Filming Dracula: Vampires, Genre, and Cinematography

Jörg Waltje

[Jörg Waltje PhD is Director of the Language Resource Center at Ohio University. His academic interests
also include instructional technologies and Computer-Assisted Language Learning.]

On a Tuesday morning Katje discovered that Dr. Weyland was a vampire, like the one in the movie she had
seen last week. (Charnas 3-4, emphasis added)

Films that belong to the same genre are like the links of a chain, yet any generic type of film will also
mark its difference from its predecessors. These films remain aware of their heritage and draw on earlier
examples by modifying and reinterpreting certain aspects that are generically coded, with differing
results. Accordingly, Ken Gelder points out:

Each new vampire film engages in a process of familiarisation and defamiliarisation, both
interpellating viewers who already “know” about vampires from the movies (and elsewhere), and
providing enough points of difference (in the narrative, in the “look” of the vampire, and so on)
for newness to maintain itself. (86)

As I intend to work out in this article, films of a particular genre have the ability to do more than
merely propagate received motifs and structures. They also comment on the art form of film itself, and
how it has changed over a period of time. An analysis of stylistic and technical devices entails
information not only about the progress of cinematography, but also about the self-awareness of film as a
medium that makes use of a certain apparatus – an apparatus of which the audience is generally kept
unaware in other filmic genres. 1 I will look closely at three vampire films, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1992), and in an analysis of their filmic techniques work out how the two earlier films constituted what
was then to become a genre, and how the structure of genre is closely related to the parameters of myth.
My thesis can be summarized as follows: Stylistic/formal features that were developed in Nosferatu and
Dracula with their combined influence molded the vampire films to come and found a preliminary
culmination point in Coppola’s treatment of the Dracula subject. I will focus on the depiction of the
vampire through gestures and make-up, lighting and editing techniques as well as special effects and
framing. Lastly, I will point out how vampire films and fictions, like myths, mirror the structure
underlying our psychic apparatus. The fact that Dracula is a prototype of myth as well as an ideal
representative of genre is responsible for our conscious and unconscious attraction to the figure of the
vampire.
Especially in the overtly self-reflexive horror subgenre of the vampire film, the (post-modern)
technique of including intertextual references into texts can only be savored by those familiar with earlier
horror films, who in turn will enjoy watching early films because of their inter-relation with the
contemporary oeuvre. In the manner of a hermeneutic circle, each film bears the possibility of enriching
the experience of the other, regardless of its ability to create suspense and terror. The epigraph introducing
this article stems from Suzy Charnas’ 1980 novel The Vampire Tapestry, and perfectly illustrates that
modern people derive their knowledge about vampires from the cinema. A random person who grew up in
the western hemisphere, when asked for the name of a vampire, would almost certainly respond with
“Dracula,” although not that many people might be aware of the fact that the name originated in a novel
by the Anglo-Irish writer Bram Stoker. But where did the original audience for a film like Nosferatu get
1“Apparatus” here is understood as the formal elements which make up a film and the effect their use might have on the
audience. Varying use of lenses, light, camera angles, mise en scène, editing, sound, a particular film stock, etc. can be employed
to evoke certain reactions/emotions in the audience, and a trained observer will be aware of that.
its information about vampires? Were those people who had not read Stoker’s novel tabulae rasae when
they entered the movie theater? This is what often is assumed when we are thinking about the beginnings
