Oceans of Time: The Magic of ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ at 30

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a film that, much like its protagonist, crosses oceans of time. Director Francis Ford Coppola, one of the filmmakers at the leading edge of the “film school” generation of the seventies, tapped into the talents of the young up-and-coming stars, both in front of and behind the camera, to tell a familiar story using very old techniques. Opting to avoid the rising tide of digital effects, expensive location shooting, and elaborate artifices in favor of “naïve” in-camera effects, stage-bound shooting, and lavish costumes as “sets,” Coppola and his collaborators created a thoroughly unique retelling of Dracula. The look of the film is simultaneously timeless and on the cutting-edge of innovation. Though it celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, it still feels as modern and transgressive as the day it was released.

Though Coppola is cited as one of cinema’s great auteurs, he is first to give credit to his collaborators and defined his directorial role as akin to a gardener. “A team of filmmakers is like a garden in which every variety of plant is overproducing…The director has to smush all this brilliant creativity together and make it work.” In the case of Dracula, the first of these overproducing plants was actress Winona Ryder. She had originally been cast in Coppola’s previous film, The Godfather Part III, but had to back out. Coppola still hoped to work with her and invited her to bring any projects she might be interested in collaborating with him on to his attention. In late 1990 or early 1991 (depending on varying accounts) she brought him James V. Hart’s script for a new film version of Dracula that adhered closer than any previous film to Bram Stoker’s original novel. This sent Coppola back through the oceans of time of his own life to his teenage years when he worked as a drama camp counselor and, during one summer, read the entire novel aloud to the eight and nine year old boys in his charge.

There had already been scores, if not hundreds, of film versions of Dracula of varying quality and importance and it was vital to Coppola that this film be something truly unique. He very much liked the script and the fact that Hart had remained generally faithful to the novel while infusing it with a love story drawn from some of the historical facts about the real Vlad “the Impaler” of the house of Dracul. He also realized that the year the novel was released and the screenplay was set coincided with the birth of cinema. This sparked an idea on how to go about making the film. “What if I made the movie,” he thought, “in the style that movies were being made at the turn of the century? Which is to say, an illusion.” This led Coppola to the idea of shooting the entire film on sound stages and with in-camera effects. Feeling this was impossible, the original special effects supervisor hired for the film quit and Coppola hired his magic-obsessed son Roman to create the visual effects.

By reaching back to the “naïve effects” techniques employed by Georges Méliès (“A Trip to the Moon”-1902), Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyre-1932), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane-1941), and others cut from similar magic-inspired cloth, Roman Coppola and his team give the film an undeniably timeless quality that would have been lost if the early digital techniques of the time had been used. Here, the younger Coppola used any number of “tricks” including multi-pass opticals, reverse photography, scrims, mirrors, shadow puppets, models, forced perspective, and altered gravity. The result is otherworldly, disorienting, and, in a word, magical.

Related to this is the cinematography by frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator Michael Ballhaus. For Dracula, he seems to be channeling another great director of photography who also lensed a Dracula film, Karl Freund. But rather than the generally static camera Freund was shackled to for Tod Browning’s 1931 film, Ballhaus taps into the work his masterful predecessor used on films like The Last Laugh (1924) in which the camera freely floats, spins, and dances seemingly of its own volition. For one brief sequence, Ballhaus even uses Francis Coppola’s personal Pathé silent film camera, very much like Freund would have used during the 20s, to evoke the look and feel of early cinema as Dracula (Gary Oldman) walks through the London streets and first sees Mina, the very image of his deceased bride Elizabeta whom he has “crossed oceans of time” to find. Between Roman Coppola’s visual effects and Ballhaus’s cinematography, the singular photographic style of the film was set, but also contributing to the distinctive look of the film were the unique sets and costumes created for Dracula.

