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Who is the best Dracula?

  • Bela Lugosi

    Votes: 7 17.5%
  • Christopher Lee

    Votes: 19 47.5%
  • Frank Langella

    Votes: 3 7.5%
  • Jack Palance

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Louis Jordain

    Votes: 1 2.5%
  • Gary Oldman

    Votes: 3 7.5%
  • David Niven

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Udo Kier

    Votes: 1 2.5%
  • George Hamilton

    Votes: 1 2.5%
  • Somebody not on this list

    Votes: 5 12.5%

  • Total voters
    40
And there you go, a reimagining of a character seemingly born to be reimagined over and over. Really liked this, a full on horror TV series in prime time (or on Netflix if you're not in the UK). The Lucy stuff was pretty nasty. Praise to Claes Bang for a fine interpretation, but also Dolly Wells as an original take on Van Helsing. The "blood memory" idea could have been a gimmick, but wasn't, very smart.

Ending left open for possible sequel? I suppose it depends on how it does on streaming, because apparently hardly anybody watches TV live anymore, or at least about three million tuned in for this every episode, which is OK, but I suspect the length made a lot of folk opt for the streaming so they could watch it in pieces.
 
Oh yeah, and Mark Gatiss's documentary In Search of Dracula (a title not plucked at random, I suspect) was excellent, wonderful to see all those lovely ladies who were Dracula's Brides being interviewed. A very compact overview considering there have been so many versions. He's so good at these overviews.
 
And there you go, a reimagining of a character seemingly born to be reimagined over and over. Really liked this, a full on horror TV series in prime time (or on Netflix if you're not in the UK). The Lucy stuff was pretty nasty. Praise to Claes Bang for a fine interpretation, but also Dolly Wells as an original take on Van Helsing. The "blood memory" idea could have been a gimmick, but wasn't, very smart.

Ending left open for possible sequel? I suppose it depends on how it does on streaming, because apparently hardly anybody watches TV live anymore, or at least about three million tuned in for this every episode, which is OK, but I suspect the length made a lot of folk opt for the streaming so they could watch it in pieces.

Ending was definitely ambiguous enough to allow room for a sequel. Great reimagining and I loved the boat sequence as well as the modern third. I think I've encountered the blood memory trope before in Vampire fiction.
 
Ending was definitely ambiguous enough to allow room for a sequel. Great reimagining and I loved the boat sequence as well as the modern third. I think I've encountered the blood memory trope before in Vampire fiction.

Yeah, it did seem kind of familiar, but I couldn't place it.
 
In episode two, I enjoyed how they managed to refer to the mysterious occupancy of room 9 without ever saying "Inside No. 9".

And the Grand Duchess Valeria...
 
I voted for Louis Jourdan. I remember his Dracula well. It was the first time I had seen Dracula portrayed as someone who was very charming. That made Dracula much more frightening to me then.

There's a scene in that one where a baby is glimpsed being handed over in a holdall to be eaten alive or summat.
When it was first shown on TV the ex and I had a child around the same age. The former Mr Snail pointed at the telly and shouted 'That's DISGUSTING!'
 
Dialled back the jokes in tonight's middle episode, quite effectively too. I suppose this was the Nosferatu one, with the emphasis on the ship. No spoilers, but judging by the short trailer tomorrow's could see the Count calling himself Johnny Alucard!

I've only watched 2, will finish it tonight. I think it's great (WTF? at the end of episode 2!) but I was wondering...

When the Demeter blew up, how did Dracula end up in his coffin at the bottom of the sea? And how was he speaking to Sister Agatha during a chess game when she sank with the ship (and that conversation was obviously in the future)?


Shall I just stop wondering and get the final episode watched?
 
Oh yeah, and Mark Gatiss's documentary In Search of Dracula (

Ooh I shall have to watch this!! Is it on the Iplayer methinks, I shall have a look tonight.

Have yet to watch ep's 2/3 of Dracula properly. Had it on last night but had company so wasn't paying full attention, was good to see Mark Gattis as a solicitor in it. Always been a big fan of league of gentlemen.

( the local shop scenes were filmed v near to where I live, and the local FB page calls itself "Marsden , a local place for local people.....love that!!).
 
Ooh I shall have to watch this!! Is it on the Iplayer methinks, I shall have a look tonight.

Have yet to watch ep's 2/3 of Dracula properly. Had it on last night but had company so wasn't paying full attention, was good to see Mark Gattis as a solicitor in it. Always been a big fan of league of gentlemen.

