Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
This week sees the release of Dracula Untold, a film starring The Hobbit star Luke Evans as the dark prince who terrifies the European countryside with his undead ways. It doesn’t seem to offer much of a new spin on the classic tale (although it looks maybe as if Game of Thrones had vampires in addition to dragons and snow zombies). Other than the obvious reason (money), what could possible warrant another tired take on the Transylvanian vampire?
Ever since Bram Stoker published his horror classic back in 1897, audiences have clamored for the tale of Dracula and his fiendish ways. We had a superb silent films, sexy and groovy adaptations from Hammer Films and Andy Warhol, a blaxploitation spin, and the definitive cinematic vision of literature and cinema’s most famous and influential monster in Francis Ford Coppola’s straight-forward adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hell, even Leslie Nielson has even played him once, and you think that’d be enough to put the final nail in the proverbial coffin. So why must we insist Dracula keep raising from the dead?
Surely it’s not just a lack of imagine. There have been countless vampire tales, from Anne Rice’s multi-volume Vampire Chronicles, which sparked the big-screen adaptation of the lovely (and hilariously homoerotic) Interview With the Vampire. Joss Whedon brought new, energetic life into the vampire genre with Buffy the Vampire Slayer — first a teen movie and later a cult TV show. Say what you will about Stephenie Meyer, but Twilight subverted the vampire, making him less of a sexual threat and more of a sexual protector. And then there’s True Blood, which used vampires as the jumping-off point to make a handful of familiar monsters even more campy and ridiculous.
There was a Vampire Renaissance in the last decade, and one major player was notably absent: Dracula. And there’s a reason for that; Dracula had been done to death for over a century. What else can we bring to the story? Based on what we’ve seen from Dracula Untold, it’s simply special effects — CGI efforts that don’t even feel particular fresh or exciting. (Oh? Dracula turns into a swarm of bats? How inventive.) If anything, it feels like an effort to start a Dracula franchise — it does, after all, examine Dracula’s origin story. But it’s a big bet with a limited payoff.
Look. It’s easy to come up with a Dracula movie, and it’ll certainly bring in an audience who are bored enough to see another damn vampire movie (although, let’s be honest, does anyone expect this to be a box-office slam in Gone Girl‘s wake?). Dracula Untold feels like all filler, no killer, and there’s nothing about the story that can be retooled or revamped (sorry) to make it even more transcendent than the original story or the numerous adaptions already are. We’re stuck with this one, but it’s time to really ask ourselves why we need Dracula so bad in the first place, and maybe see, finally, that it’s time to let him finally die.
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Photos: Universal Pictures; Courtesy Everett Collection
