Dear Dracula (2012, Chad Van De Keere)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: Small-town America and Transylvania; it’s the present day, around Halloween.

Faithful to the novel? This direct-to-DVD animated special for children uses the character of Count Dracula in a new storyline. Adapted from a graphic novel, Dear Dracula is based around the idea that the horror icon has lost his reputation for being scary. Count Dracula was once a fearsome villain, but he now loiters in his spooky castle – ignored and untroubled by the wider world. Meanwhile, in an American suburb, a young boy called Sam (Nathan Gamble) is Dracula’s biggest fan. When he wants to get hold of a Drac action figure, his gran suggests he write to Santa Claus. But as it’s not yet Halloween, he decides instead to write to Dracula himself. Cheered by a first fan letter in years, Count Dracula then decides to journey over to America to meet Sam. As their new friendship develops, Sam tries to help Dracula regain his scary edge, while at the same time the Count assists Sam with his blossoming friendship with a local girl called Emma (Ariel Winter).

Best performance: Dracula is voiced by Ray Liotta, who has fun with the role. This incarnation of the Count has a Bela Lugosi accent, can turn into a bat and pass through solid objects, and has an assistant (‘a certified henchman’) called Myro (Emilio Estevez).

Best bit: Arriving at Sam’s house, Myro rings the doorbells. When the door is answered by Sam’s grandmother, she’s surprised to see a coffin lying on the porch. The lid then magically opens and Dracula rises out of it. His whole body rigid, he pivots up onto his feet a la Count Orlok in the silent movie Nosferatu.

Review: There’s a peculiar history of Count Dracula being defanged, at least metaphorically. For around a century now, the character has routinely been stripped of his monstrosity and menace; changed from the evil, capricious murderer of Bram Stoker’s book into something safer, cosier, more palatable. The first authorised adaptation of the novel was a 1924 stage play that reimagined the ageing, ugly, repulsive vampire as a dashing young man in an evening suit who could woo women at the opera and mingle with professional gentlemen in drawing rooms. Over the decades, in the movies, he’s been presented as an antihero or a misunderstood victim: Francis Ford Coppola repurposed him as a devastated widower, while at least one film suggested he’s a noble, national hero of Churchillian proportions. Dracula stories have also been aimed at children several times – multiple episodes of Scooby-Doo, a CBBC drama, an animation franchise for kids – which is surely a development that would have astonished Bram Stoker. But pop culture’s most famed vampire is far from alone in this blunting process. Within a few years of his debut in horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, the paedophiliac killer Freddy Krueger was being pitched to children as an action figure. Coincidentally, in Dear Dracula, Sam watches a TV advert for a Dracula doll: ‘Hypnotic spinning eyes? Spring-loaded fangs? Oh, I gotta have that,’ he says with boyish, but far from ghoulish, enthusiasm. This neutering of the mythology even annoys the Count. At one point, Sam shows him a movie called Demons at Dusk, clearly a disguised version of the anaemic Twilight films. ‘What did you think?’ asks Sam as it ends. ‘That was rubbish!’ cries an indignant Dracula. ‘Absolute hogwash! Vampires aren’t pretty boys that sparkle in the sun. Real vampires burn and crumbles into dust when exposed to daylight!’ However, there’s a rather major irony going on here. Being aimed at a pre-pre-teen audience, Dear Dracula presents possibly the least terrifying and benign version of Dracula there’s ever been. For all its gags about the vampire now being a kiddie-friendly irrelevance in our culture, this special contains not one suggestion that the character is anything but a kiddie-friendly irrelevance. The animation, meanwhile, is relatively simplistic. Compared to big-budget Pixar efforts and the like, it feels blockier and the characters often seem to float against their backgrounds. The script is funny without ever being hilarious, but at least it has some charm and a nice message about confidence and self-determination.

Six classic horror movie aficionados out of 10

True Lies (1994, James Cameron)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 5 April 2020
Format: I’d taken a recording from Film4 way back on 1 March 2019.
Seen before? Yes.

Review: One of the things most often said about James Cameron’s film True Lies is that it’s the director’s pastiche of the James Bond series. This is correct, but only up to a point. In 1994, 007 was in abeyance. It had been five years since the most recent Bond movie, lead actor Timothy Dalton had quit, and the producers were mired in legal problems. There was a gap in the market, so Cameron teamed up with his old Terminator colleague Arnold Schwarzenegger to fill it. Their effort was an expensive, glossy action thriller that married huge spectacle with suspense, and high-tech gizmos with droll comedy, all played out in a heightened fantasy world of virtuous spies and foreign bad guys. Clearly very Bondish. The hero of the piece even takes off a wetsuit to reveal an immaculate tuxedo underneath, al a Sean Connery in Goldfinger.

However, away from the superficial similarities, True Lies is very different from the Bond format. Unlike the lone-wolf 007, American counter-terrorism agent Harry Tasker (Schwarzenegger) works as part of a team and even has a comedy sidekick played by Tom Arnold. He’s also a family man, with a doting wife and a benignly rebellious daughter. The bulk of the plot, in fact, is not really about the terrorist organisation fronted by Tia Carrere and Art Malik who want to blow things up because they’re angry, evil foreigners. It’s true that there are plenty of outlandish action scenes, such as a chase sequence with a bad guy on a motorbike and Harry on a horse, as well as a grand finale involving Harry’s daughter (Eliza Dushku) clinging onto a Harrier Jump Jet. But the focus is actually on Harry and his relationship with his wife, who as the story begins has no idea that he’s an international spy.

Helen Trasker is initially presented as dowdy and dull, with Jamie Lee Curtis gamely wearing unflattering clothes and a dowdy hairdo. But when Harry accidentally discovers that she may be having an affair with a comic-relief character played by a fun Bill Paxton, he realises Helen is craving excitement. So, here the film takes… an interesting turn. For reasons that may have made sense in an early-90s script meeting, but which now seem rather pathetic, Harry decides to manipulate his wife to the point of abject terror. He kidnaps her, locks her up in a secret bunker and interrogates her – all while maintaining his anonymity. She wanted an adventure, right?!

Helen is then coerced into being a spy herself, with a ‘training mission’ that involves putting on a sexy dress, greasing back her hair (a la the models from that Robert Palmer video), and seducing a businessman… who’s actually Harry hiding his face. The scene, ahem, climaxes with Helen stripping to her underwear and performing a pole-dancer’s routine in a hotel room. Some of this subplot’s ickiness is offset by casting an actress as confident and capable as Curtis, so Helen never feels like a total victim, but it still comes off as hopelessly naive.

The year after True Lies was released, the James Bond franchise returned in the form of the swaggering GoldenEye, which introduced the world to Pierce Brosnan’s incarnation of the famous spy. Notably, the film recognised that the world was evolving. The Cold War, such a staple of the series in the 60s, 70s and 80s, was no more; secretary Miss Moneypenny was rebooted as a sassy, assured woman who gave as good as she got in her flirty scenes with Bond; and M was recast with a takes-no-bullshit Judi Dench. GoldenEye also made self-deprecating digs at James Bond’s reputation as a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’. It was exactly the level of irony and awareness that, for all its fun and flippancy, True Lies had failed to achieve.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘All of [James Cameron’s] movies feature strong female characters, and he transformed Helen Tasker from an ordinary hausfrau to the character Jamie Lee plays: smart and sexy, with her own secret life. He’d call me in to consult while the script was taking shape. At one point, we holed up for two days in Las Vegas, exploring how I would talk to my wife, how I’d confront her if I suspected her of having an affair, what I would say to a terrorist before I killed him, how I would handle it if I found out my daughter was stealing from my friend. In these conversations we tailored the rhythm of the dialogue to me.’

Seven Suzie Homemakers out of 10

Next: Raw Deal

Dracula (Audible Edition) (2012)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, which this audiobook production recites in full, largely takes place in two countries. We start in eastern Europe, as British lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to Castle Dracula near the Borgo Pass in Transylvania (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now in Romania). After his experiences with the vampiric Count Dracula, Harker escapes and ends up in the Hospital of St Joseph and St Mary in Budapest – again part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1890s, but the capital of the independent Hungary since 1918. Meanwhile, Dracula travels on a ship called the Demeter, which sails from Varna in Bulgaria to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast in England. There are many sequences in the picture-postcard fishing town of Whitby, often set in real-life locations, then the action moves to various parts of London and the nearby Essex town of Purfleet. We’re briefly in Exeter too, then the later stages of the story feature a cross-continent chase as Dracula retreats back to Transylvania. Every segment of the novel comes with a date stamp: the main bulk of the story takes places from 3 May until 6 November in an unspecified year (probably 1893); a short coda scene is set seven years later.

Faithful to the novel? This is an unabridged reading of Bram Stoker’s novel, produced by the audiobook company Audible in 2012. You couldn’t get any more faithfuller. Note: it follows the original text as published in 1897 so does not include a change made in an 1899 reprint. Originally, in chapter four when his Brides are attempting to seduce Jonathan Harker, Dracula said, ‘Have patience! Tomorrow night, tomorrow night is yours!’ After a rethink, Stoker then changed this to ‘Have patience! Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours!’ – which has led some to interpret a homoerotic edge to the Count’s intentions for his prisoner.

Best performance: Being an epistolary work, the fin de siècle classic Dracula is perfect for an audiobook reading. Whether we’re hearing journal entries, letters, telegrams, memoranda or extracts from newspapers, every word of this novel has been written by a character – there is no third-person narrator. So listening to a talking-book version of Dracula is closer to experiencing a full-cast play than hearing someone read you a story.

