Most people have, at one point or another in their lives, enjoyed a vampire story. Or many vampire stories. They are a deliciously uncomfortable paradox as supernatural beings go—bound up in death, but also in lust, in sensuality, and of course, in sex. You can’t really get around it, even if you acknowledge how creepy (even gross or grotesque) the conceit is. Vampires are meant to be attractive to us in order to help us confront something fundamental to much of humanity.
And Bram Stoker’s Dracula may not be the first vampire story, but it is often given credit for the genre’s longevity.
So it should come as no surprise that Sherlock creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss would tackle such a story; the two have already made their love of Victorian literature known, as well as their interest in reimagining these beloved texts for modern viewers. Dracula follows the same format as their erstwhile hit, three 90 minute episodes that are more akin to films. It has many similarities to the Stoker tale, and many little easter eggs for devoted fans.
It’s also a particularly gruesome sort of mess.
[Spoilers for all of Netflix’s Dracula below]
But how is it a mess, you might ask? The problem is, it’s not one thing, or one over-arcing issue. It’s a bunch of little upsets, oddities, and choices that won’t stop tweaking. It starts out benignly enough—Sister Agatha, once a bit character in Stoker’s book, is trying to get a statement from Jonathan Harker about his time in Count Dracula’s castle. But this nun actually carries the surname name Van Helsing (Dolly Wells), and Harker’s account is not quite what is seems.
Our introduction to Claes Bang’s Dracula is reminiscent of Gary Oldman’s grotesque turn in Francis Ford Coppola’s titular film. But a change in vampiric power does away with that similarity quickly; this Dracula takes on aspects of the people he “eats”, which means that he absorbs bits of their personalities and skills after feeding. And for some reason, while Harker is a fairly mild-mannered guy, the act of consuming him imbues the Count with all the subtlety of a Las Vegas magician. All the mystery evaporates, only slightly-off smiles and abrupt transitions left in its wake. This is made even uglier when we learn that this is the Count’s reason for wanting to go to England—the people there are more “educated” and “sophisticated”, you see, and Dracula literally is what he eats. This does lend him the distinction of being the most imperialist-positive, xenophobic take on the character that you’ll probably ever see? So that’s one way to start.
But there’s more! Early in her questioning of Jonathan Harker, Sister Agatha asks him if he’s had sexual relations with Dracula. Now, this is jarring as a question all by itself, but eventually, Harker thinks to ask her why the question came up at all. Agatha points out that he has a “disease”—his skin is decaying and he’s covered in sores—and that she’s merely trying to work out what would have caused it. The thing is, we find out later that Agatha Van Helsing completely aware what caused this state because she’s been seeking evidence of vampires for quite some time. So connecting Harker’s physical state to the possibility of sex with a man ends up reading like a 1980s AIDs scare tactic, much in the manner that David Lynch employed with his portrayal of Baron Harkonnen in Dune. It may not have been the intention, but that’s still how it comes off.
The second episode revolves around Dracula’s trip to the United Kingdom by a ship called the Demeter. This works out much in the same manner as the original tale, with the added presence of Agatha Van Helsing there to make the plot more interesting; she’s playing a game of chess with the Count, goading him into telling her about his trip to England, only to eventually realize that she’s dreaming, and Dracula is holding her on the ship as he drinks her dry along with the rest of the passengers. She manages to stop Dracula and convince the remaining crew to blow up the ship—but Dracula survives in one of his coffins of Transylvanian dirt at the bottom of the ocean, off the coast of England. When he wakes, rejuvenated, he comes to shore and discovers the greatest surprise of all: It’s 2020! And Agatha’s descendant, a woman named Zoe (who looks exactly like her), is waiting for him.
If this is that part where you think “did the creators of Sherlock really just do the exact same thing all over again?” the answer is yes, and I’m sorry, and also—but what did you expect, really? They have one idea, and we’ll all be damned if they aren’t going to use it.
