150 Word Review: 'Abigail' (2024)+ Essay: 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992)
Dancing in the dark
The plot twist midway through is the best part of Abigail—a breezy, wannabe midnight movie with an impressive fake blood budget. It was revealed in the trailers long ago, but spoiler alert anyway.
The set-up: a group of professional criminals kidnap a twelve-year-old in a ballerina tutu and hold her for ransom while hiding out in a spooky old mansion. The crew is a pack of lowlifes: a sniper, a hacker, a getaway driver, a hulk, a bespectacled psycho played by demented pretty boy Dan Stevens, and a reluctant baddie who wants to be a good mom. And then, the curveball: surprise, it's all a trap. The ballerina is a hungry vampire. The house is a vault. Oh, how the tables have turned.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett aren't satisfied with one genre. Alisha Weir is delightfully demonic as the littlest killing machine, her mouth full of fangs.
Grief, friendship, Jazz Hands. My debut memoir, Theatre Kids, comes out June 18th.
Random Rankings
Top 5 Non-Dracula Vampire Movies
5. 'Martin' (1977)
4. 'Let The Right One In' (2008)
3. 'Blade II' (2002)
2. 'Near Dark' (1987)
1. 'Interview with the Vampire' (1994)
New 150 Word Review: ‘Unfrosted’ (2024)
Essay: ‘Bram Stoker's Dracula’ (1992)
I prefer romantic tragedies to romantic comedies. I gravitate toward sad songs and paintings that celebrate melancholy. If randomly asked to recite the most important words in any traditional wedding vow, I’d answer, “Till death do you part.” There is a part of me that wants to believe if you truly love a person, death is just a momentary inconvenience.
I didn’t understand the first Shakespeare play I saw, a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet. I was barely a teenager. But I was drawn to it anyway. There on stage was a message from the past: love hurts. The cruelest fact of life is that love is pain as much, if not more, than bliss.
It took me forever to read Mary Shelley’s peerless novel Frankenstein, but I will forever identify with the unloved monster and his large, flowery vocabulary. And when I learned about vampires, I was hooked — doomed and damned? Yes, oh god, please.
My favorite sexual activity as a teen has the giving and getting of sloppy hickeys on the neck, the most underappreciated of the hookup bases. I was proud of the bruises she left on me and vice versa. Love is bright red like a rose and purple, the color of blood once it pools under the skin.
I wish I knew then what I know now. I have always rooted for the moth instead of the flame. I was always a goth kid, and now I am a goth middle-aged man. I never dared to admit this about myself. I am not a vampire, but I would wear a cape if society didn’t make it hard on grown men who want to wear clothes that make them feel sexy and powerful.
A romantic comedy usually ends with a kiss. There is nothing wrong with that. Romcoms exist to affirm the life force! It is pleasant to be lied to by art because love doesn’t always conquer. No. Love can fail.
I think romantic comedies are popular because we want to believe the opposite. But give me a pair of lovers destined to die in each other’s arms. Or better yet, a story about a vampire with a gore-slicked mouth crying about the one who got away. If that last one ended with a decapitation, it would be perfect.
***
Sometimes, art makes you flinch. Sometimes, art knows you better than you know yourself. It looks you straight in the eye and forces you to look away. To flinch.
This happened to me in 1992 when I went to the local multiplex and saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s hot-blooded Hollywood adaptation of the granddaddy of all vampire books. In retrospect, I think I was a little too young to watch a movie made for me. I was barely 18, but unwise.
It’s not that I didn’t like it or gave it a “thumbs down.” I couldn’t bear it. I reacted to it like a vampire sprayed with holy water — only I was still, at that point in my life, a Catholic who attended Mass. I was a fan of horror movies, but this Dracula wasn’t a horror movie. It was a heavy-breathing creep of a movie. A woozy tragi-opera about a man with too many feelings: Dracula wasn’t just an animal who ate people for fun. He was a dude who drained his victims of blood and then felt sorry for himself.
Francis Ford Coppola is a fellow Catholic, and maybe that’s why this movie is so overwrought and blood-hungry. The story of Jesus is about a love that doesn’t quite work out. The Son of Man opens his heart to humanity, and they kill him quite gruesomely. Then, like a vampire, he comes back to life. There is a lot of blood-drinking in Catholicism, too.
Bela Lugosi's Count famously says, "I don't drink wine" in director Todd Browning's 1931 classic Dracula, a line that's not in the book. Do you know who else preferred sangue to vino? Correct.
He drew from his religious upbringing for this movie, but more importantly, the Academy Award-winning director found inspiration in the pages of Bram Stoker’s original epistolatory novel. That’s why the movie isn’t just Dracula or Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. This movie isn’t based on some lazy screenwriter’s idea of Dracula, it’s channeling the source material. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Dracula, but it’s intense. Coppola does his best to capture the charms of a book that isn’t quite the masterpiece that is Frankenstein but still rules in its stuffy way.
