How Had I Never Seen..."Bram Stoker's Dracula"
Thursday, October 29, 2020 at 11:00PM 
“You haven’t seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” my girlfriend gasped, stopping her laundry folding dead.
This caught my attention as it upset the established dynamic of our relationship. I am the one who interrupts every conversation with some version of “What? You’re telling me you’ve never seen [insert name of film no one has ever watched outside a film studies program]?!"
She then reflected on how gorgeous Coppola’s vampire opus is and chastised herself for not owning it. This again was a reversal of the natural order. I wake up with night sweats at the thought that there is a great movie somewhere I don’t own. She owns approximately seven DVD’s she acquired by accident in the early 00’s which she stores in a dusty case next to "Jagged Little Pill" and her old Microsoft startup discs.
I immediately turned off what I was watching and popped on the Coppola film...
I guess I thought I was safe skipping it all this time because I had absorbed all the famous flourishes like Dracula’s giant hair buns and his independently moving shadow through cultural osmosis and Simpsons Halloween episodes so I didn’t see the value in sitting through the whole movie. It’s not like Coppola covered himself in glory in the 90’s. His Dracula was sandwiched between Godfather III and Jack, a pair more cursed than any creature Bram Stoker ever dreamt up. (I do have a soft spot for The Rainmaker. Late 90’s Damon schlock is one of my favorite schlock vintages.)
So I was prepared for some good Oldman hamminess plus some visual extravagance. And maybe some scattered moments of unintentional camp?
What I got...I was not prepared for.
Coppola imagines the prologue battle as a glorious shadow play against a bloody red-orange sky which suggests Kurosawa’s Ran by way of Suspiria. The silhouette of Vlad the Impaler charges into frame and impales the holy bejesus out of the silhouette of some hapless soldier and I went “Oooooh.” Gorgeous stuff. It crossed my mind that I had stumbled upon an underappreciated masterpiece. Then he continued to impale that same guy and I stopped going “Ooh” and started worrying that Vlad was going to finish the battle with awfully low impaling stats if he gets this carried away with the first guy. Then Vlad lifted the guy off his feet with his spear and jiggled him in the air and I laughed out loud. What do you want him to do? Un-impale the guy? He has his reputation to think of.
When we cut to the carnage of the finished battle to reveal a sea of impaled soldiers stuck in the ground like bloodied beach umbrellas I applauded in my living room. The prologue gives a good taste of Coppola’s raging contempt toward restraint and coherence. It made me positively giddy and the rest of the movie did not disappoint.
The film is indeed the visual feast I expected, although visual orgy might be a more apt description. But it is more than just a showcase for stellar production design and jaw-dropping costumery. It is completely bugnuts and about fifty times hornier than I was expecting. I had heard the film was crazy but I thought that meant sloppy late-period auteur crazy. Not bouncing-off-the-walls-of-a-padded-cell-crazy. At one point two geysers of blood erupt into the frame from offscreen seemingly without cause. Even at its most hallucinogenic, The Shining at least had the courtesy to drop the blood off in an elevator.
Here is a film that features Tom Waits as gibbering, bug-eating Renfield lurching about in a loony bin that evokes nothing so much as an episode of Hoarders set in Terry Gilliam’s basement and it doesn’t stand out from the rest of the movie in the slightest.
If you can sit through this perverse phantasmagoria and your only reaction is “the accents are shaky”, well, you have my pity. Perhaps there is alternate dimension early 90’s Dracula where you don’t even consider the accents because the Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder’s parts are quite sensibly cast with Hugh Grant and Helena Bonham Carter, and everything is very grounded and logical, and Gary Oldman never explodes into a heap of rats that scurry out of a room like a scene from Ratatouille In Hell. Thankfully, we live in this dimension.
The film posits that around vampires the laws of physics warp and falter altogether. Shadows drop out of sync, blood drips upward, and rats crawl across the ceiling. Coppola takes this as his artistic baseline. The very celluloid on which the movie was shot feels warped by some twisted and unsavory evil. Scenes aren’t cut together in the traditional sense so much as they are swept up in a tempest of slavering fuck beasts and vampire concubines biting Keanu Reeves on the dick. You can just make out the structure of the Dracula novel in there through the operatic din. But it plays less like a traditional telling of the Dracula legend and more like someone watched all the versions of Dracula simultaneously while out of his mind on absinthe and then tried to transcribe the nightmares that ensued.
It is quite a lot of fun.
And yes Oldman, is quite the ham here. But when hamminess meets material that welcomes, nee, demands hamminess, the results can be glorious. The actor correctly intuits that when he is tasked with telling Ryder that he has crossed “oceans of time” to find her, subtle understatement is not the order of the day. And this is to say nothing of the need to be heard over Anthony Hopkins.
