Dracula Book and Movie Review

Tim Wick

We owe it all to Bram Stoker and Bela Lugosi.

By "it all", I am referring, of course, to the Goth craze that is sweeping the world. Vampires are sexy because of Bela Lugosi and Bram Stoker. Anne Rice may have taken the masked sexuality of Dracula and made it all too explicit in her vampire novels, but that trek from demon to devil (or from the grotesquely evil to the charmingly evil) began in Victorian England.

Stoker wrote a novel that was in truth, a depiction of the modern world pitted against the ancient world. Our vampire hunters are using the most modern of devices and techniques to track their prey while Dracula must rely on old world solutions to his problems. Despite his power, he is not able to compete against the technology that is brought to bear against him. Sex hardly comes into the equation.

In fact, Dracula's raw sexuality is part of what makes him evil. When Lucy becomes a vampire, she is no longer virginal, but behaves little better than a prostitute would. To Victorian England, such behavior was unacceptable. The concept of exploring ones sexuality was viewed as unseemly. In this world, Dracula, who is openly sexual becomes the antithesis of what makes England "great". He must, therefore, be destroyed.

The performance of Dracula is one of the classics of cinema, like Gable and Leigh in Gone With The Wind or Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Every performance of Dracula since Lugosi's has been compared to his. Even if a performance is universally praised as "better than Lugosi", the next review again compares the work of the new Dracula to Bela Lugosi.

Lugosi, acting under the strict regulations of the Hayes commission, was charged with bringing Dracula to the screen. The film itself is little better than a drawing room thriller and remains a classic only because of Lugosi's performance as the great vampire himself. The Hayes commission would not allow for anything overtly sexual to be presented on screen, so almost all of Lugosi's performance is in understated facial expression and verbal inflection. "I never drink - wine" he tells Renfeld early in the movie. Of course not, he is a vampire. But the way Lugosi speaks the line, it is almost a come-on. It is an invitation to come over to the dark side.

I think Lugosi and Stoker both understood the sexual connotations behind the concept of drinking blood. Neither was able to overtly address such connotations, but they both found ways to make it obvious even so.

Certainly, there can be no mistaking the fact that Dracula chooses to prey only on young women. Oh, he drinks the blood of men (as evidenced by the shipload of sailors he slowly disposes of), but he doesn't turn them into one of his army. Lucy and Mina are not merely meals for a vampire, they are companions of a baser nature. In the book and the film, we are shown that Dracula seems to enjoy tormenting men, but nothing more.

Both the book and the movie are classics. They are both classics because of a single man's approach to the character of Dracula. Stoker may have created Dracula, but Lugosi breathed life into him.

Every performance of Dracula since Lugosi's has been compared to his