Coppola made it steamier, that’s for sure. His Dracula is one part Lord Byron to two parts shape-shifting hell beast. He also made it very cinematic, relying on old-school special effects that aren’t much older than Dracula’s 1897 publication.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula — the movie — is horny and romantic, and weird. I was all those things at 18, and I still have the composition books filled with tortured poetry as proof. That’s right, I didn’t ritually burn all the lovesick verses I wrote as a teen. I kept a few select volumes that will be buried with me.
And Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a lovesick movie, and I’m emphasizing both words: love and sick. It is a movie about a love so powerful it spans centuries. I mean, Dracula becomes Dracula because he’s so brokenhearted over the death of his betrothed that he tells God to go f***k Himself. Then, he becomes an undead creature who drinks blood while patiently waiting for reincarnation to do its thing. Dracula is addicted to hot human bodily fluids and love. There are scenes in the movie that are hallucinatory, like flu-induced delirium. Lovesick.
Coppola’s Dracula called out to me, and I couldn’t respond. I gasped for air. The movie seemed to whisper: “Do you think you’re the only person who feels empty because she’s gone?” Dracula wasn’t technically dumped, but I had been! The movie wanted to comfort me, but I wouldn’t let it. I should have. It would be years until I let it into my dark heart.
I remember thinking the actor playing the Count was surprisingly excellent—he was a nobody to me, and he was named Gary Oldman. Casting a non-superstar in the title role was controversial, but it worked. His performance is subtle and theatrical in the best sense—mythical.
Gary Oldman’s Drac is, most of all, sexy. He’s sexy because he’s got a hard-on for one woman and will murder the world for her. He’s sexy as a skeletal hermit who loves silk robes. He’s sexy as a young gentleman with Victorian-style shades, and he’s sexy as a giant wolfman. He’s sexy because he won’t move on. That’s simple advice most people give when they’re unlucky in love. Move on. Dracula doesn’t want to move on. He refuses to give up. He doesn’t want time to heal his wounds. He wants his wounds to stay wet.
Legosi’s dapper Dracula — a sort of butler from hell — is the most popular version of Bram Stoker’s villain. But Oldman’s is my preference: a sinister, pervy grandfather in a red cape and long silver hair tied into two large buns on his head. He looks alien, ancient, frail, and dangerous, a mashup of Emperor Palpatine and Cruella DeVille.
***
This big-screen Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula is full of haunting imagery and slyly disturbing moments: A woman dressed in white vomits blood. A lunatic eats bugs. A monster transforms into dozens of rats. An old man greedily licks a razor blade clean of a few drops of blood. A shadow tries to murder another shadow. Three brides with white skin and soft mouths filled with fangs move like spiders. A crucifix bleeds.
There is so much going on.
When Keanu Reeves first meets the Count, he notices hair growing on the palms of his claw-like hand. At the time, I didn’t know that furry hands were an obscure sign of vampirism. I had grown up believing the rumor that masturbation made hair grow on the palms of your hand—Catholic anti-self-love propaganda. I wasn’t ready for that kind of representation.
Since I mentioned him, I may as well weigh in on another of Coppola’s questionable casting decisions: I didn’t think Reeves’ Jonathan Harker was terrible, but many do. His English accent, which would melt away mid-sentence, isn’t all that bad, and thankfully, he’s not in the movie a lot.
That’s because it’s not Reeves’ movie. He’s neither the hero nor famed vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing, played with gusto by Anthony Hopkins, newly world-famous thanks to his star turn as serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. No, the hero is the titular character. The hero is the vampire.
The hero is Count Dracula, a bloodsucking beast of the night. He signed a contract with the Devil and sacrificed his soul so he could one day love again. How did I not see how awesome that was when I was a young man?
But the underappreciated MVP of Bram Stoker's Dracula is Winona Ryder as Mina Harker, the melancholy woman our immortal Transylvanian is obsessed with. This was Ryder at the peak of her powers, an unlikely Hollywood star, a moody beauty who mixed mystery and intelligence. A lot is going on behind her wide-trembling eyes, and her Mina is drawn to, and repelled by, her ancient former lover. And who hasn't been there? The spark between Ryder and Oldman—two supremely quirky actors—lifts this movie from mere melodrama to passion play.
I’m so happy to rediscover one of Coppola’s best movies. I am a lifelong fan of the first two Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now. But Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Well, I’m here to pay attention to it now. I should have given it its due then, but I was too scared of a messy movie made by a master for people like me.
A few years later, I’d sit through James Cameron’s 1997 romantic epic Titanic and roll my eyes. At 23, I was too old for a weepy historical drama about doomed lovers. I didn’t know how good I had it when I was younger. At the end of Titanic, the male lead freezes to death in the frigid ocean as the love of his life looks on in horror. Bram Stoker’s Dracula ends with the male lead dying at the foot of the cross where his curse began, a knife sticking out of his chest, as the love of his life looks on in horror. She then kisses his infernal mouth, thrusts the knife deeper into his chest, and beheads him. Now that’s romance.
john you should get a cape
BSD Is one of my all time favorites. I love how Coppola incorporates so many cinematic tricks but never looses sight of the narrative. I'm even prepared to defend the much maligned casting of Keanu Reeves.