of a genre (any genre), disregarding the fact that a whole intertextual set of vampire depictions was
already in existence all over Europe, for example through popular theater plays and operas, the Grand
Guignol, woodcuts and book illustrations. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that after the appearance of
the vampire on film, all subsequent depictions are more or less heavily influenced by the earliest
examples of cinematic adaption of Stoker’s master text. Since the beginnings of cinematography, literally
hundreds of vampire films have been made, with no end in sight. 2 Murnau’s Nosferatu is generally
considered the first full-fledged cinematic treatment of the vampire, while more recent examples are
Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994),
Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), Stephen Norrington’s Blade (1998), and John Carpenter’s
Vampires (1998).
According to the credits in Nosferatu, the script by Henrik Galeen was “adapted from the novel by
Bram Stoker,” but Galeen and Murnau ignored the existing copyright. In turn, Stoker’s widow procured a
court injunction against this unauthorized version of Dracula and almost succeeded in having all copies
of the film destroyed. Several copies were saved since they had already been exported abroad. 3 However,
this German version bears only a nominal resemblance to its source. Murnau and Galeen had changed the
original names and transferred the locale to Bremen. The tale has been stripped and simplified, and
although the plot of Nosferatu like Dracula consists of three principal parts (namely: Jonathan’s voyage
to Transylvania/his and Dracula’s race to Bremen/Dracula’s influence and demise), the last part revised
Stoker’s fiction considerably. As Judith Mayne rightfully insists, it is not the case that literature provides
an “unquestioned master code” that has to be translated into some cinematic equivalent. Every kind of
Verfilmung creates a relationship between two texts, “a dynamic encounter rather than a static rendering
of a story line from one medium to another” (25). Thus, this first film version of Dracula not merely
deviates from the original, it appropriates the predecessor to the new medium.
The narrative structure in Stoker’s work calls attention to itself; the book comes in the form of an
epistolary novel which has no narration but rather presents letters and diary-entries from several people.
The point-of-view is constantly changing, and Murnau transfers this pivotal feature by using point-of-
view (POV) shots, subjective camera, and cross-cutting sequences to construct his narrative. The most
impressive scene illustrating this technique occurs halfway through the film. When Jonathan hears a clock
strike midnight, he gets agitated and runs to the door. 4 As he opens it a crack, we share his POV. In a long
shot, Dracula is visible at the end of a long, dark corridor. A dissolve brings him closer, his shadow
lurking behind him, and although we have seen his ghastly figure before, for the first time he wears no hat
in this scene, and we perceive his bald head with pointed ears, while his long arms like claws stick
threateningly out of his sleeves. He is the center of this tableau, framed by light in a coffin shape and by
the darkness that surrounds him – indeed, it almost seems to radiate from him. This framing motif recurs
throughout the film in different variations, often as Gothic arches, creating a feeling of confinement and
enclosure, which is emphasized by the conventional use of the iris and masked shots. Harker attempts to
hide in his room, but the door flies open, and out of the darkness the vampire approaches, halts under the
arched doorway and is framed by it. Through crosscutting, Murnau depicts simultaneous events in
Bremen. Mina wakes up with fear in her eyes and walks to the balcony in a “somnambulistic dream” as
an intertitle informs us. The sequence continues with crosscutting: Harker is hiding under his bedcovers,
the shadow of the Count can be seen on the wall behind Harker, with hands held high and pointed ears.
Mina screams, and as the shadow recedes, the camera cuts to the Count who turns his head around to look

