A Pigment of My Imagination

    Thus, instead of religious faith being the driving force behind the story, the filmmakers decided to replace this with a new element—romance. Stoker’s work presents a clear distinction between the sexually conservative Victorian life and the alluringly erotic world of the evil undead (most obviously embodied in the Count’s three “brides”). The novel’s strong and intelligent heroine, Mina Murray, is an image of innocence, purity and faith, a woman firmly in keeping with the strict boundaries of traditional Victorian ideals. The romance is the novel is minimal, with Mina’s marriage to Jonathan Harker not one of strong passions, but led by respect and devotion.

The film nearly flips this moral compass on its head. Coppola described his impressions of Hart’s script as story soaked in “passion and eroticism” (qtd. in Schumacher 437). This is where the plot and characters of the film most radically differ from the original material. The new take becomes a very romantic one—essentially a love story between Dracula and Mina. In a journal entry, Coppola described this relationship as two eternal “souls reaching out through a universe of horror and pathos,” an element not found in the novel (Clarke 213).

In fact, for the film, Hart and Coppola literally create a new life for the two lovers. This extends Stoker’s characters into a mythic past. Winona Ryder thus not only plays Mina, but also appears in the beginning of the film as Elisabeta, the wife of Lord Vlad. Elisabeta commits suicide upon hearing of Vlad’s supposed death. When Vlad (then a crusader for the Church) returns victorious from battle to find his wife excommunicated for her suicide, he runs his sword through a giant cross, drowning the room in blood, and renounces his faith, condemning himself to an eternity without divine mercy. As the movie progresses, we find Dracula searching for his lost love, and discovering her in the person of Mina (both of whom share a sort of psychic bond when they first meet). Later, Mina almost mystically becomes aware that she is Elisabeta reincarnated and thus destined to be with the Count. Consequentially, the scene where Dracula bites Mina and turns her into a vampire, instead of being a moment of horror and defeat, becomes a passionately erotic, mystical fusion of two souls, fated for each other in eternity (Dracula).

The character of Count Dracula similarly is adjusted. Like Mina, the Count has also been given a mystic link to the past. In the book’s third chapter, Dracula proudly recounts that he is a descendant of Prince Vlad (Stoker). In the film, Vlad is Dracula, cursed to be reborn into each new century, desperately searching for his lost soul mate. Instead of being a servant of evil, the ultimate villain, he now becomes a sexually charged and tragic anti-hero. With this new Dracula, played extravagantly by Gary Oldman, sexuality is no longer associated with moral corruption but is used to create a seductively alluring romantic icon.

    Coppola does, however, make a rather serious deviation in the tone and themes of the film and this casts a shadow on the rest of the story, and is largely responsible for the other changes in the adaptation. Bram Stoker wrote his book in the Victorian era. It was a repressed world, yet one on the verge of many new discoveries and much social upheaval. These changes included a more liberal view of sexuality, science, and ethics. Despite Stoker’s delving into many of these themes, his novel has a strong sense of absolute truth. He doesn’t shy away from describing violence or sexual references, and the novel often incorporates Eastern mystical concepts (“Dracula”). Yet, through it all, the novel retains a strong core of Christian belief that permeates the world and life of the protagonists. Thus, though Stoker presents a very dark world of temptations, it is clearly associated with evil, and it is in clear opposition to the Christian ethic that the book’s heroes embrace. It is a very visual and imaginative portrayal of the battle between good versus evil.

Coppola takes a different approach when it comes to the theme of spirituality. Although he doesn’t remove the religious elements from the story, he paints them in a very different light. While the novel had a sense of morality defined by faith, the movie is much more ambiguous. The film is filled with Christian imagery, yet its symbolic intent is not always clear. Crucifixes (as well as communion wafers and holy water) in the original are powerful tools given by God to fight the Devil, whereas in the adaptation, the cross motif often seems to highlight a more modern and pessimistic views toward the Church. The use of the cross now almost becomes an attack on clichéd fanatical religiousness. In the hands of Dr. Van Helsing, the cross is used as a weapon. But while the book shows him to be a firm defender of the faith, the film presents him as a near madman, obsessed with vengeance and glory. Thus, we are taken from a world of clear right and wrong into one where these very concepts are put into question.

The film also changes its focus in its use of symbols. Blood is used frequently in the novel. The blood is meant to be a shocking contrast to spirituality. In the practice of communion, Christians celebrate “the blood of Christ” and the cleansing power of blood. When Dracula drinks his victim’s blood to keep himself alive, it is a perversion of the act of communion, and thus, a direct attack against God himself (“Dracula”). In the film, blood is a central motif; this adaptation is practically drenched with it. From the extreme close-ups of blood cells from Dr. Seward’s microscope, to bleeding necks, to Vlad’s scarlet armor and robes, to the photography’s red tint, Coppola not only incorporates the motif as used by Stoker but takes it a step further. Coppola’s blood becomes a sexual symbol. The fear of sexually transmitted diseases is felt throughout this film as the danger of the unknown. During this time, Coppola was also developing a project about AIDS, and many of those ideas seem to carry into Dracula (Clarke 213). It is this blood that comes to dominate the film, and represents Mina’s surrendering to Dracula, as in one central scene where she literally drinks blood from the Count’s chest. Ultimately, blood becomes not a sacrilegious insult to Christianity, but an erotic bond that unifies the characters in the film, both physically and aesthetically. The red embodies both the horror and pain in the story, but also the passion and romance (Stoker).