(By the way, no one ever told me Hopkins is HILARIOUS as Van Helsing. At one point Ryder asks if her best friend who had been turned into a vampire died in great pain, and Hopkins assures her that yes this was absolutely the case, adding by way of comfort “Then we cut off her head, and drove a stake through her heart, and burned it, and then she found peace.”)
I’m not sure I could argue with anyone who doesn’t like Bram Stoker's Dracula. It’s true I never got involved in the story exactly, enjoying the film more from the outside, as an observer to a bonkers spectacle. Yes, one could have made a better version of this movie, but that would mean we would lose this version of the movie and that would make me very sad indeed. I enjoyed every element of this film, but most of all I loved that there was a time when such a baroque, experimental swing from an auteur could exist as a popular mainstream hit.
Reader Comments (22)
Eiko Ishioka winning an Oscar for her costumes is easily one of my favorite victories in any category. Only Coppola could’ve presented these dailies and been allowed to continue filming. I also forget how funny Hopkins is as Van Helsing.
This film is brilliant. In my recollection of it, the only thing that was wrong was Keanu Reeves. The other actors are over-the-top in the best way possible, but he is just bad (and the film seems aware of it). There's a scene in a restaurant (I think), where Hopkins' scorn is palpable.
I love Coppolas' tribute to old fashion effects
1992 was for me the year of first cinematic erotical experiences as a 13 year old boy. First Bram Stokers Dracula and then Basic Instinct
Dracula, is simply a movie I truly love. The costumes, the score, coloring, the introducing of Monica Bellucci. And YES Keanu Reeves is so so bad, but even he cannot destroy my experience. I am afraid of rewatching it to discover that Dracula may not be as good as I thought it was he he
Dracula was also my first time with Gary Oldman and he continued to mesmerize me in Leon, two years later
No shame in being a Rainmaker fan. It holds up as one of the better courtroom dramas of the 1990's and was one of the few movies to ever get an A+ for legal realism from LegalEagle.
I would replace Winona Ryder with Michelle Pfeiffer, Keanu Reeves with Hugh Grant and Gary Oldman with António Banderas or Daniel Day-Lewis. Everything else works perfectly.
The film that really brought Francis Ford Coppola back to the fold and actually saved him from the debt he had acquired from One from the Heart back in 1982. I think it's his best film since Rumble Fish as one of the reasons is because of the second unit from his son Roman.
Robert: Yeah, though Damon has an unusual amount of late 90s/early 2000s stuff that absolutely IS schlock (Rounders, Dogma (good, but still schlock), Titan A.E., Bagger Vance), but I'd absolutely hesitate on citing The Rainmaker as an example.
Gary Oldman is fantastic in this, the shot where he tastes the blood from the razor is brilliant but i found the film a little exhaustive by the end part.
I've been reading a lot the 'hammy' term a lot in this page. Someone could explaine me what that word means?
More than the lavish and ornate visuals, Bram Stoker's Dracula has the best film score of the 90s. One that seduces me to return to the movie even though it fails me as a standard narrative experience.
I've been reading a lot the 'hammy' term a lot in this page. Someone could explaine me what that word means?
It means Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.
This over the years has become THE Dracula film for me,Oldman is outsanding,how did he not get any traction for this role,he's on par with the nominees that year even better than some.
The accents can get wonky but it's such a lushly designed photographed piece of film making.
Hilarious and totally accurate write up. Thanks! LOL
César -- hammy means overdoing it ... the acting gets a bit exaggerated and inauthentic.. Other phrases you might have heard that are similar (if not always exactly the same) are "over the top" and "scenery chewing"
I love this movie. /3rtful. Shut up... I thought you had grown up!!!
Superb write-up of this batshit movie. My sister and I watched it countless times as teenagers and I can still recite every line. I recall it being quite divisive when it was first released, with some people disappointed with the mad theatricality and others in thrall to it. I was firmly in the latter camp and I think it’s aged really well - the heightened stylisation and more-is-more tenor have rendered it somehow timeless. It certainly stands apart from a tendency towards self-seriousness and period authenticity that characterise other 90s horror adaptations. Thank you for this wild review - you’ve really captured what makes it so unique.
I just wish it would have been more slowly paced, more KWAIDAN than "Vampire Tornado", but then it would have lost that fin-de-siècle delerium (batshit craziness) that we all love about it. Tough call.
It's a film that celebrates the artifice of cinema.
I find the movie quite enjoyable to watch , but it was a stupid movie. I can't understand how it won 21 awards... At first I thought it was a Month Python style movie for gods sake.
Just watched this again for the millionth time. I saw it on opening night because it was closer to the book than any of the other movies. It's fun and gory. It was never meant to be a horror film. My 15 and 17 yo loved it!
rdf—don’t be rude. He’s entitled to his opinion. And he’s right.
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