This results in Dracula getting a personal assistant (by turning his lawyer into a vampire) and a cell phone and a ridiculous flat, and using hook-up services to find victims. The rest of the vampire-hunting gang from the novel are now present-day young adults, who are getting up to no good by partying and dealing with ennui and lusting after each other. Jack Seward (Matthew Beard) is smitten in a near-stalkery way with a modern day Lucy Westerna (Lydia West), but we all know that won’t turn out well, especially once Lucy meets the Count. Dr. Zoe Van Helsing is also dying of cancer because… narrative urgency? Her blood is helpfully poison to Dracula because of it, so there’s that. She’s determined to figure Dracula out in ways her ancestor Agatha couldn’t imagine, so she drinks a vial of his blood (“Blood is lives,” Dracula keeps saying, as though it will somehow get more profound every time we hear it) and gains a helpful mental connection with the long-dead nun. She uses Jack—who was a former student of hers—to find about Dracula’s movements and his interest in Lucy, in order to finally beat him at his own game.
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Said game is actually pretty simple: Dracula is afraid of sunlight and crucifixes and all those little mythical things because he’s decided to believe they’re lethal. Because he’s sacred of death. And once she puts that to him, he realizes that she’s right, and drinks her blood so they can die together.
Um.
It seems as though we’re meant to think the gender swap of Van Helsing from male to female is a profound and forward-thinking choice. Certainly the actor who plays both Agatha and Zoe gives a moving and nuanced performance in both roles, and it’s also exciting to see that they chose a woman who is roughly the same age as the actor playing Dracula himself. But there’s a strange problem in all of this when it comes to how the narrative progresses; in the first episode, Agatha’s primary role is learning Jonathan Harker’s story; in the second episode her primary role is wheedling information out of Count Dracula about his voyage on the Demeter; in the third episode, Zoe’s primary role comes down to helping Dracula understand himself by deconstructing his fears. While there is something of an arc to her story, the narrative still indicates that a woman’s primary function is listening to men’s stories and then perhaps helping them along in their journeys. In effect, Van Helsing’s role in this version of Dracula is not one of a shrewd hunter of monsters—it’s the role of a particularly excellent therapist.
This gets even murkier when we add the sheen of romance that’s imposed upon their relationship at the end of the series, and the creators’ unwillingness to engage with the sexuality inherent in the story they’ve chosen to recreate.
When it was pointed out that one could perceive queer undertones to the show, that Dracula could in fact be counted as bisexual based on his tastes, Steven Moffat was quick to explain otherwise: “He’s bi-homicidal, it’s not the same thing. He’s killing them, not dating them.” This seems a profoundly naive take on the character and what vampires have always represented in the narrative zeitgeist. If the show had gone out of its way to create a particularly asexual version of Dracula, one who didn’t deal in sensuality and lust at all, that would be a different story. But consider: This version of the story calls Dracula’s special prisoners his “brides”—an oft-used term for them, though Stoker himself referred to them in the novel as “sisters”. We then hear Dracula tell Jonathan Harker that he could become his “greatest bride” yet, once he’s turned the man into a vampire. Insisting that the act of murder precludes any discussion of sexuality when we’re having terms and imagery and relationships that are directly associated with sex and intimacy thrust upon us is ultimately a decision to gaslight your audience. You can’t have it both ways.
This also has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that the only reason Van Helsing was reimagined as a woman was to make sure that anything that happened between her and the Count was never viewed as remotely homosexual. It robs the choice to have a female Van Helsing of its power. And what’s more, it’s not as though the original Dracula narrative had no interesting women in it to begin with—Mina Harker drives the majority of the narrative in the novel, a woman sharp enough to create the whole plan to take Dracula out. Here, she’s merely thrust aside and then makes a foundation in the name of her dead fiancé. Huzzah.
