You Love to See It: Bram Stoker's Dracula (Patreon)

As horror author Garth Marenghi once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Nowhere does that philosophy prove out more definitively than in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguably the director’s last great film and certainly his most extravagant. Starring Gary Oldman as the titular vampire and Winona Ryder as Mina Murray, Dracula is a lush, maximalist reimagining of Stoker’s novel as a kind of grotesque love story. Everything about the film, from Oldman’s tragic, operatic performance to its jaw-dropping pre-production special effects, is loud, vulgar, and impossible to miss. 

Legendary costume designer Eiko Ishioka certainly had no use for caution or reserve in her work on the film, draping its characters in rivers of blood-red silk and bright, cold constellations of white lace. Texan gentleman caller Quincey Morris (Billy Campbell) wears a tailcoat lined in leopard print. Everything is right there on the surface, just as with the peacock fan that unfolds to hide Mina and Jonathan’s farewell kiss near the beginning of the film, a symbol of both sexuality and surveillance, or the orgasmic gouts of blood which explode from the walls of Lucy’s (Sadie Frost) bedchamber when the vampire completes her transformation into one of his brides. 

The film is replete with images of commingled death and sexuality. A time lapse shot of a red rose rotting. Sharp teeth sinking into a man’s thighs and throat, beads of blood tracing paths along his skin the way a lover’s fingers might. Lucy is buried in her wedding dress. Twice vampire women are shown feeding or attempting to feed on babies, a brute-force subversion of the woman’s cultural “place” as a caregiver for the vulnerable. There is not one ounce of subtlety to any of it, but that’s not to say it’s stupid or ineffective. Rather the film’s aesthetics and its uses of symbolism are overwhelming, clutching at guts and minds with crushing force. It knows its target, and it thrusts for that spoiled black stain on the human heart like a champion fencer at the height of his art.