Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), my favorite novel, has the curious distinction of being adapted more often, but less faithfully, than most, as I was reminded by watching Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) for SILVER. When Coppola’s version came out, I was dazzled by its audacious virtuosity and comparative fidelity, yet on this umpteenth viewing, I found the former lapsing too often into annoying excess—especially those hideous and inexplicably Oscar-winning costumes—and the latter much more qualified. Summing up the film’s intrinsic dichotomy, its title suggests that the book was finally filmed as written, while its tagline, “Love Never Dies,” epitomizes the way in which it most diverges from Stoker’s novel.
Don’t let this happen to you.
Contrary to what you might have been told elsewhere, if you actually read Dracula, you will see that he is not sexy, that Mina (or Lucy, depending on which Mixmaster version you watch) is not the reincarnation of his lost inamorata, and that she does not call him “my love.” The fact that Richard Matheson wrote the 1974 version from which Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart cribbed this plot device (which director Dan Curtis in turn freely admitted to borrowing from his own Dark Shadows) does not excuse it, nor is that Curtis’s only drastic divergence. The novel is admittedly long and complex, so most versions combine, eliminate and/or transpose Stoker’s characters while removing entire locales or sequences from the story.
So I hit on the latest in the list of things I would do if I had all the time and money in the world, meaning they will never happen. First, I would create—or commission someone as diligent as my friend Gilbert, assuming another such person exists, to create—a detailed summary and transcript for each of my personal Top Ten adaptations of Stoker’s novel (in chronological order):
- F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)
- Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931)
- Terence Fisher’s Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula, 1958)
- Jesús Franco’s El Conde Drácula (Count Dracula, 1970)
- Dan Curtis’s Dracula (1974)
- Philip Saville’s Count Dracula (1977)
- Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
- John Badham’s Dracula (1979)
- Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
- And—partly to make it an even ten, although it’s not an adaptation per se, but mostly because I believe it dramatized a key scene for the first time—Fisher’s sequel Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966).
Then, I would put each one side by side with the novel, highlight every line or scene they have in common, choose from among them the most faithful rendition of each element, and edit them all together into a monster mash-up that would represent the book far more faithfully than any version filmed to date. Gee, you suppose I could crowd-source that…?
Make no mistake, I still like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I just like it less than I did.
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