Coppola envisioned using the space of the massive studio sound stages to add to the illusion of the film. Rather than creating sets that have a literal and realistic quality, Coppola asked production designer Thomas E. Sanders to create sets that utilize the space of the sound stages and expand off into darkness. This can be most clearly seen in the Castle Dracula and Carfax Abbey sets that seem to be, at least in part, inspired by the expansive Xanadu sets in Citizen Kane in which darkness adds to the illusion of size. As Coppola notes, these seemingly endless spaces make room for the elaborate and imaginative costumes of Eiko Ishoka to serve as the film’s “sets.” Our eyes are constantly drawn to these unique creations that at turns feel of the film’s Victorian setting and out of place in it. Once again, the otherworldly nature of the film is expressed in these costumes, which earned their creator a much-deserved Academy Award.

All these elements and more contribute to creating the vision that Coppola set out to realize. As he wrote in his production journal for the film, “I would like to do Dracula like a dark, passionate, erotic dream,” and the film is very much that. It allows all the sexual subtext of Stoker’s Victorian and somewhat repressed novel to bubble to the surface and drive the images and the characters along with their motivations. It is appropriate that the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula came along just as a semi-Victorian time in American life, the buttoned-up conservative Regan/Bush era of the 80s and early 90s, was coming to an end. As in Stoker’s day, this outward appearance of conservativism barely masked the hot-blooded sexual energy that lay just below the surface. This is perhaps most exemplified by the differences between novel and film in the character of Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost). In the novel, she is innocent and virginal, whereas in the film she is sexually aggressive and vivacious, causing friends and suiters to blush at her openness and curiosity.

This brings us to the last group of collaborators to highlight, the cast. Tapping into his days of working at the drama camp, Coppola said, “I still like to take actors up to the country and find new ways to work together—do theater games, improvisations, read the book aloud, stage scenes and discuss characters.” For much of the young cast, this was welcome and works specifically to the benefit of Ryder, Frost, Cary Elwes (Arthur Holmwood), Richard E. Grant (Dr. Jack Seward), and Billy Campbell (Quincey P. Morris) as they spend much of the film as an ensemble. Johnny Depp was originally hired to play Mina’s fiancé Jonathan Harker but at the last minute the studio deemed him to not be a big enough star to appear in the role. Winona Ryder suggested her friend Keanu Reeves for the part, and he was cast very close to the beginning of shooting.

Gary Oldman, who gives one of the great performances as the Count, placing him among the pantheon of Dracula actors with Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Udo Kier, and Frank Langella, utilized much of the time he was not needed on set to explore different personas that Dracula could take. He worked with makeup and hair designer Michèle Burke and team to create incarnations of the vampire between and in various animal forms that were not already in the script. Tom Waits gives the greatest performance as the lunatic Renfield since Dwight Frye in the 1931 film, playing it with gleeful, unhinged abandon. The only actor who seems to have resisted the rehearsal process was, ironically, the actor with the most stage experience of the entire cast, Anthony Hopkins. Fresh off his Oscar win as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hopkins resisted Coppola’s requests to have Professor Abraham Van Helsing “go a little berserk,” but then would unexpectedly do surprising and unusual things in certain takes. As a result, Van Helsing has a touch of madness that makes Hopkins’ performance truly unique and worthy to stand in the lineage of predecessors like Edward Van Sloan, Peter Cushing, and Laurence Olivier.

As I return to it now, I can’t help but be transported back to 1992 when I was fourteen and saw it in the theater for the first time with my dad. I remember it distinctly because he and I have only seen four movies together, just the two of us: E.T. (1982), Home Alone (1990), Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Hannibal (1999). I remember him laughing at certain sections of the film and I imagine, now as the father of children around the age I was then, that some of that laughter was nervous, as the film pulls no punches with its sexuality and bloodletting. At the same time, it was a moment of bonding; a connection to the Hammer and Universal films he had grown up with and the modern horror films I was becoming obsessed with. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a film of contradictions in many ways. It is innovative and familiar, uses age-old techniques at the dawn of the digital boom, is highly technical and deeply human, set in the Victorian era and sexually charged, expansive and intimate, exploitation and high art, romance and horror. Few films are as visually striking and even fewer from the era hold up to modern eyes the way Dracula does. As the years have gone by, I am only more impressed by the film and awed that it was made in such a “primitive” fashion. Coppola describes the film as an illusion. As I watch it now, I tend to agree, but I prefer to use a different word. As it was to me as a fourteen-year-old it still is now, an ocean of time later, nothing short of one thing: magic.

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