Dracula Schmacula

I'm going to come right out and say this straight away; Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of my favourite novels and I love it unashamedly. That's not to say it's a good novel. Because it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I would go so far as to say it's probably the late Victorian equivalent of something like The Da Vinci Code, badly written, ludicrously over-complicated and somewhat overshadowed by the subsequent publicity. Despite all of this though, and unlike Dan Brown's "novel", it's a rollicking good read from start to finish with some of the most wildly melodramatic, hand-slamming-on-desk dialogue I've ever seen.

I am currently re-reading it for an essay I'm writing for my course (on anxieties surrounding evolution in the late Victorian novel if you wanted to know, but you probably didn't) and it sparked in me a desire to watch one of the countless adaptations that are on offer. So last night, off I popped to my DVD collection in search of Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation starring Keanu Reeves (winning the Worst Accent Ever award by a country mile, despite Winona Ryder's best efforts) and Gary Oldman chomping through the Gothic scenery. But, hidden at the back of the box, buried beneath the unusual combination of Battlestar Galactica and 10 Things I Hate About You, was the BBC adaptation of Dracula from back in 2006. I barely remembered it, other than that it had Marc Warren as the titular Count and a certain Mr Dan Stevens before he found fame as the dashing Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey, so naturally decided to give it a viewing.

And oh my, what a viewing it was.

The BBC has been home to many a period drama over the years and it is something they are usually very, very good at. But this adaptation of Dracula is woeful to the point of laughable, and not in a 'so bad it's good' sort of way. It's just bad. To call it an adaptation is using the word in its very loosest sense. It takes some of the chief characters from the novel, makes the rest disappear and then writes them into a story that bears little to no resemblance to Stoker's original tale. Now I'm all for loose adaptations. Sometimes, if done well, they can be badly fantastic in their own right. As evidence for this, one of my favourite good-bad films is the Disney adaptation of The Three Musketeers which sees Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Oliver Platt bound around the French countryside with swords while Tim Curry snarls his way through the hammiest performance of Cardinal Richlieu you'll ever see. It's awful, but it has a very funny script and gets away with it because it's an enjoyable film to watch. The BBC adaptation of Dracula, however, makes that look like an Oscar winner.

Dracula the novel is built on various social anxieties that were plaguing the Victorians at the time of its release and amongst others, we've got immigration, technology and sexual relationships all appearing at various points. Around the latter half of the nineteenth century, sexually transmitted diseases were a bit of a worry and various social commentators were all het up about the prostitutes having it off with gentlemen and infecting them with all sorts of nasties. With all the bodily-fluid swapping going in Dracula, this is clearly a subtext in the novel with anyone drinking the vampire's blood becoming corrupted by it and basically transforming themselves into your standard prostitute stereotype. Stoker depicts human women as pure, innocent and lovely until the vampire women take over when they become sex-crazed maniacs, all heaving breasts and big hair. While this anxiety around sex and what it can do to your body is an undercurrent in the novel, the television adaptation decides to take this theme and proceed to beat you repeatedly over the head with it.

For Lord Holmwood (Dan Stevens) has been infected with syphilis by his wayward father and his unwitting mother meaning that, when he comes to marry the sweet, virginal yet clearly gagging for it Lucy Westernra (Sophia Miles), he doesn't want to consummate the marriage. But rather than telling her about it and explaining the situation like a normal person, he doesn't do this. In fact, he utters the biggest clunker in the entire script,with Captain Obvious hat planted firmly on his golden locks: "Society does not speak of that which it fears". So through a blood-worshipping cult which has absolutely no equivalent in the novel, he decides to hire the mysterious Count Dracula (Marc Warren) who can apparently cure him through a simple blood transfusion (I know that attempting to create a sense of mystery around Dracula to a vampire-savvy audience is something of a tall ask, but the dramatic irony here has all the subtlety of a solid gold brick). 

Moving swiftly on, the original novel's plot is somewhat over-complicated but this takes it to new levels; in order to cover his tracks, Holmwood hires the innocent Jonathan Harker (Rafe Spall), engaged to Mina (Stephanie Leonidas) who is Lucy's best friend, to fill all the requirements that Dracula has in order to move over to England. Meanwhile John Seward (a criminally underrated Tom Burke) is madly in love with Lucy and desperate to find out why Holmwood is being all shady and talking to the man who used to be the uncle in The Queen's Nose (Donald Sumpter). All this leads to the inevitable conclusion of defeating Dracula, though not quite because, as Buffy Summers observes in her own Count encounter, he always comes back. I won't give you a plot summary of the novel because a) it would take too long, so I'll link you to this for reference and b) maybe it will encourage you to read the book itself because it's ace and rest assured, it's much more interesting than the mystical cure for syphilis shocker.

Tom Burke spends the entire thing looking slightly bemused at the fact he's found himself in a such a batty production while David Suchet's Van Helsing, arguably the most famous character in the novel aside from the obvious, is relegated to little more than a cameo role in which he basically does a slightly demented Victorian version of Poirot. But both Dan Stevens and Stephanie Leonidas have to be commended on managing to make me laugh out loud in supposedly dramatic and emotional moments. Stevens is a great actor, but here decides to play Holmwood as the short-man-syndrome type, in fine nostril-flaring form with lots of enunciated but ineffectual yelling. Leonidas on the other hand, veers so quickly from being silently morose to overly emotional bereaved fiance that it leaves you spinning.

But perhaps what annoys me most about this adaptation is that it takes what is a fantastic opportunity for horror, blood and Gothicky goodness into a soul-sucking (pun intended), angst-filled and curiously non-dramatic drama. There is already so much drama and a ridiculous amount of plot in the novel, nearly half of which I haven't actually mentioned, that to create an entirely new story just seems stupid. Also, in giving Dracula a motive, something which other adaptations also try to do, they take away what is most terrifying about him; he has no motive other than propagating his own kind, infiltrating England and conquering another country just as he's been doing for generations. A personal vendetta is much less dangerous and with Dracula, the narratives that result from this are pretty small fry. Curiously enough, one of the only aspects of the novel to survive this brutal assassination on its character is the way in which blood transfusions are carried out with gay abandon and little regard for blood types or sterilised equipment. Poor old Jonathan Harker doesn't even make it past the prologue (despite being a main character in the novel), but inaccurate medical practices get given an entire scene to themselves.

I know I've ranted on a bit about this adaptation but it's a little upsetting that it might be the cause of people wandering around with this version of Stoker's great novel in their heads or worse, that it encourages them not to read it. The novel has always been overshadowed by its subsequent transference to screen but when it is something like Bela Legosi's iconic portrayal, Christopher Lee's menacing ability to loom on screen or even something as daft as Dracula: Dead and Loving It, they all show the novel a far greater respect than this BBC production. Stoker's only famous work is one of the most adapted and imitated novels in English literature (which sadly makes it inadvertently responsible for Twilight, but I'll let that one go) and it really deserves a great adaptation because, when I get the urge of an evening to procrastinate with a film, I want to watch one that truly does the book justice. Sorry BBC, but this was one period drama that not only failed to hit the mark, it sailed past it and disappeared over the horizon, laughing maniacally at its own awfulness.