This is indicative that sometimes there is perhaps more technique behind the camera than human-scale passion on screen. The shadow that stretches, grasping, across the wall in homage to Nosferatu is practically its own character so are the costumes by the late Eiko Ishioka. Scenes dissolve between each other ostentatiously and memorably, like the vampire bite that fades into the growing green eyes of a wolf. Menacingly fast point-of-view shots, pushing through the scenery, recall Sam Raimi. The whole movie prowls and creeps and pulses with life. London is full of them,” Mina huffs at first.) Instead, Coppola retells the story of Dracula using matte paintings, miniatures and in-camera optical illusions, some dating back to the earliest days of cinema-an era also depicted in this 1897-set movie, where Dracula, in a dashing-young-man guise, drags Mina Harker (Winona Ryder) to a London theater showing silent nudie reels. Indeed, while Dracula was success enough to inspire a mini-boom in adult-oriented reimaginings of classic movie monsters, and though Coppola made a couple more big studio movies later in the ‘90s, three decades later, this one feels like the inadvertent last stand for his time as a marquee filmmaker.Ĭoppola makes it count: His movie is absolutely saturated with color, shadow and the craft required to wield them, a gothic horror epic made without any computer effects-just before Jurassic Park kickstarted the next phase of the CG revolution. Imagine: All this over a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Coppola’s name is right in the front of the marketing, and while this will certainly be the case for his long-gestating Megalopolis, which finally just began filming, it’s unlikely to receive the lavish, mainstream push that Bram Stoker’s Dracula did. Though I didn’t catch it theatrically, I remember that a lot of people did, especially on its opening weekend, which for 1992 was up there with Batman and Lethal Weapon sequels.

I remember my aunt and uncle, on the younger and hipper end of my family tree, calling it the worst movie they’d ever seen.

I remember the lines and intonations of the trailers, both the teaser version featuring close-ups of thick, shiny blood droplets rushing together under a voiceover that sounds a bit like Laurence Fishburne, and the full trailer where Winona Ryder pleads with Dracula (Gary Oldman) to “take me away from all of this… death.” I remember the dripping-gothic font-the font scared the hell out of me. Though it was 30 years ago and I didn’t attend, there are things I remember about the November 1992 release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dracula francis ford coppola