What could be said however is that it is a culmination of the cinematic development of the genre, baroque and self-referential to the extreme. Within the scope of the film Coppola pays homage in one way or another to many other landmark depictions of the legend, historical, mythological, literary and cinematic. As a film maker he acknowledges also something of the evolution of the medium. And, has been the case with the other films I have discussed, this long, rich re-telling of the story also carries with it contemporary meanings for the discourse of blood.
In 1976, New Orleans romance novelist Anne Rice, grieving over her daughter's death from leukaemia (characterized by the abnormal proliferation of blood cells - leucocytes – and usually accompanied by anaemia and impaired blood clotting ), wrote Interview With The Vampire. The new wave vampire, with its origins in a killer disease of the blood, began the prolific "Vampire Chronicles" cycle. Rice's books (e.g. The Vampire Lestat, 1985; The Queen of the Damned, 1988; The Tale of the Body Thief, 1992) became immensely popular during the 1980s. They consistently topped the best seller lists throughout the decade, casting a whole new slant on the portrayal of the vampire in the media, and of the vampire's relationship with the media, culminating in the Neil Jordan's 1994 film Interview With The Vampire.
Francis Ford Coppola, however, jumped on the vampire wagon two years earlier, and the influence of Rice's media savvy vampire is evident in the close literal and figurative use of the cinematograph in Bram Stoker 'Dracula'. Another piece of textual evidence that connects the work of Rice to Coppola's film is the device by which the victim must drink from the vampire to become a vampire his/her self. This piece of vampire lore has its roots in Rice's fiction, but was re-inforced in Tony Scott's 1983 vampire film The Hunger, leaving it open to speculation whether or not Rice was a direct source for this element in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'.
Coppola made numerous allusions to horror films and directors, including Tony Scott – the farcical 'roast beef' scene is a reference to The Hunger, so it is entirely possible that Scott's film rather than the Rice novels was Coppola's primary source. The film tag for Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', however, "Love Never Dies" smacks far more of soft-core Southern romance novels than the cerebral pop-goth pseudo-horror Bowie film. The association made between vampirism and blood disease are further drawn together in this film.
Coppola has taken strands from the earlier metaphor of sexually transmitted diseases, from the literary sources of blood disorders such as leukaemia, porphyria and anaemia and combined this with a powerful connection to the HIV/AIDS crisis which had so much attention in the media during the decade preceding the release of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Coppola's captive audience in 1992 was a public already trained to make a strong correlation between with sex, blood and death through constant media exposure to AIDS news and education.
With the potent killer sexuality of the vampire both literally and figuratively engorging the screen with tainted blood, the reference to AIDS is obvious. Dr Van Helsing for example (in this version played by Anthony Hopkins) is a specialist in diseases of the blood who searches frantically for the right answers to the victims' grim malaise, like a Dr Robert Gallo or Luc Montagnier as they desperately battled time in the early 1980s to find the cause of what was at that stage referred to as a gay 'plague' – which brings us full circle to the plague analogy of Nosferatu.
The use of intravenous drugs in Bram Stoker's Dracula, specifically the self-'medicating' morphine injecting Dr Seward, seems perhaps gratuitious unless used in the context of reinforcing the idea the spread of HIV/AIDS. However it is worth comparing the drug addiction of the 1992 Seward with the comments of Dr Van Helsing in the 1958 version, (as discussed in Section 4) whose medical expertise claimed that "the victims consciously detest being dominated by vampirism, but are unable to reliquish the practice, similar to the addiction to drugs".
Here we have a clear example of how the vampiric metaphor changes to oppose shifting social perceptions. In the late 1950s, when the loss of young lives both physically and mentally to drugs was a pressing social anxiety, the vampire was like the drug – dangerous, addictive, unknown. The youth drug culture represented the enemy of the medical establishment, whose authority is of course embodied in Van Helsing. By 1992 it is the medical establishment itself, as represented by Dr Seward, that is guilty of the abuse of substances and dispensing of drugs in dangerous and ignorant fashion.
The scientific institution, in fact, which had during the 1980s prematurely released the reverse transcriptase inhibitor AZT - a highly toxic drug which had disastrous effects in the attempted treatment of AIDS. The blood transfusion is of course the other commonly known method of transmission of the disease, and the typical victims haemophiliacs, sufferers of blood coagulation disorders which may cause uncontrollable bleeding after even a small cut - this of course could be compared to the vampire bite scenario.
