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 this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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