Dracula: In Blood We Find the Truth

There have been many adaptations of Bram Stoker’s seminal 1897 horror novel “Dracula,” reaching back through a century of horror cinema, beginning in 1922 with German Expressionist director F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” a somewhat loose adaptation which nevertheless saw its filmmakers sued by Bram Stoker’s widow for copyright infringement because of similarities to the source novel. In 1931, Tod Browning’s “Dracula” was produced by Universal Studio’s starring Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire – arguably the most iconic actor ever to don The Count’s cape. Then, decades later, “Horror of Dracula” (1958) hit the screens with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Count Dracula and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing courtesy of Hammer Film Productions – a studio known for their bloody Technicolour gore-fests and boasting a uniquely British sensibility. Lee and Cushing starred in several movies about the Count with 1973’s Satanic Rites of Dracula marking the 7th and final time Lee played the blood sucker. Although the details changed slightly from adaptation to adaptation and certain technical aspects improved and progressed as the decades went on, the overarching story remained the same. Even Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of the tale – despite being the most formally wild and stylistically inventive of the pack – called itself “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” with the intention of hewing closer to the book than any of the previous films had before.

Now, Netflix and the BBC have produced the umpteenth adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel as a series, this time with the help of British television veterans Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat as the series’ creators – the men behind the BBC’s wildly successful “Sherlock” (another retelling of a century old story updated for the modern day). The series’ format is similar to Gatiss and Moffat’s “Sherlock” in that the show’s first season unfolds over the course of three feature-length episodes of 90-minutes each.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t the slightest bit worried about where the show appeared to be headed in the first half of its premiere episode, “The Rules of the Beast,” introducing lawyer Jonathan Harker (the main protagonist of the novel from whose accounts the novel’s contents have supposedly been compiled) as he arrives at a mysterious Transylvanian castle to conclude a real estate transaction with its owner, Count Dracula – looking especially old upon their initial meeting. It’s not long before Harker finds himself trapped in the castle, each night growing weaker and weaker as Dracula regains his youth and inhuman strength, feeding off Harker as he sleeps.

I found this portion of the episode to be pretty exhausting – going through the motions of a story we have seen play out dozens of times in as many movies, while adding very little that’s particularly new or different – save for a tantalizing framing device which has Harker recounting his unpleasant stay at Dracula’s castle to a group of nuns who have rescued him and brought him to their convent for recovery. This suggests a new direction for the story whose promise is fulfilled as the episode takes a hard left turn around the halfway mark, situating the remainder of the action within the walls of the convent. Soon, Dracula arrives at the convent’s gates and things get especially bloody.

Gattis and Moffat’s writing is quite clever throughout – both in terms of dialogue as well as certain developments and subversive plot twists – and the talented cast really steps up to the plate as well, performing their tongue-in-cheek dialogue with a great sense of relish and a healthy dose of camp with series lead Claes Bang especially spending as much time chewing scenery as his fictional counterpart does chewing on the necks of ill-fated victims.