Macabre Mondays: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

A magnificent Monday to all you Spooks, it currently is Sunday night for me and anyone else on the west coast and I am dying in this ridiculous heat. I live where I live on this beautiful island for the moderate change in temperature through the seasons. This 30 degree Celsius nonsense must end soon! Luckily for me I will be spending most of my week in air conditioned offices and classrooms as I continue my quest to complete my grant application for school. I now do not even know if there’s space in the program in September and will have to find that out as well as a few more key items.  Now, on to the macabre!

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992 (DVD)

Image via IMDB

“The vampire comes to England to seduce a visitor’s fiancée and inflict havoc in the foreign land.”

What can I say that hasn’t already been said about this film? Probably not too much. It is a classic flick filled with an outstanding cast and directed by the fabulous, if not quirkier than quirky, Francis Ford Coppola. It is a visual feast for your eyeballs. I adore how operatic and stage-like many of his shots are.

I adore Sir Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. He provides a much needed dose of comic relief in a very quiet and slow moving story line. His wit and bluntness give us such gems as:

While the movie stays particularly true to the book, there is one major theme in this and that is the sex. Man this is all about sex. There are breasts everywhere in this movie. And I’m not even mad about it. When I first watched this, probably with my Nana around the age of 13 or 14 I remember having quite the sexual shakeup from the first scene involving Dracula’s brides and poor little Keanu Reeves. Still gives me the good low down tingles when I view it. And can we just take a moment to worship the eternal beauty that is Monica Belluci. Swoons for life.

Perhaps it is due to my having viewed Dracula an uncountable amount of times, perhaps it is because I have read the book into a well worn, dog-eared, tattered security blanket state of being, or it could be the extra-large slurpee I downed before and during that hit me with brain freeze so many times,  but I found the story to be slow. Slower than the blood flowing in the movie. I’ve actually taken to using this movie as a “go-to-sleep” film. It is dark, fairly quiet, and not overly loud, gory, or aggressive. I can fall asleep quite nicely to it these days.

Image via Fanpop.com

However if you’re looking to get into vampire movies, have a penchant for 90s things, or want a horror movie that doesn’t rely on startling you every ten minutes to be successful, or you just want to ogle a wonderful cast and treat your eyes to a stunning world of macabre madness: you cannot go wrong with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This will never leave my roster of movies I adore and watch at least once a month. Or more if I’m feeling in need of a babysitter at bedtime. Four Vampire Brides out of five!

What is your opinion on this classic? Have you even seen it? Do you have any other Dracula movies you love? What about favourite vampire movies overall? No I won’t banish you for saying Twilight, but I may question your life choices. Kidding! Own what you love, and love what you love! I’m considering writing next weeks posts on something other than a movie. Perhaps a visit to one of my favorite local spooky spots and grabbing some photos and sharing it’s story. Maybe a review of a horror novel, or an anime horror movie. Or anything else! If you have any suggestions, comments or questions you can leave them in the comments below! Until next time, keep the creeps coming!