Dracula Film & Novel

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a novel that is a product in opposition to the conventional sexual manners and mores of its era, while it also shows the schism between then modern London and Transylvania which still belongs to the unhealthy manners and mores of the past. Though the novel is replete with vampires and all manner of horrors and evil, it is a thinly disguised critique of the sexual manners and more of the Victorian era. One critic of the novel actually goes so far as to label it pornography "For erotic Dracula certainly is. �Quasi-pornography' one critic labels it. Another describes it as a �kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-all wrestling match'. A sexual search of the novel unearths the following: seduction, rape, necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, adultery, oral sex, group sex, menstruation, venereal disease, voyeurism" (Leatherdale 155-156).

Except for the addition of a love story, the film Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, too shows the schism between repression and passion. However, it shows the schism within Dracula and Mina Murray as its focus. Dracula has waited centuries for the return of his bride, and once he sees a picture of Mina among the possessions of her fianc�e, he knows his wait has been finally rewarded. If we compare the film and the novel, we see many similarities albeit more graphic and emboldened in the film than the novel. One of the best sc

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gainst his lack of willingness to infect her with his blood. Finally, he succumbs to her pleas to join him and he allows her to suck on his chest wound. They are now united and damned together eternally. The film does go overboard when it comes to emotionalism and this scene of their mutual damnation is one of them. The orchestral soundtrack overwhelms the visual imagery and emotion of the scene. It builds to such a prolonged and loud crescendo that all one can visualize is some mad, raving conductor orchestrating wildly until the scene ends. Another time the film ruins the mood of its original source is when Mina and Jonathan are wed. The wedding scene is interspersed with cuts of the blood-bath the outraged Dracula is waging on Mina's sister, Lucy. By the time the scene ends a huge flood of blood splashes over the entire screen. The effect worked nicely in The Godfather, Coppola's most admired film, but the cutting of scenes of violence into the scenes of marriage does not fit as nicely here and it reminds one of his earlier film which breaks the aesthetic distance (hence) mood of Dracula. In the novel, too, Mina is shown as being tempted by and unable to resist the advances of Dracula and his passion. As she says in

Category: Film - D