2For the most comprehensive listings of vampire films, see Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., The Vampire Film: From
Nosferatu to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993) and J. Gordon Melton, VideoHounds Vampires on
Video (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1997).
3David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic (New York: Norton, 1990) provides a detailed account of Florence Stoker’s fights to block the
Murnau film and later attempts to transfer Dracula from the written word to stage and screen.
4Depending on the print, the characters come with different names: Dracula/Graf Orlok, Mina/Ellen, Jonathan Harker/Thomas
Hutter, Renfield/Knock, Van Helsing/Prof. Bulwer.
over his shoulder, as if he had heard the scream. The reaction shot is set up so slowly that it is almost
suffocating, but this is the normal speed at which the Count moves, and when the camera cuts back to
Mina, an eyeline match makes it appear as if she is looking straight at the vampire, who walks out of the
room with the door closing itself behind him.
This is a sequence only a film can represent – although Stoker changes narrative perspective
throughout the novel, he cannot depict two (or more) scenes going on simultaneously as Murnau does it at
times. There are other advantages film has over the written word. The immediacy of the medium enables
effects that operate instantly on the beholder. What follows is the description Jonathan Harker gives of
Count Dracula early in the novel:

His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly
arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but
profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with
bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the
heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these
protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his
years. For the rest his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and
strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor ....
[The hands] were rather coarse--broad with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the
centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. (27)

A purist might criticize the fact that Max Schreck’s physique as Graf Orlok in Nosferatu has very
little in common with Harker’s depiction of Dracula. Yet, what counts is that Schreck’s first appearance
out of a dark tunnel underneath an archway sets up his persona instantaneously. One look is enough to
create an aura of terror around him, an effect even the most imaginative reader will not derive from the
passage quoted above and that only film can achieve. With literature, the text lies between the reader and
the image and description can only unfold over time. Film, however, can work directly on the viewer;
although for film theorists the medium can function as a filter in other respects.
Many of the scenes and effects Murnau created for Nosferatu went on to become tropes of the genre:
the use of shadows as the harbingers of doom, shots and reverse shots from the perspective of the vampire
approaching its victim and the victim shrinking from him, the extremely slow gait of the vampire, his
threatening gestures with his right hand raised and his claw reaching out, the twitching and jerking
portrayal of madness in Renfield, and the use of reaction shots to portray the effect of a statement or noise
on the listeners (Dracula’s name, the clock striking midnight, the herald’s announcement, etc.). Murnau’s
repeated use of the relatively open form in which the action is not contained or completed within the
frame also indicates the potential off-screen menaces.
As is fitting for a film that deals with the supernatural, Nosferatu repeatedly makes use of special
effects: doors opening by themselves; superimpositions and dissolves of the vampire; his erect rising from
his coffin; the under-cranked stop-motion technique that results in sped-up, jerky movements when
Dracula’s coach first approaches Harker, and later when the Count loads his coffins on a cart. Finally, the
scene in the film which probably has received the most critical attention, is an insertion of negative
footage creating an effect of surrealistic distortion as the hearse-like carriage enters “the land of the
phantoms,” the latter perhaps an apt description of cinema itself.
While there are many scenes that could be singled out as precursors of the genre, there is another
aspect in Nosferatu that is worth investigating more fully. Murnau’s film is extremely self-conscious, and
in numerous instances the spectator is made aware of the fact that s/he is watching a film. Dracula was
published in 1897, and although the novel repeatedly refers to contemporary technologies like the
typewriter and the phonograph, it ignores the fact that the cinema was emerging at the same time.
