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strange_complexI don't think I've even mentioned this here yet due to being busy with other things, but I have agreed to give a lecture in Bradford on 26 May to mark World Dracula Day. As it's the 125th anniversary of the publication of Stoker's novel, I'm going to lean into the theme and talk about how Stoker himself uses temporal resonances in the novel, and then about how people have responded to it since its publication in 25-year snap-shots, and how they have made use of round-number anniversaries in their own right. It's something I should be on pretty solid ground with, between my knowledge of vampire film and literature and all the thinking I've done about anniversaries and how they work in the context of my work on Augustus.
Anyway, that's all by way of a preamble to explain why I spent an hour and a half of my life watching this shonky low-budget film on Saturday night. It's the work of The Asylum, who make what are usually called 'mockbuster' films - that is, cheap rip-offs which they hope will be able to ride on the coat-tails of major blockbusters. Probably their best-known work is Sharknado which as I understand it is typical of their oeuvre for the way in which it just embraces silliness head-on. This particular film is apparently a response to Morbius, which is in turn based on a Marvel comics character with the epithet 'the Living Vampire'. However, as far as I can tell the Asylum film only really relates to Morbius in the sense that it's claiming Dracula as a rival vampire-archetype and has slightly based its make-up for Dracula in full vampire-mode on Morbius. Is doesn't, for example, suggest that Dracula is a human suffering from a rare blood disease for which he is seeking a cure, which is my understanding of Morbius' back-story. So, while I needed to watch Dracula: the Original Living Vampire in order to be able to talk about how people are responding to Stoker's novel right now, 125 years after its publication, I believe I can probably get away with not spending my time watching Morbius as well. I hope so, anyway. Let me know in the comments if you think that's wrong!
As far as my talk goes, it gave me what I was hoping for almost straight away. Not only is it a contemporary response to Dracula; it goes straight for the round-number anniversaries too. We open with Amelia Van Helsing, a detective, and Captain Renfield, the local chief of police, investigating a series of murders which closely resemble another spate of killings exactly 100 years ago. They are the work of Dracula, of course, who is in the process of moving to the city and spending his time between killings arranging the purchase of some property with the help of Mina Murray, Amelia's girlfriend. Mina herself, meanwhile, shares one key characteristic (or as they put it 'matches the profile') of the murder victims, in that she is a natural red-head, although she dyes her hair blonde. Yes, you've guessed it - she is of course the living image of Dracula's long-dead wife, whom he is constantly seeking in his victims.
Why he should have gone on a particularly noticeable murder-rampage exactly 100 years before the main narrative is never really explained, but in a way that's all the better as far as my lecture is concerned. It shows that round-number anniversaries have become such an expected feature of narratives like this that they are ritualistically used as a motif even when they don't really have any meaningful in-story explanation. Perfect. Meanwhile, of course, what I've already said above about Mina as the red-headed supposed reincarnation of Dracula's wife shows how this film is drawing on and recycling multiple other motifs from previous Dracula movies, from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974; LJ / DW) to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992; LJ / DW). Other detectable sources include Dracula Untold, which showed up in the way the Dracula of this film could coalesce out of a cloud of bats and the impossibly-high vaulted bridge leading to the castle looming over the city where the main action takes place, as well as Hammer's Dracula (1958) whose climactic curtain-ripping technique provided the final means of defeating Dracula - though it may have been indirect, since that technique has been borrowed by many earlier predecessors, including Dracula père et fils (1976) and the BBC's recent Dracula with Claes Bang.
As what I've already said above reflects, the story isn't a straightforward telling of Bram's novel, though it retains the central premise of Dracula coming to a city, pursuing a character called Mina Murray, and eventually being chased back to his castle and despatched by a collection of humans led by a character called Van Helsing. All the main named characters are there (except for poor old Quincey, as ever), but their actual roles are a bit mixed around. Quite apart from Van Helsing becoming a young female detective, she's also a hardline rationalist, so that it falls instead to Jonathan Harker (a chemist who's never been near Dracula's castle) to have a collection of antiquarian books on the occult and say things like 'Scientists who aren't open to the unknown aren't really that good as scientists, are they?' Seward (pronounced 'See-ward') throughout is a forensic pathologist, and Renfield as mentioned is the Captain of the Police, but is actively working for Dracula to help him find more women who match 'the profile'.
