How We Killed DRACULA

Bram Stoker’s Dracula terrified me as a child. I mean the masterfully written novel, not the star studded film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola.

Don’t get me wrong, that movie was actually a decent attempt at a retelling of the original story, but it was burdened with a wooden Keanu Reeves unsuccessfully trying to be a Victorian era Englishman suffering from severe psychological trauma. This tragic casting choice was made even more painful by the fact that he was sharing screen space with acting legends like Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins. The stark contrast of talent manifested on film proved to be more disturbing than the story.
Coming back to my initial point, the novel really succeeded in scaring my young mind, which was not yet desensitized to the horror genre.

Looking back at that literary experience now, it occurs to me that none of the Dracula movies I have seen match up to the book when it comes to the dread and fear. It also dawns on me that an actually scary movie or television depiction of the good Count looks highly unlikely now.

The once terrifying character has in the past century saturated popular culture with a million different gimmicks and appearances. So much so that his very name is now little more than a punchline to an old, humourless joke.

Somehow looking at the situation, I can’t help but feel that the Count was handled all wrong by all parties involved.

We killed Dracula. Or at the very least we stripped him of his macabre dignity.

What went wrong?

Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931)

Well, the image of Dracula that you might have now – the sleek combed back hair, sharp canines and the ridiculous cape – all of that began with the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi. It has little to do with how Stoker intended his character to look.

Nevertheless, this became the iconic visage of Dracula in pop culture for all times.

The Christopher Lee movies, which were essentially poorly made B- Grade films, further damned the evil Count to an eternity of running away from crosses and dying over and over again at the hands of pointless heroes. I liked those movies when I saw them and they are entertaining for what they are, but the truth is they did irreversible damage to how Dracula is perceived by the audiences worldwide.

Christopher Lee as Dracula

In the 90s and 2000s, there was an attempt to modernize and innovate with the character’s back story. You know, give him an upgrade of sorts to make him appeal to the millennials. That, quite emphatically, did not work either.

The short lived BBC series a few years back attempted to make Dracula in to a hybrid Victorian Twilight-ish vampire lord. They can’t be blamed entirely for riding on the coat tails of the Twilight epidemic, but they got it wrong too. If you can’t make him scary anymore, better make him a badass heart throb, I guess, was the thinking. Sigh. At least they didn't make him sparkle, so there’s that.

I’m assuming from how it got canceled after a short first season that the production budget couldn't be justified by the niche fan base it managed to gather.

There have been countless other depictions on film and television scattered throughout these many decades but they all made the same fundamental mistakes.

Their error was in not giving due consideration to what made the original novel by Stoker, which birthed this whole thing, a chilling tale. The novel is told for the most part, if not all of it, from the perspectives of the other characters in it – not from Dracula’s point of view. The events, right from the start, all create a nightmarish ambiance of fear and despair because it is told by the people experiencing the terror caused by this monstrous evil from ancient lore.

The mood is set step by step, layer by layer, through vivid narration by characters who are thrown without warning into the midst of this darkness before Dracula is even introduced as a true monster. And even once he is revealed to be what he is, he steps very rarely in to the spotlight to accommodate jump scares or give chase to a victim.

The best comparison I can make cinematically is maybe to the original Jaws movie by Spielberg. Back when it was released, it terrified the audiences not because the shark was in itself a monster of indescribable horror, but by building up the dread and tension in meticulous fashion. This makes the eventual and abrupt appearance of the shark something that scared the hell out of the average viewer back then.

I could also compare the elements of the novel to a movie like Alien. The point being the fear factor was constructed by observing the plot move through the eyes of the vulnerable and scared humans.

Dracula is not a visually terrifying monster who needs to be on screen for most of the movie or show. But that’s how the entertainment industry always handled him. They lost track of what made him a nightmare inducing villain and as a result we now have the unflattering caricature of what originally was a dreaded being.

Count Dracula of Transylvania is an undead being with tremendous powers. While his ability to control the ‘creatures of the night’ or maybe transform in to one, and his gift of summoning the harsher elements of nature to aid him are impressive, the original novel laid great importance on the fact that what was most crippling to his foes was his mind itself.

This is a being, who was in life a leader of men and a warrior of great strength and intelligence. He won countless wars and developed a taste for brutality. In undead existence, he had all of that still in him, along with the ability to learn and grow smarter with time. He has lived for centuries and witnessed humankind through all their victories and follies, while also preying on them from the shadows of the night.

Think about it. Knowing him in this light, does the fanged man in a silly cape jumping in front of his enemies only to be shown a wooden cross which makes him run away, make any sense whatsoever?

The Count is a mastermind of diabolical schemes, manipulating and seducing the minds of his human enemies and victims. A creature of unspeakable horror emerging from the pitch black of the night to feed on their life source, and if he so chooses, to transform them into something unholy and subservient to him.

In the novel, we see a man, pitiable and broken, committed in an asylum, having lost all will to be himself and existing just to serve this unseen monster. The plight of this character, Renfield, alone shows the true evil of Dracula.

If anything, I think Dracula should be portrayed more along the lines of something like a super villain, pulling the strings of his living puppets to unleash pain and suffering in our realm from behind the curtain of all things known. Ideally he must emerge onto the screen only when it is absolutely called for. Reveal his vile self in all its glory, inspiring awe and fear in us, when the stage has been perfectly set with preceding events that build him up.

Well… I can dream can’t I?

The truth is we may already have destroyed him, drained him of his life force by innumerable depictions that border on the silly and laughable. I will have to face the fact that in my lifetime, I may never see a cool adaptation of Dracula or his story on screen.

But then again, the Count has been known to resurrect when least expected. Fingers crossed that someone in the right position understands him for who he is.