Murnau, however, constantly alludes to film as an art form.
Nosferatu not only relates the story of vampiric contamination, but at the same time the film also
comments on the medium of film itself. Dr. Van Helsing appears in an almost non-diegetic insert, his
prominent role in the novel having been reduced so much that he seems dispensable for the unfolding of
the events. The short scene in which he is lecturing to a group of men about “natural” vampires is not
important in furthering the plot, but rather contains a subtle comment on the medium. Metaphorically, the
polyp under Van Helsing’s microscope represents the vampire as we have seen him in superimpositions –
“transparent and without substance” as the intertitle lets us know. But does this insert not stand as an
allegory for the medium of film itself? The film strip is transparent: whatever is projected against the
screen has no substance and represents merely a play of light and shadow, a Lichtspiel, as films were
called in German at the time of the Weimar Republic when Nosferatu was released. The recurrent use of
light falling in from a window alludes on the one hand to offscreen space as an outside world free from
lurking evil, and on the other, to filmmaking itself. What else is film, if not light that falls through an
opening and is captured on a piece of celluloid?
Tod Browning’s Dracula, the first sound version of the vampire tale, was not directly derived from
Stoker’s novel, but based on an adaptation by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston. Their Dracula: The
Vampire Play had stripped Stoker’s novel to the core so that the central conflict could be portrayed on a
stage almost in accordance with the Aristotelian notions of unity in the drama. Dracula: The Vampire
Play was set in merely two locales, Dr. Seward’s parlor and Carfax Abbey. Jonathan Harker’s travel to
Transylvania, the voyage on the Demeter, and the Crew of Light’s pursuit of the Count to Transylvania
had been eliminated. The play had enjoyed continuous success after its opening in New York in 1927 and
prompted Universal to produce a film version. With Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula and Edward van Sloan
as Dr. Van Helsing, Browning cast two actors who had already portrayed their characters on the stage.
The whole film has a theatrical flair; entirely shot in the studio, many of the scenes seem staged and
static, like tableaux captured by a camera. Yet, in some portions of the film the apparatus is put to work,
especially in the portrayal of the vampire, which owes a lot to camera and lighting techniques but also to
the theatrical artifice of the protagonist, Bela Lugosi. His portrayal of Dracula as a foreign predator in the
guise of aristocratic sophistication became the role model for many vampires to come.
Early in the film, in a sequence of high and low angle-shots/reverse-shots, the relation between
Dracula and his victim Renfield is set up: vampire and prey, or master and servant as it will become clear
at a later point. In frames that contain both Dracula and another person, there is always an imaginary
diagonal between the two heads. Even when Dracula is not standing a few steps up on a staircase, he is
always taller; looking down on his counterpart he has an air of authority and danger. He is in control;
when he leans forward, almost into the faces of the other characters, he appears ready to pounce on them.
While the vampire in Nosferatu is mostly depicted by long and medium shots that kept him at a distance,
Browning uses close-ups and low-angles to give Dracula a fearful appearance. 5 Low key and
underlighting, as well as the recurring use of an eye-light, emphasize the hypnotic power of the vampire
and often create a dramatic horror effect by distorting Lugosi’s facial features.
It is noticeably quiet through these scenes (the film has no score that supplies nondiegetic sound), but
we must not forget that sound is available. 6 In contrast to Nosferatu, this vampire has a voice, and a
striking one at that. Many of Lugosi’s utterances have found their way into the successors of Browning’s
Dracula. Lugosi’s low voice, his staccato rhythm, and the extreme slowness of his articulation have often
been mimicked and parodied, yet these features form another thread running through the genre. “I am –
Dracula,” he introduces himself nonchalantly to a baffled Renfield; when offscreen howling is heard he
comments “Listen to them, the children of the night – what music they make,” and when he serves wine
to his guest he explains “I never drink – wine.” His pronunciation is guttural, rolling his R’s he sounds as
if a dangerous animal is hiding underneath the surface of the well-groomed aristocrat, and his Hungarian
accent characterizes the Count as the dangerous, intrusive foreigner that he is coded as being.

