Dracula Gets Killed a Lot, but Never the Right Way  Part Two

Christopher Lee didn’t end it there on the library floor, blowin' in the wind. 

He returned eight years later (it apparently took Hammer Films screenwriters that long to figure out how) in 1966’s Dracula Prince of Darkness.  


The interest in vampires, and Lee’s star power, showed no sign of waning, so back he comes in a shower of blood (literally, as the corpse of an unlucky traveler is suspended over his ashes, and the throat slit).  


The flood of ketchup that cascades onto the dust signaled a new era for bloody excess in Hammer and other film companies.  (Although to be fair, Mario Bava had already shown some gorgeous gore of his own, six years earlier, in 1960’s Black Sunday, with nail-ridden masks driven onto human faces.  It was a black-and-white movie, though, which helped us keep our distance). 

The vampire king rises and puts the bite on Barbara Shelley (a great screamer and Hammer favorite at the time, who later admitted her screams in the film were dubbed by co-star Suzan Farmer), then he’s driven onto a frozen moat, where ice is shot out from under him (one idea Tonya Harding never thought of) and he drowns.  Why?  Running water can kill a bloodsucker, says the Van Helsing surrogate, Father Sandor (Andrew Keir underplayed him nicely); it’s the first time that particular rule was found in the undead canon.  

He rises again when a priest shatters the icy tomb in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave; Drac’s demise in this one is spectacularly preposterous.   Under his command, the heroine (Veronica Carlson) removes a massive crucifix that bars the gates of Castle Dracula.  The Christian monolith is hurled over a cliff and jams into the earth.  Of course, in the struggle with the hero, Dracula falls onto the same spot, and dies impaled on the crucifix.   Talk about deus ex machina. 

He is revived by black magic in Taste the Blood of Dracula, only to be reduced to bloody dust; in Scars of Dracula, the ashes are blood-resuscitated yet again, and Drac falls from the castle tower, struck by lightning.  And in the modern day versions that followed, Dracula A.D. l972 and Satanic Rites of Dracula, he’s simply back in action, with no resurrection scenes or explanations.  And he dies staked in each one (in the latter, crucified by a hawthorn bush).  

Lee grew rather naturally impatient with the repetitive nature and monotonous re-animations of the Dracula series, and Satanic was his last Drac.  Two years earlier, Lee had done a faithful but sadly very cheap Dracula for Jess Franco in l970, which returned to the intentions of Stoker’s original, as far as the budget allowed; no resonance there, though, and it’s pretty much a forgotten, and forgettable, film.  

But Dracula didn’t end there—he never ends, of course, as long as he makes money.

The most notable incarnation of him, before the Coppola version, was the Louis Jourdan opus for PBS.  It’s notable because it’s the first Dracula who is genuinely attractive and sensual (heavily so, for PBS), as well as being coldly sophisticated and powerful.   


Stephen King, in his must-read horror review Danse Macabre, holds Jourdan’s Dracula in esteem as a definitive performance.  One strong point for his supreme masculine sensuality is that for the first time onscreen the Vampire King embraces and teases the vampire women (who were mere ghostly presences in Bela Lugosi’s castle), enfolding them in his massive cape and suggesting an orgy without flesh, in the shadow of the grave. 

Another interesting incarnation around this same time was Jack Palance’s version of Dracula, directed by Dan Curtis, using the familiar zoom shots, quick cuts and ranting acting he’d patented in TV’s Dark Shadows.  Palance was stuck with a fillip that inevitably reduced the Count to a less formidable figure—the screenplay by Richard Matheson gave him a provenance, a warlike history with a thwarted love story.  Mina, of course, reminds the Count of his lost love, and off we go. 

Other than Karloff’s The Mummy, has there ever been a successful movie about lovers reincarnated?  The idea is as threadbare as having an amnesiac for a protagonist of a movie (Random Harvest, yuck). 

That brings me to Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker's Dracula.   The ending of which sucks. 

The movie is jeweled in cinematic pastiche, a gorgeous red-toned study in blood and obsession, its prelude set in a metaphorical Romanian kingdom where cut-out style representations (like the old silent silhouette film Adventures of Prince Ahmed) showed the battle of the Count’s forces against the Turks.  


Coppola then either worked off or added to his Catholic guilt by having Dracula’s beloved (Winona Ryder), believing him dead, drown herself; the church condemns her soul, and Drac (as Vlad) impales The Cross with his sword.  Blood gushes forth, and it’s on; for once the vampire has all the good will on his side as he rallies against the alleged evils of Romanian Catholicism. 

There follows the bizarre encounter with Jonathan Harker (Jesus God, Keanu Reeves?  Really?), where the warrior Count seems to have gone all out for floor-length silken robes, like Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, and he wears what look like curved crullers on his head—the most bizarrely disfiguring outré coiffure since Princess Leia’s cinnamon rolls over her ears.  

Gary Oldman is the Count; Oldman plays him as a frustrated romantic, a basic good guy turned evil through loss of love.  This doesn’t turn out to be such a hot idea.  Oldman is marvelous at dangerous eccentrics (like the Ming-like gambling boss Zorg in Fifth Element, the hoarder Carnegie in Book of Eli or the psychotic Russian in Air Force One) as well as trustworthy straight arrows (Sirius Black in the Potter films, Commissioner Gordon in the Batman series).   


But he’s wearing romance's face (as Dimmesdale in Demi Moore’s abortive Scarlet Letter or as Dracula here), he’s intense but colorless; he’s a sufferer for our sins, right up there with Jim Cavaziel’s Jesus, and that’s nobody’s idea of a good time. 

The ending of the Stoker novel (see Part One) depicted Dracula’s riproaring death in a few scant, powerful sentences.   It took Coppola ten minutes, as Mina (the reincarnation of Drac’s former love, natch) drags him to the altar he desecrated and forgives him.  She does drive the knife all the way through in one beautiful stroke, but we’re already too tired to appreciate it. 

Some may feel that I’m spitting on The Coppola Cross (a Romanian one at that) by disliking this movie, but the Dracula story goes peculiarly wrong in Coppola’s film—our sympathy for the Count inevitably weakens the horror.  It’s like seeing Jaws as a cute little minnow before you’re asked to be scared of him as a full grown shark; it simply doesn’t work.  Dino De Laurentiis said, “Nobody cry when Jaws die.”   Some may have cried at Dracula’s death in Coppola’s version, but there’s the problem—he’s supposed to be a figure of horror, and they never got to be scared of him in the first place. 

That’s my point: the best monsters, the ones we fear because we can NOT understand or analyze them, have the best and scariest—and most cathartic and satisfying—death scenes.  And that’s because they had a novel’s worth, or a movie’s worth, of terrifying, inexplicable life in them.