There are 16 voices in Bram Stoker’s novel: we hear from seven main characters, while there are also letters or telegrams from six minor characters or companies and extracts from three newspapers. It’s far from an equal spread, though, with three of our heroes accounting for 87 per cent of the whole book. Nine of the other narrators, meanwhile, provide less than one per cent each.

Not counting headers, chapter titles and the like, the text of Dracula contains 160,508 words. If we rank the 16 individual narrators by total word count, the distribution breaks down like this:

16th. Rufus Smith, an agent at Lloyd’s of London who sends two telegrams to report on Dracula’s movements.
49 words – 0.03%

15th. Carter, Paterson & Co, a delivery firm in London. They take possession of Count Dracula’s boxes of earth when they arrive at King’s Cross and deposit them at his new house.
55 words – 0.03%

14th. Mitchell, Sons & Candy, an estate agents who sells 347 Piccadilly to a ‘Count de Ville’ – a pseudonym of Dracula’s.
113 words – 0.07%

13th. Quincey P Morris, a long-time American friend of main character Jack Seward who falls in love with Lucy Westenra.
197 words – 0.12%

12th. Samuel F Billington & Son, a Whitby solicitor who acts on Dracula’s behalf.
271 words – 0.17%

11th. Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), a friend of Jack and Quincey’s. He woos Lucy and they become engaged. During the course of the novel his father dies and he inherits a peerage.
292 words – 0.18%

10th. Sister Agatha, a nun at the hospital where Jonathan Harker recuperates after his terrifying time at Castle Dracula.
402 words – 0.25%

9th. Extracts from the Westminster Gazette newspaper, detailing the sightings of a mysterious ‘bloofer lady’ who lures and bites children (actually a vampiric Lucy).
495 words – 0.31%

8th. Patrick Hennessey, a colleague of Jack Seward’s who writes to him with an update about their patient Renfield.
975 words – 0.61%

7th. An extract from the Pall Mall Gazette newspaper, telling the story of an escaped wolf at London Zoo.
2,049 words – 1.28%

6th. Extracts from the Dailygragh newspaper, which reports on a significant shipwreck at Whitby. (The articles publish the captain’s log in full.)
4,731 words – 2.95%

5th. Lucy Westenra, a 19-year-old woman who receives three proposals of marriage on the same day (she picks the rich, posh bloke). She later succumbs to Count Dracula and is turned into a vampire.
4,939 words – 3.08%

4th. Dr Abraham Van Helsing, a Dutch expert in obscure ailments who is brought over to England when Lucy falls mysteriously ill. He’s the de facto leader of the novel’s heroes.
5,432 words – 3.38%

3rd. Mina Murray (later Mina Harker), Lucy’s best friend and Jonathan’s fiancée and later wife. Her shorthand and secretarial skills come in handy when she assembles her friends’ diaries and correspondence into a narrative.
33,251 words – 20.72%

2nd. Jonathan Harker, the solicitor sent to Transylvania to inform Count Dracula about his property purchases in London. He’s taken prisoner by the Count and tormented, but escapes and eventually returns to England.
43,998 words – 27.41%

1st. Dr Jack Seward, another of Lucy’s unsuccessful suitors. He runs an asylum next door to Carfax, the house Count Dracula buys in Purfleet.
63,259 words – 39.41%

The top three narrators, who make up nearly nine-tenths of the whole book, are interesting choices by Bram Stoker. He populated his story with an evil Transylvanian vampire, a fun-loving American horseman, an enigmatic Dutch professor and a flighty teenage girl, but they only narrate the action in small doses. (Poor Quincey Morris, the American, only gets to talk in his own voice for 197 words. No wonder he’s often dropped from film and TV adaptations.) The bulk of the narration therefore comes from a respectable lawyer, his respectable fiancée and a respectable doctor – all English, all middle-class, all good, decent and God-fearing. Dracula is the story of a mythological monster born in medieval eastern Europe; an ‘outsider’ and foreigner who ‘invades’ the safe, Christian society of Britain. Stoker clearly wanted the Count’s primary opponents to represent something – an ideal, English way of life under threat.

That’s not to say that we don’t hear from the other characters. Van Helsing, for example, has reams and reams and reams of dialogue. It’s just that, other than his 5,432 words of telegrams and memos, he only speaks to us through other characters’ points of view. In Chapter 24, for example, Mina needs all her shorthand skills to record the professor giving a 2,200-word explanation of his plan to foil Dracula’s return to Transylvania.

This 15-and-a-half-hour Audible production has a strong cast, led by Alan Cumming (GoldenEye) as a sincere Dr Seward, Simon Vance as a likeable Jonathan Harker, and the late Katherine Kellgren as a determined Mina. The reliably brilliant Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Clue) also pops up when we’re experiencing the story from Van Helsing’s point of view. As mentioned above, all the actors are performing roles rather than giving a neutral reading. There are some different approaches, however. Dr Seward recites what other people have said to him with no attempt to mimic their accent. In contrast, Lucy Westenra (played by Susan Duerden, who appeared in three episodes of TV show Lost) colours her diary with eccentric regional dialects like she’s a stand-up comedian telling a story of backwards rural folk.

Best bit: The finest – and probably most famous – section of the book is its opening. Stoker’s first four chapters (nearly 18,000 words) form a continuous narrative from Jonathan Harker’s perspective as he travel to Castle Dracula, encounters its nobleman resident and then realises he is now a prisoner of a barbaric monster. In his performance as Harker, award-winning audiobook veteran Simon Vance ably draws us into the character’s experience – we sense the slow dread, the rising panic and the abject terror.

Review: A classy reading of the novel, nicely produced with well-chosen actors giving good performances. If the project misses a trick, however, it’s by not casting someone to play Count Dracula himself. As noted above, none of Bram Stoker’s novel is told through the vampire’s eyes – he keeps no diaries, writes no letters, sends no telegrams. But it would have added an extra edge of menace if Dracula’s dialogue, wherever it falls, had been performed by a specific actor. It would have given the villain a voice.

Nine harsh sounds that came from I know not where and commanded me to do I know not what out of 10

Dave (1993, Ivan Reitman)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts.

Watched: 29 March 2019
Format: A DVD bought online.
Seen before? No.

Review: Arnold Schwarzenegger appears for just the briefest of cameos in this gently satirical comedy film, playing himself in a scene where he advises kids not to eat unhealthy snacks. He’s one of many celebrities and politicians cropping up in a Frank Capra-like tale of a professional lookalike posing as the US President, and he did it as a favour to his director friend Ivan Reitman. But Arnie’s connection actually runs slightly deeper. The rumour has it that at one point he was suggested for the twin lead roles – in between Warren Beatty dragging his feet over the contract and Kevin Kline worrying that the film would be too farcical.

In the end, it was Kline who signed up for the dual role of President Bill Mitchell and his everyman doppelgänger, Dave Kovic. The latter runs an employment agency in Washington, DC, but also earns extra cash on the side thanks to his uncanny resemblance to the Commander-in-Chief. Then a stern Secret Service agent played by Ving Rhames approaches him with a proposition: they need Dave to impersonate the president at a gala function. All Dave needs do is wave to the crowd. But before you can say convoluted plot shenanigans, the real president suffers a debilitating stroke while having sex with his secretary, and Dave is asked to maintain the illusion for a while longer.

At first he’s just a stooge, under direct orders from Frank Langella’s Machiavellian Chief of Staff who wants to engineer the crisis for his own ends. But then Dave starts to grow into his role and realises he can make a difference. He even rekindles President Mitchell’s failing marriage to the First Lady (a reliably brilliant Sigourney Weaver). All the while, the real president lies in a secret bunker, deep in a coma from which he’s unlikely to recover…

If the comedy perhaps lacks bite here and there – and the plot requires a huge dollop of disbelief to be suspended – then the film makes up for it in charm. Kline and Weaver are terrific and the fairy-tale story of virtue winning the day over corruption is likeable and watchable. It’s a softer, less complex, even-more-optimistic version of The West Wing, a TV show with which this film shares several sets (the interior of the White House) and one secondary cast member (Anna Deavere Smith).

Incidentally, this was far from the last time Kevin Kline played two roles in the same film. An actor of huge energy and dexterity, he also doubled up in 1997’s Fierce Creatures (as a coarse Australian business mogul and his dippy son) and 1999’s Wild Wild West (as a US marshal and the real-life President Ulysses S Grant). Schwarzenegger did the same trick in The 6th Day (2000), appearing as both a helicopter pilot and his genetically engineered clone.

Eight defence contractors who are delinquent in their contracts out of 10

Next: True Lies

Dracula: The Dark Compass (2020, Paul McGuigan)

SPOILER WARNING: These reviews reveal plot twists.
You can read my review of episode one, The Rules of the Game, here.
My review of episode two, Blood Vessel, is here.

Having finally arrived in Britain, Count Dracula is captured by a secretive organisation – but he soon escapes and ensnares a new victim…

Episode: 3 of 3. Broadcast: BBC1, Friday 3 January 2020; Netflix, Saturday 4 January 2020. Written by: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Directed by: Paul McGuigan

Setting: Other than a short scene set in 1897 (at the convent seen in episode one), we are now in the year 2020. Most of the first half of The Dark Compass takes place in Whitby, a beautiful town on the North Yorkshire coast with strong Dracula connections, then the action cuts to three months later in London. Bram Stoker worked on his novel while on holiday in Whitby in the 1890s; it was in Whitby Library that he first came across the name he gave to his villain; and he set chunks of his story in the town. Personal note: The Dark Compass features a swooping camera shot showing us the smashed window of Whitby clothes store Spanton. The shop is on a steep road called Flowergate and is opposite the hotel where I stayed while on holiday in Whitby in February 2019. I recognised it immediately.