5A shift in film history becomes perceptible here, namely the move from more traditional and almost “primitive” film relying on
a “proscenium arch” composition towards the establishment of close-ups and editing. For more information compare David
Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New
York: Columbia UP, 1985) 194-213.
6In 1999, 68 years after its original release, Philip Glass composed a score for Dracula. Universal Home Videos now makes
Dracula available with this soundtrack played by the Kronos Quartet as part of their “Classic Monster Collection.”
 Like Murnau’s Nosferatu, Tod Browning’s Dracula is aware of its constructedness as a film and
covertly alerts the viewer to this fact. Framing and editing call attention to themselves and foreground the
apparatus whenever we see a character walking from one frame into the next without a cut on movement.
It is striking that Browning wholly abstains from the use of special effects. The pans and cuts that
circumvent the vampire’s transformation from a bat to human shape and his rising from the coffin make
no effort to create an illusion of verisimilitude. Browning plays with the medium and with the spectator.
Instead of using dissolves and superimpositions, he consciously calls attention to framing and editing.
Scenes the spectator is most eager to perceive are always relegated offscreen, undermining the
expectations of the audience and mocking them by compromising their visual pleasure.
The fact that this vampire, unlike the one in Nosferatu, has no mirror-image finally presents us with a
paradox. When Van Helsing opens the cigarette box, a close up of the mirror shows Mina but no image of
Dracula. If the screen is considered a mirror, a representation of the vampire would be impossible, yet we
can see him throughout the film. Indeed, we can only see him because of the screen: only film makes the
vampire representable. In a way, film lends itself to be the medium of the vampire just as the figure of the
vampire connotes the nature of film. An interplay of light and darkness – the Lichtspiel – defines the
vampire as well as the audience. The vampire only comes out in the dark and spends the rest of the time
in his coffin. The spectators voluntarily sit in a coffin (the darkened cinema), watching a screen on which
not only light but also (within and between every frame) darkness is projected. Having turned themselves
into vampires, they are waiting for the film-vampire to come out and join them. Furthermore, film has the
same hypnotic power over its audience as Dracula in Browning’s version over his victims.
The notions of transformation and constancy, of novelty and recognition, not only define the vampire
but also its medium, film. Browning takes up the conventions Murnau had brought to life in his treatment
of Nosferatu and expands on them. A coded use of lighting, editing techniques like crosscutting, the
gestures, poise, and gait of the vampire, his pallid make-up and mascara-eyes, these are only some of the
features Browning adapted from his predecessor. The portrayal of the Count as an aristocrat, mobile
framing, tracking and craning shots, and most importantly the use of sound, both onscreen and offscreen,
add a new dimension to the awaking genre. Creaking doors, howling wolves, the vampire’s metaphorical
association with vermin and rodents, and the ominous utterances of Lugosi became stock features for
vampire films to come.7 Both Nosferatu and Dracula are more or less conscious of their constructedness
and their cinematic apparatus, and make at least subtle efforts to communicate this self-reflexivity to the
spectator. A sense of film history reflected in intertextual references as well as the preoccupation with the
cinematic apparatus became a token of the vampire genre and finds its climax in Francis Ford Coppola’s
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (BSD), a film which not only covertly reflects on the medium of film, but rather
makes film history and cinematic apparatus one of its central concerns.
Seventy years after Nosferatu, Coppola’s version of Dracula seemingly takes the audience back to the
original concept. The film, which opened on Friday, November 13, 1992, on almost 2500 screens
throughout the United States and Canada, provided Columbia Pictures with its largest release ever. 8 BSD
had the seventh best opening for any film in history, which goes to show that the interest in vampire
fiction runs high, a fact that is further documented by the number of vampire films which have appeared
in the wake of BSD. Silver and Ursini point out that this ultimate version of the Dracula legend is “both
the highest budgeted and largest grossing vampire film ever made” (155).
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was greeted with sarcasm by many critics although it not only revitalized the
genre, but in certain respects – by rediscovering and foregrounding the eminent traits of the genre – it also
redefined some of the crumbling generic boundaries. For Stoker purists BSD quickly became a very
controversial film, since Coppola and his screen writer James V. Hart claim that they adhered as closely as
possible to Bram Stoker’s original, while only including changes they deemed necessary to improve on
the original story’s plausibility and cohesiveness.