( the local shop scenes were filmed v near to where I live, and the local FB page calls itself "Marsden , a local place for local people.....love that!!).

You probably know this by now, but the In Search of Dracula is on the iPlayer, just search on BBC2 for Friday night if it's not on the front page. There was a Christopher Lee-presented documentary film of the same name in the 1970s, I assume this new one is a reference to that?

Mark Gatiss was playing Renfield! Only a little bit twitchy and insectivorous, though.
 
After all the moans about the 3 million-odd viewing figures, the 7 day figures paint a rosier picture for the latest Dracula:
BBC Dracula news

Now it seems 7 million, probably more, watched it, half of those on iPlayer, making it the most watched programme of the day. Not Sherlock numbers, but nothing to be ashamed of.
 

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We watched all 3 episodes over consecutive nights. I loved the first one although it was a bit too jokey. The atmosphere was menacing and dark. Agatha was great. The second episode was less jokey and Claes was perfect as Dracula. The ending to episode 2 left me a little irritated. There were massive plot holes and "why didn't he/she just do this, that or the other" moments from the TV sofa.

1. Why keep one box of soil? Throw it overboard and give him nowhere to rest.
2. When Dracula killed the Captain, he took the bottle and headed off to the deck inviting Agatha to follow him. Why didn't Agatha just head down into the hold and blow the ship up instead of relying on a mortally wounded Captain to do the job?
3. How did the lid of his wooden box stay on when the coffin drifted down into the depths?
4. Why was he still fresh and young looking when the divers opened his box?

Episode 3 was a car crash as far as I was concerned. The entire charm, mystery and atmosphere of the story was chucked out the window. Lucy was terrible. It felt like "Sherlock meets Dracula meets Black Mirror" with text messages and emails flying around. More gaping plot holes with stuff just crowbared in. The ending was, well...I suppose it ended at least.

But there are enough question marks left hanging to make a 2nd series although I think I'm getting sick of Gatiss and Moffat.
 
I really enjoyed the way each episode worked as a self-contained piece, and the 'bottle episode' of #2 (complete with ship in a bottle to nail it home) was a stroke of genius.

The only part that I didn't like was the Lucy reveal. It was built up so effectively with the voices, reactions and reflections, that anything less than full Hollywood CGI was bound to be a let down.

Other than that - brilliant.
 
l started watching with gritted teeth, waiting for the usual Gatiss/Moffat/BBC tics, but l found myself being won over. All the above trio’s knee-jerk box-ticking was present, but the central performances by Claes Bang as Dracula and Dolly Wells as Van Helsing were both excellent, and more than made up for it.

l enjoyed the dark humour and wordplay, and there were a couple of effective scares - the undead unfolding themselves from tiny boxes - to satisfy the viewer who wanted darker meat.

It was, however, let down by the ending.

7/10

maximus otter
 
50 Draculas, the good, the bad and the ugly.

The real immortality of the ancient vampire Dracula, the villain of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel of the same name, resides less in the difficulty of killing him and more in how, once you kill him, he doesn’t stay dead for long before springing up—robust, red-blooded, and thirsty—in another new version of the story.

There have been hundreds of Dracula adaptations since the first one—a play, adapted by Stoker himself, that had a reading eight days before the release of his novel on May 26th, 1897. They’ve taken the form of plays, films, comics, and other pieces of art. But Dracula, the vampire, is also one of the most iconic roles that any performer can take on, and so today, we’re going to rank the top fifty most iconic performances of the character. That’s right. Fifty. ...

The rules:

Although there have been many memorable theatrical incarnations of the Count (I’m looking at you two, Raul Julia and Jeremy Brett—having played Dracula on Broadway and on tour, but without having been captured on footage while doing so), we’re only going to rank ones that appeared on film, television, or in other recordings, because that levels the playing field. Vampires by nature don’t always appear on film, but we’re very fortunate that all of these guys were able to. But these performances must be of Dracula, specifically; for example, sitcom characters wearing Dracula Halloween costumes (like Darryl on The Office) don’t count.

And, folks, we are ranking performances/interpretations of Dracula the figure, not ranking Dracula movies overall, even if our explanations do discuss the overall film. ...

https://crimereads.com/fifty-best-draculas/
 
50 Draculas, the good, the bad and the ugly.

The real immortality of the ancient vampire Dracula, the villain of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel of the same name, resides less in the difficulty of killing him and more in how, once you kill him, he doesn’t stay dead for long before springing up—robust, red-blooded, and thirsty—in another new version of the story.

