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I quite liked Coppola's version. Perhaps not superscry, but it had a great atmosphere imo. What did you not like about it?
I loathed everything about it, personally. Claiming it was a faithful adaptation while it was anything but. The porno depiction of Victorian England (made even worse in the BBC version), the hamming up of the actors, Keanu Reeves as an Englishman (Coppola himself admitted he was miscast), the reincarnated love... it was so bloody ridiculous.
Me too. Then again, I'm not against some style over substance once in a while :)
Yeah, but as a fan of the novel, I felt insulted by Coppola's claims.
Me neither, @GoldenGun. The films shows its hand early. Lavish sets, cosmetic excess, shameless overacting, bombastic music... Nothing about this film suggests that it will ever look for visual modesty or quiet, introspective moments, let alone a faithful narration of the book. Yet neither did Blade Runner, an immersive experience from a visual director based on a script that liberally selected the bits from its source novel it wanted to keep while discarding everything else, resulting in something vastly different.
Coppola's main sin was to call the film "Bram Stoker's Dracula", thereby highlighting something it wasn't. Had he called it "Prince Vlad", the film would have had less commercial appeal perhaps but raised different expectations in fans of the book.
That said, after Hammer and the lot freely went in almost every conceivable direction with Dracula, surely Coppola cannot be blamed for doing his own thing. He still stayed a lot closer to the book than Dracula Untold, Dracula 2000, and other movies. Many dozens of Dracula films, including some that are pornografic, some that are futuristic, even one by H.G. Lewis, ... have all been extremely "indignant" of the book because their intention was never to bring the book to life in the first place. Dracula as an almost cartoonish horror icon has severed the umbilical cord from Stoker's novel long ago. Coppola tried to return to the book, but obviously felt no need to slavishly recreate it either. I frankly cannot be angry with his film because of that. How literal an adaptation is, isn't the prime metric by which I evaluate it. If I did that, I'd have a hard time watching the Bonds, Sherlocks, Jules Verne, Poe and Lovecraft adaptations, and so on. I keep repeating that books and films are two separate mediums. They can inspire each other, but something entirely made of words cannot be compared to the sum total of so many more elements. If I want Stoker, I'll happily read the book again. I have 4 editions in the house, including one with excessive notes next to each sentence. When I watch a film, however, I want to be slightly surprised too. Otherwise, what's the point? But that’s just my humble opinion.
Lastly, I have come to discover that many people, inspired by the Dracula films, are excited to read the novel, only to find it a tough book to plough through. Most give up after about a third or so, and encouraging them to continue reading rarely pays off. People who enjoy Frankenstein, the stories of Poe, Lovecraft and Wells, who read Verne and Doyle for fun, have told me that they find Dracula an immensely boring book. This experience makes me worried that a faithful adaptation of Dracula might entertain a few, but be too hard for most. Not many filmmakers want to burn money on that. Like the awesome 2005 indy adaptation of Call Of Cthulhu, perhaps a low-cost production could serve the purpose, but I doubt that too many filmmakers would want to commit to a high-profile, literal Dracula adaptation.
That’s true. Slow pacing or loyalty to source material doesn’t automatically doom a film. But LOTR was adapted with substantial restructuring, action emphasis, and cinematic spectacle that aren’t really present in Dracula if you stick to the original structure and pacing. The novel is a collection of letters with long stretches of travel and investigation, and rarely any direct conflict with Dracula himself. This can feel anticlimactic on screen, I'd argue.
I think Barry Lyndon works very well because of Kubrick's brilliant visual style, which becomes the spectacle itself. Even viewers who find the plot slow may stay engaged through cinematography, music, and mood. Dracula, told faithfully, would need a lot of that to keep people engaged anno 2025. Eggers' Nosferatu was pretty successful, and it, too, dealt more in style than in actual scares, so there is certainly potential. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a Dracula done well. I'm just not very confident that it would attract a wide audience.
I absolutely agree, and I want them to try, just like I want someone to spearhead a series of Lovecraft adaptations.
But I think nowadays, even a film like The Exorcist would be a hard sell: you'd have to pitch convincingly a plot revolving around a girl sick in bed with gastroenteritis.
Oh and on a side note, here's an article from Dracula specialist Elizabeth Miller about the novel's sexual elements: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n44-ron1433/014002ar/
I love how she puts things in perspective.