He chooses eternal perdition because his beloved wife, Elisabeta (also Ryder), has committed suicide, thus incurring her own damnation. Meanwhile, Mina’s journey finds her developing many of the same erotic tendencies as Lucy under Dracula’s tutelage, the ramp up in her seductiveness once again mirrored in the costumes that she wears.Ĭoppola’s film also functions as religious allegory, ultimately in support of so-called Christian civilization, but one that’s unafraid to plumb society’s dark underbelly, as when Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) claims that “civilization and syphilization have advanced together.” Dracula is depicted as a fallen angel, an avowed renegade against God. So it should come as little surprise that, in the film, the sexually available Lucy is Count Dracula’s (Gary Oldman) first victim. The difference is evident in everything from their comportment to the very clothes that they wear.
The film is definitely a bodice-ripper, literally so on several occasions, that unabashedly traces out the arc between sexual repression and erotic liberation.īram Stoker’s Dracula offers a study in sexual contrasts between the (at least verbally) wanton and aristocratic Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) and the buttoned-down working-class Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Coppola’s film unspools like an erotic nightmare, dredging up all the pent-up and sexually charged energy that roils (sometimes barely) below the surface of Stoker’s novel.
This isn’t a staid literary adaptation of the Merchant-Ivory variety. Though the vampire did also desire Mina in the book, he was depicted as a far more monstrous figure.Ĭheck out a 4K restoration trailer below.Francis Ford Coppola certainly brought the operatic intensity that was evident in his previous film, The Godfather Part III, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Though it remained faithful to the original story in most respects, it altered the relationship between the now more sympathetic count and Mina to make them star-crossed lovers, with Dracula crossing the ocean to track down and turn who he believed to be a reincarnation of his late wife. Starring Gary Oldman ( Batman Begins, Harry Potter) as the legendary vampire, Anthony Hopkins ( The Silence of the Lambs, Thor) as Van Helsing, Winona Ryder ( Stranger Things) as Mina Harker and Keanu Reeves ( The Matrix, John Wick) as her beleaguered husband Jonathan, the film took a lavish, often surreal approach to Stoker's novel. It may seem hard to believe given how well Francis Ford Coppola's stunning adaptation has held up over the years, but the 30th anniversary of Bram Stoker's Dracula is fast approaching, and the stylish horror film is returning to theatres in 4K for the first time this Halloween.
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