Editorials
The Dark Power of Faith: 25 Years of ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’
There are so many things to talk about when the subject of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is brought up. The lavish, supremely Gothic production design. The wild art-inspired costumes. The roaring, bombastic score. The insanely theatrical and operatic performances of the cast. The obsessive adherence to classic in-camera and practical effects techniques*. The elements of author Bram Stoker’s tale that other films have skipped, but this one didn’t. The changes to Stoker’s tale that director Francis Ford Coppola and writer James V. Hart made. The subtextual elements of sexually transmitted diseases in vampire fiction and how the film directly addresses them at times.
All of these things and more could be written about at length. Hell, they already have been discussed across the world wide web, both in the past and this very month for the film’s 25 anniversary. When I decided to sit down to write about this film that I love unconditionally, I realized that short of writing a book on the subject, I would need to zero in on one particular element that intrigues me. Boil it down to the bare essentials, if you’ll allow a Thanksgiving-esque example this week.
What is that core, singular element that excites my horror-loving brain most when I sit down with this movie at least once a year? The answer, my fellow fiends, is faith. Don’t worry. You’re not about to sit through a lecture on religion and spirituality. Both things are important to some of the protagonists, but their names are not in the title. It’s Dracula’s faith that interests me most.
Here we have a man. A warlord prince protecting his lands in the most vicious and cruel ways imaginable. Someone viewed as a hero by his people and an insane tyrant by others. Someone who committed a great many of his horrific acts in the name of the Church and even God himself. Vlad (Gary Oldman) is a passionate man and that passion extends to his duties as a leader, a warrior, his religion, and his wife. When the latter is ripped away from him due to the trickery of his enemies, all else in his life thrown into turmoil.
We are shown a man grieving for the loss of his wife, who committed suicide upon hearing false news of his death. In the midst of that grief, he is told by his priest (Anthony Hopkins) that her self-extinguishing act has rendered her unworthy of entering Heaven. True or not in the context of the film, that’s a terrible thing to say to someone who only just began to mourn his lost love. A religion supposed to be comforting and welcoming to all instead becomes cruel when a believer most needs its compassion. Cruelty often begets cruelty and Vlad returns in kind. The dialogue sequence then plays out as follows…
Priest: “She has taken her own life, my son. Her soul cannot be saved. She is damned. It is God’s law.”
*Vlad screams and knocks over the pillar of holy water*
Priest: “Sacrilege!”
Vlad: “Is this my reward for defending God’s church?!”
Priest: “Sacrilege! Do not turn your back against Christ! He has chosen you to protect…”
Vlad: “I renounce Him! I renounce God and all you hypocrites who feed off Him! If my beloved burns in Hell, then so shall I! I, Dracula, Voivode of Transylvania, shall rise from my own death to avenge hers with all the powers of Darkness!”
*Vlad roars and stabs the giant cross in the temple. It, along with many other holy relics, begins to bleed.*
Vlad: “The blood is the life! And the blood…it shall be mine!”
The subtitles on the English language version of the film distill down the words that Oldman and Hopkins actually speak (perhaps because they’re firing it off so fast), but the emotionally-charged sequence loses none of its effect. What we are witnessing is a man so wrought with grief and anger that the violent vow he speaks aloud actually comes to pass. All of us often say things we don’t truly mean when we are in emotional pain. Not so here. Dracula means what he says right to the core, enough that he actually brings a nigh-unstoppable curse into existence through sheer willpower.
This fascinates me. Fanaticism is something that is a problem for the world at large on a daily basis across the globe. People believing in things so blindly that they are sometimes driven to unspeakable acts of cruelty. This iconic moment from Coppola’s film is no different. Prince Vlad Dracul, now simply Dracula, is presented here as a man who believed in his cause so much that when it ruled against him, he became its archnemesis. A walking perversion of the holy covenant, spreading his desecration of it across nearly all who come into contact with him over the next 400 years.
The horror genre is littered with Satanic-tinged horror films. Stories where an antagonist sold their soul to Satan for power, either through blood sacrifices, unholy rituals, or sometimes even directly speaking to the Dark One himself. Not Dracula. He rips the Heavens asunder by creating his own personal curse. You have to imagine that if Lucifer were watching this occur from a distance, he flinched a bit in shock. Perhaps then followed by a nodding approval. After all, who else had the balls to attack God with such vitriol, other than he?