This is even worse when we look at Lucy Westerna’s story, the woman in 2020 who Dracula becomes enamored with because she’s not afraid of death. It’s the Count’s obsession with Lucy that helps Zoe/Agatha figure out what he’s truly afraid of, made more obscenely cruel because Lucy is portrayed as this coquettish tease of a woman, one who breaks hearts and dances in short skirts at clubs—when anyone with the slightest understanding of mental health can guess that Lucy is deeply depressed and probably dealing with suicide ideation. The story doesn’t care about this, though. It cares about Dracula’s obsession with her and what that tells us about him.
Oh, and then it has Lucy half-cremated (when she becomes undead and breaks out of her coffin mid-burning), all so that it can use her melted body as a comment on beauty and ownership? She comes to Dracula’s flat, and he insists that she’s his greatest Bride ever for not caring about death, but once she sees her own reflection—from taking a selfie, of course, since mirrors don’t work—she crumples and begs for someone to kill her. Jack obliges and then tells Dracula the truth: She didn’t belong to either of them!
Thank goodness a man learned something about female autonomy in the mutilation and death of this depressed and hurting black woman. Sorry, two men. Dracula does too, I think. Or, he does later, with the death revelation thing. He gets to stand in the sun and stuff. It’s very edgy.
Is there anything salvageable in this Mona Lisa knock-off of a show? It’s enjoyable to watch Agatha Van Helsing’s schtick as an atheist nun, but it’s a small piece of a strange and mealy dinner. There’s no reason to sugarcoat it, or try to make sense of what we were given. Dracula is incomprehensible, and depressing to boot. Maybe the next stab at vampire television will land well, but this is not what we deserved.
Emmet Asher-Perrin did enjoy parts of the second episode because boat murder is fun? You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
#spoiler i agree… what a waste. so stupid the 123 years later…
Rejecting one’s own people and heritage in favor of foreign ones for their supposed cultural superiority is not xenophobia.
Do not disagree. I think what you might have missed is the representation of all vampire horror camp is baked right in from the start. With some cringy examples grafted on by Moffitt (the forced AIDS reference) a good deal of it is infused with silly because that is what is baked into nearly every media version of vampires & Dracula. They’ve also brought out serial killer qualities of Dracula. The so called psychic vampire of Hannibal Lecter. Watch the Agetha/Dracula dynamic through that of Agent Starling/Lecter. Silence of the Lambs itself not without its comic cheek. Moffitt’s take on Dracula improves immensely when you view it through that lens.
That said it is impossible to see WTF they were trying to accomplish in the last episode. My guess is slasher film plotting, editing & pacing? People complained about the last episode of Sherlock drastically changing tone but I read it as Sherlock’s media influences on the spy genre or action heroes. They are always solving a crime or mystery, aren’t they? Probably wouldn’t have been without Sherlock making it popular first. Batman, second. Still I enjoyed the first two episodes very much. The last, WTF? Rather have watch an episode of “Things We Do in the Shadows” It would have made more sense than that.
Omg may I agree more than 100%?
@t_grafeas: “Rejecting one’s own people and heritage in favor of foreign ones for their supposed cultural superiority is not xenophobia.”
But it could be argued that an English television show assuming that a Transylvanian count would do so, is.
One nitpick – the character’s name in the book is Lucy Westenra, not Westerna; not sure if that’s your typo or actually the way the Netflix production has it, but it’s bugging me (I can’t tell from imdb if that’s an oddity of the film, and I’m not willing to watch to find out, ’cause it sounds dire).
I was iffy on the Sherlock adaptation, and I’ve found a lot of the writing on the rebooted Who to be on the level of self-indulgent slash fanfic; Steven Moffatt really is coming across as a one trick pony at this point.
“This does lend him the distinction of being the most imperialist-positive, xenophobic take on the character that you’ll probably ever see?”
Well, unless you read the original book, which a number of critics have interpreted as an exercise in stoking (pun intended) the anti-immigrant fears and anti-Semitism that were common in England at the time. The idea of Dracula as a romantic, seductive figure is more an invention of later adaptations like the Lugosi film; Stoker’s Dracula is less a seducer than a rapist, with drinking blood as a metaphorical stand-in for sex. As I read it, he was presented, not as an enticing, romantic figure, but as a debased foreigner coming to prey on proper English women, hypnotically forcing them to submit when they would normally find him repulsive.
