Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula opens with a lie that becomes a curse. In 1462, Vlad Dracula returns from a victory against the Ottoman Empire to find his wife, Elisabeta, dead by suicide. She killed herself after his enemies falsely reported he was dead. A Romanian Orthodox priest tells him her soul is damned to Hell for the act. Vlad desecrates the chapel, renounces God, drives his sword into the stone cross and drinks the blood that pours out. He becomes a vampire.
Trailer, via Sony Pics at Home UK.
A Photograph of Mina Murray
The film jumps to 1897. Solicitor Jonathan Harker takes the elderly Transylvanian Count Dracula as a client, inheriting the account from his colleague R. M. Renfield, who has gone insane and now lives in Dr. Jack Seward’s asylum. Harker travels to the castle to arrange Dracula’s London real estate purchases. There, Dracula finds a photograph of Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, and decides she is Elisabeta reincarnated.
Dracula imprisons Harker and leaves him to be fed on by his brides. He sails to England with Transylvanian soil and moves into Carfax Abbey, which he has just bought. In London he takes werewolf form and bites Mina’s best friend, Lucy Westenra, the woman Mina is staying with while Harker is away.
Lucy Westenra’s Blood
Lucy’s health fails and her behavior changes. Her fiancé, Lord Arthur Holmwood, and her former suitors, Quincey P. Morris and Dr. Seward, bring in Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, Seward’s mentor. Van Helsing recognizes what is wrong with her: she is the victim of a vampire.
Sadie Frost plays Lucy. The role is the film’s most efficient piece of horror. She gets less screen time than the title character and does more with it.
Gary Oldman Plays Two Men
Oldman plays two men in one body. He is the ancient count in the castle, and he is the young, handsome suitor who charms Mina in daylight London. The performance is the reason the film holds together at all. Bram Stoker’s Dracula runs 128 minutes and moves through two countries, four centuries and at least three genres, and Oldman is the constant.
Winona Ryder plays Mina Murray and Elisabeta, and the doubling is the point. Anthony Hopkins plays Van Helsing and the Romanian Orthodox priest who condemns Vlad at the start. That second role is easy to miss. It also means the man who explains vampirism to the heroes is, in the film’s opening, the man who created the vampire by telling him his wife was damned.
Tom Waits plays Renfield, the asylum inmate who handed the Dracula account to Harker in the first place. The film never resolves how much Renfield knows or why he broke, and Waits plays him as a man already past the point of explaining himself.
Keanu Reeves Is the Weak Link
Reeves is the problem. Harker should be the audience’s way into the castle, the ordinary man who walks into something wrong and cannot walk out. Reeves plays him as a man reading lines he does not believe. The film’s critical reception in 1992 singled this out, and the criticism has aged better than most.
The rest of the cast is stacked and largely wasted on small parts. Cary Elwes plays Holmwood, Richard E. Grant plays Seward, Billy Campbell plays Morris. All three are Lucy’s suitors, and all three exist mainly to summon Van Helsing and then stand around while he works. Monica Bellucci, Michaela Bercu and Florina Kendrick play Dracula’s brides. They get one scene and no names.
Eiko Ishioka’s Costumes
The production is where the money went, and it shows. Eiko Ishioka won Best Costume Design at the 65th Academy Awards for this film. The costumes are not period-accurate in any way that matters. They are red and gold and built like armor, and they make Dracula look like something that has been alive too long to care what century it is in.
The film also won Best Sound Editing and Best Makeup, and lost on its fourth nomination. It was nominated four times and won three. That is a strange split for a film that got mixed reviews on release. The Academy rewarded the craft and ignored the story, which is roughly the correct call.
Principal photography ran from October 14, 1991, to January 31, 1992, at Sony Pictures Studios and the Universal Studios Lot, with reshoots at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles. Annie Lennox wrote and performed the closing credits song, “Love Song for a Vampire.”
$215.9 Million Against $40 Million
Columbia Pictures released Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the United States on November 13, 1992. It opened at the top of the box office and grossed $215.9 million against a $40 million production budget. That is a hit by any measure, and it is the number that explains why this film keeps getting rewatched.
The tagline is “Love never dies.” It is a romance as much as a horror film, and the genres listed for it are exactly that: Romance, Horror. The romance is the part that has held up worst. Mina develops feelings for Dracula and goes on several outings with him while her fiancé is imprisoned in a castle. The film wants this to be tragic and sweeping. It plays as a woman being charmed by the man holding her future husband captive, and the film never reckons with that.
What the Film Gets Right
The horror still works. The brides, the blood, the chapel, the cross. Coppola shoots the supernatural as if it were a physical fact, and the film never winks at the audience about any of it. James V. Hart’s screenplay is based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, and it keeps the book’s structure: the journey east, the ship, the asylum, the hunt. It adds the reincarnation romance, which is the film’s invention and its biggest liability.
Where the film earns its place is in the images. The old count in the castle, the young count in London, the same face doing both. A man who renounced God over one woman and then found her face on a photograph four hundred years later. That is a good enough idea to carry 128 minutes, and Oldman carries it.
Where the Film Lands
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a great-looking film with a weak lead and a romance that does not hold. Oldman and Hopkins are worth the runtime. Reeves is not. The costumes, makeup and sound won Oscars and deserved them. The story got mixed reviews in 1992 and those reviews were right about the story.
The film’s real failure is that it never decides whether Mina’s pull toward Dracula is love or hypnosis. The plot says he charms her. The tagline says love never dies. Those are two different movies, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula plays both without choosing. That is why it lands as a spectacle rather than a tragedy.
What is worth watching is the craft and the central performance. What is worth skipping is every scene where Harker has to carry the plot. The film knows this. It gives Oldman the castle, the seduction, the wolf form and the finale, and it gives Reeves the expository dialogue. That is a trade the film makes on purpose, and it mostly pays off.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula scores 7.4 of 10. It is a beautiful, uneven film that survives on its villain and its design, and it is remembered for exactly those two things.
KEY FACTS
- Title: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
- Director: Francis Ford Coppola
- Writer: James V. Hart, based on the 1897 novel by Bram Stoker
- Runtime: 128 minutes
- Genres: Romance, Horror
- Tagline: “Love never dies.”
- Release date: November 13, 1992 (United States, Columbia Pictures)
- Production budget: $40 million
- Box office: $215.9 million
- Academy Awards: 4 nominations, 3 wins (Best Costume Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Makeup)
- Principal photography: October 14, 1991 – January 31, 1992
- Closing credits theme: “Love Song for a Vampire,” written and performed by Annie Lennox
- Score: 7.4 of 10
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