Bram Stoker’s Dracula [31 DVDs of Halloween]

I don’t know if I can call Bram Stoker’s Drac­ula my absolute favorite vam­pire movie, but it’s up there for sure, and cer­tainly my favorite Drac­ula movie. I remem­ber see­ing this when it first came out in 1992. I was twelve. My par­ents rented this from Video Tonight (a seedy mom & pop video store before Block­buster came to town–the kind that had a roped-off porn sec­tion) and boy were they in for a shock. I can’t be sure if it was the Keanu Reeves/vampire orgy scene or the WOLF RAPE that set them off, but in a rare dis­play of good par­ent­ing, I was sud­denly sent to bed early with­out being allowed to fin­ish watch­ing the movie.

I didn’t care, though. At that age, other than the scary parts with Gary Old­man, I thought this movie was a ter­ri­ble bore. I didn’t even bother sneak­ing around to watch it with­out per­mis­sion. It wouldn’t be until years later, after I re-watched this movie as an adult, that I fell in love with it and learned to appre­ci­ate all the things that make it so good.

For one thing it’s directed by Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola ( The God­fa­ther, Apoc­a­lypse Now, The Out­siders …do I really need to go on?) and it’s full of phe­nom­e­nal per­for­mances by some of my favorite actors: Gary Old­man, Anthony Hop­kins, and Winona Ryder. Oh, right, Keanu “Duu­u­u­u­ude” Reeves is in it too. He’s tol­er­a­ble here, though. It’s also got Richard Grant, Cary Elwes (!), and best of all–Tom Waits.

I also love the visual style of this movie. It is beau­ti­fully col­ored and richly detailed, like watch­ing a liv­ing paint­ing. I love this quote I found on Wikipedia which gives us a glimpse into the frame of mind Cop­pola was in while mak­ing this film:

Cop­pola asked the set cos­tume design­ers to sim­ply bring him designs which were “weird”. “‘Weird’ became a code word for ‘Let’s not do for­mula,’” he later recalled. “‘Give me some­thing that either comes from the research or that comes from your own night­mares.’ I gave them paint­ings, and I gave them draw­ings, and I talked to them about how I thought the imagery could work.”

It cer­tainly did work.

They say you are a man of good taste.

Spooky Screencaps

What is 31 DVDs of Halloween?

As a spe­cial fea­ture for the Hal­loween Count­down, I’m show­cas­ing 31 Hal­loween DVDs from my per­sonal col­lec­tion. I have a lot of Halloween-related and hor­ror DVDs in gen­eral, but for this year’s count­down I’m only going to focus on my absolute favorites–the ones I con­sider 100% essen­tial for my enjoy­ment of the holiday.

More stuff and things!