@6/edb1: Wikipedia has it as Westenra here, as has one other review I’ve read. The only time I’ve seen it as Westerna was in a 2002 stage musical I happened to see because a friend of mine was starring in it as Mina.
@5, it is not assuming what a Transylvannian Count would do, it is deciding what that Transylvannian Count did.
The titular character was never supposed to have any positive qualities in Stoker’s book, he was a monster, pure and simple. The movies turned him into an almost romantic and tragic figure, with Coppola’s version a fascinating, but very untrue to the original take on the character. It is also Coppola’s Dracula that took pride in his lineage, not Stoker’s. Moffat may have hugely missed the mark as far as making an interesting show is concerned, but his version of Dracula isn’t any less legit an adaptation than Coppola’s, and arguably closer to Stoker’s book. Well, not the fairly ridiculous becoming who he drinks bit, but still.
“This does lend him the distinction of being the most imperialist-positive, xenophobic take on the character that you’ll probably ever see?”
The 2002 movie DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIGIN’S DIARY, a collaboration between arthouse filmmaker Guy Maddin and The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, deliberately emphasized the xenophobia inherent in the novel, due to the fortuitous coincidence the dancer playing Dracula be one Wei-Qiang Zhang. They even have characters at the beginning experiencing premonitory nightmares at the beginning with mock silent-movie titles saying “He is invading from the East!”
It’s safe to say this more a comment on the text rather than the attitudes seemingly expressed by Gatiss & Moffat in this take.
I agree with most everything you’ve said (you are allowed to express your gratitude) but have only one cavil (one “L” it’s a deed not a dud): The absorption of lives via the blood Dracula drinks doesn’t seem as lame to me as it apparently does to others. Blood is life…ask any transfusion recipient…and given the inherent absurdity of the premise, what’s not on about extending that fact into fiction? Dracula is re-imagined for each generation according to its needs. Let’s keep that going by allowing the myth to grow.
@11/oldfan: Indeed, there’s precedent in fiction, e.g. horror movies where the recipient of an organ transplant from a murderer becomes a murderer, or is possessed by the murderer’s soul. I’m sure there have been stories that did something similar with blood transfusions.
Whatever grade the first episode deserves (and I’d struggle to give it a B+), I’d subtract a full letter grade for each subsequent installment. Perfect example of diminishing returns in this series.
The first episode is fairly respectable, though by the time it gets to Dracula birthing himself out of a wolf carcass, it’s gone to camp. Not sure why it couldn’t have been a transformation. Then he tramps around naked in front of a convent full of nuns, covered in amniotic fluid and blood. Was it supposed to be a metaphor?
Another detail that I couldn’t get past (among others; so many goofy choices), was Harker falling from Dracula’s tower and turning up at the convent with some decaying skin and sores. As he wasn’t undead yet, he should’ve have been pulped. This is about as bad as Lyra in the HDM series falling from a hot air balloon onto jagged rocks and ice, then getting up without a scratch, just a sore rib.
Then there’s the repeated closeups of picking at and tearing off fingernails, almost to the point of making it a fetish.
The only really good thing is Dolly Wells as Sister Agatha. She’s very charismatic and provides a throughline for all three episodes, though I no longer remember if they explained how a nun has descendants.
The second episode is structurally flawed. You can’t have a closed room mystery if the audience knows who the killer is from the start. There’s zero tension. Even Agatha’s reference to knowing a detective in London is self-indulgently irrelevant. And leaving him one coffin… c’mon Agatha, force him to jump into the ocean.
The last episode? Renfield freeing Dracula from a semi-secret base because he has rights? Sigh. What’s jumping the shark for Brit shows?
@12/Christopher you are doubtless correct. Anyone know of any?
@13/Sunspear …I no longer remember if they explained how a nun has descendants.
