No One Has Correctly Adapted This
After almost ninety years, it’s likely no one will.
To pull off a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula a director has to get tone correct and that tone begins at the very beginning of the book, not the fucking castle.
You begin at the train station — Transylvania by itself is a bizarre, unsettling place out of time. Then you slowly bleed in the fear, first of merely the darkness, then of things in the dark and then of the supernatural itself.
If the viewer is not questioning whether there could be something out there lurking in the night, an ancient fear, if you will, existing outside of science and rationality, then the adaptation has failed.
You require that fear of the unknown as a base for the rest of the story.
However, after almost a century of the tale being told it might be impossible to be faithful and entertaining to modern audiences, so instead we get the familiar and the profane: recycled cinematic Dracula tropes blended with lazy contemporary symbology.
Case in point, the BBC and Netflix co-production from the guys who did Sherlock:
The Christopher Lee, the cloak and the cross, now mixed with vampire-hunting nuns and close-up grotesquery.
What, the time-lapse decomposition of an animal corpse didn’t make the cut?
Let’s see what YouTube has to say:
- “Don’t know why but Dracula reminds me when Christopher Lee played Dracula…”
- “Dracula has a Midlands accent? Hmmm.”
- “Take note universal this is how you do horror!”
- “The teeth look crap! and im not sure about the Christopher Lee knockoff look.”
- “Is he a she or a he get ready bbc dracula is a she”
It’s odd that no one asked the most important question of all: does everyone have a license for those wooden stakes?
If readers are interested in the most faithful Dracula adaptation strictly based on plot and characters, Cinemassacre has done a very thorough video on the subject.
Thorough but completely worthless — he ranks Coppola’s absolute dogshit adaptation, complete with Dracula in Red Vines armor and wearing sunglasses, at the top.
Again, if you fail at the tone, you fail at Dracula. Still, you might find it interesting.
Dracula premieres on BBC One Christmas 2019 and then a little later on Netflix.
