In the late 1950s, Hammer studios in England unleashed a form of vampiric cinema upon the world that would cause present day audiences, in the parlance of our times, to lose their shit.
Hammer traded in big, splashy color, with reds that looked like they’d just been squeezed from atomic ketchup bottles, a form of blood seeming less like a life force than human-sourced lava. Horror had been moribund since the 1930s, when Bogeymen like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were the beloved revenants of pop culture, the Frankenstein monster and Dracula, respectively, in those somewhat creaky Universal black-and-white pictures. Hammer was all about a new terror-dawn. In 1958, the studio put out what was known to American audiences as Horror of Dracula (which went merely by Dracula in its native England), with Christopher Lee as the Count, and Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing, the man-in-the-know, dude with the brains, seeking to make the undead the merely dead.
What we have to remember now, more than 60 years later, is that this was akin to porn at the time. Director Terence Fisher—who was the go-to director for these Hammer vehicles—loved to show you cleavage up close and personal. Side-boob? Loved it. A heaving bosom that looked as if it might be rising and falling in the throes of orgasm? Loved it even more. The color stock had noticeable grain, as if the movie itself had been lifted from a sepulcher, and not all of the dirt had been shaken free.
ADVERTISEMENT
There is a scene in Netflix’s new three-part Dracula series when the title character, played by Claes Bang, perches in a window at a convent, where one of his “brides”—that poor old soul Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan)—lies on his back, stake through his heart, in an otherwise untenanted room. Harker has self-staked himself, which, in vampire lore, does not free you from the curse. The Count has scaled the convent wall because he wishes for Harker to invite him in, a stipulation of him gaining ingress, to feast on all of those tasty nuns as if he’d been let loose in a PornHub cosplay channel.
He’s backlit in such a way that we can see the obvious nod to that classic Hammer grain, the raftering of moonbeams which felt less akin to lunar light and more like a visual call to arms for transgressive virility. The riff is clearly upon a theme of the past, but co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat—the duo behind Sherlock—intend to fashion a Dracula for our modern age. In other words, they wish to bust apart every convention that has ever marked this fecund field, because despite all of the various iterations of the blood-sucking tale, tropes have always been rigidly in place, right back to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel.
What’s curious about our love of all things Dracula is how athwart our age is with the trappings of the story. Gatiss and Moffat are always well-versed in their subject matter—in love, too, with their subject matter, which is axiomatic to everyone who has ever watched Sherlock and delighted in some recondite reference to a bit of Holmesian canon that author Conan Doyle himself would not have remembered five minutes after writing it in the first place.
In Stoker’s novel, and certainly in the Hammer pictures—that first offering spawning a bevy of sequels, prequels, parallel stories—men rule all. There will be a band of brothers, and this band will be awfully gay while its members think they are not remotely gay and in fact paragons of machismo; many times during the proceedings, great declarations of fealty and respect will be made, toasts drunk, backs clapped, love eternally pledged.
The women, meanwhile, get used and get used hard. They are possessed by Dracula, which indubitably is a bad time. They do his bidding, symbolically lacking a mind of their own. They need constant protection and are so helpless you can’t leave them in a room alone at night for five minutes, which the men inevitably fuck up anyway, because these men-gangs are pretty ineffective. Van Helsing serves as auteur, and eventually he’s able to prevail. But one always has the sense that Dracula’s heart isn’t really in his evil, he’d like to be done with it all.
There are many cringe-worthy lines in this new production, the stuff of real tin-eared writing. Van Helsing is not a male vampire hunter, as he usually is, but rather the nun Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells) who is questioning her own faith, and talks with a streak of whimsy that borders on the fatuous. When a plague of bats turns up at the convent, she declares, “How interesting!” with the same wide-eyed, happy-go-lucky blitheness of Strawberry Shortcake when chancing upon the latest scheme launched by the Purple Pie Man.
Harker has been contaminated by Dracula, he’s escaped the castle—by leaping from it and getting washed up in a fisherman’s net—and he provides the show’s framing device, at least insofar as the first installment (directed by Jonny Campbell) goes, before everything goes full-on hugger-mugger. Sister Agatha Van Helsing and a nun who is not really a nun—Mina, Harker’s betrothed—interview the lost soul, trying to figure out what makes this Drac dude tick.
It’s a good idea, this inversion, fostering a kind of sociological equity we hardly ever get in vampire period pictures. This isn’t some present day update, which would perhaps prove riper for this kind of twist. We’re back in the olden days, when Stoker himself set his novel. Concept is one thing, though, execution is another. We all have that friend who doesn’t know when to let a joke go, who provides one beat too many, each and every time. Our showrunners are the dyadic version of that friend.