Major characters:

* Count Dracula (Claes Bang) has awoken from his seabed slumber and climbed ashore in Whitby. He’s momentarily surprised that 123 years have passed while he was asleep, but he soon acclimatises to the new world. As he points out, he’s 500 years old and has seen change often enough not to be confused by new technologies (‘I like the flying thing,’ he says of a helicopter). Evading the authorities by turning into a colony of bats, he steals a suit and hides in a working-class home, where he kills one occupant and is then enraptured by seeing a shot of the sun on TV. An agent called Zoe Helsing, a descendent of his old foe Sister Agatha, captures him and takes him to an underground bunker run by a shady organisation that has been planning for the Count’s return. He’s kept in a steampunk prison cell, but they mistakenly give him access to a tablet and he uses it to call in his lawyer, who facilitates his release. (As co-writer Steven Moffat has pointed out, we’re all conditioned to accept that characters in thrillers can be summarily locked up – but people actually aren’t allowed to do that!) Now free, the Count heads for London and targets a new victim: a young woman called Lucy, who he stumbles across after stealing someone’s mobile phone. He woos her, preys on her vanity, and reveals his true nature – which intrigues her. In a flirty text message, he even uses a ‘Dracula’ emoji (‘the most meta gag ever,’ says Moffat, pointing out that Dracula isn’t a pop-culture icon in this continuity). The Count regularly feeds on her blood – she is, from her point of view, a willing victim – and it soon kills her. Of course, the death doesn’t trouble Dracula – he may have liked Lucy, but she was always a means to an end. However, an encounter with Zoe leads to him having an epiphany about his own existence. He realises that he is terrified of death – that’s why he recoils at the crucifix (a symbol of execution), that’s why he was drawn to Lucy, who had was excited by the idea. Freed from his psychosis, he drinks the tainted blood of the terminally ill Zoe, killing them both… In this three-part series, Claes Bang has given us a Dracula for the 21st century. Wonderful at conveying a commanding confidence – a supreme, unflappable arrogance – without ever being boorish or po-faced, and also adding a sexy charisma, his Count joins Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Louis Jourdan in the first division of Draculas.

* Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells) appears briefly in the opening scene, set during the timeframe of episode one. But it is far from her only contribution to this story…

* Dr Zoe Helsing (Dolly Wells) is in change of the armed forces that attempt to arrest Dracula on the beach then hunt him down to a nearby house. She looks exactly like her 1897 ancestor Agatha, who was her great-great-aunt on her father’s side. (So after Agatha, we now have Zoe – the A to Z of the Van Helsing lineage.) During her pursuit of the vampire, he bites her – but then recoils. It’s because Zoe has cancer and her blood is foul to him. After Dracula has escaped the Jonathan Harker Foundation, the organisation Zoe works for, a despondent Zoe drinks a sample she took of the Count’s blood. Because his blood contains traces of all of his victims, Zoe now has some of Agatha’s DNA in her system – and she starts to imagine conversations with her proactive forebear. ‘Together’, they work out what Count Dracula’s plan is and set out to stop him. As she confronts the vampire, Zoe’s English accent starts to drift into Agatha’s Dutch.

* Kathleen (Chanel Cresswell) is the unfortunate Whitby woman whose house the Count hides in. He murders her partner, Bob, and stuffs him in a fridge, then gives her a lecture about she’s actually really well off despite considering her home to be a dump. (Compared to what people had in 1897, he’s right.)

* Bloxham (Lyndsey Marshal) is the scientist with the Jonathan Harker Foundation who found Dracula’s coffin on the seabed. She was actually responsible for his resurrection – while examining him, he bit her thumb off and was able to feed for the first time since the 19th century.

* Dr Jack Seward (Matthew Beard) is a junior doctor who has signed up to freelance for the Jonathan Harker Foundation. He’s in love with his friend Lucy, but when she starts to fall ill, he examines her and realises a vampire has been feeding on her. He can’t prevent her dying, but after the funeral he teams up with his mentor Zoe to confront Count Dracula. The sombre, never-smiling Jack is shocked to see Lucy has survived her ‘death’ and is now an undead creature – burnt, disfigured, in eternal pain. He tearfully puts her out of her misery… Beard plays the role a tad too dour for him to pop in the same way as the episode’s other main characters: Dracula, Zoe and Lucy.

* Lucy Westenra (Lydia West) is a selfie-happy, social-media-using, party-loving 22-year-old living her life to the fullest (‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’). She’s friends with Jack, to whom she has given a few sympathy fucks; has a platonic pal called Zev; and gets engaged to an American rogue called Quincey. When Count Dracula steals Jonathan’s phone, he uses it to connect with Lucy and over several weeks they develop a perverse relationship based on his blood lust and her fascination with mortality. Lucy, it turns out, has a nihilistic death-wish and has no fear of the vampire. In return for her blood, Dracula allows her to dream exciting dreams – but the draining soon kills her. Or rather, it *seems* to kill her. Although outwardly dead, she’s fully conscious. Lucy screams unheard throughout her own memorial service and cremation (which is ironically scored by Robbie Williams’s Angels). But the fire still doesn’t end her pain: she’s now a walking corpse, burnt to a crisp and in terrible anguish. Hashtag careful what you wish for… (Co-writer Mark Gatiss has likened Lucy to an addict who realises too late that she’s out of her depth.) Lydia West is just *radiant* in the role of Lucy. For a character attracted to the idea of death, Lucy is always full of life, but West makes you believe in the hidden depths.

* Having cracked the wi-fi password at the Jonathan Harker Foundation (it’s ‘Dracula’), Dracula calls in a lawyer called Frank Renfield (Mark Gatiss). We learn that the Count first engaged his firm on 12 September 1896 when he started to make his plans to emigrate to England. Renfield is a bit of a duffer: a bumbling, dishevelled, glasses-wearing man who soon falls under Dracula’s thrall and becomes his sidekick/servant. It’s a clever-clever gag to get your villain out of a hole because of a legal loophole, but it was perhaps a misstep for co-writer Gatiss to cast himself in the role. His comedic performance is a notch too self-aware compared to the rest of the cast.

Connections to the novel:
* Rather obviously, The Dark Compass takes the radical step of shifting the story forward 123 years into the present day. Bram Stoker’s book takes place entirely in one year of the 1890s.
* It’s tempting to assume the move to 2020 is co-writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss doing for Dracula what they did for Sherlock Holmes in a prior TV show. But the shift does still honour Stoker’s intentions. As Moffat has pointed out, the book is the story of a medieval monster invading what contemporary readers would have thought of as the present day.
* The Dark Compass is essentially dramatising the Lucy Westenra subplot from Stoker’s novel, though in a vastly different context. The book Lucy may be from the upper middle class but both versions of the character have a hedonistic outlook on life and enjoy the attention of various men. They are each targeted by Dracula once he begins his life in England, and are both naive victims of his evil.
* Zoe spends some time near the ruins of Whitby Abbey (founded 657 AD, largely rebuilt in the 1220s, dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540, and shelled during the First World War). The Abbey is mentioned often in the novel (in Mina Murray’s diary entries), though only as a distant landmark looming over the town.
* Dr Jack says he wants to specialise is mental health. In the book, the character is running an asylum. Also carried over from the novel is the idea that Van Helsing (here, Zoe Helsing) is Jack’s mentor.
* The way this episode presents Renfield, however, is at odds with the book. Stoker’s Renfield – he isn’t given a first name – is a troubled inmate of Jack Seward’s asylum. Here, he’s been repurposed as Dracula’s UK-based lawyer. In a book connection, it’s specified that he works for a firm called Hawkins & Wentworth (the novel’s Jonathan Harker is a partner in Hawkins & Harker).
* Able to hear the undead banging on their coffin lids in a cemetery, Count Dracula says, ‘The children of the night. What music they make.’ It’s a famous line from the book, although there he’s talking about the howling of wolves.
* An undead child refers to Lucy as a ‘bloofer lady’. In the book, this phrase is Bram Stoker’s idea of how a Cockney child would mispronounce ‘beautiful lady’.