Great-aunt of Zoe, which at least made some small sense. A rare instance of seeing and proactively plugging a plot hole.
@8 It is also Coppola’s Dracula that took pride in his lineage, not Stoker’s.
I wouldn’t say Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t proud of his lineage. From chapter three of Dracula:
I was enjoying it overall, minus the Van Helsing reveal, until episode 3. No need to jump to modern day. From there, just weird.
@8, Stoker’s Dracula was hugely proud of his lineage, so Coppola gets it right from novel. Coppola also got it right by letting his Dracula be real warrior who kept fighting till the end, until vampire hunters got to him and he was fatally wounded. Moffat and Gatiss’s Dracula was supposed to be a warrior too, he kept saying that, but instead it was revealed he was nothing but a coward, who wanted death and simply imagined all those vampire weaknesses and believed in them. Then he committed suicide! Also I’m pretty sure this Dracula/Zoe thing in the end was a direct rip off from Coppola’s movie ending. Only without any proper foundation for it and development.
Btw, we as a modern audience may assume Agatha’s question to Harker about aquiring an STD from Dracula was an AIDS reference, but the disease terrifying late 19th century Europe was syphilis. His sores are consistent with that. Probably the timeline lines up too: a month at the castle, a couple at the convent (?). Some biographers say Stoker himself died of tertiary syphilis.
@14 In the recent TV adaption of A Discovery of Witches, Vampires can steal knowledge/memories while feeding. I haven’t read the book, but I assume its in the original work as well.
Considering what these two did with Sherlock, I did not have high expectations. I am pleasantly surprised that I was right in that they would mess up. Wait, should I be unpleasantly surprised? Nevermind.
@19/BlairB thanks, I’ll look out for that detail now.
@13 sunspear….I regret immensely I can correct you about Harker. He was indeed undead before he fell from the castle wall, he’d had his neck broken to start the process. So he was pulped, then drowned, then knit back together somehow even though he wasn’t feeding or resting in native soil….see, regret.
I actually mostly liked episode 2, but omg I loled for real at the wtf ending. I tried to explain it to my husband and got a lot of “no, really, they did what?!” It was good for a laugh anyway, if unintentional .
@22. laura: good points adding to the inconsistency. He was also in full sunlight for that scene (although we find out later the sun has no effect on vampires). So yeah, it adds up… not.
For a couple writers who like clever plots and think of themselves as clever, this series was several seminars’ worth of stupid writing.
I turned it off as soon as Claes Bang said “I do not drink… wine.” and now I’m glad I didn’t waste more time on it.
@15, Thank you, I knew there was a reference to Attila the Hun somewhere in the book.
Yes, it was awful. But please don’t let that stop you from rolling around in the campy blood puddle for a little fun. I enjoyed the heck out of it even as I cringed, finding it to be over the top silly, overacted, full of plot holes, lousy with loose ends, and so weird. Perfect for a cold winter day, some lazy dogs to pat, and a basket of knitting to finish.
bi-homicidal.
what an absolute plonker Moffat is.
@@@@@ 15, amanda4242
I wouldn’t say Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t proud of his lineage. From chapter three of Dracula:
We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.
The Szeklers were a tribe linguistically similar to the Magyars. When the later invaded Hungary, they found the Szeklers inhabiting Hungary and Romania. The Szeklers claimed to be descendants of the Hunnish Confederation, led to survival after Attila’s death, by one of Attila’s sons.
The word szekely means “border guard.” And that’s what they did. They occupied the borderlands between Magyar-land and the Turks. For bloody centuries. While Hungary stayed fat and happy. They did have a right to be proud.
They also have the distinction of a national dish invented by mistake.
@Fernhunter: stuffed cabbage?
@@@@@ 28 Sunspear:
@@@@@fernhunter: stuffed cabbage?
Stuffed cabbage is everywhere. Under many different names.
The dish is szekely gulyas.
The story is, in their hillbilly isolation, the Szeklers developed a version of goulash made with pork instead of beef, with sour cream added. Even the hillbillies believed the tale. Not so.