The blood transfusion sequence of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' is especially significant with this in mind, compared for example to the corresponding scene in The Horror of Dracula, which while a reasonably lengthy scene in the context of the film only hints at the sexual connotations which underlie the passage in the Stoker novel. Whilst the implications of the title Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' are in my opinion somewhat misleading, the film does in some ways do more justice to the richness of Stoker's text than the others I have looked at.
The inclusion and character development of the full 'Crew of Light' for example (including the heretofore neglected Texan Quincey P Morris) allows for the dramatic blood transfusion sequence to reinforce a strong connection between the blood, disease, sex and death, with the underlying AIDS inference.
The trigger factor of promiscuity (another great concern during the height of the AIDS crisis) was expressed by Bram Stoker through Lucy's early letters within the novel, where she speaks joyfully of receiving three proposals from Holmwood, Morris and Seward and exclaims "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her and save all this trouble?" . This scene is faithfully represented by Coppola in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'.
During the course of the novel Lucy acts out her desires through the symbolism of the blood transfusion, where Holmwood, Seward, Morris and Van Helsing all transfuse their blood into her body. Later Morris describes the event "that poor pretty girl we all love has had put into her veins… the blood of four strong men" . In Stoker's account this is yet another example of the blurred boundaries between bodily fluids blood and semen., as well as suggesting another form of anatomical displacement as the phallic penetration of the hypodermic needle parallels the penetration of Dracula's teeth.
For Lucy's fiance Arthur Holmwood, the transfusion procedure was like a marriage ceremony, like an ancient wedding ritual of sharing blood: "He felt since then [his part in the transfusion] as if they two had been really married" . Van Helsing clearly recognises the symbolic connection between the intimate nature of the blood transfusion and sexual intercourse, being careful to hide his own participation and that of Seward and Morris from the grieving Holmwood, knowing that this would "enjealous him" .
Van Helsing mocks Holmwood notion of marriage, while acknowledging the sexual nature of the blood sharing, laughing cruelly and saying: "If so that, then what about the others? Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church's law, though no wits, all gone – even I, who am faithful husband to this now no-wife, am bigamist."
Coppola effectively recreates the transfusion sequence, drawing together all the various connotations of the exchange of blood, with all its old and new meanings. If Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' can be viewed as the culmination in an evolution of the character of Count Dracula, the discourse of blood in takes on a special meaning in his development from anti-Christ to Christ. Earlier I have discussed the idea of the 'Good' and 'Evil' as binary opposites in regard to Dracula's relationship to society.
By tracing the changes in the vampire character, we can see his transition from 'Evil' in Nosferatu to 'Good' in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' through a number of stages in which the roles of Dracula and his antithesis (society as represented by Van Helsing, Seward, the patriarchy, British institution, the Church etc) complete a polar progression. The journey begins with the evil Nosferatu in 1922, ugly, demonic, bestial, primal and an anti-Christ figure. By 1931, Dracula was far more refined, by 1958 he had charm, class and a hip travelling coffin.
In 1979 Dracula was suave, good looking and a hero for the oppressed, and by 1992, Francis Ford Coppola presented the movie going audience with a vampire that so resembles a Christ figure that he could be said to represent 'Good', a complete pilgramage from his origins in evil, in the earthly and animal realms. Gary Oldman's portrayal of the character clearly inhabits the timeless, the spiritual and the pure.
The character of Prince Vlad Tepes (the Impaler) and the generally accepted historical background to vampire tales is used by Coppola to sanction and add credibility to the story in a similar manner to which earlier directors such as Murnau and Browning used the proclamations of the authority of 'science', and the film's explanation of Vlad's existence as a vampire is strongly suggestive in setting up Gary Oldman's Dracula as a Christ figure.
Vlad's role as a Defender of the Faith against the Turks invites a Christian reading. Richard Dyer points out parallels such as Prince Vlad's cry that God had deserted him (as Christ did on the cross); the name of his lover Elizabeth; the long-haired, bearded image of Oldman in Dracula's death sequence that "looks like countless images of Christ" and most importantly, the blood and what it represents. Dyer suggests that the cut on Dracula's chest resembles the fifth wound of Christ, and when he offers Mina eternal life to drink from him, it is reminiscent of the Catholic ritual of transubstantiation, in which the consumption of the blood of Christ represents transcendent union. This again is the familiar theme of immortality, central to the vampire tale, the desired, the feared, the inseparable opposite of death.
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