#i know it could be part of van helsing's eccentricity but damn! he was saying something poignant!

[aida-amoako]

It’s so funny and weird to me how sometimes Bram Stoker will construct a perfect sentence and then undercut it with some super cheesy thing.

e.g when Van Helsing is retelling how he killed Dracula’s brides

“For, friend John, hardly had my knife severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and crumble into its native dust, as though the death that should have come centuries agone had at last assert himself...

...and say at once and loud ‘I am here!’” 

#i know it could be part of van helsing's eccentricity but damn! he was saying something poignant! #dracula #books #lit #dark academia #dark aesthetic #litblr

[leam1983]

On Netflix and the BBC’s “Dracula”...

It’s late, so I’ll keep it short.

It’s symptomatic of every great thing and every massively visible wart that’s always characterized the Gatiss/Moffatt pairing. If you’ve loved anything between the newer Doctor Who series to Jekyll or Sherlock, you’ll love it. Or, well, you’re liable to love the first two episodes. The third one is where things get hairy, as you’d expect of a Gatiss/Moffatt product at the end of its lifespan.

On the good side, Claes Bang’s Dracula is very, very, unapologetically Gatiss in his demeanor. Cut from the same cloth as James Nesbitt’s Mr. Hyde, Matt Smith’s Doctor or Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, he feels glib and suave, manipulative and urbane, chatty and witty - a far cry from your usual gloomy caped gentleman with the pointy teeth and the requisite inscrutable accent. This is more or less Dracula as a game show host, as that dangerously clever neighbor or acquaintance of yours you know you shouldn’t trust - but damn, that smile of his!

No spoilers on offer, but as is to be expected, some characters are here substantially remixed and re-jiggered. This adaptation’s particular take on Van Helsing has to be the best one by far, presenting this particular character as a tart, no-nonsense and whip-smart sort who more or less comes quickly across as Dracula’s intellectual equal and his would-be partner. Bang briefly channels Lecter even as his nemesis feels like a less-statuesque and more spry take on Clarice Starling, the end result being snappy dialog and exposition scenes between two of classic horror literature’s mainstays. Van Helsing’s character is interestingly deepened, and Dracula’s roots as Victorian England’s moral panic made flesh are addressed, then cleverly pushed aside. This bloodsucker’s not just a sexpot, he’s a hopeless addict who wishes he could trade his fix for anything else, and a socialite who’s as much starved for attention as he is for fresh plasma. Sex, in and of itself, isn’t as important as you’d assume, even if Sister Agatha opens her line of questioning with Jonathan Harker by asking him if he’s had sexual intercourse with the Wallachian aristocrat...

Venereal disease, thy name is Dracula...

The first two episodes take their sweet time in de-constructing and rebuilding the Dracula mythos, going from a police procedural gone Horrorshow to a Whodunit set aboard a ship sailing to Whitby’s iconic crumbling abbey and blackened shores. Both give ample room for Bang and Dolly Wells to work their craft, the second one impishly passing the proverbial deerstalker cap to the Count...

We all know there’s a killer onboard the Demeter, but it can’t possibly the dark-haired gentleman with his crooked teeth and disarming smiles, could it? The very same man who’s more or less headlined the investigation as the eccentric big-brained sort stuck with a posse of murderous oafs and money-hungry fops all worthy of an Agatha Christie cast?

Things unfold more or less like you’d expect, if you’ve read the novel, only we get more of a sense of how these people died. Dracula reaches Whitby, and then...

Then, the miniseries takes a nosedive. The easiest twist ever reveals that Drac’s spent a tad too much time in that last dirt box of his, and awakens in modern-day England, after walking up the seabed and the beachfloor Dawn of the Dead style. We meet the rest of the cast, all reduced to quick-and-dirty archetypes, introduce the Count to concepts such as smartphones, plasma TVs and democracy, and present bureaucracy as the bloodsucker’s most precious ally. In walks Gatiss as the least-memorable Renfield incarnation to date, reduced to looking merely drab and utilitarian while scribbling Dracula is my master, Dracula is my god in the weekend edition’s crossword puzzle...

Lucy Westenra pops up - and yes, we did see Mina Murray, if all-too-briefly - she’s vamped, suitably dispatched; and it’s only now, in the series’ last minutes, that the scriptwriters pull out the laziest cop-out imaginable.

Suffice it to say, someone probably saw a parallel to be made between Batman, the Joker, and Van Helsing and Dracula, and opted to make the pair abruptly consummate their union. Deductive reasoning amounts to “Yo, Transylvanian superstitions are dumb, bro - the sun can’t hurt you! Drop your cross fixation, it’s just jewelery!” and Dracula dies a freed man after inexplicably choosing to snack on the disease-carrying blood of the modern timeline’s Van Helsing descendant. Their final embrace is presented as a union of sorts, but it simply isn’t set up properly.

Therein lies the issue: a lot of Gatiss and Moffatt projects start with a bang, remain consistent for three, four or five seasons, and then peter out weakly. In the case of Sherlock, we’re left with a cliffhanger we may never recover from. In Dracula’s case, we’re shown a Vlad Dracul that could honestly give charisma lessons to Lestat de Lioncourt, we’re given about six hours of winks at the audience and cheeky grins - we’re more than primed to like this Dracula, at that point - 

And then it’s over. He dies, or rather, ends it all.

Imagine if you had to work through a banger of an essay, one heck of a brilliant thesis - and the final ten pages amount to a po-faced summary and concluding statement, with no synthesis provided, no closing statement, no developed argument.

That’s the BBC’s Dracula. If it had been given time to breathe, maybe we’d have obtained something that could have structured that final obliteration of the count’s perceived weaknesses a bit more congently. As it stands, though, it feels like Gatiss looked at his alotted budget, realize he couldn’t fit crucial elements in, and then made like any student during Finals Week with an assignment to hand in, by putting everything he had in the first two thirds. The last act feels unearned and unmotivated, there to more or less parrot empty concepts we’ve seen imagined in other forms many, many times before.

“What if Lucy Westenra were this jaded Instagram sexpot that’s been, like, totally desensitized to it all? Dracula could walk up to her, go ‘Hey, I’m gonna kill you RN’ and she’d basically just shrug and say ‘YOLO, right?’.”

I think I’ll just stick to the Coppola version for the most part, Sadie Frost really sold the idea that for anyone with a position, Victorian England came with a set of requirements that more or less pushed some people down more licentious corridors. Her character’s never read as jaded to me, even on paper. In fact, Westenra’s always seemed like more of a thrillseeker than someone who flat-out doesn’t give a shit.

Still, props given where props are due; Claes Bang’s made for a memorable Count, one that’s packed just enough vim and vigor to make me remember Lestat’s good parts, as opposed to the walking character assassination he’d later become, beyond The Vampire Lestat.

I’d say you can stick to watching the first two episodes and then tune out. I’m sure the fanfic circles could do a better job at expanding the Dragon and Dutchman’s intellectual song-and-dance interestingly.