How quick the Un-Dead have become–though they don’t feel quite themselves these days. As an enervated pop culture slouches toward the millennium, vampires obsess us. Consider the evidence. Francis Ford recycles Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel of 1897 and rakes in $32 million the first weekend at the box. Ungodly lines of devoted readers wait for Anne Rice to sign their copies of “The Tale of the Body Thief” (Knopf. $24), the fourth installment of her wise and kinky Vampire Chronicles. Vampires like Rice’s Lestat are irresistible. They are immortal, they have supernatural power and they are sexier than just about anyone alive. They also force us to look into certain mirrors of reality that we normally avoid. Their true power lies in what Rice calls “a fathomless well of metaphor.” “Once I was looking through the vampire’s eyes,” she says, “I was able to describe the world as I really saw it.”
Long ago and far away, there were just two kinds of vampires: those made of words and those captured on film. But in the age of the Crossover Culture, where word and frame intertwine in novels of the movie and movie tie-ins of the novel and the best screenplay adapted from another medium, everything has become blurred. Stoker’s Dracula was satanic, a force of pure evil. Lestat has a conscience, but it doesn’t stop him from his more grisly work. Coppola has tried to transfuse Bram’s Dracula with Anne’s Lestat. The latest Dracula is sentimental, not scary. Leaving a theater for the darkness of Manhattan, Kevin Young, a horror buff who cut his own baby teeth on “Creature Features,” said gloomily, “You don’t know whether to hate him or feel sorry for him.” In our demented pop culture, the question is no longer what vampires do to us, but what we are doing to them: just who is sucking the life out of whom?
No one knew the dangers better than Coppola, but he succumbed to them. He went back to Dracula’s Ur-text. He even called his movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” “We were scrupulously true to the book,” he says in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend, A Pictorial Moviebook” (Newmarket. $29.95).
Not.
Not, not, not, not, not.
Well, he concedes, he did make just one teensy “innovative take that comes from history–the love story between Mina [the heroine] and the Prince,” played by Gary Oldman. This is rather like trying to be scrupulously true to Hamlet while making it Ophelia’s story. The sex in Stoker was mostly between the lines, not the covers; Coppola leaves nothing to the imagination.
Here’s the love scene according to the screenplay: ..MR.-
Dracula caresses [Mina’s] face as tenderly as a child. She is willing. She is ready… She moans in ecstasy… With a long thumbnail, he opens a vein over his heart… She drinks. She swoons … He falters… shoves her back in anguish.
Dracula: I cannot let this be!
Mina: Please–I don’t care-make me yours …
She shudders–pleading, holding him, caressing him … forces her lips back to his chest. His moans of ecstasy build to a climax. ..MR0-
Now here’s the same scene the way Bram Stoker wrote it in the 19th century: ..MR.-
[Dracula:] “First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. [Mina]. Oh, my God, my God, pity me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!. . . He took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the–Oh my God! my God! What have I done?” ..MR0-
The sappy Hollywood impulse kills Dracula even before the good guys begin sharpening their stakes. How did it happen? James V. Hart, who did the screenplay and co-novelized the movie, started to think about vampires about 15 years ago. First he read “The Annotated Dracula,” Leonard Wolf’s superb scholarly text of Stoker’s masterpiece. Then he decided that women, not men, were his market. After that he read Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire,” discovering what he took to be a “psycho-sexual inner vampire.” Then, on the opening night of Frank Langella’s Broadway “Dracula,” he heard a woman in front of him say loudly, “I would rather spend one night with Dracula dead than the rest of my life with my husband alive.”
Hart put all of this into one brew, giving Dracula a lost love who happens to be a dead ringer for Mina. “Mina ends up freeing him, which is the twist we put on Stoker,” he says. For years his screenplay gathered dust until Winona Ryder took it to Coppola in 1991. The child star wanted to play a grown-up; the bearded director wanted to tap into the kids’ market.
The result was high concept: Dracula as Beauty and the Beast. Directors used to know better. In the ’20s and ’30s, Max Schreck of “Nosferatu,” and Bela Lugosi got the vampire movie off to a strong start. The more vampire movies that came churning out, the weaker they became, yet the larger the audiences grew. The screen tended to produce revenants, decomposing anemics, cartoon monsters, not elegant vampires like the Dracula or Lestat of the printed word.
Stoker’s “Dracula” had power for three reasons. It was a taut adventure. It carried a Christian allegory. And it was loaded with more sex than Stoker even knew. The vampire’s blood exchange, says Wolf, “stands for every conceivable union of men with women, men with men, women with women,” every “permutation, normal, subnormal, hypernormal, or supernatural.” A bite without the above is just another Hollywood hickey.
Rice understands all this. As it happens, she began as one of Wolf’s students at San Francisco State. “She is probably the best writer on vampire themes alive,” he says. Where Coppola retreads, Rice invents; she’s gotten more out of vampire weirdness than anyone since Stoker himself. She calls herself “an excessivist” and argues that the immortality of her creatures is especially pertinent right now. “We’re all living longer,” she says. “I’m 51. When I was a child a 51-year-old woman was an old woman in a rocking chair. I feel I’m barely out of adolescence.” Maybe she can beat the curse of the vampire that got Coppola. She sold film rights to “Interview With the Vampire” many years ago; now the project is finally moving ahead. Your turn next, Lestat.