The setting is a city with a castle looming over it in the distance, so they've followed Hammer's lead in shrinking down the geography of Stoker's novel, but taken the shrinking even further. The actual location is left vague and the actors seem to have been left to speak in their natural American and English accents as appropriate, but the city's (heavily CGI-enhanced) architecture looks broadly European (thanks to it being shot in Serbia) and you see at least one shop with a French sign ('L'epicerie', I think). The time-period is also hazy, and they certainly didn't put much effort into making it look consistent or convincing. Given the lesbian relationship between Amelia and Mina, which everyone around them seemed to accept without question, I thought at first it was supposed to be taking place in the present, but in a context where a lot of people were just really into vintage clothing and decor. Gradually, though, I realised that the total absence of electricity or modern communications technology meant that it was probably actually supposed to be set in the past, and in fact when I looked at a screen-cap of a newspaper I had taken early on, it turned out to be dated 18 May 1920. I would guess that if someone asked the production team why half the sets, props and costumes didn't actually look like they belonged in the 1920s, they would probably refer airily to productions like The Favourite and Bridgerton, and say it's old-fashioned to fetishise total period verism on screen. To be honest, though, I was perfectly happy with both the geographical and the chronological vagueness, which together gave it a fantastical otherworld feel such as you might get in a Batman movie. In fact, it looks quite good visually overall for a movie of this budget.
Narratively, though, not so much. The dialogue, acting, character-development and storyline are all second-rate, and although there's a death part-way through and a fight at the end, there isn't otherwise much excitement or tension to keep things interesting. Some films in this register make up for their low budget with creative energy, throwing outrageous ideas and knowing winks at the screen, but this one largely didn't. Its Dracula got a bit more exciting towards the end when he discarded his human-passing appearance in favour of a Morbius-inspired vampire mode, but had displayed all too little animal magnetism or sheer physical self-confidence before that. And while a gender-swapped lesbian Van Helsing sounds great on paper, it was hard to escape the suspicion that that might have been done largely as an excuse to show two young ladies getting smoochy in bed together. At one point I thought the script might actually be making a point about queerphobia, when Amelia explained to Jonathan Harker that although he had known Mina since childhood he couldn't know what it had been like for her to be bullied for being different. But it turned out this was just an early teaser for the big plot reveal that she was actually a red-head. Still, on the plus side, the trope of the reincarnated wife which this fed into was at least actively challenged, when Van Helsing scoffs at Dracula for thinking Mina is his lost wife and then Mina helps to defeat Dracula by deliberately luring him towards her so that she can stake him. This doesn't actually kill him, of course - instead, Mina and Van Helsing do that together via a joint rip-down-the-curtains move. But it certainly means Mina is at least a much responsible for his death as Van Helsing, if not more so. Sadly for Mina, though, it seems that a bite Dracula got in on Van Helsing before the staking ruse was successful, so that the film ends with Van Helsing revealing a nice sharp set of fangs...
Finally, as soon as I saw pages from an antiquarian vampire tome bearing what looked a lot like Latin writing being flicked through in front of the camera, I of course hit the print screen button. I expected to discover it was something like lorem ipsum, and functionally it kind of was - but weirder...
Obviously the first word, and probably the only word most people will catch when watching the film normally, is 'Nosferatu'. After that, someone seems to have stuck in a garbled version of 'mens( )sana in corpo(re sano)' ('a healthy mind in a healthy body'). But then came the real surprise - most of the rest of the text was lorem-ipsumified snippets from Augustus' Res Gestae. You can make out 'A. Hirti{b}o consulibus, con{w}sula{j}rem locum [...] sententiae' (RG 1), '{i}quos ex se{ }natus' (RG 4) and 'in libertatem vindicavi' (RG 1 again). There are other bits in between them, but I think that's enough to show that the Res Gestae is the basic source text here - especially the first and longest snippet with the very distinctive 'Hirti{b}o' in it. I'm still pretty sure it's basically the output of an automated lorem ipsum generator which happens to have the Res Gestae in its database, but nonetheless it was fun to come across it. I expected this film to be of interest as a reception of Dracula, but I didn't anticipate bonus Augustan receptions along the way.