Film, TV and literature allusions:
* Bringing a Victorian Dracula into the modern day recalls the terrific Hammer film Dracula A.D. 1972, which saw Christopher Lee’s Count vanquished in 1872 and then resurrected 100 years later. The movie Dracula 2000 does the same trick too, killing the Count in an 1897-set prologue before he comes back in, that’s right, the year 2000. The lead vampire in Blacula, meanwhile, comes from 1780 but is then awoken in the 1970s.
* There’s a long tradition of Dracula films and TV shows featuring a descendant of the Van Helsing who battled Count Dracula in the 19th century. See: Dracula A.D. 1972 (and its sequel, The Satanic Rites of Dracula); Dracula 2000; comedy films Love at First Bite and Stan Helsing; 1980s flick Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat; sci-fi film Dracula 3000; the TV show Demons; and many more.
* The BBC’s first adaptation of Dracula from 1977 also filmed on location in Whitby.
* Jack’s flat has wallpaper with a distinctive pattern taken from a famous stretch of carpet in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining.
* We’re told that Mina survived the events of episode one and, with the help from her wealthy father, set up the Jonathan Harker Foundation. Mina’s father is never mentioned in the novel, but he appears in the TV show Penny Dreadful where he is indeed very rich (and played by Timothy Dalton).
* On the walls of the Jonathan Harker Foundation hangs a portrait of Louis Jourdan, the actor who played Dracula for the BBC in 1977. It was painted by Mark Gatiss.
* Renfield being a lawyer honours a change made in the 1920s stage-play version of Dracula, which muddled up the characters of Renfield and Jonathan Harker. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation also retrofitted Renfield as a lawyer but still kept him as an asylum inmate too.
* Zoe has a dream sequence where Dracula wears a cape. Absent from the novel, the garment was introduced in the 1920s stage play and then many subsequent films.
* In a further nod towards Dracula A.D 1972, the terminally ill Zoe sleeps in a hospital ward called AD072.
* Just like the BBC’s 1977 adaptation, the number of men in love with Lucy has been reduced from three to two. Both series retain the unlucky-in-love Jack Seward and a brash American called Quincey, but the aristocratic Arthur has been dropped. (In the earlier version, Quincey was given Arthur’s surname, Holmwood, but here he’s still Quincey Morris.)
* Dracula tells us that some people survive their death and are conscious in their coffins or crematoriums. ‘The unfortunate few remain sentient as they rot,’ he ghoulishly tells Lucy. Steven Moffat had dabbled with this notion in the Doctor Who story Dark Water/Death in Heaven (2014), which had dead people still self-aware while being buried and cremated.
* At one point, we see Frank Renfield doing a newspaper’s crossword. The puzzle has been set by Sphinx, which is the real-life pseudonym of actor/writer Steve Pemberton, a friend of Mark Gatiss’s and a keen cruciverbalist. Also, the cryptic clue Frank reads aloud – ‘Unscrupulous doctor deployed tanner’s knife (12)’ – refers to Dracula’s biggest rival as the presiding icon of 19th-century horror. (Hint: rearrange the letters of the last two words.)
* When Lucy is staked – the only time we see a vampire staked in this whole series, remarkably – she quickly crumbles away into dust. The special effect is very reminiscent of how vamps are dispatched in TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
* The finale contains a visual reference to the end of Hammer’s original Dracula movie in 1958 – in both, the Van Helsing character sprints across a long table and tears down some curtains to reveal the sun.
* Immediately after this episode’s initial screening on BBC1, Mark Gatiss hosted a BBC2 documentary called In Search of Dracula, which investigated the novel’s creation and cinematic legacy.
* This series’s lead actor is not the first C Bang to have a Dracula connection. In the 1920s, Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, heard about a copyright-infringing film version of Dracula – the expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu. Angered and wanting financial reparation, she started legal proceedings and was advised by a man called CA Bang. Like his 21st-century namesake, CA Bang was Danish. He had worked for one of Bram Stoker’s publishers and now, in the 1920s, helped Florence hunt for illegal copies of Nosferatu. He also had a major influence in the authorised stage-play version of Dracula first performed in 1924. Not only did he act on Florence’s behalf in the negotiations with writer/producer Hamilton Deane, but it was Bang’s brother-in-law, future Upstairs Downstairs star Raymond Huntley, who ended up being cast as Count Dracula. When relations between Florence and Deane broke down, Bang helped commission a new script that Florence could mount as a rival production, but agent and client later fell out over his extortionate cut of the Dracula earnings (a ‘vampirically high’ 25 per cent, as historian David J Skal has put it).

Review: When it was published in May 1897, Dracula was a thoroughly modern novel. It may have been dealing with ancient folklore and a mythological monster, but Stoker was writing a cutting-edge story and he filled his text with mentions of new technology – phonographs, typewriters, telegraphy, Kodak photographs – as well as contemporary concepts such as the ‘new woman’ (a trend for more assertive and independent women in British society).

The book was very timely, in fact, because the world was changing in many long-lasting ways. Dracula was published in the same month as the first ever wireless telegraph signal sent across open water (conducted by Guglielmo Marconi at the Bristol Channel). The previous year had seen Sigmund Freud coin the term psychoanalysis; the year before that, the Lumière brothers had invented the cinema experience and physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had discovered X-rays. Dracula was published four months after the word ‘computer’ was first used to describe a mechanical calculating device. It wasn’t the only forward-thinking genre story to come out of 1897 either: in that year, HG Wells published both The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds. We might not think about it now, but Bram Stroker’s book was right up-to-the-minute and progressive.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s adaptation acknowledges and reflects this vividly in its third and final episode, which moves Count Dracula from his home of the 1890s onto the foreign shores of the 2020s. As well as a daring plot twist (which wasn’t mentioned in any publicity material – even to the extent of the writers blatantly lying about it), the 12-decade shift means each episode has its own distinct feel. After the Gothic sweep of The Rules of the Beast, and the Agatha Christie tone of Blood Vessel, The Dark Compass is *gleamingly* modern. Dracula’s foes are not a terrified bunch of middle-class Christians (as in the novel), but a well-funded organisation straight out of a techno-thriller. London is full of laser-beam night clubs, artfully lit exteriors, swanky hotels, swish cars and shiny architecture. Characters use smartphones and social media and take selfies.

Some viewers reacted negatively to this third instalment, in part because of the new setting. But the move allows the series to do some very clever things with the material. For a start, it takes away the ‘safeness’ we instinctively feel when we watch a thriller set in a quasi-Victorian fantasyland. The Dark Compass is not set in fog-bound streets populated by cheeky Cockney prostitutes and mutton-chopped coppers from the Yard. It’s in the here and fucking now. Also, the ‘new woman’ references in Stoker’s novel were hardly radical feminism and are always in need of a rethink. Stoker was acknowledging that women’s roles in society were changing, but he still only featured two main female characters. Mina is saddled with misogynist cliches, becoming both a caring mother figure for the male heroes and their efficient secretary, and gets less and less agency as the story goes on. Meanwhile, her friend Lucy is presented as a flighty young girl who succumbs to Dracula very easily then has to be killed. (One reading of the book is that she’s punished for flirting with multiple men; the monogamous Mina survives.) In The Dark Compass, though, things are more complex. Zoe is the episode’s cleverest character – guiding others, outwitting Count Dracula and making the ultimate sacrifice. Meanwhile, rebooting Lucy as a 21st-century woman means she is a richer, deeper character than Bram Stoker ever wrote. She’s slightly older, a lot smarter, and significantly more in command of her sexuality. All this makes her more sympathetic as Dracula manipulates and abuses her.

Just generally, the 2020 Dracula is a series that does audacious and engaging things with the established mythology. It’s a respectful yet far from dogmatic adaptation, but more importantly it’s also incredibly entertaining. The scripts balance horror with humour, humanity with hubris, while the cast is mostly excellent and the direction never anything less than stylish and insightful. Sequel please.

Nine experiences catalogued somewhere in your endless chattering libraries out of 10

Conan the Destroyer (1984, Richard Fleischer)

 For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 17 March 2020
Format: A secondhand DVD.
Seen before? No.

Review: Born a year after the end of the First World War, the Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis began his career a year after the end of the Second World War. For six decades, his name was emblazoned across the credits of popular movies in a whole host of genres – sci-fi romp Barbarella, gritty cop drama Serpico, sleazy revenge flick Death Wish, the campy Flash Gordon, horror films Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Dead Zone, Evil Dead II and Hannibal, and many more.

Some were successful, both critically and financially, but other projects floundered. Reading up on his career, you get the sense of him being an optimistic huckster – a money-raiser supreme with his fingers in many pies. ‘Soon Mr De Laurentiis was founding and closing production companies with dizzying speed, often selling the rights to his old films to secure the financing for his new ones,’ said the New York Times in De Laurentiis’s 2010 obituary. But today he is perhaps best remembered for his work on epics such as the 1970s remake of King Kong, David Lynch’s Dune, and the prehistoric melodrama Conan the Barbarian. These were big-budget, large-scale and grandiose endeavours, as was the latter’s sequel: 1984’s Conan the Destroyer.

The director of the 1982 original, John Milius, was unavailable to return for film two – he was busy making the crass Soviet-invasion story Red Dawn. But star Arnold Schwarzenegger was under contract to De Laurentiis so therefore compelled to pick up Conan’s sword again. Activating the sequel option in Arnie’s deal actually meant the actor couldn’t do a project he favoured – a science-fiction thriller by an up-and-coming director. Thankfully for pop-culture posterity, James Cameron and his producer Gale Ann Hurd were so keen on employing Schwarzenegger that they delayed the filming of The Terminator, allowing him to retain both roles. (The eight-month postponement also gave them time to hone the script and rethink plans for a cost-cutting shoot in Canada.)

Conan the Destroyer’s story has the echo of a fairy-tale adventure. Arnie’s Conan is given a quest by a powerful queen: to accompany and protect an important princess (Olivia d’Abo, later of The Wonder Years) who’s fated to retrieve a magical horn. At first all this seems a superficial retread of the first film, but the longer it goes on the more you realise that – without Milius’s militarist-fetishist obsession – it’s a bit earthier and grungier.