This sequence alone would be enough to firmly embed the film in my memory banks, but the rest of the story goes on to further enhance it in a variety of intriguing ways. Sure, there are plenty of examples of Dracula gleefully rubbing his perversion of the holy covenant in the faces of his enemies. Just as interesting are the moments when he shows regret, however.
After all, so far as we know, Dracula didn’t go to Hell and then claw his way back out of the pit to assault the Earth. He never left our world. As a result, a bit of the man he once was still lies within. That man rears his head at times in the film twofold. One is as a lover, with Mina Murray (Winona Ryder) rekindling the romantic side of Vlad that he had long thought dead for hundreds of years. The other is Vlad the religious warrior. This is his sadder side, appearing a few times to both Mina and Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) throughout the running time.
Also intriguing is the man-bat sequence, where a literal monster version of the titular fiend faces off against Van Helsing (Hopkins again) and his vampire hunters. Dracula is given a small speech here, boasting about his accomplishments, while also blaming God for his vampiric condition. We the audience know better. Dracula has no one to blame for his curse but himself and I imagine Van Helsing suspects this. Like anyone who feels so horribly wronged, however, I have little doubt that Dracula tells himself that it is all God’s fault. Fanatics are often likely to blame their troubles on others and that holds true here.
In the end, it is Dracula’s human side that saves his eternal soul from his centuries-twisted faith, even in spite of all the countless lives he has damned throughout the centuries. This too is fascinating. After all, how can a man who has murdered nations receive forgiveness simply by asking for it, when a woman who killed herself in a moment of intense sorrow is damned for all time? Are they not both guilty of “turning their back on” their God? Why is one worthy of forgiveness and the other not? The finale hints that both have been forgiven, which flies in the face of the fanaticism of the priest at the start of the movie. I wonder how the priest himself would feel about this or where exactly he himself ended up in the afterlife. After all, the saying is “Judge not lest ye be judged yourself,” right?
Faith is a powerful thing. It is something that can transcend emotion and inspire one’s will, although not always for the better. Bram Stoker’s Dracula makes for a wild and imaginative parable on that front. It’s often said that you can accomplish anything if you truly put your mind to it. This movie is a perfect example of that. It’s just that Vlad Dracul put his mind to becoming a bloodsucking monster whose sheer existence warped the reality around him and begat the murder of hundreds, if not thousands. I guess the moral here is both be careful what you wish for AND be careful what you faith for. You never know how it might change you.
Lastly, Happy 25th, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. You are one bombastic and weird masterpiece of a movie. I love you for that.
Your friend,
D
* – Save for the blue rings of fire outside of Dracula’s castle, which are reportedly the only element of CGI in the film.
In a world where over-polished corporate products dominate the media landscape while the ever-growing threat of AI-generated “art” haunts the horizon, I can’t help but remember a story about how Wes Anderson insisted on using real fur on the stop-motion puppets of his animated opus, Fantastic Mr. Fox. When the animators complained that using fur would result in obvious thumbprints and erratic hair movement that would ruin the “illusion” of lifelike movement, the filmmaker explained that these imperfections were the point.
Why am I bringing this up on a horror website? Well, I’ve always been of the opinion that low production value is simply part of the appeal of independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in the horror genre. Rubber monster suits and watery blood effects are a big part of what make even the cheapest scary movies so endearing, and horror fans are uniquely predisposed to look beyond technical limitations in order to appreciate a good story.
One of my favorite examples of this is a certain micro-budget duology that kicked off one of the scariest film series of all time despite some undeniably janky presentation. And as a lifelong fan of low-budget scares, I’d like to invite you to join me down a J-Horror rabbit hole as we explore the criminally underrated origins of the Ju-On/The Grudge franchise.
While most of you are likely already familiar with 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge, the film that helped to kick off the J-Horror craze and established Takashi Shimizu as a master of the craft, a lot of folks don’t realize that this was actually the filmmaker’s third attempt at telling the Saeki family story. In fact, the very first appearance of Kayako and her ghostly son occurred in a couple of 1998 short films made by Shimizu while he was still in film school.
Part of a made-for-TV anthology showcasing the work of up-and-coming Japanese filmmakers (Gakkô no Kaidan G), the shorts attempted to update classic Japanese folk tales for a new generation by incorporating modern elements like helpless high-schoolers and cellphones into old-fashioned ghost stories.
