The story of Count Dracula, a vampire from Transylvania, has been thrilling filmmakers for years. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker, both film adaptations and free adaptations "based on" were created.
Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola
The novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker "Dracula" is one of the most screened works of world literature. The story of the Transylvanian prince Vlad Dracula, who turned into a bloodthirsty vampire and terrorized England several centuries after his official death, has attracted directors and screenwriters since the dawn of cinema.
The most famous black and white horror film “Nosferatu. Symphony of Horror”by Friedrich Murnau is based on this work, and the actor Bela Lugosi gained worldwide popularity and the status of a cinema legend precisely with his roles in numerous films about Dracula. The cinema of the 1920s and 1930s made Dracula an impressive monster, far from the original image from the book, to which only Francis Ford Coppola managed to return in 1992.
Playboy, killer, vampire
The full title of Coppola's film is Bram Stoker's Dracula. By this, the director sought to emphasize his desire to convey the spirit and atmosphere of a classic Gothic novel, but he nevertheless made some rather serious plot deviations. As in Stoker's book, the central characters of the film are the young lawyer Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder), the vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) and the beautiful, deadly and immortal Count Dracula himself (Gary Oldman) …
But the film turned out to be much more sensual and full of life than Stoker's slightly dry novel, performed mainly in the epistolary genre. Of course, the impressive plot of a vampire wandering through time and space in search of new victims remained untouched. But Coppola made Vlad more human by inventing an excuse for his immoral actions: many centuries ago, he lost his beloved, the beautiful Elizabeth. Her tragic death plunged the count into eternal damnation, and in Mina he found a new embodiment of his eternal love.
No one turns in a coffin
Jonathan arrives in a Transylvanian village to visit a mysterious local feudal lord who wants to buy property in England. During his stay in the castle of the count, he notices some oddities in his behavior - Dracula is not reflected in the mirrors, runs along the walls at night, and does not go out into the light of day at all during the day.
The last straw for Jonathan is a visit to his room by three seductive vampires who are desperate to convert him to their faith, but Dracula does not allow them. In London, the count gradually approaches Mina and her friend Lucy, showing the girls what true love is.
Everything ends, as it should be, with the expulsion of the vampire with the help of a cross, holy water, an aspen stake and the moral stress of the experienced van Helsing, who with great difficulty rescues Mina, who managed to sink into devilish debauchery and return her to Jonathan.
Thus, Coppola managed to create a new, unusual look at the familiar literary image of Dracula, while simultaneously creating a movie masterpiece, which in the future will be an example for many other interpretations of the eternal theme of vampirism. And, remarkably, Dracula does not use CGI.
