I hate scary movies. I really do.
It’s not that I think they’re predictable, or that they revel
in absurd premises, or that they resort to lots of cheap scares, even though
all of those things are probably true. No, I hate scary movies because of the
simple fact that when I watch them, I get scared really, really easily.
I don’t get scared in the fun way, either, where you react
to each scene as it comes and then get over it quickly. No, when I’m sitting in
that theater (or much more likely, at home on my sofa, with the remote firmly
in hand), I am on red alert, constantly trying to predict the next scary
moment, bracing myself every second until it arrives, and then repeating the
process all over again. I really have no idea if this is how it works for everyone,
but for me it’s emotionally draining and physically uncomfortable, and it
happens every single time I try to watch a horror flick. Hell, I almost walked
out of This is the End because I was
feeling too tense. And that was a comedy starring Darryl from The Office.
So yeah. I hate scary movies.
But I love Halloween.
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| What? I'm a complex individual. |
Is it paradoxical? Maybe. I’d just say that I prefer spooky
to scary. Either way, my holiday spirit is strong enough that I’m willing to put
up with a few creature features, if only during the month of October. And
really, could there be a better time of the year to bring this blog back from
the dead? Don’t answer that.
Today, I’m going to look at a movie that I just watched for
the first time, but that’s been on my Netflix queue for over a year. Directed
by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, it’s Dracula.
Now, Dracula is
one of my favorite books, and I’ve read it about five times in the last seven
years, so I was extremely excited when I heard tell that Coppola’s version was
the most faithful adaptation of the story yet to be put on film. Now that I’ve seen
it, I’d say that, yeah, that’s about right. It certainly quotes the novel often
enough. If nothing else, the main characters are all present and accounted for,
and they all play their proper roles in the story, both of those things being
surprisingly rare occurrences in Dracula movies.
A quick breakdown of
the story’s characters-slash-roles for your benefit-slash-my own personal
satisfaction: The first part of Dracula focuses on solicitor
Jonathan Harker, who apparently drew the short straw in his office lottery, and
ends up having to pay his newest client a visit at his remote Transylvania
castle. Once Jonathan’s story peters out, we return to England to meet his
fiancée Mina Murray and her best friend Lucy Westenra. Also introduced at this
point are the three men that want to marry Lucy: Dr. John Seward, who provides
more than half of the narration in the novel but tends to get short-changed on
film (this one being no exception); Arthur Holmwood, the most important of the
three from a hierarchical standpoint, as well as the one who actually gets the
girl; and badass Texan Quincey Morris, who gets… well, something else. Through
Seward, we periodically check in on Renfield, a patient at the mental asylum
the doctor runs. And last but certainly not least, we have Abraham Van Helsing,
who is decidedly not a vampire
hunter, but rather Seward’s friend and former teacher, called in to help make
sense of things despite being armed only with several PhDs, a reasonable
knowledge of the occult, and an open mind.
(On a little bit of a
tangent: Keanu Reeves, of all people, plays Jonathan in this movie, and I
really want to know… Can the man act? Like, at all? Seriously, has he ever
given a genuinely good performance outside of Bill and Ted? Let me know in the comments or through
Facebook, because if he has, I’d really like to see it. Help me out, folks.)
Right, so we’re all grounded. Let’s talk about the bloody
movie now, eh?
I try really hard not to be that guy when I watch adaptations, pointing out every little
difference from the book, because adaptation is a lot more difficult than it
seems. Stories rarely transition well from one medium to another, so if you
want the story to live up to its fullest potential, you have to make changes to suit the format you’re working in.
Compressing certain plot points and skipping over others are a good first step,
because books and comics have the luxury of much slower pacing than your
average movie. They certainly have slower pacing than your average good movie.
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| This trilogy will be nine hours long. I’ve read The Hobbit. You know how long it took me? FOUR HOURS. |
Condensing the plot is rarely enough, though. For instance, JAWS, which I talked about last time,
was also based on a novel, and in adapting it, several characters were cut or
drastically reinvented, and multiple storylines got dropped completely. Among
them: the Mafia’s intimidation of the Mayor in order to keep the beaches open,
because (besides that concept being really silly,) maintaining the Mayor’s
agency creates a more personal conflict; and Hooper’s affair with Brody’s wife,
because a fight to the death with a great white shark creates more than enough
tension for a film’s third act, thank you very much. You have to be willing to shake
things up in an adaptation, or else you risk making a crappy movie. It’s as
simple as that. Little differences, big differences, I welcome them all, as
long as they’re justified.
