INSPIRED BY DRACULA
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FILMS

Employing disorienting techniques of perspective throughout Dracula’s pages, Bram Stoker suspends and teases. By presenting his story through letters and journals, he obscures the action until the frightful moment when the reader confronts the horrible Count. So it is no surprise that Dracula makes for such terrific cinema. The book has an illustrious history of film adaptations, the first of which, Nosferatu (1922), is among the best. Directed by F. W. Murnau, this silent film derives from the same wave of German expressionist cinema that produced Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1922). Despite its title, Nosferatu is more faithful to Stoker’s text than most later adaptations. The film revels in shadowed coffins and spiderwebs, and its disturbing soundlessness forces its imagery into focus—in particular, Count Orlok’s pointed nose and ears, and his elongated, claw-like fingers.
In 1931, a year in which the horror genre blossomed in America, director Tod Browning released his version of Dracula. If not for Bela Lugosi’s eerily convincing portrayal of the Count, this otherwise mediocre film would have never attained its classic status. Speaking through his thick Hungarian accent and white fangs, Lugosi played Count Dracula with theatrical charm and cunning. That same year director James Whale’s seminal film Frankenstein was released (Lugosi turned down the role of the monster in that film); as Dracula and Frankenstein continued to contend for the title “Greatest Horror Novel of All Time,” a battle cycle between myriad cinematic incarnations now began in earnest. And a battle raged not just between the characters—that is, Dracula versus Frankenstein—but also between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff for ghoul-playing supremacy. As the films about Dracula proliferated, Christopher Lee replaced Lugosi as the Count. Lee, who had made his Hollywood mark playing the monster in a film version of Frankenstein, reprised the role of Count Dracula more times than any other actor. Sadly, Dracula adaptations tend to fall largely into the B-movie category, and many of the sequels could be mistaken for spoofs.
Not until 1992 did Dracula become the subject of an A-list movie. Lavishly filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula flaunts exorbitant production values and features a sinister Gary Oldman as the Count. Imbued with an operatic flavor, Coppola’s film stylishly presents dark, textured landscapes and memorable sets—perfect backdrops to accentuate Dracula’s penchant for shape-shifting. Despite the title’s suggestion of accuracy, the film includes a few departures from Stoker’s novel: It recounts Dracula’s pious days as a soldier in the Crusades and the suicide of his lover, the event that brings the embittered Count to vampirism. These flashbacks to centuries past are married to Stoker’s plot with uncertain success, but the film unquestionably breathes life into Count Dracula, a character who has had an uneven career in celluloid.

A PAINTING AND A POEM

The publication of Dracula coincided with an exhibition at London’s New Gallery that featured a painting called The Vampire by Phillip Burne-Jones, son of Edward Burne-Jones, a preeminent figure among the Pre-Raphaelites. The portrait shows a gloating woman perched on her rigged arms over an unconscious man lying on his back across a bed. The textures of the drapes, the woman’s nightdress, the sheet, and the man’s opened nightshirt press in and gather, lending a dreamlike quality to the scene. The portrait is dark in tone, with accents of emerald and crimson. The woman, rumored to be modeled after the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, glowers as she distends her long, white teeth. In a letter to Bram Stoker, Burne-Jones wrote, “As soon as I have a copy, I shall beg your acceptance of a photograph of my Vampire—a woman this time, so as to make the balance fair!”
Burne-Jones’s cousin Rudyard Kipling, inspired by the portrait, contributed his poem “The Vampire” to the exhibition catalog:
A fool there was and he made his prayer

(Even as you or I!)

To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,

(We called her the woman who did not care),

But the fool he called her his lady fair—

(Even as you or I!)
 

Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste,

And the work of our head and hand

Belong to the woman who did not know

(And now we know that she never could know)

And did not understand!
 

A fool there was and his goods he spent,

(Even as you or I!)

Honour and faith and a sure intent

(And it wasn’t the least what the lady meant),

But a fool must follow his natural bent

(Even as you or I!)
 

Oh, the toil we lost and the spoil we lost

And the excellent things we planned

Belong to the woman who didn’t know why

(And now we know that she never knew why)

And did not understand!
 

The fool was stripped to his foolish hide,

(Even as you or I!)

Which she might have seen when she threw him

aside—

(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)

So some of him lived but the most of him died—

(Even as you or I!)
 

“And it isn’t the shame and it isn’t the blame

That stings like a white-hot brand—

It’s coming to know that she never knew why

(Seeing, at last, she could never know why)

And never could understand!”