Vampire Cinema Series #2: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Written by Madeline Ostdick
Part 2/3 of our Vampire Cinema Series
The first commercial film exhibitions were held in 1895: the Lambda Company debuted their “Eidoloscope” in New York that spring, and Auguste and Louis Lumière debuted the “Cinematograph” the following winter. Two years later, Bram Stoker published his epistolary novel Dracula, a Gothic horror take on the vampire myth. “Count Dracula” and cinema came into this world at the same time, but until Francis Ford Coppola set out to adapt Stoker’s novel, no one thought to make the connection.
“It is a wonder of the civilized world,” Count Dracula (Gary Oldman), a remnant of an archaic world, remarks to his prey, Mina Harker (Winona Ryder), while in disguise as a gentleman at a cinematograph exhibition in London. To Coppola, this early film technology was inherently mystical: “It’s a form of alchemy, of magic,” Coppola once said of the medium.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is full of magic tricks: the camera twists at odd angles to produce unnerving perspectives; colossal images of a tempestuous natural world are achieved through the use of matte painted backgrounds; unusual match cuts obscure narrative logic; and separate scenes run simultaneously within frame through use of multiple exposure (recording new images atop previously exposed film). In one scene, a female vampire eerily floats across the screen, achieved by ingeniously performing the scene backwards, then playing the footage in reverse. And yet there are no computer-generated effects in the film: everything was accomplished on-set or in-camera, employing techniques from the earliest decades of motion picture filmmaking. By integrating and remixing classic film history and technique, the film links cinema past and present, subverting our expectations to create a Dracula adaptation that somehow feels entirely fresh and modern.
A major commercial hit, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has remained popular for several reasons: its unforgettable visual design, convincing practical effects, the strength of its cast, its lurid sensuality, and a rich thematic throughline that emphasizes the novel’s preoccupation with transformation through cross-cultural pollination.
In Stoker’s novel, written at a time of cultural preoccupation with Eastern Europe and its seemingly archaic ways, an undead Romanian aristocrat feeds on the blood of living creatures, using his terrific powers to travel from his home in the Carpathian mountains, the borderlands of the East and West, to an England modernized by the Industrial Revolution. He is a manifestation of the superstitious Old World and its hierarchical arrangements: a parasite, living off the exploited masses. In Coppola’s adaptation, Dracula is also from a long ancestral line of brutal religious warriors: a violent creature from a blood-soaked time and place, damned to eternal life by his rejection of God following the loss of his beloved (also Ryder). It’s a faithful adaptation that adds a tepid love story between Dracula and Mina Harker, but the romance is really a metaphor for Christian salvation: slay the (heretical) monster to save the soul of the (religious) man.
Playing with spiritual themes of transubstantiation and transmutation, the film envisions a vampire that’s in a state of constant metamorphosis, transforming into bat-like hybrids and bipedal wolves. This monster is a shape-shifting spectacle, a creature of “a million faces,” said costume designer Eiko Ishioka, who won an Academy Award for her work on the film.
An acclaimed visual artist, Ishioka developed the film’s entire visual concept, an unusual hybrid of Eastern and Western influences. She discarded traditional cinematic depictions of Dracula, particularly the cliché black cape, in favor of striking designs pulled from diverse influences, from Romanticist and Art Nouveau painting, to Japanese traditional dress, to Victorian medical illustration, and even the natural world (a female vampire’s burial gown, for example, was inspired by an Australian frilled lizard). These eccentric costumes are a far cry from the buttoned-up sartorial sensibilities of Victorian England, representing the libidinous threat posed by this mystical force from the East, creating a tableau in which man is constantly at war with himself, fighting primal, beastly forces. It’s something wholly different from every Dracula adaptation that came before, and proof that traditional craftsmanship, not technological advancement, makes a movie.
Outrageous and unforgettable, Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s polarizing elements are what help it endure: the visual design, in service of a phantasmagoric cinematic experience, holds up so well precisely because there are no dated computer effects shaping the overall aesthetic. In bringing such a supernatural story to the screen, Coppola reaffirms the power of man’s creativity through cinematic alchemy, inspired by what first drew him to filmmaking: the chance to cast a magic spell.
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