7The use of diegetic sound is, indeed, one of the most striking features of the horror film in general: in well-executed horror films
the soundtrack is always part of the narrative (diegesis).
8See J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1994) 124.
 Mainly, it was that no one had ever done the book. I’m amazed, watching all the other Dracula
films, how much they held back from what was written or implied, how they played havoc with
the characters and their relationships ... Aside from the one innovative take that comes from
history – the love story between Mina and the Prince – we were scrupulously true to the book. (3)

There is certainly more than just one “innovative take” in BSD’s treatment of the original novel. Yet it is
fairly obvious that Coppola and Hart felt compelled to draw on seventy years of vampiric
cinematography. With a plethora of intertextual references, they are paying homage to their predecessors
while trying to provide stimulating material to the devotees of the genre.
At an earlier point in our discussion we had recourse to an observation made by Ken Gelder which is
worth restating here. “Each new vampire film,” Gelder points out, “engages in a process of familiarisation
and defamiliarisation, ... providing enough points of difference ... for newness to maintain itself” (86). For
David Glover the “protean durability of the un-dead” is exemplified in the vampire’s ability to “reproduce
itself in a seemingly endless series of copies, always resourcefully different from previous incarnations,
frequently altering the rules of the genre in order to secure a new lease on life” (126-27). This oscillation
between new and old motifs, and the allusion to familiar, yet sometimes unconscious features and
sentiments, seems to be what we find at the core of any genre fiction. In the case of BSD the technique of
alluding to recurring staples of the genre, a trademark of any generic fiction, and the tendency for
intertextual references has nevertheless met with on-going criticism ever since the film first opened.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula emerges “like a music video directed by Dario Argento,” Richard Dyer
comments. “It’s post-modern allusionism, a welter of things to make reference to without any of them
mattering much” (18). According to Kim Newman the film “revives the most tiresome of monster
motivations ... : the search for the reincarnation of the lost love,” instead of providing new impulses to a
faltering genre (13). Like other recent horror fictions, the film merely embodies “plagiarism and theft,
dignified as ‘post-modernist,’” Iain Sinclair grudgingly observes of the achievement of Hart and
Coppola’s endeavors (15).
Such harsh criticism clearly disregards the importance of what has to be defined as the sine qua non
of generic fiction: repetition and recognition of familiar elements. “[The] rediscovery of what is familiar,
‘recognition,’ is pleasurable,” Freud points out, and pleasurable effects arise from “a repetition of what is
similar, a rediscovery of what is familiar” (128). It is also worthwhile to recall Wellek and Warren’s
dictum that both “novelty and the sense of recognition” are responsible for our pleasure when consuming
(literary) fictions (225).
In BSD the pleasures of recognition indeed work on several levels:

recognition of familiar elements of the Dracula story;

