Review: "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is Coppola's expressionistic masterpiece

Movie of the Week #10 is a beautiful nightmare

Welcome to Movie of the Week, a column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie each and every week for paid subscribers. It usually publishes on Wednesday, but I pushed it to Friday this week to make room for the review of Coppola’s much-anticipated MEGALOPOLIS - so be sure to read that if you haven’t already. And follow this link for more details on everything you get subscribing to Fade to Lack!

I had two questions after I finally watched Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time earlier this year:

1) How in the name of Christ did a movie this unapologetically weird, this flagrantly sexual and delightfully deviant and gloriously artificial, ever get made in Hollywood in 1992, or any other year for that matter? And –

2) Why aren’t we all talking about it every minute of every day? 

Coppola’s film is a truly astonishing piece of big-budget myth-making, the rare kind of experience where my jaw hit the floor from the very first frames – an opening of medieval carnage that takes its theatrical, horrifically colorful cues from Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) – and never closed again for the next two hours. Dracula’s dreamlike visuals are much more akin to the silent film greats of the 1920s and 30s than almost anything made for wide commercial release since; I thought not only of the obvious German Expressionist comparisons to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), but also Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and Mário Peixoto‘s Limite (1931), or experimental films of the period like The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928). The thrill of watching masterpieces from that era is their relative lack of inhibition; the cinema was still, quite literally, new, and there were artists working on almost unfathomably massive canvases treating celluloid as a space of experimentation, a laboratory for inventing a new visual language of mass communication. That is the register Coppola’s Dracula operates on, banishing a century of conventions from its vocabulary and treating every shot as an opportunity to try something new, to communicate a mood or an emotion differently than other artists had before. That Coppola does this while re-telling one of cinema’s most oft-adapted pieces of source material makes it all the more thrilling, because the gap between what we expect – all the other versions of Dracula we have watched, or simply absorbed through cultural osmosis – and what we actually see is a daunting, yawning chasm.