One little difference in this film that I very much approved
of was the decision to give Renfield a backstory. In the novel, Renfield isn’t
much more than a lunatic who likes to eat small animals alive, and who is
particularly susceptible to Dracula’s influence. In the film, he’s turned into Dracula’s
former solicitor, the one Jonathan is replacing at the start of the movie, and
it really goes a long way towards explaining how he became crazy and why he has
such a strong connection to the Count in the story’s second half. I learned in
the research for this blugpost that that choice is really more of an homage to
Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, in which
the Renfield character actually replaces Jonathan at the castle in the first
part of the movie, but either way, giving Renfield a history with vampires puts
a nice little bow on that loose end, and strengthens an already really
interesting character. There are further attempts made to strengthen other
characters in ways that I don’t think are nearly as successful, but I’ll have
plenty to say about that after I get the general stuff out of the way.
The appeal of Dracula
as a novel comes from the fact that the bulk of its narrative is, for all
intents and purposes, a single, long exercise in dramatic irony: Jonathan heads
off to Transylvania and goes missing, but of those he leaves behind, only we
know the horrific things he witnessed while he was there. A few months later, a
ship with a murdered crew washes up in the town of Whitby, filled only with
boxes of dirt; we know from Jonathan that Count Dracula was preparing to move
to England. Then Lucy starts sleepwalking and gets sick, seemingly from an
inexplicable loss of blood, and… well, you get the idea. We aren’t given all
the pieces of the puzzle right away, but as they’re doled out, we have the
benefit – unlike the characters – of seeing them all in context. The end result
is a book that’s almost, but not quite, a mystery, because the reader’s
knowledge outpaces the characters’ knowledge just enough that we start itching for them to figure it out.
Such a concept may have worked in 1897, when vampires didn’t
pervade the cultural consciousness to an absolutely insane degree. It may have
been fascinating, or even terrifying. Nowadays, though, an idea like that, no
matter how well it’s executed, just isn’t going to fly, and that development
isn’t really anyone’s fault.
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| But I’m gonna go ahead and blame Stephenie Meyer anyway. |
We all know how vampires work now, and because of that, Dracula holds no surprises for us. Even
I still have a tendency to sigh with relief after the big reveal is finally
reached, and like I said before, I love the book to death.
So no, Dracula’s
plotting does not lend itself well to movie form in this day and age. Before we
can do anything, something has to be done about all that (now obsolete)
exposition. And believe me, there is a LOT of exposition. The book is really
mostly exposition. And the writers of this movie will have none of it. They opt
take the easy way out, dumping all the information on us at once via Van
Helsing, and really trashing his character as a result. Yes, book Van Helsing is
also a walking exposition dump, but he gave it out a little bit at a time, and
he also got frequent opportunities to spend a page or seven simply waxing
philosophical. He’s a great, even funny character, and he’s become the second
most important part of the Dracula mythology for a reason. Movie Van Helsing,
though, doesn’t have time for your silly nonsense, and that includes ridiculous
notions like ‘exploring our options’ or ‘reasonable doubt.’ He simply shows up,
sees Lucy’s bite marks, and promptly declares it Vampire Season.
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| Rabbit Season! |
Even Anthony Hopkins (Anthony Hopkins!!) can’t seem to
figure out how to play the poor guy, resorting to a kind of grumpy
matter-of-factness that is occasionally, in his better moments, tempered by a
very grim sense of humor and multiple, inexplicable Exorcist references.
The alternative to this exposition dump in question would
have been, in my opinon, to take things in the complete opposite direction: abandon
all hope of surprise, and embrace the fact that the audience knows how vampires
work, using our knowledge to really build the suspense. Oh, silly me. I forgot
to outline what I mean when I use those terms. But I just so happen to have
brought someone who can help! Professor?
Van Helsing Says: Thank you, friend Michael. Surprise and
suspense, we are all familiar with these things, no? Though the heart race when
he feel them, they be not as strangers to us. We think of them as we do the
hands that clasp one another. And yet in the execution we see that they be oh!
so different. Your so famous director, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, he describe the
difference as such: Suppose two men, such as you and myself, we sit here at
this table and we chat, about life, about weather, about work, it matters not
what. Suddenly, out of nowhere there comes the boom! from beneath the table,
and we two are dead. To those observing our chat, they experience the sensation
of surprise, for they knew not that
this thing would happen, and because of this, they cared not for what we had to
say. Now! Suppose instead that those watching, they see the anarchist as he place the bomb beneath our table, and they know that it shall explode at eleven on the
clock. How great then will their despair be, to watch us while away our so
precious minutes on trivialities? Would they not yearn to reach out, to warn us
of our fate that we know not of, even though this thing they cannot do, for I
forget to say that in this example we are as mere figures on a screen? In such
a case, our every word hold the viewer in his thrall, though our topics be the
same, for the audience is caught now in the great web of suspense. You tell me, dear reader at home, which be
the better tool of cinema? The surprise of the jump scare, which my dear friend
Michael hate so much, or the drama of suspense, which even he, in his
woman-like fear of the horror film, must hold in so high a regard?
Ahem. Thank you, Professor, for that very… illuminating
lecture. Moving on.