Anyway, that's all by way of a preamble to explain why I spent an hour and a half of my life watching this shonky low-budget film on Saturday night. It's the work of The Asylum, who make what are usually called 'mockbuster' films - that is, cheap rip-offs which they hope will be able to ride on the coat-tails of major blockbusters. Probably their best-known work is Sharknado which as I understand it is typical of their oeuvre for the way in which it just embraces silliness head-on. This particular film is apparently a response to Morbius, which is in turn based on a Marvel comics character with the epithet 'the Living Vampire'. However, as far as I can tell the Asylum film only really relates to Morbius in the sense that it's claiming Dracula as a rival vampire-archetype and has slightly based its make-up for Dracula in full vampire-mode on Morbius. Is doesn't, for example, suggest that Dracula is a human suffering from a rare blood disease for which he is seeking a cure, which is my understanding of Morbius' back-story. So, while I needed to watch Dracula: the Original Living Vampire in order to be able to talk about how people are responding to Stoker's novel right now, 125 years after its publication, I believe I can probably get away with not spending my time watching Morbius as well. I hope so, anyway. Let me know in the comments if you think that's wrong!
As far as my talk goes, it gave me what I was hoping for almost straight away. Not only is it a contemporary response to Dracula; it goes straight for the round-number anniversaries too. We open with Amelia Van Helsing, a detective, and Captain Renfield, the local chief of police, investigating a series of murders which closely resemble another spate of killings exactly 100 years ago. They are the work of Dracula, of course, who is in the process of moving to the city and spending his time between killings arranging the purchase of some property with the help of Mina Murray, Amelia's girlfriend. Mina herself, meanwhile, shares one key characteristic (or as they put it 'matches the profile') of the murder victims, in that she is a natural red-head, although she dyes her hair blonde. Yes, you've guessed it - she is of course the living image of Dracula's long-dead wife, whom he is constantly seeking in his victims.
Why he should have gone on a particularly noticeable murder-rampage exactly 100 years before the main narrative is never really explained, but in a way that's all the better as far as my lecture is concerned. It shows that round-number anniversaries have become such an expected feature of narratives like this that they are ritualistically used as a motif even when they don't really have any meaningful in-story explanation. Perfect. Meanwhile, of course, what I've already said above about Mina as the red-headed supposed reincarnation of Dracula's wife shows how this film is drawing on and recycling multiple other motifs from previous Dracula movies, from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974; LJ / DW) to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992; LJ / DW). Other detectable sources include Dracula Untold, which showed up in the way the Dracula of this film could coalesce out of a cloud of bats and the impossibly-high vaulted bridge leading to the castle looming over the city where the main action takes place, as well as Hammer's Dracula (1958) whose climactic curtain-ripping technique provided the final means of defeating Dracula - though it may have been indirect, since that technique has been borrowed by many earlier predecessors, including Dracula père et fils (1976) and the BBC's recent Dracula with Claes Bang.
As what I've already said above reflects, the story isn't a straightforward telling of Bram's novel, though it retains the central premise of Dracula coming to a city, pursuing a character called Mina Murray, and eventually being chased back to his castle and despatched by a collection of humans led by a character called Van Helsing. All the main named characters are there (except for poor old Quincey, as ever), but their actual roles are a bit mixed around. Quite apart from Van Helsing becoming a young female detective, she's also a hardline rationalist, so that it falls instead to Jonathan Harker (a chemist who's never been near Dracula's castle) to have a collection of antiquarian books on the occult and say things like 'Scientists who aren't open to the unknown aren't really that good as scientists, are they?' Seward (pronounced 'See-ward') throughout is a forensic pathologist, and Renfield as mentioned is the Captain of the Police, but is actively working for Dracula to help him find more women who match 'the profile'.