In the mid-nineteenth century there was a restaurant in Pest called the Zenelo Ora. That is, The Musical Clock. A librarian named Szekley—a common surname—came in near to closing time. He took what was still available; pork porkolt and sauerkraut. They arrived in one pile, but he was too hungry to care.
The Hungarian poet Petrofi watched this scene. The next night he asked for that gulyas he saw Szekely eat. The publican tarted up Petrofi’s order with a dollop of sour cream. In those days, in Hungary as in England, poets were superstars. Since the great poet Petrofi ordered Szekely’s gulyas, others asked for the same thing. By the same name.
And a great pseudo-national dish was born.
I really wished they could have stuck the landing, but they did not. I myself have messed with the continuity of Dracula in my own novel, but return Dracula to history unscathed. I really liked we were seeing an evil Dracula again, but then it all fell apart in the end.
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Ms. Asher-Perrin, I disagree with you on certain specific points* but most defiantly agree that this is a Hellishly vexing DRACULA adaptation – while I do think it has some points in its favour (Sister Agatha VAN HELSING was an obvious, yet delightful reveal – this series’ depiction of Poor Jonathan must now rank as my favourite vision of that character to date – its Renfield was pitch perfect though sadly underused – and Mr Claes Bang** is actually rather good at playing a Count Dracula of the most slithery sort, as creepily delightful as he is insufferable from start to finish) but must say that it has been a Guilty Pleasure at best and more often frustrating; I find it hard to hate a production clearly made with such rampant & transparent Enthusiasm, but quite frankly one feels that three ninety-minute episodes allowed Mr Gatiss & Mr Moffat far too much time to clutter up this production with the superfluous, the superficially clever and other elements that could (and should) have been left on the cutting room floor.
Don’t even get me STARTED on that finale; this series proved fatally unable to stick the landing, despite having set up all the ingredients for a potentially Brilliant finale, the sort of conclusion only possible with an adaptation set (at least partly) in the Present Day – but instead of seeing Count Dracula put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity (heck, he even left a WITNESS after Doctor Van Helsing and the Harker Foundation showed up) the show commits the Cardinal Sin of Bad DRACULA adaptations and assumes we DO NOT want to see the living incarnation of Bastard Feudalism handed his head, metaphorically or literally.
I don’t watch DRACULA adaptations to see The Count get THERAPY then commit a Murder-Suicide, I watch them so for the sake of seeing a supernatural 1%-er get outwitted, outmanoeuvred and stamped out by the ‘mere’ Mortals he so foolishly dismissed!
(*Mostly quibbles concerning the original novel – the cruise of the SS Demeter carried no passengers, with the partial exception of that vampire who drove them all to death or flat out killed them in lieu of any other ‘in flight entertainment’, being explicitly a mere cargo freighter and not a passenger liner; also, while Madam Mina played an inarguably important role in making the Hunt for Dracula successful – indeed an indispensable one – she shares credit for working out The Plan as whole with Professor Van Helsing, due to the fact that DRACULA doesn’t just have only one Protagonist, it has a whole Team of them!).
**Amusingly, I have never been able to bring myself to call him ‘Mr Bang’ for reasons that should be obvious.
@5.Peacooper: It should be noted that the literary Dracula, at least, is not rejecting his own people & heritage for the simple reason that he holds himself to be the sole lingering example of both in what he understood to be Modern World – The Count’s contempt for his current neighbours extends to ‘mushroom growths’ such as the Habsburg and Romanov Dynasties – and, in fact, he has a whole speech in which he expresses the ‘Glories’ of the Past and his melancholia at their departure from the corner of the World he has made his own (hence his decision to move on to London in the throes of what I can best compare to a mid-life Crisis).
