Since the annual American lolly festival is almost upon us, Cinefix is covering one of the classics. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Francis Coppola’s 1992 Dracula.
Time for some straight talk. I don’t know how you discuss this particular adaptation without mentioning just how bad Keanu Reeves is in this film. Embarrassingly bad.
I actually tried to rewatch Dracula a couple of years ago and just couldn’t bring myself to sit through it all. Despite it being a bit of a who’s who of actors in the cast – and people like Tom Waits – it all feels so camp and silly. Even when I first saw it in high school, I remember Dracula being only average – with possibly the best visual explanation of the link between Dracula and Vlad the Impaler ever.
It is harder for me to talk about the book as I read it so long ago. And, let’s be honest here, I’ve since read way too many Anne Rice novels to not get the details confused. I read Dracula and Frankenstein at roughly the same time; because gothic horror novels are what pre-teen kids should be reading. Neither stood out for me as novels, but it is amazing how influential they have both been to genre fiction.
I wonder if there will be any modern equivalent. A novel that establishes an entire genre that is continuously reimagined, refined, and redefined such that we get analogues ranging from True Blood (coming out of the closet analogy) to Buffy (girl power).
Tyson Adams 
Dracula in the Stokers original novel is actually not about Vlad The Impaler. Rather Dracula is his own monster.
Adaptations arenALWAYS bad. I stopped watching them because Hollywood always messes up the story. Always.
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Yes, while it is popularly tied together because of the name Dracula, Stoker’s own notes bear no mention of Vlad nor does Dracula’s backstory link in any way.
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in 1972, a researcher named Radu Florescu posited that Dracul of Stoker’s imagination and Vlad the Impaler were one and the same. This then became the popular opinion in all the world and often in novels that were written in the same way as Dracula itself. Dracul, by Dacre Stoker was written to dispel that belief.
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