Stokers Dracula - Book Report/Review Example

It is the eve of St. Georges Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?" Bram Stoker in Dracula Overview Dracula is one of the most famous works of Victorian literature. Written by Bram Stoker in 1897, it is the story of the vampire, Dracula, who is on a quest to be eternally reunited with the only woman he ever really loved. Dracula travels from Transylvania to London to find the young woman who is the double image of the love he lost centuries earlier. The novel is one of the most evocative and frightening of the period. It is especially adaptable to film and is the antecedent of dozens, if not hundreds, of spin off films and novels. Indeed, what is perhaps most adapatable is the Gothic style found in Stoker’s work. This immediately evokes a time and place and puts the reader or viewer on the edge of his or her seat. These days it has come to mean, dark and steam-filled cities with ornate gargoyles carved into cornices of buildings (Murphy 79). Even if it originated in France, during the mid 1100s, Gothic art and architecture quickly spread through out much of the rest of Western Europe, and has becomes a stable of novels and films that wish to evoke another period of time and truly frighten people. Introduction To fully understand nineteenth-century Britain, one must delve deeper into the Victorian gothic literature of that time. During the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, fiction writing became extremely popular in England where the plots included mysterious and supernatural events that were intended to frighten the reader. They were called Gothic because most of them took place in gloomy, medieval castles built in the same gothic style of architecture prevalent during that time (Milbank 94). Such buildings had many secret passageways, dungeons and towers that provided ideal settings for strange happenings. People were looking for an escape from their dreary lives and this stories which combined romance and horror provided this. A novel by the English author Bram Stoker is the most famous vampire story of that time. It has also become one of the famous stories of our own time due to its numerous spin-offs. The main character is a wicked nobleman, Count Dracula of Transylvania, which is a small region of Romania. Dracula is a vampire - a corpse that returns to life at night and attacks innocent people and sucks their blood. Although vampires do not exist in real life, stories about them are popular because they allow people to transgress boundaries and break laws with impunity. The novel describes in detail Dracula’s horrifying search for new victims which leads him to England where he pursues two young women. Dracula in turn, is hunted by the young woman’s fiancé and by Abraham Van Helsing, an authority on vampires and a vampire hunter. The two men finally track down Dracula and destroy him by driving a stake through his heart. This is where the movie produced by Hammer Films picked up the storyline. This studio’s version of Dracula is quite well known and successful. Of all the Victorian novels, Dracula has perhaps had the most success. There is something about vampires that both draws people’s attention and also repels them at the same time. They have been enduringly popular. Discussion The director’s take on the Dracula legend is a bloody visual feast. Romance is subsumed by gore. Significantly, the Dracula name, generates strong feelings, but the movie’s extreme adult nature limits its potential reach with younger generation. Reaction to it was bound to be decidedly mixed (Montgomery 651). In the movie, the audience gets the feeling that Dracula thinks himself so important that he is willing to live forever as he nurses his resentments and vows to wait forever for the return of the woman he loves. Even under the dreary conditions imposed by his vampirism, he avoids the sun, sleeping in coffins, feeding his monstrous ego with romantic notions that after the first two or three centuries the feelings his lover must have had for him will stay on to endure and they could pick up where they left off (Montagu 94). This is in some sense Dracula as the Byronic romantic rather than the single-minded monster he is sometimes portrayed as. The Hammer Film Studio film vividly evokes the violence, intrigue and the supernatural events of the novel while adding its own gloss. Their vivid impression on moviegoers is heightened by the intelligent script and storytelling, the skilled actors and luxuriant color which contemporary horror movie try to follow. Often, these kind of horror movies were obviously produced on a tight budget and so the special effects are limited, but the characters reactions more than made up what the technical aspect lacked and the emphasis is placed not on emotional hysterics but on the psychological development of characters (Milbank 243). Camera tricks are implied but in this movie it presents a more straightforward staging that foregoes dramatic stateliness and give way to a distinctive British film characteristic. As Terence Fisher, a great director once said, “this is not to make the Hammer films out to be great works of arts—they are still melodramatic but it takes on popular cultural obsessions within the horror genre and they are among the classiest chillers and thrillers.” This comment is right on the mark, the Hammer films translate Victorian cultural preoccupations into a contemporary language we can understand and be affected by. In the movie, the title character is presented without all the gothic theatrics - wolves howling in the night or spider-webbed castle stairs. The corny, silly Dracula is nowhere to be seen. Rather, Draculas castle is clean, tasteful and (like most Hammer sets) somewhat over-lit (Katz 187). A reasonable sort of aristocrat, one is taken back by the host’s politeness. The blood-sucking monster unveiling makes this even scarier. For the inflamed Dracula fangs and reddened eyes dont stop the flow of gore either. Dracula in this movie turns out to be more selfish and brutal but at the same time even more elegant. It isn’t possible for the viewer to dismiss him as a simple caricature—despite his occasional melodrama—because of the way he is presented. His attractiveness is also played up. The movie also invests in a plot filled with a primal sexuality and animalism quite consistent with the book. Sent to Draculas Transylvanian castle to advise the count about London real estate, Jonathan Harker ends up being held prisoner there and being feasted upon by his hosts three luscious concubines (Peccei 353). Dracula, meanwhile, is plotting his unique conquest of Britain, which involves transporting a quantity of coffins filled with fertile Transylvanian earth and infecting the local populace via incarnations as wolf, bats and fog. The political implications of this plot also draw the viewer into a world of consequence rather than a story with a character who is endlessly sucking blood and spouting catchphrases. Great