Because we as a culture have such intimate knowledge of a
vampire’s bag of tricks, an idealized version of this movie would not only
allow us to anticipate Dracula’s every move, but could indicate to us what that
move will be with only the slightest of hints or visual cues. The characters
would still be able to figure things out, but more slowly and at a pace that
makes sense to the story. Really, it wouldn’t matter to us if they figured it
out at all, much less explained it out loud for our benefit, because we would
already know the lay of the land. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to
drop, we would grow all the more worried for the characters’ safety as they
advance further into what we know to be a dangerous situation. (Of course, for
that method to succeed, the writers would have to make us like the characters first, a technique that most horror movies have
completely given up on. In this case, though, it would be worth the investment,
since only two of the seven main characters die.) (No spoilers.) It’s not every
day that you hear me wishing that a movie was scarier – again, I point you
towards This is the End – but in this
instance, I feel that it would have been the right thing to do.
I will remind you, since it seems like forever ago that I
explained it, that what the filmmakers actually
chose to do was adapt the novel more or less as written, simply moving along at
2x speed. The fallout from that decision is that they have a lot of time to fill,
and to my great dismay, they filled this time with an original(?) subplot: a
love triangle between Jonathan, Mina, and, yes, the Count.
I don’t know who first came up with the idea that Mina is secretly
the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-dead wife. I really don’t. It may or may
not have been these writers, because I’ve seen the concept show up in quite a
few versions of the story, including the new NBC show, and a similar love
triangle is featured in the Broadway musical. Regardless, whoever it was that
had the idea, I’d like to punch them.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with invoking sympathy for vampires in fiction. As a Joss
Whedon megafan, Angel and Spike immediately spring to mind. I’ll even confess
to watching True Blood. (Though I’ll
hold off on saying just how much.) In this particular case, I call it a
mistake, if only because it ends up confusing the audience. The film should, by
all accounts, want us to care about its supposed protagonists, but ends up
expending far more effort humanizing the creature they are all risking their
lives to kill. There is pity to be had for Count Dracula, to be sure, and
evoking it adds a nice depth to the conflict at hand. But that pity should be
directed at the man he once was, not the unqualified monster that he is.
There are times when the Mina/Dracula subplot comes across
as the only part of the movie the filmmakers cared about at all; if it weren’t
for the frequent – and often very impressive – practical SFX that fill the
movie, I’d be willing to say so outright. The scenes between the two are long,
indulgent, sensual, and surprisingly tender, while other parts of the film are
so brusque that they could almost be Dracula
Sparknotes read aloud. One gets the sense that the entire project was an
excuse to share this one subplot with the world. That, or Francis Ford Coppola
REALLY wanted to see Gary Oldman have sex with Winona Ryder.
That last point was a joke, but I almost think that it might
be true. After all, it’s not just Drac and Mina; the whole movie is bursting at
the seams with depraved sexual overtones. In fact, they’re so blatant that they
could very well just be ‘tones.’ Dracula the
novel has its fair share of thinly veiled sexual imagery, don’t get me wrong,
but this has to be the most sexual version of the story I’ve ever seen.
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Pictured: Raw sexuality.
WEIRDLY SEXUAL MOMENT CHECKLIST!!
- Jonathan’s first encounter with the three brides of Dracula very quickly devolves into what I am regrettably forced to call a blood orgy. True, that same scene in the book is absolutely its most overtly sexual moment, but (luckily for Jonathan) nothing actually happens between the four of them, and any eroticism comes solely from the antici……pation of a single bite. Here, we get lots and lots of biting, and it’s all so explicit that it reads only as exploitative.
- At Hillingham, Mina and Lucy get caught in a rainstorm in a hedge maze, and decide to use this opportunity to make out with each other, because, sure, why not? Mind you, this is well before Dracula shows up. I really can’t justify it at all. Do women kiss each other indiscriminately when they get caught in the rain? Is that a thing? Because if it is, I really wish I’d known about it sooner.
- It’s not enough for poor Lucy to get bitten by Dracula; she also has to be raped by him in werewolf form. Because that’s how you get turned into a vampire, right guys? Werewolf rape? Come on, don’t look at me like that, this stuff is common knowledge.
- Book Lucy is found in a ‘swoon’ after a night of being fed on. Movie Lucy reacts with a ten-minute orgasm.
- *SPOILERS* At the end of the movie, when half-vampirized Mina and Van Helsing are alone outside Dracula’s castle, she makes a half-assed effort to schtupp the good doctor. It’s not as bad as everything else on this list, especially since she was really just going in for a bite, but still. Really?
Bottom line: The
Godfather this ain’t. Hell, it might not even be The Godfather: Part III. (I couldn’t tell you; I’ve never seen that
one. Please don’t make me.) However Dracula
may have turned out in the end, though, the film was a least made with the
intention of doing justice to the original novel, and I’ve got to give it
credit for that.
Bottom bottom line: read Dracula!
It’s really good! Or you could watch this movie, I guess. It’s okay.
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| Maybe Keanu was a good choice for a vampire movie after all... |
