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Jun. 30th, 2014 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreSo, I watched Dracula yesterday for the first time in a while, as I said. And, y'know, in many ways, it is not a good film. But it is also, kinda, a great one, in that it basically defined the vampire for our culture, at least in the 20th century. (All the film vampires I have seen post-1931 are either an emulation of or a reaction to this movie. Either your vampire has a cape or your vampire is shouting "Basingstoke!" at the murgatroyds*, but either way they are engaging with the image produced by this film.)
And yeah, the drawing room scenes are tedious and yeah, there are dangling plot threads galore to the point where sometimes the movie only makes sense if you have either read the book a lot or engaged in a lot of fanfic** and yeah, the famous Armadillo of Transylvania. But there is still absolutely something there, even if sometimes it seems to have happened by accident. And when I come back to it, I find new things.
For instance - I think we can all agree that the scenes in Dracula's castle are actually good, even with the armadillos and the spider on a string. But this time, my favorite thing about it is how stilted Dracula seems, how awkward. Nothing he says is quite right, none of his reactions make sense as part of a normal conversation. And it's wonderful, because once you've watched the movie way too many times and are intimately familiar with the story, you start to think, "Of course. He's been in this castle for gods know how long, with only those silent sepulchral women for company. Of course he doesn't know how to talk to people anymore." And that has a wonderful texture to it now, because Dracula is a story that we've told over and over throughout the last century, so that you can't see one version without having it take on flavors from every other version you've seen. So of course I think that and am immediately reminded of the wonderful bit in Shadow of a Vampire - "The loneliest part of the book comes when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table." It's a beautiful little touch, even if it wasn't at all deliberate.
*I read Anno Dracula at an impressionable age and have always found the term "murgatroyd" (meaning a vampire who presents as the stereotypical vampire) very useful.
**::raises hand::
And yeah, the drawing room scenes are tedious and yeah, there are dangling plot threads galore to the point where sometimes the movie only makes sense if you have either read the book a lot or engaged in a lot of fanfic** and yeah, the famous Armadillo of Transylvania. But there is still absolutely something there, even if sometimes it seems to have happened by accident. And when I come back to it, I find new things.
For instance - I think we can all agree that the scenes in Dracula's castle are actually good, even with the armadillos and the spider on a string. But this time, my favorite thing about it is how stilted Dracula seems, how awkward. Nothing he says is quite right, none of his reactions make sense as part of a normal conversation. And it's wonderful, because once you've watched the movie way too many times and are intimately familiar with the story, you start to think, "Of course. He's been in this castle for gods know how long, with only those silent sepulchral women for company. Of course he doesn't know how to talk to people anymore." And that has a wonderful texture to it now, because Dracula is a story that we've told over and over throughout the last century, so that you can't see one version without having it take on flavors from every other version you've seen. So of course I think that and am immediately reminded of the wonderful bit in Shadow of a Vampire - "The loneliest part of the book comes when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table." It's a beautiful little touch, even if it wasn't at all deliberate.
*I read Anno Dracula at an impressionable age and have always found the term "murgatroyd" (meaning a vampire who presents as the stereotypical vampire) very useful.
**::raises hand::