liberties are taken with Bram Stokers plot and characters by the Hammer films. In the first part, Harker comes to Draculas castle somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, not to sell him real estate but to kill him. He fails and is turned into a vampire himself before his colleague Van Helsing arrives on the scene to put him to rest. Then the drama moves to the home of Harkers fiancée Lucy and her friends the Homewoods, who become stalked by the evil count. The action never leaves eastern Europe and all the secondary characters are switched around from what we expect form the book and previous films (Murphy 337). But these changes are smart, making the story both fresh and more believable. No wonder many acclaim this to be the best Dracula ever. Back in London, the movie descends into an orgy of visual decadence, in which what people do is not nearly as degraded as how they look while they do it and the actors perform as if afraid they will not be audible in the other theaters of the multiplex. The sets are grand opera run riot - Gothic extravaganza intercut with the Victorian London of gaslights and fogbound streets, rogues in top hats and bad girls in bustiers. A world of vanity and depravity is portrayed as a kind of warning to uptight Victorians. Interestingly, although sexual desire plays a role in this Dracula, as it does in most versions, a greater parallel is drawn with drug addiction, with Van Helsing himself making a direct comparison briefly in one scene (Peccei 118). Hes got a point. Think about it. The disease is introduced through punctures in the skin, directly into the blood system. It changes the perceptions and the drives of those infected. They become desperate to get more of the same, until the addiction progresses beyond the point of no return and the victims become the walking dead, deeply desiring to be released from their bondage but unable to stop themselves from preying on everyone around them (Montagu 129). Van Helsings mission is to strike at the heart of the affliction, the head drug dealer if you will, in the person of Count Dracula. So goes the theory of Draculas appeal as expressing an allegory for the fear of drugs or other modern addictions taking possession of us. Of course, uptight Victorians might have also considered sex to be a drug; and contemporary critics might talk about the danger of HIV/AIDS and unprotected sex which has parallels to vampiric blood sucking. Vampire movies, which run in the face of all scientific logic, are always heavily laden with pseudo-science. Dracula is capable of teleportation and other tricks not in the physics books. And the Ryder character finds herself falling under the terrible spell of the vampires need. Many women are flattered when a man says he has been waiting all of his life for them. But if he has been waiting four centuries? The one thing the movie lacks is headlong narrative energy and coherence. There is no story we can follow well enough to care about. In this sense this version of the Dracula story is not especially successful. This Dracula is a tragic love story, the closest to date that any serious adaptation comes to sympathizing with the vampires point of view. It is vital, potent, and even slightly pathetic, in an attempt to find a mate to live through the centuries with him, raising her to live with him on another plane, high above mere mortals upon whom they will feast. Their coming together on that fateful night was an explosion of red heat. And his demise (if it is a demise) comes in the burning red light of a sunrise. The period of this film is also moved ahead a few years, which allows the use of early motor vehicles in the chase scenes. But Dracula remains a Gothic horror with great sweeping camera work, ghostly atmosphere and romantic acting in the title role. The Hammer films freely revised the narrative to bring out the exciting and fascinatingly repellent aspects of vampirism, while burying the tedious explication (Montgomery 559). Sure they glamorized and sensationalized it, but with Dracula thats not necessarily a bad thing. In the end people do want to be entertained. By remaining true to the original narrative, the film both gains and loses. Still it is one of the serious Dracula films you have got to see to understand the many ways Bram Stokers creation has touched us and become a cultural touchstone. As dramatically sketched here, the overarching story becomes Draculas quest to recapture his great love. Unfortunately, the familiarity of the plotting has the feel of an old-fashioned, 1930s, studio-enclosed production made with the benefit of 1990s technology (Bordwell 163). From the striking, blood-drenched prologue onward, the viewer is constantly made aware of cinema artifice in its grandest manifestations. Detractors may compare this to "One from the Heart," but the mechanics are really quite impressive and provide plenty to marvel at including a dark world of heightened unreality within a context that is both Gothic and Victorian. Conclusion Most film versions of Dracula have been based not on the 1897 novel but on the 1927 stage adaptation. Dracula brings back the novels multiple narrators through the adaptation, leading to a somewhat dispersed and overcrowded story line that remains fascinating and often affecting thanks to all its visual and conceptual energy (Monaco 29). Some of this derives from musings about what was going on culturally in Europe at the turn of the century, including the decadent art of the Vienna Secession and the birth of movies and of psychoanalysis. Underlying everything here, as perhaps it must with any serious vampire story today, is an AIDS subtext involving sex, infected blood and the plague. Overall, this Dracula could have been less heavy and more deliciously evil than it is, but it does offer a “sumptuous engorgement of the senses” (Peccei 761). It suffers a bit from a surfeit of ideas. But this is still a visual feast with those ideas, more disturbing than scary. Works Cited Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 7th International Edition. 7th edition. Ohio: McGraw-Hill Education (ISE Editions). 2003 Cartmell, Deborah and Whelehan, Imelda. Adaptations:From Text To Screen To Text. London: Routledge. 1999 Katz, Steven. Film Directing: Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen. California: Michael Wiese Books. 1991 Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 1992. Montagu, Ivor. Film World: A Guide To Cinema. Berkley: Pelican. 1964 Montgomery, Martin. An Introduction to Language and Society (Studies in Culture & Communication). 2nd edition. Kentucky: Routledge. 1995 Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, Multimedia: Language, History, Theory. 3rd edition. OUP USA. 2000 Murphy, Robert. The British Cinema Book (BFI Film Classics (Paperback)). 2nd Revised edition. Southbank: BFI Publishing. 2002 Peccei, Jean Stilwell. Language, Society and Power: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Kentucky: Routledge. 2003 Read More