and conventions that your auteur status has exempted you from ever since Dementia 13. And you do it like a filmmaker with nothing to lose, because that’s exactly what you are.

(WATCH THE ENTIRE FILM FOR FREE RIGHT NOW AT CRACKLE)

Emily Yoshida is a writer living in Seattle who may or may not have dabbled in gothic RPGs as an adolescent. She writes about TV for The A.V. Club and tumbls here.