Sadly, it’s no less boring. This is a film almost completely devoid of any character development, and the lengthy fight scenes and episodic structure fail to keep the interest. The cast is also hugely variable in ability. The nominal villain is played by Superman II‘s Sarah Douglas, who’s game enough and adds some sparkle, while Grace Jones is certainly memorable as a bandit called Zula who joins Conan’s mission. But elsewhere there’s Wilt Chamberlain – an NBA legend who once claimed to have slept with 20,000 women – as the queen’s duplicitous henchman, while Schwarzenegger constantly looks like he’d rather be elsewhere.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘Universal had E.T. on the brain. The company had made so much money on Spielberg’s blockbuster that the executives decided that Conan, too, should be made into family entertainment. Somebody actually calculated that if Conan the Barbarian had been rated PG instead of R, it would have sold 50 per cent more tickets… But you couldn’t make Conan the Barbarian into Conan the Babysitter. He was not a PG character. He was a violent guy who lived for conquest and revenge…. “You are wimping out,” I told [studio executives]. “You are not being true to what Conan is about…” It was no use. In the end I was stuck with these decisions because I was bound by a contract.’

Three juggling apples out of 10

Next: Dave

Dracula: Blood Vessel (2020, Damon Thomas)

SPOILER WARNING: These reviews reveal plot twists.
You can read my review of episode one, The Rules of the Game, here.

En route to England, the passengers and crew of a cargo ship realise a killer is aboard – and is picking them off one by one…

Episode: 2 of 3. Broadcast: BBC1, Thursday 2 January 2020; Netflix, Saturday 4 January 2020. Written by: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Directed by: Damon Thomas

Setting: On a ship called the Demeter, sailing from an unnamed city on the Black Sea to Whitby in England. It’s 1897, not long after the events of the first episode. The voyage lasts around four weeks. A coda scene then takes place on the foreshore at Whitby; some time has passed…

Major characters:

* Count Dracula (Claes Bang) had already booked his place on the Demeter before his encounter with the nuns in episode one – his plan is to flee to Britain and gorge himself on the blood of that country’s vibrant population. As the ship sets sail, Dracula maintains the appearance of a suave nobleman, but behind the scenes he periodically slaughters a member of the crew or one of the other passengers. Part of his motivation is that, by feeding on someone’s blood, he gains their knowledge – he murders a deckhand from Bavaria, for example, just so he can speak German to an aristocrat. As the disappearances mount up – Dracula dumps the drained corpses overboard – he enjoys taunting everyone by talking about there being a killer in plain sight. But the Count’s blood lust is getting the better of him and he takes more and more risks and kills more openly and more gruesomely. We then learn that he is not travelling alone. There’s a mystery passenger in cabin nine. No one is allowed in there, but we hear occasional coughs and heavy breathing. It’s eventually revealed that the occupant is Sister Agatha, Dracula’s adversary from the previous episode. She comes in handy when the Count is then able to convince the others that she’s the killer and they attempt to hang her. But Agatha gets the better of Dracula and – just as they’re approaching Whitby – scuttles the ship, leaving him to sink to the seabed in a coffin. After a period of time, the Count breaks free and swims ashore. He’s finally made it to England… But then a helicopter swoops in, he’s caught in its searchlight, and armed police units surround him. It seems that more than a century has gone by while he was in the water…

* At first, Sister Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells) appears to be in some framing scenes set after the main events of the episode – ie, the same format as the Agatha/Jonathan scenes from The Rules of the Beast. In an old, stone, curved room, she and Count Dracula sit across a table from each other and discuss his experiences on the Demeter: ‘It’s a long and complex story,’ he teases. Their dialogue is fruity, even creeping towards flirty, as she questions him. But then Agatha starts to have doubts… When we left her in the first episode, Dracula was killing her fellow nuns, so how did she escape the covent? Why does she feel peculiar? In the Count’s story, who is the mystery passenger stashed away out of sight in cabin nine? It then dawns on her – and us – that *she’s* the mystery passenger stashed away out of sight in cabin nine. Dracula has been feeding on her, and a kind of psychic link has allowed them to talk in her mind. Why didn’t Dracula simply kill her at the convent? He’s making her last because he recognises that she’s special: she has a lot of fascinating knowledge for him to soak up. He also *admires* her. (Not that this would stop him murdering her once she’s served her purpose.) When the survivors assume Agatha has been killing their friends, they try to hang her, but she outwits everyone. Claiming to be a vampire (this bold move visibly impresses Dracula), she then exposes Dracula’s evil nature, sets him on fire and watches as he dives into the sea. Agatha knows that her time is running out: after all, a powerful vampire has been drinking her blood. So she resolves to sink the Demeter, to make sure no remnant of the Count reaches England. She dies with a smile on her face…

* Captain Yuri Sokolov (Jonathan Aris) and his ship have been hired by a man in Britain, who he knows as Mr Balaur. We later learn that the enigmatic Balaur has been engineering events: he also arranged for several of the guests to be aboard for a variety of false reasons. The word balaur is Romanian for a mythological, many-headed dragon. Seeing how Dracula’s surname is a corruption of ‘son of dragon’, it’s no surprise when we learn who Mr Balaur really is… Cynical and weary, Sokolov is relieved of his command once Agatha wakes up and gets free from cabin nine. But he’s also a brave man who insists on helping her combat Dracula and he even goes down with his ship.

* Dr Sharma (Sacha Dhawan) is travelling with his deaf and dumb daughter. He’s a scientist with an especial interest in the undead. In fact, in his first scene he encounters a zombie while investigating a coffin lid with scratches on the inside. Dracula has arranged for Sharma to be aboard so he can feed on his blood and gain his scientific knowhow.

* Before the Demeter leaves its port, a lad called Marius (Samuel Blenkin) happens to see a crew member die in a local hospital. So he assumes Piotr’s identity and takes over his job. Unfortunately for Marius, he misses the salient info that deckhand Piotr was killed by a vampire… A very specific vampire, we later learn. 

* Lord Ruthven (Patrick Walshe McBride), his wife Dorabella, Lady Ruthven (Lily Dodsworth-Evans) and his manservant Adisa (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) are travelling as a group, and have their own little psycho drama going on. The couple are newly married, and are heading for America, but there’s barely disguised sexual tension between Lord R and Adisa. Dorabella becomes an early victim of Dracula’s (‘I’m a vampire,’ he brazenly tells her while they chat alone on the deck), while the naive Lord Ruthven is seduced by the Count’s power and Adisa is goaded into risking everyone’s lives.

* Grand Duchess Valeria of Augsburg (Catherine Schell), a German aristo in her 70s, is travelling alone. When she meets Dracula she thinks he seems familiar. ‘Oh, dear lady,’ he says. ‘I promise to be as familiar as you like.’ Then, when she discusses her 18th birthday party and Dracula ‘guesses’ that she was given a pineapple as a present, she realises that he was there. They met six decades earlier, when he of course looked the same as he does in 1897.

* An unnamed woman (Dolly Wells) appears on Whitby’s foreshore when Dracula climbs up out of the sea. ‘Welcome to England, Count Dracula,’ she says. ‘What kept you?’ He can’t help but notice that she looks exactly like Sister Agatha.

Connections to the novel:
* Count Dracula, the Demeter’s captain and Sister Agatha are the only characters in this episode who come from the novel.
* The voyage of the Russian schooner Demeter takes up just five pages in the book. After the ship runs aground off Whitby, a local newspaper publishes two articles on the incident. The character of Mina Murray had seen the ship in trouble, so takes cuttings and pastes them into her diary. One edition reprints the captain’s log in full, which details several mysterious deaths among the crew (there are no paying passengers in the novel).
* Speaking of shipwrecks, Dracula author Bram Stoker died in London on 20 April 1912 – just five days after the most famous wreck in history, the Titanic.
* The Demeter’s home port is not named here, but in the book it’s the town of Varna in Bulgaria. We also never learn the name of the ship’s captain. Not even Mina Murray, who attends his funeral and writes about it in her diary, seems to know what he was called.
* Stoker had Dracula spending most of the journey in a wooden crate in the Demeter’s hold. But here he’s travelling openly as a passenger (he boards the ship at dusk, wearing sunglasses). ‘We just reasoned it out,’ says co-writer Steven Moffat. ‘He’s Count Dracula. He lives in a castle. He’s a nobleman. He’s gonna travel in a nice cabin and keep the curtains shut. Why would he lie in a box?!’
* In this series, Count Dracula doesn’t seem overly concerned with the gender of his victims – he feeds on Jonathan in episode one, and now flirts with Lord Ruthven. Although sometimes presented in pop culture solely as a woman-chaser, the book Dracula probably feeds on Harker and attempts to drink Dr Seward’s blood. He also attacks Mina while her husband is sleeping in the same bed, which some readers interpret as a twisted ménage à trois. The academic Christopher Craft once argued that the primal power of the story is due to ‘Dracula’s hovering interest in Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat… that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male.’ (Incidentally, some biographers think Bram Stoker was gay – though like scholars who question Shakespeare’s sexuality, there’s no firm evidence for this.)
* Sharma refers to the undead as ‘nosferatu’, which is a term used in Stoker’s text (and then famously by the 1922 German film adaptation). We know Stoker took the word from British author Emily Gerard, who had published articles on Transylvanian history and folklore. But where it came from originally is more of an issue. It’s not a real Romanian word, and Gerard probably misheard or badly transcribed another term entirely.
* Lord Ruthven comes to see himself as an acolyte of Dracula, so he’s an equivalent of book character Renfield, a naive asylum inmate who is manipulated by Dracula into helping him.
* While at sea, the Demeter is always shrouded in fog. As well as helping the production team to film exterior scenes in a studio, this detail honours Stoker’s novel. ‘Only God can guide us in the fog, which seems to move with us,’ writes the captain in his log, while later Van Helsing talks about Dracula’s ability to summon and command the elements.