It’s an Angry Old Man rant worthy of Drunk History – and there is, in fact, a video on Youtube showing Sir Christoper Lee give his considerable All to bringing that harangue to life as a sort of Shakespearean soliloquy in the Jess Franco adaptation of Dracula (the COUNT DRACULA of 1970, which is apparently a fairly spotty adaptation in its own right but DOES feature a Dracula who looks & sounds as though he sprang full-formed from Mr Stoker’s imagination the way Athena emerged from the head of Zeus), which I highly recommend.
Basically he’s bored, the neighbours are boring and the ‘Weird Sisters’ some call his Brides are downright insufferable – so he’s clearing out and moving as far away from them as he can manage (one suspects the only reason he didn’t try for the United States was because the mere concept of the Great Republic reduced him to fits of snobbery).
This show somehow managed to screw up all its characters by the end: Dracula is fully evil at first, with never ending quips and scheming, until suddenly he is sad, and needs psychological therapy and wants to die so badly that he performs suicide as soon as somebody says to him that he has shame. Sorry, what? Agatha Van Helsing is a token brave and clever woman and we expect she will defeat Dracula with her wits. But then she doesn’t. She dies in 19th century and then we have her great-great niece lookalike Zoe, who also doesn’t defeat Dracula actually but gives him lame therapy session and Dracula kills himself, in the process killing her as well. Don’t get me started on what they’ve done to original Stoker’s characters. Mina has like 15 minutes of screentime and half of it she either screams or acts stupidly. Lucy is made into promiscuous narcissist and only cares about her looks. They also apparently needed to cremate her for shock value. Jonathan is not only killed off, twice at least, but made complicit in Dracula’s massacre of the nunnery since he let him in. Quincey is a douche, who doesn’t even care about Lucy. It’s like one enormous train wreck where characters either misused, treated awfully or don’t have consistent characterization.
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I can understand every one of the negative points brought against this, and can even see a few more myself which have not been mentioned. Having said that though, I absolutely adored it! I loved Agatha, and there is something I can’t quite articulate about Claes Bang that made him so very perfect as Count Dracula. I found his performance brilliant. I had no problems with the romantic element. The best adaptations I’ve seen over the years have at least an erotic, if not fully romantic, bent. In short, I am delighted with the whole “mess”! Lol
I truly hated this Dracula. I’ve seen over 20+ adaptations, and this is the only one that infuriated me – which even the one where he turns into a giant praying mantis (Argento’s) failed to do. Dracula is meant to be a monster, not a swaggering d-bag who combines playground bully and pick-up artist, with more snarky quips than the MCU’s Loki (who I like, but he’s not supposed to be Dracula) and more puns than Dracula: Dead and Loving It (which is good, unlike this).
This is for people who love the campiest lows of Hammer (as opposed to the good Hammers like their first Dracula and the Karnstein movies) who also delight in the most contrived twists and overdone snark of Moffat & Gatiss’ Sherlock (which is fine overall but has some irksome excesses – in Dracula it’s all excess).
And I hate the changes to Stoker’s vampire lore. SPOILERS. He’s killed by cancer like the alien in Species II. He absorbs victims’ essences like Freddy Kreuger. Bad ideas.
I’d like to add that if anyone wants to see a Dracula-esque movie with a female Van Helsing type who is definitely not a therapist, see The Return of the Vampire (1943) starring Bela Lugosi and Frieda Inescort.
As a huge fan of the novel, i absolutely loved this delightfully absurd camp retelling of Dracula. Lucy is probably the best version of her character – a woman of agency and no fear but who also makes some very poor choices – a perfectly human character rather than the 2D version of Lucy we always get.
it was hugely entertaining and i enjoyed the twists and turns. Very fun popcorn tv.
Well as a graduate in sociology and a graduate in film as well as being a postgraduate in Humanities: Horror and Transgression and having written and published a historical and psychoanalytical account of the vampire, I must say that I have absolutely loved this version. Some of the things that I have learned here I have loved!! I thought it was a fantastic version. And to be fair I binge watched it last night and was up until 5am as I couldn’t stop watching! And now I am sat here again re watching it!!! And will watch it again I am sure if it.