Claes Bang’s Dracula is wonderfully Wildean in some ways. He’s sexual, certainly, which Dracula has to be, but he’s also bored—bored in lust, we might say. He longs for connection. He is, thus, a Dracula for the social media age. We could even add that he’s non-binary, in the sense that he doesn’t see gender, and if anyone was going to think gender was fluid, it’d be someone whose entire existence revolves around liquids and fluidity.
He wants stimulation, which makes him a Transylvania cousin to Milton’s Satan, and the script calls Dracula the devil himself over and over again. Which is confusing in one way—after all, the Devil, to most of us, even as a character, is an entirely different fiend—and also logical, as the larger point is that Dracula represents the devil within. As a result, this version “reads” blood, as if it were a book, stripping knowledge from the same source he taints.
It’s another interesting conceit, and Bang looks the part, but Gatiss and Moffat stuff so much scenery in his mouth that it’s a wonder he can get out his lines. He’s not especially campy, but his remarks are, as when he calls Harker “Jonny Blue Eyes,” like he’s Sinatra about to croon a post-coitus ballad in bed.
We’re prepped for lines like this early on, when Sister Van Helsing blows right past the bullshit and asks Harker if he had sexual intercourse with Dracula. As a Victorian man, Harker is taken aback, and we practically see sweat dot his brow as a visual for sodomy passes through his death-addled brain. It’s tough not to think, given how unsubtle the line is, “Ah, it’s going to be that kind of series,” and you hope that overtness won’t come across as an attention-grab. But this isn’t virtue signaling, or testament to a cognizance of changing times—it flirts with a lampooning, because the series doesn’t feel as if it even believes in itself. There’s a for-a-lark aspect, intercut with earnest intention.
The first installment focuses on Harker’s backstory and the interrogation at the convent. Much like the recent BBC adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Dracula takes quick moments, and extends them. This can feel like padding, story-stretching, but not during the second installment, directed by Damon Thomas, which takes place in large part on the Demeter, the ship that bore the Count to England.
There’s a clever tweak you won’t see anywhere else—Dracula, on deck, blows befouled air from his lungs skyward, wrapping the doomed vessel in fog, to blot out the sunlight.
He can’t come and go completely freely, but rocking a pair of Victorian sunglasses, he can flit about the shadows during the day, which lends some jolt and fear to the story, a further dollop of what we associate with unnatural order. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula has no real issues with the day at his castle. Harker even observes him making a bed one morning, and Gatiss and Moffat are aware of this, with Dracula saying a couple times that he doesn’t have any staff working for him. He may be the 1 percent, with the urbanity of accent to match, but no one waits on him, at least.
So far so good, until the showrunners thought it wise to endow their series with something straight out of a Marvel film. Without giving away the exact plot points, let’s just say that Sister Agatha Van Helsing has been aboard the ship the entire time, serving as a Drac snack, while he also goes around knocking off people not because he necessarily wants to drink their blood or needs to, but because they possess a given quality, and he wishes to absorb it.
So, if you have a cool accent and he’s envious, he’ll knock you off and drink from your neck and get the cool accent, too. This smacks of our clichéd notion of living your best life, which often means ascribing whatever quality you wish to have to who you are, even if you don’t possess that quality, an idea that Dracula makes ham-fistedly literal. Sister Agatha is going to thwart his evilness with a big old explosion, and down his coffin goes into the sea, and her with it.
Hardly empowering. A progression, perhaps, in that a woman is the agency of a solution, but it’s pretty weak gruel that she serves as host for a parasite along the way—something that has been going on long enough, thank you—and succumbs in the end. As for the bizarro world timeline: I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe Moffat has a kind of temporality ague leftover from helming Doctor Who.
There’s a lot of Hammer fan-service in the mise-en-scène itself with the Demeter scenes, and the chiaroscuro cinematography is as if the ghost of noir-pioneer John Alton were revived to try his hand at horror circa 2020. But we are unmoored at this point, which cues the insanity for the third and concluding installment, with Paul McGuigan rounding out our trinity of on-hand directors.
Sister Agatha is back, kind of, only it’s 123 years later and she’s Dr. Zoe Van Helsing. Dracula has been dormant, he’s essentially unfrozen, Sister Agatha talks in Dr. Zoe’s head, there’s a Jonathan Harker Institute—it’s a cluster.
Turns out Dracula is scared witless of death, but Zoe, who is dying herself of cancer, helps him learn it’s not that bad, and they do this kind of murder-suicide-y thing. Again, not hugely empowering, not epiphanic, and almost a brand of satire, but this isn’t satire. If anything, it’s a toe-dip. An exploration of the water, at the surface of the water, sans plunge. As a footnote, there’s mild interest, in both trying something vaguely post-sexist, in terms of how women are usually treated during these affairs, and in taking a new tack with the Van Helsing character, who, frankly, is usually a pretty boring guy. But almost-as-boring women don’t really counter that, especially when their bane is not the King of the Undead, but your mess of an undertaking.