Film, TV and literature allusions:
* The Demeter voyage is often skipped over or heavily abbreviated in adaptations. One big exception is 1922’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Some of that silent film’s most striking images – and it is a film made up of many striking images – are of the Dracula character in the hold of the ship.
* In an early scene, Captain Sokolov has a nightmare. He sees a severed hand crawling across the floor – a clear reference to Thing T Thing, a sentient hand in the 1960s sitcom The Addams Family and its film adaptations.
* The name Lord Ruthven is taken from a vampire character that predates Dracula by 78 years. He originated in John Polidori’s 1819 novel The Vampyr and is one of the earliest vampires in English literature. Polidori had, in turn, purloined the name from a recent non-vamp novel by Lady Caroline Lamb. Both Lamb and Polidori were friends of Lord Byron and each based their characters on the poet. In an additional Byronic connection, The Vampyr was Polidori’s contribution to the same challenge to write a horror story that produced Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein – a contest that Byron instigated.
* The urbane, sophisticated Dracula we see in this series – a man who can mingle in polite society – was really born in the 1920s stage-play version of the story. In Stoker’s novel, and Nosferatu, the Count is an ugly, repellent, contemptuous monster. He ‘seduces’ people through hypnotism, coercion and threat, not charm or sexiness. But the play had rebooted him as a debonair gentleman in evening wear. That concept was quickly carried over into the 1931 movie with Bela Lugosi and became the default image of Dracula in the public consciousness. In Blood Vessel, when attending dinner aboard the Demeter, Count Dracula dresses in a way that immediately brings to mind Bela Lugosi. He even wears a similar medallion.
* Dr Sharma’s line that ‘there *are* such things’ as the undead is a quotation from the 1931 Dracula in which actor Edward Van Sloan (Van Helsing) directly addresses the audience and discusses the film’s subject matter.
* The mystery cabin aboard the Demeter is cabin number nine. This is a deliberate reference to the TV series Inside No.9, a horror/comedy anthology written by and starring Mark Gatiss’s friends Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. They didn’t learn about this Easter egg until transmission.
* On a wall inside the Demeter hangs a portrait of Christopher Lee (Dracula in multiple films from 1958 to 1976). It’s of his character in the 1964 Hammer film The Devil-Ship Pirates.
* The Count’s journey from eastern Europe to Whitby had previously been expanded into a full-length story in the 2012 novel Dracula’s Demeter by Doug Lamoreux. Coincidentally, that book was nominated for an award named after the vampire Lord Ruthven.

Review: Film and TV adaptations of Dracula always have to deal with the fact that, in the novel, the Count himself barely features. He’s a big enough character in the opening four chapters, but is then almost entirely absent until the finale. We learn about the consequences of his actions, but hardly ever witness him actually carrying out his evil. Despite his subsequent fame and cachet, he’s mostly an off-screen character.

Blood Vessel, the middle episode of the 2020 series Dracula, rights this wrong by staying with the Count rather than following the book’s format of cutting to the heroes back in England. The script keeps him front and centre, and he’s often our point-of-view character. Co-writer Mark Gatiss has spoken about a desire to make Dracula the ‘hero of his own story’, and we get to know the vampire in this episode even more deeply than in The Rules of the Beast. The 2020 Dracula is as evil, callous and selfish as any we’ve seen before – but a combination of great writing and charismatic acting make him so watchable. Whisper it, but perhaps we even root for him as he murders his way through the Demeter’s crew and passengers. (No? Just me?)

Blood Vessel is also ignoring Bram Stoker’s lead in another way. By focusing on the voyage of the Demeter the script is taking a gap in the established Dracula story and embellishing it into something original. Something fresh and new. This kind of storytelling has happened before, of course. Huge swathes of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films take place in Laketown, a settlement that features only fleetingly in JRR Tolkien’s novel. But the masterstroke here is to realise that a ship on a month-long voyage is a ready-made location for a horror story: ‘the best idea Stoker never used,’ according to co-writer Steven Moffat.

The confined setting populated by well-off passengers and working-class crew also means there’s an Agatha Christie mood to this episode – it’s there in the clash of strangers, the dinning-room etiquette, people with secrets, people pretending to be something they’re not, and of course a murderer on the loose. It’s And Then There Were None, but And Then There Were None where we know who dunnit. (In fact, Christie did write stories about murders on ships – Problem at Sea (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). If only she’d thought to add a vampire, eh?) That’s not to imply that we have any old-fashioned cosiness or drawing-room safeness here. There’s an unsettling, horror-movie tone to Blood Vessel throughout, a sensation heightened by isolating the characters in the middle of nowhere with a savage killer. ‘Part Dracula, part Alien,’ Claes Bang has called this episode.

The guest cast could be stronger, and some of the passenger characters feel like they have story potential that goes untapped, but Bang and Wells are again sensational. You could watch scenes of Dracula and Agatha sparring with each other until the sea runs dry.

Nine marks of horror and oppression out of 10

Next: The Dark Compass

Dracula: The Rules of the Beast (2020, Jonny Campbell)

SPOILER WARNING: These reviews reveal plot twists.

After terrifying experiences at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, an English lawyer recounts his story to an inquisitive nun…

Episode: 1 of 3. Broadcast: BBC1, Wednesday 1 January 2020; Netflix, Saturday 4 January 2020. Written by: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Directed by: Jonny Campbell

Setting: The Rules of the Beast, the opening episode of this three-part Dracula adaptation, plays out in two timelines. The ‘present’ scenes take place at a convent in Budapest, Hungary, while we see extensive flashbacks to a few weeks earlier in Castle Dracula, Transylvania. An on-screen caption tells us the date is 1897, the year in which Bram Stoker’s original novel was published. When the book is set, by the way, has long been an issue of debate among Draculaologists. Stoker’s private notes suggest that he intended it to be 1893, as do a few references in the text (21 September falling on a Thursday, for example, and a mention of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot having recently died). The date didn’t make it into the published book, though a minor character does say that 1873 was ‘nigh twenty years past’. The 2009 novel Dracula: The Un-dead – an official sequel written by Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grandnephew, and Ian Holt – retcons the first book’s story as taking place in 1888.

Major characters:

* Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan) is a mild-mannered lawyer. He’s left his loving fiancée, Mina, back in England while he travels all the way to Transylvania in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to meet an elderly aristocrat called Count Dracula. Dracula, who is buying property near London, is initially a welcoming host but then insists that Jonathan stay much longer than he had planned. It’s ostensibly to help the Count refine his English, but Jonathan soon realises that he is Dracula’s prisoner. He also comes to understand that the Count, who starts to look younger and younger with each passing day, is not entirely human… A month or so later, Jonathan has escaped the castle and ended up at a nearby convent. He’s bald and scared and clearly been through a traumatic time. He’s questioned by two nuns and the process leads to him realising some awful truths. Count Dracula is a vampire and was feeding on Jonathan’s blood. After a confrontation, Dracula killed Jonathan, who was then revived as an undead creature. At the convent, the fact he is now a vampire dawns on Jonathan – and his blood lust begins to grow. He attempts suicide to prevent himself attacking anyone, but vampires cannot kill themselves. Then Dracula arrives at the covent and offers to put Jonathan out of his misery in return for an invitation inside… John Heffernan initially plays Harker with Victorian affability, or the kind of pure innocence of a silent-movie character. He then smartly descends into mania and desolation as the character’s plight becomes darker. In the scenes with the nuns he seems a genuinely broken man.

* Sister Agatha (Dolly Wells) is the nun who wants to know all about Jonathan’s experiences at the castle: she interrogates him while they sit opposite each other like a police detective and a suspect. Another nun is there too, quietly watching. Agatha is chatty, upbeat, no-nonsense, no-frills – and seems to know an awful lot of the undead, which she describes as a contagion. She also has a pragmatic attitude to religion (‘Faith is a sleeping draught for children and simpletons’) as well as a wide-eyed wonder and curiosity. When the evil Count Dracula arrives at the convent’s gate and threatens to murder everyone within, she can’t help but find it *exciting*. Dracula recognises Agatha as a serious foe, especially when he learns that she has been training her fellow nuns in vamp-slaying combat. When he tastes a drop of her blood, which she had sarcastically flicked at him through the gate, he then uses his vampiric abilities to deduce that her full name is Agatha Van Helsing… Very possibly the best performance in the whole episode, Dolly Wells plays Agatha with a huge amount of glee and not a small amount of intelligence. She is a thoroughly modern character, full of Blackadder-style anachronistic attitudes and a proto-feminist zeal. She’s incredibly entertaining.

* We first see Mina Murray (Morfydd Clark) obliquely. We catch glimpses of her, shot out of focus or obscured by lens flares, as Jonathan thinks about his fiancée while reading a letter. Much later in the episode, we realise that the nun sitting with Agatha during the interview scenes has actually been Mina the whole time. Jonathan hasn’t recognised her because his mind is addled after his trauma. We fail to recognise her because the writing distracts us from the obvious (and the fact she’s got a habit on)… This production hasn’t been the only time Morfydd Clark has played a ‘double’ role. In the 2020 film The Personal History of David Copperfield, she was cast as two separate characters. (Your current blogger failed to spot the repetition both times.)

