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 fiancée, 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 scenes transferred from fiction to film is the scene where Jonathan Harker is being seduced by the daughters of Satan. In the novel, Harker as well as most characters, are repressed sexually. However, when he awaits the approach of Dracula’s wives, rather than sound like he is about to be attacked by some kind of undead monsters who might do him harm, he sounds like a man who is erotically aroused at the thought of foreplay “Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range ...