The original Toshio!
Despite some cheap camerawork and drama class make-up effects, Shimizu’s Katasumi and 4444444444 (so titled because the Japanese pronunciation of the number 4 is similar to that of death) were the clear highlights of the spooky collection despite being much shorter than the other segments. That’s why it was only natural that the director’s next project would be a feature-length expansion of these ideas produced for the direct-to-video market.
Coming up with an extensive mythology surrounding his murderous ghosts and realizing that he had a potential hit on his hands, Shimizu ended up making the risky decision to split his original two-hour story into two smaller films shot back-to-back. And while the sequel would suffer from this decision, the focus on serialized storytelling is what would ultimately turn this indie experiment into a global phenomenon.
Released in 2000, the first entry in this duology, simply titled Ju-On: The Curse, weaves an interconnected web of paranormal incidents surrounding a cursed house and the ill-fated families that inhabit it. While the film would actually reference the events of Shimizu’s shorts, it’s here that audiences were first introduced to the iconic opening text explaining how a violent death may spawn an infectious curse that self-perpetuates by causing even more deaths in a never-ending cycle of violence.
At first glance, The Curse feels a lot like an anthology meant to repurpose Shimizu’s existing ideas for ghostly short films into a feature format, but narrative details eventually add up as worried teachers, unsuspecting teenagers and psychic realtors unravel bits and pieces of the Saeki family history in a tragic tapestry of death. Curiously, this attempt at crafting a complex narrative puzzle would become a staple of the franchise as future entries (and even the video game) used non-linear storytelling to breathe new life into familiar yarns.
Of course, it’s really the scares that put this franchise on the map, and that’s why you’ll find plenty of expertly orchestrated frights here. Sure, the pale makeup effects and stock sound design aren’t that much better than what we saw in Gakkô no Kaidan G, but the suspenseful execution of moments like Toshio’s slow undead reveal and Kayako’s first contortionist crawl down the stairs – not to mention the incredibly disturbing sequence with a baby inside of a trash bag – are the stuff of horror legend regardless of budget.
I’d even argue that the low production value actually adds to the experience by making everything feel that much more down to earth. The Saeki house isn’t a stylish haunted manor from the Vincent Price era, it’s just a regular Japanese home inhabited by regular people, making it easier to believe that this modern urban legend could also happen to you. Hell, I even think Toshio is scarier when he can pass as a living kid even if the screaming cat effects aren’t as good as the sequels.
Cheap can still be scary.
Unfortunately, quality scares can’t solve everything, and that’s where Ju-On: The Curse 2 comes in. Released the same year as its predecessor, this bizarre sequel only features about 45 minutes of new footage, with the rest being recycled segments from the first film meant to pad out the runtime. While this is a surprisingly dishonest move on Shimizu’s part, with the decision likely resulting in confused viewers thinking that there was something wrong with their rented videotapes, it’s still pretty hard to call this a bad movie.
That’s why I’ve come to respect the flick as a rare instance of a cinematic expansion pack, as the first film didn’t really need to be any longer, but the new segments still do a great job of adding to the existing mythology. This time around, we learn that you don’t even have to come into direct contact with the haunted house in order to be affected by the curse, with characters only tangentially connected to the Saeki tragedy still meeting terrible fates.
That final shot featuring multiple Kayakos is also one of the most incredibly chilling moments in the entire franchise, with the amount of care put into these scenes suggesting that this was probably all meant to have been included in the first film before Shimizu decided otherwise. Either way, I’d still recommend watching this one immediately after Part I in a condensed double-feature – so long as you skip the first thirty minutes.
Despite their humble origins, these low-budget scare-fests would go on to inspire a ghostly media empire, with Shimizu eventually being given the chance to bring his creations to the big screen with one of the best J-Horror flicks of all time. And while I won’t argue that these direct-to-video precursors are necessarily better than 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge (or even the American duology which was also helmed by Shimizu), I still think that something special was lost each time the series was tasked with pleasing a wider audience, as the story slowly became glossier and less real.
That’s why I’d urge hardcore horror fans to seek out Shimizu’s early experiments, as his creative fingerprints are the duct-tape that keeps this janky collection of horrific vignettes together. It may not always be pretty, but I’ll take the grimy actors caked in cheap blood and white clown makeup over corporate-approved movie monsters any day of the week.
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