* Count Dracula (Claes Bang) initially appears to be a wizened old man, all wrinkled and decayed and bent-over. He’s a jovial host… that is, until Jonathan Harker suggests only staying one night before returning to Britain. ‘No,’ says Dracula coldly; he wants Jonathan to stay for *weeks*. We soon learn the reason why: the vampire Count is feeding on the confused Jonathan, and as Jonathan fades and grows weaker, Dracula becomes both stronger and younger-looking. He is a totally amoral creature, capable of savage violence and capricious evil. He can control bats and hide himself *inside* a dog. But away from all that nastiness, he’s also hugely charismatic and quite a lot of fun (‘I’m undead, I’m not unreasonable,’ he says in a trailer-baiting moment). This is an articulate, clever Dracula. A sexy Dracula. A rock-n’roll Dracula. A you-can’t-help-but-like-him Dracula. It’s there in the writing, of course, but huge credit must also go to Claes Bang. The creative team have spoken about wanting to cast a relative unknown as their Dracula. Free of any baggage from previous big roles, Bang is able to be fresh, dynamic and unpredictable. It’s a star-making performance.

* Elena (Lujza Richter) is a vampire who Jonathan discovers trapped in the bowels of Castle Dracula. The damaged, unbalanced Elena is one of the Count’s ‘Brides’ – beings he keeps locked up because he has a desire to reproduce. (In the next box over is a vampiric baby.)

* The Mother Superior (Joanna Scanlan) is a graphically violent victim of Dracula once the vampire has gained access to the convent. He beheads her.

Connections to the novel:
* The flashback sections of The Rules of the Beast broadly follow the plot of Bram Stoker’s opening four chapters – at least to begin with. The book begins entirely from Jonathan Harker’s point of view as he: travels to Castle Dracula; is warned off by suspicious locals; encounters a driver who we later realise was Dracula in disguise; meets the Count properly, who at first seems genteel and polite; cuts himself, much to Dracula’s excitement; has his mirror broken; realises he’s a prisoner, and so on – all moments dramatised here.
* The ‘present’ stuff, however, is new material. In the novel, Jonathan *does* end up recuperating at a convent after he escapes Castle Dracula. He even meets a character called Sister Agatha. But he’s not been turned into a vampire, she has no knowledge of the undead, and she does not interrogate him about his experiences.
* In a letter to Jonathan, Mina mentions their friend ‘Dr Holmwood’ – presumably a conflation of book characters Arthur Holmwood and Dr Jack Seward.
* The idea of Count Dracula being a very old man who only starts to look younger once he feeds on blood is from the novel. When they first meet in Stoker’s story, Jonathan describes Dracula as ‘a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot’. Weeks later, after he’s escaped the castle and returned to London, Jonathan is stunned to see the Count on Piccadilly – and the vampire is visibly more youthful (‘a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard’). This 2020 adaptation, therefore, speeds the process up a huge amount: Dracula seems to look about 45 while Jonathan is still his prisoner. Most film and TV Draculas ignore this plot point completely, a big exception being 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
* Dracula is purchasing property in Britain – specifically Carfax Abbey in Purfleet, according to legal papers seen on screen. In the novel, however, the house is only referred to as Carfax (‘no doubt a corruption of the old “quatre face”, as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass’). It’s been called Carfax Abbey in numerous film adaptations since 1931, but the only abbey in the book is the long-ruined Whitby Abbey.
* In the book, we meet three female vampires when they attempt to seduce Jonathan at the castle. Many adaptations – such as the BBC’s Count Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stroker’s Dracula and Mel Brooks’s spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It – play up the characters’ sexiness and essentially present them as whores eager for an orgy. Here, however, the ‘Brides’ have been distilled into one character and dirtied up by turning her into a sex-abuse victim.
* The epistolary format of Stoker’s novel – which is made up entirely of diary entries, letters, telegrams, memos and newspaper extracts – is acknowledged by the fact that Jonathan writes a manuscript about his experiences at the castle. But there’s a twist: we later learn that he’s unknowingly written phrases like ‘Dracula is my master’ and ‘Dracula will be obeyed’ over and over.
* In the book, Mina travels out to eastern Europe after Jonathan has escaped the castle. But she doesn’t pretend to be a nun and he doesn’t fail to recognise her.
* One of the biggest switches from Stoker’s story is the way the script combines two characters into one. In the original novel, Sister Agatha is decidedly minor presence. Her entire appearance constitutes one letter she writes to Mina: it makes up a quarter of one per cent of the book’s total word count. Much later, of course, we meet the Dutch professor Dr Abraham Van Helsing, an expert on the undead and the nominal leader of the heroes who are attempting to defeat Count Dracula. It is a masterstroke on a number of levels to combine Agatha and Abraham into one person: it brings Van Helsing into the story much earlier; it means Van Helsing and Dracula square off before he sets sail for Britain; and it adds some female agency to Stoker’s male-dominated story.

Film, TV and literature allusions:
* The exterior of Castle Dracula was filmed at Orava Castle in Slovakia, the same location used in Nosferatu (1922) – the first ever cinematic adaptation of Stoker’s novel. albeit an unofficial one.
* The castle interiors have an echo of the designs used in Universal’s 1931 version of Dracula. (In an additional connection, the sets were built at Bray Studios in Berkshire, which is where many of Hammer Films’ Draculas were made.)
* In a letter to Johnathan, Mina mentions ‘a maid in the Rose and Crown’ – it’s a sneaky reference to the character of Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) from the 1892-set Doctor Who episode The Snowmen, which was written by Steven Moffat.
* As Dracula grows younger-looking, his accent also evolves – from the kind of eastern-European cadence we associate with the character thanks to Bela Lugosi to a more neutral English.
* Dracula’s famous line, quoted here, that he ‘never drinks… wine’ isn’t from the book. It first appeared in the 1931 movie.
* This Count Dracula admits that he is centuries old, and Agatha tells us he was once a prince, but there’s no confirmation that he is meant to be the historical figure Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler. Bram Stoker took the name Dracula from a history book that talked about Vlad’s family history, and many film and TV adaptations – most notably Francis Ford Coppola’s – have run with the idea that the fictional vampire and the real-life warlord are the same person. But it’s debatable how much Stoker knew about the true history and his novel only gives vague, contradictory clues to Dracula’s past as a regional ruler.
* While staying at the castle, Harker has a fevered dream in which he’s having sex with his fiancee, Mina. But she is then surreally replaced by Dracula in the same on-the-top position – a moment that rhymes with a scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
* Claes Bang’s Dracula has undoubted similarities to Christopher Lee’s. Lee first played the Count in the 1958 Hammer version, then reprised the part about 37 times over the next 20 years. The 2020 Dracula’s height, posture, confidence and cape often make you think of Lee, while the moment when we first see a full-blooded, on-screen lunge for someone’s neck could be straight out of a Technicolor Hammer movie.
* When Jonathan leans out of his bedroom window and sees someone inexplicably climbing the castle’s outer wall, the staging is very reminiscent of a similar moment in the BBC’s first Dracula adaptation from 1977. (In that version, it was Count Dracula scaling the walls – as in the book. Here, it’s actually Elena.)
* Sister Agatha – referred to as ‘Atheist Nun’ when the writers were outlining their plot – was influenced by Father Sandor, a pragmatic monk played by Andrew Keir in the 1966 Hammer film Dracula: Prince of Darkness.
* Sister Agatha mentions she has a ‘detective friend’ in London – a nod, of course, to Sherlock Holmes. (Moffat and Gatiss co-created and wrote the BBC’s modern-day reboot of Sherlock.)
* This Dracula cannot stand sunlight, an idea that’s absent from Stoker. In the 1897 book, the Count is often out and about in the daytime. We’re told it reduces his powers, not that it destroys him. The idea that the sun can kill a vampire first appeared in Nosferatu and quickly became a standard part of the mythology.
* Jonathan Harker is not turned into a vampire in Stoker’s novel, but it has been done in the movies before. It’s a spoiler, but you can learn which film does it especially well by clicking on this link.

Review: One of the reasons that Dracula is such a wonderful book to adapt for film and TV is that it’s an incredibly fertile text. Bram Stoker’s storytelling is full of ideas and themes and subtexts as well as twists, adventure and tortured emotion. It’s also a fascinating matrix of references – to folklore, superstition, myth, culture, technology, history and Shakespeare. But the novel is not what you’d call high literature. It’s a potboiler; a very enjoyable read, but not exactly polished writing. Stoker was guilty of a whole host of stylistic sins: purple prose, plot holes, continuity mistakes, risible coincidences, anatopisms, patronising regional dialects, longueurs (especially in the book’s second half), unintended innuendos (‘I can see the characteristics of the vampire coming in her face’) and interchangeable characters who have no journey (and sometimes have different coloured hair in different scenes).

All this means that, for almost a century now, filmmakers have been able to mine the book for its storyline, characters and concepts, but have all felt free to reshape the material in interesting ways. The Rules of the Beast takes huge liberties with the novel but never loses the vital Dracula-ness. What it’s doing, essentially, is using the book as a foundation but then building a whole new superstructure on top.

Co-writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have taken existing characters and concepts but then asked certain questions. How would someone actually react to being a prisoner? What would a centuries-old, aristocratic vampire do if he wanted to engineer a move to a new country? This rigour means the characters – especially Jonathan, Dracula and Agatha – are all richer and more fascinating than their cardboard equivalents in the book, and just generally Dracula is being given a modern makeover. We might be in 1897, but this episode feels thoroughly 21st century in its intent.

