The Lavish Excess, Gothic Beauty, and Overt Sexuality of ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is, simply put, one of the most beautiful movies ever made. This film was one of my biggest childhood obsessions. I caught a glimpse of it when I was probably only four and then revisited it when I was eight, and was hooked to the point that I had an immediate need to get my hands on the book even though it was considered substantially above a child’s reading level. Perhaps I was still too young for something so gory, monstrous and sexual, but boy, I didn’t care. I think my parents were happy, even excited, that it pushed me to read at such a higher level. To this day, I adore this movie, and I love that this decade gave us such a lavish and sensual take on the source material, filled as much with carnage and monsters as it is with romance and heartache. From the production design to the costumes and performances, everything is heightened. People tend to think of Gothic as dreary, muted, often black and white whereas this movie is drenched in color. But I think that heightened level of emotion is key to the genre and is something that Bram Stoker’s Dracula pulls off perfectly.
The movie follows Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker, who travels to Transylvania to finalize the sale of London’s Carfax Abbey to the enigmatic Count Dracula after Harker’s predecessor, Renfield, has seemingly lost his mind. Much like the novel, this sets off a series of events that leads the Count to imprison Harker in the castle with his vampire brides while he flees to London in search of fresh blood, as well as his long-lost love. This film has been almost equally praised for being closest to the source material and derided by fans and scholars for not being nearly as close to the source material as it claims. Both are, honestly, correct. This is the only adaptation where basically the entire structure of the book is there, in order, with all of its major characters intact. Even though it is the single most adapted novel in history, no other adaptation can say that.
At the same time, the central focus of the movie is on the forbidden romance between Dracula and Mina, which is nowhere to be found in the text. In the book, Dracula slinks into the background after those opening chapters with Harker, appearing often in the distance as a malevolent, red-eyed shadow — hardly boyfriend material. One of the best things about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, however, is that the Count takes on many shapes, just as he does in the novel. With Mina, he is a romantic hero, a dark prince who succeeds in sweeping her off her feet while her fiancee is imprisoned in his castle, but when he takes on other forms, he is absolutely monstrous. When Jonathan Harker first meets Dracula in Transylvania, the Count is in the form of an old man.
Dracula starting off old and growing younger over the course of the story is an aspect of the original text that had been kept out of every feature film adaptation except for Jess Franco’s 1970 Italian production starring Christopher Lee. Oldman brings authenticity to each of these different forms. Each one is slightly different, but the through line that makes them all believably the same character is clear as day. The actor absolutely had an uphill battle acting through both the makeup and the costumes, which range from Elizabethan gowns to elaborate armor.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula draws a clear link between the historical Vlad III Dracula, AKA Vlad the Impaler, and the fictional vampire of Stoker’s novel. This was not the first Dracula film to lean into that connection, but it was the first to truly cement that connection in pop culture, thanks to the movie’s success. Some have disputed whether Stoker truly took inspiration from that historical Wallachian warlord or whether the name is a coincidence, but in the novel, Harker sees a portrait of an “ancestor” and Dracula explains that “ancestor” was a brutal warrior who fought off a Turkish invasion, ensuring the safety of his homeland and his people, a clear reference to the historical Dracula.
Even if the allusion to an ancestor that’s obviously Dracula’s younger self is too vague, Van Helsing literally mentions that they are the same person later on in the novel. The film’s prologue also sees Dracula’s wife committing suicide by leaping from the castle into the river below after being tricked into believing her husband had died. While there are a few different theories as to why she made the jump, this also happened. Not in the novel, mind you, but in history itself. That river is still known today as the Arges River, the Princess’s River. Even though Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a film that takes drastic liberties with its central love story and brings a lavish visual style to the adaptation, after all this time I still don’t think it gets quite enough credit for the care that was taken in preserving so many particular aspects of the story and its characters.
Lavish is honestly an understatement when it comes to the visuals, performances and practically everything in this movie. That’s one of the best things about it. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as a film, is pure excess. Everything is big, everything is heightened, and even though it is done in such a big-budget modern way, there is an element of that bigness that fully embraces the gothic tradition. This, above all else, also a deeply horny movie. Themes of sexuality and death and the unspoken link between the two have been a part of Dracula from the very beginning, present in every one of its adaptations, but never this much at the forefront. This is not subtext, this is text. This is the movie.
There is an inherent bravery on the part of both director Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart in allowing a film this sexy to also be this genuinely scary. This was an era in which studios were still allowed to do that, but the mainstream erotic thriller and the effects-heavy monster movies were considered very different beasts. Even when movies don’t necessarily have to pick one side or the other, they almost always lean heavily in one direction. Bram Stoker’s Dracula honestly doesn’t, and I think that is a huge part of its appeal.
The film also embraces a sense of unreality, partly aided by the use of many techniques so old-school that they could have been achieved when the novel was first published in 1897. There is a shot of Harker on a train with Dracula’s eyes illuminated in the sky behind him that was achieved through simple projection. There is a shot of the train moving through the mountains with Harker’s diary in the foreground that was literally done by building both a very small train and a very big book.
When vampires appear, reality shifts and the laws of physics cease to apply, which is a unique approach to the supernatural. It’s a touch of surrealism that also clues the audience in on the approaching horror. When Harker is in the presence of the vampire brides, water drips upward instead of down, because we’ve left the real and entered the unreal. The vampires themselves, alluring and sexy, are also yellow-eyed and animalistic. The showdown with the vampiric Lucy is stunning to watch because she’ll look like a hauntingly unsettling, though beautiful, marble statue one moment and a hissing demon vomiting a geyser of blood the next.
That sequence encapsulates the entire film in a nutshell. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a capital “M” Movie. It is a visual feast that is as eager to feed you as it is to be fed.