There have been hundreds of Dracula adaptations since the first one—a play, adapted by Stoker himself, that had a reading eight days before the release of his novel on May 26th, 1897. They’ve taken the form of plays, films, comics, and other pieces of art. But Dracula, the vampire, is also one of the most iconic roles that any performer can take on, and so today, we’re going to rank the top fifty most iconic performances of the character. That’s right. Fifty. ...

The rules:

Although there have been many memorable theatrical incarnations of the Count (I’m looking at you two, Raul Julia and Jeremy Brett—having played Dracula on Broadway and on tour, but without having been captured on footage while doing so), we’re only going to rank ones that appeared on film, television, or in other recordings, because that levels the playing field. Vampires by nature don’t always appear on film, but we’re very fortunate that all of these guys were able to. But these performances must be of Dracula, specifically; for example, sitcom characters wearing Dracula Halloween costumes (like Darryl on The Office) don’t count.

And, folks, we are ranking performances/interpretations of Dracula the figure, not ranking Dracula movies overall, even if our explanations do discuss the overall film. ...

https://crimereads.com/fifty-best-draculas/
Interesting and annoying.
Interesting as it is a list of 50 people who have played Dracula and there are some I feel I will have to seek out. Annoying because he doesn’t stick to his own rules. Ranking performances of Dracula not the movies they appear in? Nope plenty of time he mentions the name of the actor and then spends the rest of the time talking about the movie. The performances must be Dracula, why then include several vampires who are not Dracula? Factually incorrect David Carradine keeps his English accent, erm what? Carradine was born in New York, he’s not English and I’ve never heard him do an English accent. And bizarre - “I’ve not seen this one but I’ll still give you my view of it.” He claims that the Bela Lugosi performance is the gold standard and then doesn’t place it in the number one position! And finally he didn’t realise Alucard was Dracula written backwards...
 
Chloe Zhao, director of Oscar-buzzy Nomadland, is keen to direct a remake of Dracula:
News story

As a sci-fi Western! Come off it, Chloe, you're not trying - make it a musical, too.
 
The travails of Nosferaratu.

When Count Orlock celebrates the centenary of his big screen debut, cinephiles won't bat an eyelid.

After all, the wild-eyed star of Nosferatu is a vampire. Since the film premiered in Berlin on March 5th, 1922, it has earned its place in the honour roll of early German expressionist cinema alongside Metropolis and Dr Caligari.

But, by rights, Count Orlock should not be alive at all given the fearless vampire killer who tried to finish him off a century ago: Florence Stoker, widow of Dracula author, Bram Stoker.

While the film’s credits – and its shooting script – described Nosferatu as based on the Irish author’s horror classic, the German producers neither sought nor were granted a licence from the Stoker estate.

As a result, the world’s first vampire film turned into one of the first major cases of film industry copyright infringement.

Looking for answers, I contact the estate of Bram Stoker and, when I reach his great grandnephew Dacre Stoker, he is also trying to piece together the century-old puzzle for an upcoming edition of Scream magazine.

”I’m still trying to figure out why these people would have felt they could go ahead and just do this so brazenly,” says Stoker, a US-based author.

So who were “these people”, and why were they interested in ripping off Dracula?

Nosferatu is not just a cult classic, it is perhaps the world’s first occult classic. The film’s director, FW Murnau, an actor and artist turned film director, had a life-long interest in the occult and in the 1920s was drawn into a Berlin circle led by Albin Grau. Listed as producer of Nosferatu, Grau was responsible for much of the film’s look, feel, sets and costumes. He said later he got the idea for the film when he was a soldier in the first World War, and a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire. ...

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/nosferatu-and-the-fangs-of-copyright-infringement-1.4814233
 
Watch the film, visit the exhibition, give blood.

Nosferatu—filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's German Expressionist masterpiece about a Transylvanian vampire—turns 100 this year. (You can watch it below!)

