ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS - BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

He's met Abbott and Costello, had the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi don his pointy teeth and thick, black cape, and been the subject of parody in everything from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers to cult kids show Count Duckula. So, when Francis Ford Coppola brought the century-old gothic legend of Count Dracula to the big screen in the early 90s, he did the only thing he could to make it fresh and new: he crafted an opulent romance in which the iconic bad guy is a lovesick good guy.

The Count of Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most unique interpretations of the character cinema has yet seen. He doesn't creep out of the shadows to claim his victims, he doesn't flap his cape around grandly in his cobweb-covered castle and he doesn't particularly 'vant to suck your blood'. No, what the dear old Count really wants is someone to love. The film begins with a 15th Century prologue. We find Vlad the Impaler returning from a bloody battle only to discover his wife has committed suicide having been misinformed that her husband had died

Feeling betrayed by God and desperate to save his beloved from eternal damnation, Vlad renounces his faith and embraces vampirism, vowing to return and avenge his wife. Skip forward four centuries and we’re in the late 1800s. London-based real estate agent Jonathan Harker has been called to Transylvania to discuss business with the now old and decrepit Count. When Dracula sees a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, however, Harker finds himself imprisoned in the old man’s mansion and Dracula bids to find a way to London to be reunited with the woman who he believes to be the reincarnation of his dead wife.

Considering Coppola’s film is otherwise more or less faithful to its source material, this diversion from the text could have been rather jarring. Stoker’s novel never entertained the notion of Mina and Dracula being lovers, and most cinematic incarnations have cut the former out of the adaptation altogether or at least reduced her significance. Yet, between the lines, Dracula has always been a sympathetic, romantic figure. Forever needing to kill to live and doomed to immortality, his is a story of the nature of existence, man‘s relationship with God and repressed passion, and the film’s brilliance is that it emphasises this neglected subtext by attaching it to an elaborate opera of sound and vision.

A film you can sense and smell, Coppola’s Dracula drips with grand colours and rich vitality, utilising every aspect of the medium to craft a sort of religious-horror-romance. Michael Ballhuas's lush velvet black and blood red cinematography pops from every inch of the screen, Wojciech Kilar's over-the-top score hums in the speakers with romantic strings and foreboding brass which sound like audio interpretations of heavan and hell, Eiko Ishioka's costumes have enough grandeur to make you believe they’ve been stolen from the gods of some lost opulent civilisation, and the decision to shoot everything on a soundstage and perform the effects in-camera creates a falseness which only adds to the film’s unnerving mood.

Aside from Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder as the rather stilted leads (hardly their faults really; the romantic leads in gothic horrors are rarely their most fascinating aspect), the acting is brilliantly bombastic too. In the second of a number of early-90s villainous roles, Gary Oldman is terrifically OTT as Dracula, exuding both the vulnerability and single-minded evil of the title character. Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also get in on the act, shouting, growling and writhing their way through the film, with Frost particularly impressive as the sexually liberated Lucy Westenra. In many ways they’re mime artists in a film which is arguably best viewed as a modern day silent movie.

Receiving favourable reviews and massive box-office, Dracula sadly marks the last time Coppola really achieved critical and commercial success. He followed it up with the saccharine Jack in 1996 before moving onto ho-hum John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker in ‘97 and the critically-derided Youth Without Youth a decade later. Yet, even after all these setbacks, Coppola remains one of the most ambitious and unique directors still working. As Bram Stoker’s Dracula proves, he can craft new modes of storytelling from old stories and breath fresh life into clichéd legend.

It’s a skill which is all too absent in today’s filmmakers, and will hopefully return in full force in his next film, 2009’s family drama Tetro.