Using the style they honed on BBC1’s Sherlock – fast but not rushed, plenty of mysteries being eked out, characters who talk in crafted, witty lines, reversals of expectation – Moffat and Gatiss also brilliantly blend various tones. As well as drama and thriller aspects, The Rules of the Beast is shameless in being *funny*. You don’t usually get that with Dracula adaptations. But the humour doesn’t stop the episode also being creepy, scary, even shocking. Whether it’s a living corpse climbing out of a small box or Dracula wearing the dead Jonathan Harker’s face as a mask, The Rules of the Beast is genuinely horrific at times. As Claes Bang has pointed out, ‘If you make people relax, they jump even more when it goes to hell!’

Nine mountaintops from which your whole life is at last visible, from beginning to end, out of 10

Next: Dracula: Blood Vessel 

Around the World in 80 Days (2004, Frank Coraci)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. 

Watched: 26 February 2020
Format: A DVD bought online.
Seen before? Yes, on TV a few years ago.

Review: It would be fair to say that everyone involved in this adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel has done better work elsewhere. The leads are Jackie Chan, whose go at playing the valet Passepartout won’t trouble any summary of his stellar career, and Steve Coogan, an actor who’s had long-lasting triumphs in TV comedy. Director Frank Coraci made the funny Adam Sandler movie The Wedding Singer (1998), while a bevvy of successful actors queue up for roles much tinier than they’re used to: Jim Broadbent, John Cleese, Luke and Owen Wilson, Kathy Bates and, rather incongruously, Arnold Schwarzenegger. More on his truly bizarre contribution later…

As well as being a new version of Verne’s travelogue adventure story, this 2004 film also acts as a remake of 1956’s 70mm epic starring David Niven. In a smart change from both of those sources, however, this Phileas Fogg has been repurposed. Coogan’s Victorian gentleman is a steampunk inventor, a forward-thinking man of science; a bit naive but also a bit dashing. He’s instantly a more engaging and likeable hero than either the placid, arrogant dullard of the book or Niven’s unflappable toff of the 1950s film. This Fogg even has doubts and a romance, and Coogan is reliably endearing.

We’re in 19th-century London, but it’s a Hollywood-ish echo of the real Britain: a place of mutton-chopped men and incompetent bobbies and grand architecture that no authentic Londoner would recognise. At the Bank of England, a Buddha statuette has been stolen by a Chinese man (Jackie Chan) who then needs somewhere to hide. He poses as a valet and very speedily gets a job working for local scientist Phileas Fogg. He lies that he’s a Frenchman (on his father’s side) and makes up the alias Passepartout on the spot.

Meanwhile, Fogg is frustrated when the patronising hierarchy at the Royal Academy of Sciences – led by Jim Broadbent’s cartoonish Lord Kelvin – refuse to take his scientific endeavours seriously. An argument soon leads to a challenge when Kelvin suggests that Fogg could not circumnavigate the globe in less than – you’ve guessed it – 80 days. Fogg accepts the wager, but he’s unaware that Passepartout was actually using Chinese whispers at the Academy meeting to coerce Kelvin into laying down the bet. Why? The Buddha statuette belongs to his village and he needs a way of taking it home. (Neat idea, this, giving Passepartout more agency in the action.)

This is a family film, so there’s zip and humour. The tone at first leans towards silly but not enough to unbalance things. Then, however, at the 20-minute mark, there’s a character introduction that tips the movie headfirst into childlike excess. Ewen Bremner shows up as Inspector Fix, the policeman on the Bank of England job. It is a performance of undisciplined lunacy, as irritating as it is unfunny. This is a film full of whimsical comedy and he still sticks out like a throbbing, uncomfortable thumb.

It also marks a change overall. From now on, for example, the pointless cameos begin to mount up – both dramatised historical figures (Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, the Wright brothers) and real people in bit-parts such as Richard Branson. Then, just as you’re doubting whether the film can get any odder, Arnold Schwarzenegger appears in a wig playing Prince Hapi, a Turkish nobleman with a vainglorious obsession for statues of himself. He also takes a shine to Monique Laroche, a perky artist who hooked up with Fogg and Passepartout in Paris for not exactly plausible reasons.

Filming actually began on Around the World in 80 Days before the role of Prince Hapi had been cast. The production team knew they wanted a big name – an old-fashioned star cameo in an epic movie – but the director has admitted that the character and his dialogue needed quite a rethink once Schwarzenegger came into the frame. This is because, with all the will in the world, Arnie is miscast. Ethnically, tonally, audibly, comedically – in no way is he right for the part, and it shows from the second he appears on screen, grinning inanely and hammering away at his lines.

Anyway, as the plot jumps from location to location – London, Paris, Turkey, India, China, several parts of America, with the actual travelling usually summed up in snappy animations – there are a few delights here and there. Jackie Chan gets to show off his martial-arts skills a few times, for example. The sequences are inventive, especially a fight in a Parisian art studio that results in a painting being created by accident, but are sometimes filmed and edited drably. It’s a disposable film, but raises a smile often enough to be watchable.

Six rubber underpants out of 10

Next: Conan the Destroyer

Dracula by Northern Ballet (2020, David Nixon)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: Castle Dracula and England, the late 19th century.

Faithful to the novel? This 100-minute ballet performance, filmed at Leeds Playhouse’s Quarry Theatre on 31 October 2019 and broadcast on BBC4 on 31 May 2020, sticks closely to Bram Stoker’s general storyline but condenses it down into key beats. English solicitor Johnathan Harker (Lorenzo Trossello) travels to a far-off land, where he meets an elderly creature called Dracula (Riku Ito) in order to conclude some kind of business deal. The demonic Dracula torments him, and even causes Jonathan to dream about the woman he’s left behind at home: the virtuous Mina Murray (Abigail Prudames). Harker is then visited by three overtly sexual women (Rachael Gillespie, Sarah Chun and Minju Kang). They’re close to feeding on his blood when Dracula intercedes and takes Johnathan for himself. The transfusion leads to Dracula looking young and virile, and he’s now played by principle dancer Javier Torres. (This detail from the book, of the Count initially appearing old and de-aging as he drinks blood, is almost always ignored in adaptations.) Dracula then departs, leaving Jonathan a prisoner. Back in (presumably) England, Mina’s friend Lucy Westenra (Antoinette Brooks-Daw) is being wooed by two suitors: Dr John Seward (Joseph Taylor) and Arthur Holmwood (Matthew Koon). She chooses to marry the latter. (The novel’s third would-be husband for Lucy, the American Quincy P Morris, does not appear in this version.) Meanwhile, Dracula is toying with a troubled prisoner called Renfield (Kevin Poeung), who we then learn is a mental patient of Seward’s. The vampire is also inveigling himself into the lives of Mina and Lucy. Lucy soon dies after being drained of blood by Dracula, despite the efforts of Seward, Holmwood and their friend Van Helsing (Ashley Dixon). After she has risen as an Undead, Van Helsing has her staked and beheaded. The men then seek out the evil Dracula, but the Count goes after Mina in revenge…

Best performance: ‘One of the most difficult things to get as a dancer is, I think, that connection to the audience,’ said Torres around the time he played Dracula in this televised performance. ‘You can be an amazing dancer, you can do amazing tricks, amazing jumps and turns, but if you do not connect with the audience your job is, kind of, pointless.’ Torres’s vampire certainly has the amazing tricks, jumps and turns. As an example of pure dance, his grace and power are unquestioned – whether in seducing a victim or climbing down a wall. He also swishes his Dracula cape around with confidence.

Best bit: While Harker is trying to resist the flirtatious Brides, his fiancée Mina appears on the other side of the stage as a portrayal of his innermost thoughts. She dances innocently, in contrast the sultry Brides, which nicely dramatises the torment and temptation Johnathan is going through.

Review: Ballet is actually mentioned within the first few pages of Bram Stoker’s novel. Travelling through the unfamiliar lands east of Vienna, Jonathan Harker describes some local women in his diary: ‘Most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them.’ This throwaway reference aside, it’s debatable whether the Gothic masterpiece is a suitable story to adapt for the medium. Stoker’s tale is full of simmering sexuality and evil threat, aspects that can be conveyed through body movement alone. But with no dialogue in a ballet performance, the storytelling lacks connective tissue. Watching Dracula by Northern Ballet, for example, surely requires prior knowledge of the storyline to fully appreciate what’s going on. The BBC4 broadcast begins with captions, giving an overview of the plot, but a new viewer will surely be missing out on a lot. Nevertheless, this production has a long and successful history. The Canadian choreographer-director David Nixon first staged a ballet version of Dracula in 1999 while artistic director of the BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio. He’s since restaged it for the Northern Ballet Theatre in Leeds since 2005. The performance as filmed by the BBC on Halloween 2019 uses minimal sets designed by Ali Allen, stark lighting by Tim Mitchell, and a selection of pre-existing music by Alfred Schnittke, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arvo Pärt and Michael Daugherty. It’s shot in an unadventurous proscenium style, with occasional close-ups. The dance craft is impressive, of course, especially the way power struggles are dramatised through movement. The staging also emphasises the sexuality in Stoker’s story. But some scenes test your patience, as does the cast’s self-congratulatory finale: an elaborate bow-taking ritual that lasts for two full minutes. You don’t get *that* in the movies.

Six cages out of 10