The setting is a city with a castle looming over it in the distance, so they've followed Hammer's lead in shrinking down the geography of Stoker's novel, but taken the shrinking even further. The actual location is left vague and the actors seem to have been left to speak in their natural American and English accents as appropriate, but the city's (heavily CGI-enhanced) architecture looks broadly European (thanks to it being shot in Serbia) and you see at least one shop with a French sign ('L'epicerie', I think). The time-period is also hazy, and they certainly didn't put much effort into making it look consistent or convincing. Given the lesbian relationship between Amelia and Mina, which everyone around them seemed to accept without question, I thought at first it was supposed to be taking place in the present, but in a context where a lot of people were just really into vintage clothing and decor. Gradually, though, I realised that the total absence of electricity or modern communications technology meant that it was probably actually supposed to be set in the past, and in fact when I looked at a screen-cap of a newspaper I had taken early on, it turned out to be dated 18 May 1920. I would guess that if someone asked the production team why half the sets, props and costumes didn't actually look like they belonged in the 1920s, they would probably refer airily to productions like The Favourite and Bridgerton, and say it's old-fashioned to fetishise total period verism on screen. To be honest, though, I was perfectly happy with both the geographical and the chronological vagueness, which together gave it a fantastical otherworld feel such as you might get in a Batman movie. In fact, it looks quite good visually overall for a movie of this budget.
Narratively, though, not so much. The dialogue, acting, character-development and storyline are all second-rate, and although there's a death part-way through and a fight at the end, there isn't otherwise much excitement or tension to keep things interesting. Some films in this register make up for their low budget with creative energy, throwing outrageous ideas and knowing winks at the screen, but this one largely didn't. Its Dracula got a bit more exciting towards the end when he discarded his human-passing appearance in favour of a Morbius-inspired vampire mode, but had displayed all too little animal magnetism or sheer physical self-confidence before that. And while a gender-swapped lesbian Van Helsing sounds great on paper, it was hard to escape the suspicion that that might have been done largely as an excuse to show two young ladies getting smoochy in bed together. At one point I thought the script might actually be making a point about queerphobia, when Amelia explained to Jonathan Harker that although he had known Mina since childhood he couldn't know what it had been like for her to be bullied for being different. But it turned out this was just an early teaser for the big plot reveal that she was actually a red-head. Still, on the plus side, the trope of the reincarnated wife which this fed into was at least actively challenged, when Van Helsing scoffs at Dracula for thinking Mina is his lost wife and then Mina helps to defeat Dracula by deliberately luring him towards her so that she can stake him. This doesn't actually kill him, of course - instead, Mina and Van Helsing do that together via a joint rip-down-the-curtains move. But it certainly means Mina is at least a much responsible for his death as Van Helsing, if not more so. Sadly for Mina, though, it seems that a bite Dracula got in on Van Helsing before the staking ruse was successful, so that the film ends with Van Helsing revealing a nice sharp set of fangs...
Finally, as soon as I saw pages from an antiquarian vampire tome bearing what looked a lot like Latin writing being flicked through in front of the camera, I of course hit the print screen button. I expected to discover it was something like lorem ipsum, and functionally it kind of was - but weirder...
Obviously the first word, and probably the only word most people will catch when watching the film normally, is 'Nosferatu'. After that, someone seems to have stuck in a garbled version of 'mens( )sana in corpo(re sano)' ('a healthy mind in a healthy body'). But then came the real surprise - most of the rest of the text was lorem-ipsumified snippets from Augustus' Res Gestae. You can make out 'A. Hirti{b}o consulibus, con{w}sula{j}rem locum [...] sententiae' (RG 1), '{i}quos ex se{ }natus' (RG 4) and 'in libertatem vindicavi' (RG 1 again). There are other bits in between them, but I think that's enough to show that the Res Gestae is the basic source text here - especially the first and longest snippet with the very distinctive 'Hirti{b}o' in it. I'm still pretty sure it's basically the output of an automated lorem ipsum generator which happens to have the Res Gestae in its database, but nonetheless it was fun to come across it. I expected this film to be of interest as a reception of Dracula, but I didn't anticipate bonus Augustan receptions along the way.
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Date: Tuesday, 3 May 2022 09:40 (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, 3 May 2022 22:01 (UTC)