Thus, I would claim, one is doing the film an injustice by dismissing it so peremptorily. Indeed, as a
prototype of generic fiction, the film has many redeeming qualities, one of which is Coppola’s uncanny
ability to synthesize the materials of his predecessors.
Many characters and incidents from Bram Stoker’s novel which have never before found their way
onto the screen are included in Coppola’s version, and the frequent exercise of mis- and re-naming the
characters has been avoided. The narrative technique, at least in the first two thirds of the film, directly
reflects Stoker’s epistolary style. Multiple strands of narrative, told by the use of varying technologies
(Jonathan’s diary entries, Seward’s phonograph records, Mina’s typewritten accounts, letters, newspaper-
clippings, etc.) are held together by voice-overs, captions, maps, visual and aural cues and links.
The frequent, almost excessive, use of superimpositions and dissolves enables and enhances the
depiction of multiple points of view and the unceasing flow of information, which the novel presents in a
somewhat formal, almost pedantic manner. Bram Stoker’s Dracula makes use of many of the formal
elements we have determined as indispensable for the vampire genre in our earlier discussion of
Nosferatu and Dracula. At the same time it incorporates the later Hammer-Film tradition (1960s to
1970s) in its use of coded colors and visible blood, and feeds on film versions of Dracula and other
vampires. Examples include the motif of Dracula’s search for his lost love (used in Dan Curtis’s 1974
Dracula with Jack Palance), and the cut to roast beef (from Tony Scott’s 1983 The Hunger.
The prominent use of shadows anticipating or announcing the arrival of evil, fast crosscutting enabled
by increased editing technology, the familiar gestures, poise, and gait of the vampire, his pseudo-
Hungarian accent, the pointed fingernails (we are even treated to the hairy palms of Gary Oldman’s
Dracula), the frequent use of low angle, (medium) close-up shots for Dracula, the claustrophobic framing
of the vampiric world with the help of irises and arches, tracking and craning shots, the quasi-
expressionist chiaroscuro-lighting, and many other allusions to its generic predecessors, combine and
refine the now standardized elements of vampire cinema in BSD.
While both Nosferatu and Dracula were already covertly conscious of their constructedness as film
and communicated their self-awareness of being an art form to the spectator, BSD makes film and the
cinematic apparatus a central issue in its portrayal of Dracula’s sojourn in London. An undercranked,
jerky scene filmed in faded colors with a Pathé camera gives an impression of documentary material, and
at the same time addresses the dichotomies between the real and illusory, representation and recognition
for which both the vampire and its medium stand. We are (once again) made aware of the fact that a
vampire has no mirror image, since the film shows us the reflection of a newspaper in a window pane
which seems to float through the air where Dracula should be. Yet after a cut, the screen reverts to a
depiction of the vampire, for it is the screen alone which makes the vampire visible for us. The sequence
leads up to Dracula’s first encounter with Mina and their subsequent visit to the cinematograph. With its
inserts and backdrops of film-within-film the sequence embodies another, and this time highly
foregrounded, self-reflexive acknowledgment of the art form and its conventions.
The most striking reflection concerning the paradox of the vampire’s non-representability, however, is
an earlier segment in which Mina comes upon the rape of Lucy in the maze at Hillingham. The wolf-like
creature Dracula has metamorphosed into turns towards Mina and the spectators, who share her POV. For
just a few frames (too fast to be consciously recognized) the “human” features of the vampire are
superimposed on the wolf’s face, and both Mina and the audience are ordered “Do not see me!” Only the
screen can depict the vampire; although film is its medium, our recognition here is explicitly forbidden.
Once again this scene reveals the paradox of the vampire’s unrepresentability, at the same time that it
addresses the hypnotic power both the vampire and film can have on the perceiver. 9
Some of the outstanding novel elements contained in Bram Stoker’s Dracula are the costume designs
by Eiko Ishioko and the use of extra-diegetic sound to link scenes and characters. Both the costumes with
their crests and insignia and the soundtrack by Wojciech Kilar add to the film as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a
complete and integrated work of art in which all elements are directed toward the same end. With their
recurrent themes and motifs and by means of intra-textuality, they reinforce the film’s underlying
repetitive structure. The combination of tactile, visual, and aural elements, as for example in Dracula’s
undulating blood-red cloak and Lucy’s floating orange gown when she falls prey to the vampire in the
garden during a thunderstorm, can be singled out here. The gentle musical cues of the love-theme,
Dracula’s and Mina’s dance among a myriad of candles, and the thunderous, angry instrumentation of
Lucy’s final bloodletting crosscut with Mina’s and Jonathan’s wedding in the Romanian convent, which at
the same time reverberates with subtle musical cues from the above-mentioned love-theme – all these
elements combine to provide the spectator with heretofore unknown synaesthetic pleasure, appealing
more to the body than to the mind. The story itself as vampiric fiction contains no surprises and adheres to
Stoker, with the exception of Van Helsing’s meta-narrative of Dracula’s fight against the Turks and both
the pseudo-historical and the contemporary love connection between Mina and her “Prince.” The way in
which it is filmed and edited, however, is imaginative, and, at times, even breathtaking.

