why Coppolas version is still the best – Inspired Traveler

The Dracula by Coppola is available on Netflix, and you wont find a better version of the myth anywhere else.

In 1992, when the figure of the vampire count Dracula was worn to the cord by more than 60 films and interpretations of very different qualities, we thought we had made the tour of the myth. The last truly landmark appearance of a vampire was Nosferatu ghost of the night de Werner Herzog excellent remake Du Nosferatu le vampire -, and that was in 1979, 14 years before.

It must be said that the 80s was hardly conducive to the melancholy of Gothic romanticism (in the literary sense of the term): fashion (to put it very quickly) is more for fluorescent positive thinking, the cult of the body, the pulp adventure and sci-fi adventure.

He took dear Palpatine

A comparison of the top 10 biggest films of the 80s and the ten biggest films of the 90s will confirm it: the decade that followed was more conducive to darker works, the fault of an ambient spleen contrasting violently with individualism. enthusiastic of yesteryear (we let you choose your favorite explanation between the peak of the AIDS epidemic, the fiascos of the Gulf wars and Afghanistan, the rise of heroin and opioids and the death of Kurt Cobain ).

A period as rich in disillusion and disenchantment as it is poor in inspiring ideals, and in which the greatest of all heralds will not be an Action Man, but Dracula, regenerated by a fabulous Francis Ford Coppola.

Really very expensive

Because in 1992 it was necessary for a talented author to give substance to this character, whom too many unstable treatments, exploitation in B or Z series or parodies have emptied of its substance and left bloodless. It also needed an artist with a sharp intelligence to deliver a filmic reading that was both firmly anchored in its time, totally faithful to the spirit of its original material and still unmatched more than 25 years later.

Past, present, future: the film Dracula reigns over all other avatars of itself, for all time, indisputably. How and why ?

To your left, the graveyard of all other Dracula adaptations since 1993, be careful, NOS4A2 still bites

To go to the simplest first, because the plastic of the film is beautiful to burst. It is certain that Dracula would not have reappeared with so much force without the mountain of practical effects, without the formidable shadow plays and the magnificent palette of colors composed by the brilliant and late cinematographer Michael Balhaus, or without the dantesque sets and costumes of the film. The baroque aesthetic of Francis Ford Coppolas film will certainly eventually tire those who have little taste for stylistic exaggerations in general, but it is a real feast of images more melting than the others for fans of great style.

Then, because it is the most faithful adaptation of the original story of Bram Stoker while being his most beautiful traitor. Francis Ford Coppola in fact follows step by step the convolutions of an epistolary story that the multitude of points of view makes dense and complex, and that each episode, each character and each inflection of the rhythm which animated the pages of the book find their right place in these two hours of film.

So simple, and yet so effective

More Dracula is obviously more than a particularly brilliant and energetic exercise in style, or a skilful adaptation of an exciting literary monster. It is a particularly sagacious adaptation which spices up its original material with a few new elements., whose presence violently resurfaces in a spray of blood the baroque poem and the Gothic melancholy of the pulp horror story. By transforming the horrible predator of the night into a rebel of God motivated by an eternal love and gorging himself on low earthly flesh, Francis Ford Coppola issues an invigorating injunction to resilience.

Rather apostasy than to serve a cruel master, rather damnation than to accept the unacceptable, and above all, rather the flamboyant lover Dracula than the cruel Jonathan Harker or the cruel Van Helsing. What is bizarre is beautiful, said the poet; Dracula sums up all the legacies of his glorious past and completes the formula thus: what is monstrous is heroic. Perhaps not the most complex or the newest observation in the history of art Milton had already done the same with his Paradise Lost but certainly one of his most relentless demonstrations on film. Enough in any case to get up from the torpor of the other Dracula to rush on the remastered release of February 26.

Even if, all the same, Keanu Reeves really plays it like a foot.

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why Coppolas version is still the best - Inspired Traveler

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero