Credit: Columbia Pictures/American Zoetrope
by Morris Yang Featured Film Retrospective

Bram Stoker’s Dracula — Francis Ford Coppola

October 3, 2024

Cinema’s obsessions with images are the result of its propensity for their proliferation: although literature tempts the wayward imagination, cinema is what drives it truly crazy, instantiating orgiastic visions of sex and death without rendering their reality bare to the observer. This is, of course, a metaphysical claim; as with the unknowability of the Kantian noumenon, the reality of the silver screen is also always the reality behind the screen. We may graft causality onto cuts, and ascribe meaningful quality to qualia of image and sound. But the image remains sacrosanct, less so in documentarian realism but certainly within the context of narrative genre, where tempests of emotion and torrents of free will disturb the mimesis, as it were, of graphic, threadbare reality.

Where does reality stand, though, in relation to the supernatural? When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, he had birthed out of his eponymous creation an image that was to grant itself immortality. Monstrous in its difference and terrifying in its unpredictability, the vampiric figure was not so much a direct caricature of the ethnic or colonial Other as an eternally open signifier of unfathomable horror. The Count is flesh and blood, but the blood is not his and has to be replenished, ever so frequently, from the pool of virgin innocents. His flesh, too, is a matter of contrivance, transubstantiated at will into portents of doom and pawns of destruction: a dog and wolf on the prowl, and a final, mortal return to dust. Unshackled, mobile, and hungry from the curse of eternity, Dracula unsettled his adversaries not because of his corporeal manifestations, but in spite of them — a class of the living dead that resisted earthly retribution, redemption, and most crucially any explanation for their being and essence beyond the vagaries of some general force of will.

Classic representations of Dracula on screen — from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu to performances by Bela Lugosi (1931) and Christopher Lee (1958) — have mostly aimed for a semblance of realism, not in the strict sense of the term, but with regard to the construction and presentation of narrative at its most fundamental level. A force of malevolence surfaces and terrorizes all the goodness of the world; it has to and will be stopped. Action is sublimated into stills of fangs poised, eyes wide open, while reason is subsumed under a moral framework of natural good over grotesque evil. These are, loosely, elements of Gothic fiction. But they also draw upon more ancient templates of spiritual salvation, foregrounding the human soul above all in its triumphant heroism. The vampiric, as a subset of the supernatural and thus the unknowable, arguably doesn’t possess a stable reality. It is an ontological violation: of bloodsucking torment, of virulence without discernible trace. It’s a genre open, in particular, to lurid experimentation.

“There is much to be learned from beasts,” remarks the mysterious Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 exegesis of the genre. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Gothic to the extreme, is more than its lurid spectacles of blood-red sky and bristling shadow. What stands out is a hitherto unseen transplantation of romantic agency onto the specter of evil incarnate. Dracula (Gary Oldman), we find, is both timeless and historical; some four centuries before the events of the film, he was Vlad the Impaler, the last bastion of Christianity against the incursions of the Ottoman Empire, consigned to a tragic fate after his beloved commits suicide upon learning — falsely — of his death. He renounces the order that betrayed him, draws his sword against the church’s stone, and drains it of its lifeblood. Thus begat man his bestial mirror, an animal force welcomed by neither moral code nor social custom, but nonetheless imbued with a very human motivation for salvation: youth, love, and a respite from eternal solitude.

Looks may deceive — Coppola’s film trades in garish excess, its narrative logic muddled to fit and flit through all of Stoker’s plot points into slightly over two hours of screentime. Its mannerisms and expressions are unreservedly comical, whether in accentuating Dracula’s melodramatic disposition or in evoking raw feminine expressions of sexuality in Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), wife of the solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and her best friend Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost). But the blueprint at its heart remains at the mercy of teeming passion. Though crudely put, the statement that “civilization and syphilization have advanced together” should not be read too literally as an articulation of moral panic. Rather, something more entwined is suggested, both in the necessary relationship between passion and life as well as in the commingling of love and bloodlust. Readers of a traditional Dracula would, quite understandably, balk at a monster stripped of its monstrous evil and charged, instead, with an appetite all too desperate, all too conscious of the sliver of happiness that awaits it.

In “Defanging Dracula: The Disappearing Other in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Erik Marshall discusses the film’s potentially subversive qualities insofar as it challenges the “very notion of progress.” The supernatural world extends beyond the abandoned and forgotten Transylvanian wilderness, influencing not only Mina but also van Helsing himself, who allegedly is as old, powerful, and possibly evil as the Count is. But just as radical is the suggestion, never indubitably confirmed, that Mina really is the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-lost love. “It’s like a voice in a dream I cannot place,” she muses to the newly fashioned prince who sweeps her off her feet and, against his own pangs of conscience, allows her to incarnate herself anew. The hazy and frequently inconstant logic of Coppola’s protagonists may come courtesy of his whimsical direction, but it also speaks to the unbridled furor of the ‘90s in casting wide the nets of its dreamscapes, without fear of the unconscionable result of expressing its generational nostalgia through a repurposed series of Gothic imagery. There is, after all, the film’s final shot: transcendence, reunion, heaven. It would’ve been unthinkable, from the vampire’s perspective at least; but if we look closely, all we see are a severed head, a stake through the heart, and the physical absence of Dracula’s beloved. Is romanticism just an image? Aren’t films just images?


Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.