Saturday, November 6, 2010

Bram Stoker's Dracula-the film.

When Halloween rolls around there's a usual regime I follow-Tim Burton movies (Nightmare before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow) and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Depending on time I sometimes get the original classic with Bela Lugosi.

The Original:

I've always been a Dracula fan. I don't really say I'm a vampire fan, but just a Dracula fan. It's part of the reason all my vampires in Phoenix follow Dracula rules (stakes, crosses etc.). I've always liked Bela Lugosi's role in Dracula, and the 1950s original mostly because of what it stands for, but I've never once found it really creepy. It's mostly that after you hear so many vampires with widow's peaks and Hungarian accents seeing the man who started that whole tradition is pretty cool. It's a good movie, but I never really regard it as my favorite because it strays so far away from the original novel. I'm not dogging the movie, most people think if a movie goes away from the novel it sucks. Most of the time that's true, but I think Dracula is that rare exception where it's an ok movie by itself.

It's just not scary, I watch it for what it is, I still want to know how people get creeped by this. Though it is spooky. This is back when horror films didn't rely on making you jump five feet in the air, but rather a spooky atmosphere, which in my opinion is a better movie.

Bram Stoker's Dracula:

A lot of people have dogged this movie, and for the longest time I never really knew why. Dracula is one of my favorite novels ever. While I never draw much inspiration from Stoker's prose, or his writing style, I still think it's one of the best gothic horrors and best books ever written. I usually have Dracula on in the background while I'm doing something else like writing or making dinnner. I watch the key parts, but I've seen this so many times I just never have a need to sit down and watch it. I finally sat down to watch it after God knows how long and after one sitting I just realised something-

It's boring.

It suffers a lot of what I gripe about the novel (despite it being my favorite). The best part of the movie is the best part of the book-Jonathan Harker's journal and his travel to Transylvania . That entire group of chapters/scenes is easily the best part. For those of you who haven't read it, it's all about Harker going into Transylvania and meeting the count. In the original 1950s version Harker was replaced by Reinfield and while the travel there was pretty dead on-once the two enter the castle situations are totally different.

The book describes this massive castle with hallways and cobwebs. It's a very empty feeling you get reading about it. It feels like nothing is there, and during the day when Harker is awake (or night when Drac is nowhere to be found) without Dracula there, it feels very lonely and desolate. Harker eventually realises it's a prison just for him, but by then you feel like you know the layout of the area. It culminates both book and movie (Bram Stoker's) with Harker falling into the ocean hoping to find his fiance. It's amazing.

That feeling is nowhere to be found in the movie. While I love the costume and the castle they made, they should have added 3 minutes of Harker exploring before him and The Count have some social problems. The fall into the ocean is delayed rather so Harker could have the gypsies offer some kinky undead sex and watch an infant get devoured (which is a good choice). It just felt different, like something was missing.

From there the movie gets incredibly boring. There's good scenes that add tension, but they do a terrible job explaining things. In the book, Harker finds Dracula as a young man very early on and can't figure it out. In the movie, Dracula shows up as a young guy and it's a bit difficult to grasp what just happened or is happening (another point to add 3 minutes of Harker exploring and he finds this). Lucy's rape by Dracula, his morph into wolf, just...everything, it happens so fast and without any time to guess or say "wait, what?" (the novel does this a few times too) that it really gets annoying.

I realised Bram Stoker's Dracula is just a collection of scenes from the book, made easy to follow by someone who read or knows the plot. If you sat down to watch this movie without knowing a thing-you'd be lost and bored after the castle scenes. That my friends is a problematic movie. It sucks because I still like this movie, I LIKE it. I don't think it's bad, but it's average. It follows the novel better than any of the others, but that's not really saying much.

It's obvious if they make another Dracula movie to follow the novel-it needs to be 3 hours. There's no way around it. We need a 3 and a half hour movie to tell this story. There's so many rules and so mcuh to figure out it's the only way. SLim it to two hours and you get this-a choppy animation, very unexplainable, pretty, mess. If you haven't seen this, I recommend it. It's good for what it is-a strange and weird vampire movie.

But while it gets nearly unwatchable for first time viewers, it's very similar in style to the novel where it's hard to follow in some parts, and the scenes following the excellent Castle/guest scenes just pale in comparison. In fact, if you read just the first 60 pages of Dracula, and nothing else, you'd be satisfied. I love it, I love Dracula just cuz he's a badass.