To celebrate, Berlin's Nationalgalerie is staging an exhibition about the film and its influence on cinematic horror and pop culture. Brilliantly, the exhibit also features an opportunity to donate blood to the Red Cross. Phantoms of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu runs December 16, 2022 to April 23, 2023. From Artnet:

Murnau's film was an unauthorized remake of Bram Stoker's original 1897 novel Dracula, and instantly became an icon of the German silent film era that has been heralded by many critics as one of the best films ever made. (Who can forget Max Schreck's portrayal of the fearsome Count Orlok, whose curling facial expressions reveal the vampire in all his macabre glory?)
"André Breton considered Nosferatu a key surrealist work," read a statement from the museum, "and sketches for the set design, for example, include motifs that call to mind etchings by Francisco de Goya."

https://boingboing.net/2022/09/26/v...bit-includes-opportunity-to-donate-blood.html

 
Bram Stoker's Dracula: Saw it in the cinema last night, 30th Anniversary re-release, it wasn't a 4K restoration as claimed though, seemed to be an old print. Still, loved the opening sequence, echoes of Excalibur, great creation story for Dracula, literally rivers of blood coming from the altar and statues. Tom Waits made a good Renfield, a bit Uriah Heepish, pity he didn't sing Come Fly With me. Gary Oldman was impressive as Dracula/Vlad from medieval ruler to white face with Princess Leia hair buns to man/bat/ape to Steampunk gent, so many impressive versions of the Count. The romance across time with Mina/Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) was a real Beauty and the Beast affair, well portrayed. The use of shadows and eyes to illustrate Dracula's control from afar was well imagined. A rum performance by Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, sometimes channeling Father Jack but also Hannibal Lecter. Stands up well after all those years. Directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Screenplay by James V. Hart, based on the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. 8/10.
 
Bram Stoker's Dracula: Saw it in the cinema last night, 30th Anniversary re-release, it wasn't a 4K restoration as claimed though, seemed to be an old print. Still, loved the opening sequence, echoes of Excalibur, great creation story for Dracula, literally rivers of blood coming from the altar and statues. Tom Waits made a good Renfield, a bit Uriah Heepish, pity he didn't sing Come Fly With me. Gary Oldman was impressive as Dracula/Vlad from medieval ruler to white face with Princess Leia hair buns to man/bat/ape to Steampunk gent, so many impressive versions of the Count. The romance across time with Mina/Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) was a real Beauty and the Beast affair, well portrayed. The use of shadows and eyes to illustrate Dracula's control from afar was well imagined. A rum performance by Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, sometimes channeling Father Jack but also Hannibal Lecter. Stands up well after all those years. Directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Screenplay by James V. Hart, based on the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. 8/10.

I loved and continue to love this film--the sets, costume, music, cast and script.

One of the big films to be made prior to the advent of computer graphics, all the magic being created by clever camera and editing tricks.

I don't even think Keanu's accent puts a discernible dent it in.
 
Not just Dracula but portrayals of his sidekick Renfield,

OR MORE THAN a century, adaptations of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula have wrestled with what to do about Renfield, the madman stuck in an English sanitarium whose increasing mania portends the arrival of the Count.

Renfield is a vexing character. He isn’t necessary to the plot; in fact, he complicates it, confuses it. And Dracula can’t afford further complications, being a novel already full of holes and coincidences, ambiguities and convolutions. Among many other incomprehensibilities, it makes no sense—absolutely no sense, I say—that Dracula has a ready slave waiting for him to arrive in England, when the novel does not suggest that Dracula has ever been there or that Renfield has ever gone traveling.

And yet, the story is not the same without Renfield. Adaptations that excise him lose the metaphor of Dracula’s parasitism, his quotidian dependency. (In certain adaptations, this is likely done to downplay the associated homoeroticism in favor of other themes.) Renfield’s erasure results in dampening Dracula’s overall threat level; more than killing his victims or turning them into equally powerful monsters, he can also simply drive them mad, convert them into mindless slaves. Renfield embodies the less mordant and less glamorous side of vampirism—a fate worse than both death and eternal life, a mortal lifetime without autonomy or will of any kind.

Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023), the newest film in the Dracula adaptation bloodline, pursues this servile dimension of Dracula more than any other. The film is about what it’s like to be Renfield, a question that no other film has ever really asked. Nicholas Hoult plays the character as a long-suffering, beaten-down guy Friday. In this film, unlike previous iterations, he’s explicitly referred to as a familiar, and he has responsibilities: he cleans after, cares for, brings victims to, and generally protects his needy master Dracula (Nicolas Cage). He is given superhuman strength, masterful fighting abilities, and eternal life in exchange. This isn’t a bargain he ever made willingly, but he still loathes himself for it. ...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/out-from-the-shadow-of-the-vampire-on-chris-mckays-renfield/
 
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