9“See me now!” Dracula orders Mina/the viewer a little later, and in the subsequent scene at the cinematograph Mina articulates
our uncanny recognition of the vampire: “My God, who are you? I know you.”
 In Coppola’s film, not only the forces of good and evil but also centrifugal and centripetal forces are
battling against each other. The figure of Dracula is the center of the narrative, yet at the same time the
film tries to break away from its center in an attempt to include all possible features of the generic
tradition. The abstract concept “Dracula” has taken on a life of its own and represents a certain master-
narrative, despite – but also in addition to – the fact that it simultaneously functions as a reconfiguration
of other mythological and artistic motifs.
Both Richard Dyer and Manohla Dargis have alluded to the film’s discreet references to Christian
mythology. In Coppola’s and Hart’s treatment of what I shall loosely refer to as the Dracula myth, the
figure of Dracula becomes an inversion of Christ. Deserted by God in his darkest hour, the defender of
Christendom turns into a vampire, and thus becomes like Jesus, “a dead man who has eternal life” (Dyer
10). The idea that for the vampire blood becomes the life reverberates with the Christian dogma of
transubstantiation. “The vampire has baptized her with his own blood,” Van Helsing remarks when Mina
begins to turn. As in the Christian belief system, redemption through love appears possible in BSD. In the
final scenes (and even earlier on a portrait in Dracula’s castle), the vampire’s gory features metamorphose
for fleeting moments into the bearded, long-haired figure which traditional Christian iconography depicts
as the semblance of Christ.
“Love Never Dies” announces the original poster for the film’s release, combining the public’s
interest in romantic stories, our preoccupation with the vampire, and our fascination with death, im-
mortality, and reincarnation. The back cover of Coppola and Hart’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend, a
companion piece to the film which includes, among other things, stills and the original shooting script,
defines its contents as “A Deathless Tale.” Immortality here not only describes but inscribes the essential
trait of the narrative, which strikes me insofar as important as the notion of immortality is closely related
to the term “myth,” a concept which, it has been hinted at, Dracula has become by now.
“Mythic thought is especially concerned to deny and negate the effect of death and to affirm the
unbroken unity of life,” David Bidney points out (10). For Marina Warner, myth’s multiple functions
consist of bringing binary oppositions into accord by “defining the forbidden and the alluring, the sacred
and the profane, conjuring demons and heroes, saying who we are and what we want, telling a story
which makes sense of things” (87). Dracula is indeed a prototype of myth as well as an ideal
representative of genre. As vampire fiction the subject combines both the return of the repressed and the
compulsion to repeat; thus it mirrors the structure underlying the psychic apparatus which is responsible
for our conscious and unconscious attraction to the genre.
The simultaneous presence of folktales, medical case-histories, socio-historical and psychological
insights, and twentieth century obsessions make up what has become the myth of the vampire, reflecting
universal and innate fears, desires, and the structure of our mind. This is why any comprehensive version
of Dracula unavoidably becomes a “maelstrom of sensations” (Dyer 10), “millenial rock’n’roll with all
the stops out” (Sinclair 15). By now the vampire is a twentieth century myth, and its favored medium is
film.
Yet, not only the preferred medium of the vampire has undergone some changes over the last century,
the figure of the vampire itself has metamorphosed or been worked over again and again. In a fairly
recent development, it has split into two halves, with its double leaving the realm of fiction. I am
referring here to the figure of the serial killer, who embodies many of the traits of the vampire but presses
closer to home and can be considered an updated and less “playful” version of one of our oldest
obsessions. There has been a flood of commercially very successful serial killer fictions in recent years,
which in my view reflect and exploit many of the traits set up by the vampire cinema but cater even more
directly to the underlying repetitive structure of our mind and our innate desires, anxieties, and fears.
Over the last 100 years, the image of the vampire has proven itself to be highly adaptable and it is far
from being depleted. It will certainly be around for the next century, and as soon as the pendulum swings
back from the blood-and-gore extremes, a definitive version of Bram Stoker’s novel – possibly this time
starring Anthony Hopkins as Dracula but without any other “innovative takes” – would be more than
welcome by most fans of the genre.
Works Cited:

Bidney, David. “Myth, Symbolism, and Truth.” Myth and Literature. Ed. John B. Vickery. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966.
Charnas, Suzie McKee. The Vampire Tapestry. New York: Tor, 1986.
Coppola, Francis Ford and James V. Hart. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend. New York: Newmarket, 1992.
Dargis, Manohla. “His Bloody Valentine.” Village Voice 24 (Nov 1992).
Dyer, Richard. “Dracula and Desire.” Sight and Sound. Jan 1993.
Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994.
Glover, David. “Travels in Romania: Myths of Origins, Myths of Blood.” Discourse 16.1 (Fall 1993).
Mayne, Judith. “Dracula in the Twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).” German Film and Literature. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New
York: Methuen, 1986.
Newman, Kim. “Bloodlines.” Sight and Sound. Jan 1993.
Silver, Alain and James Ursini (eds). The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. New York: Limelight
Editions, 1993.
Sinclair, Iain. “Invasion of the Blood.” Sight and Sound. Jan 1993.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. New York: Signet, 1978.
Warner, Marina. Six Myths of Our Time. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Wellek, Rene and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.