Disney Dracula, Starring Mickey Mouse by Bruno Enna and Fabio Celoni

I've been exploring the Disney Comics line lately. It's weirdly organized, spread across two or three different publishers. Disney publishes some things directly (I especially like their Weird West Mickey series) while IDW has the license for classic series like Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge, but also Tangled and another series or two. What I've most been into though are the literary adaptations, published by Dark Horse, that feature Mickey and Friends in their own versions of stories like Treasure Island, Frankenstein, and even Hamlet. And of course Dracula.

I've read Frankenstein and Dracula and they both have great art and a funny, kid-friendly twist to their monsters. In Frankenstein, Victor Duckenstein (Donald Duck) animates a creature made of cardboard. The story talks about responsibility to the things we create, but not in a dark way. Duckenstein's separated from his creation through an accident, not because he abandons it. There are no murdered children.

In Dracula, the vampire is all about eating beets, not sucking blood. I mean, that's almost as gross, but you get the point. Mickey is Harker (renamed Ratker, which isn't great, but okay) and Minnie is (and this is great) Minnina. Goofy plays Van Helsing, which I don't love any more than I like him as Marley in Mickey's Christmas Carol, but that's probably where he needs to be plugged in.

I'm not as enthusiastic about the tweaks to Dracula as I am about the ones to Frankenstein, but that may be because Frankenstein has always been more about themes to me. My fondness for Dracula has a lot to do with the lurid prose and the way the story unfolds. It's easier to riff on Frankenstein's plot and keep the themes intact than it is to riff on Dracula and keep what I most love about that book.

I will say though that Celoni's art makes Disney Dracula something I'll want to go back to even if elements of the story don't translate super well. The look is gorgeously atmospheric and gothic.



And it's not like I actually dislike anything in the story. If you're going to tell a story about vampires to kids... well, look, kids can handle vampires, so I don't actually see the need to substitute blood-sucking for something else. If you're a parent handing a book called Dracula to your kids, you don't really get to complain about there being blood in it. But if you are going to change the blood to something else, beets are funny and clever. And the rest of the book is, too.

Rating: Four out of five Minas.

Dream-Casting Dracula

In the comments to some of my posts about Dracula adaptations, an Anonymous person and I got to talking about our own fan casts for the story. Anonymous mentioned Jeremy Irons as a possibility for Dracula and suggested Christoph Waltz as a potential Van Helsing. Waltz is an especially cool choice since he's actually the actor I imagined for the Van Helsing-inspired character as I was reading Dacre Stoker and JD Barker's Dracul. Anonymous went on to offer Saorise Ronan as a promising Mina, which would be awesome. I'll watch Ronan in anything, but especially as my favorite gothic hero.

This of course got me thinking about my own preferences for a Dracula cast. In the interest of variety, I'm intentionally picking actors that Anonymous did not mention, but my dream version would absolutely steal one of their ideas: splitting the story into two films.

I tried to think of cool subtitles for each movie, but couldn't, so I'm going the same route as the recent It films and just calling these Dracula, Part One and Dracula, Part Two.

Part One would skip the Harker-in-Transylvania stuff and go straight to Mina and Lucy in Whitby. It would be all mystery as the Demeter arrives in port and Lucy starts sleepwalking again before getting sick. Meanwhile, Mina would express worry over her missing fiancé and would leave to find him just about the time that Van Helsing shows up to assist with Lucy. The film would end with Lucy's final death at the hands of Van Helsing and her suitors. Then, as an epilogue - maybe a post-credits scene - Mina arrives back in London, newly married to Jonathan, and he spots Dracula in the street. I love that chilling image as a way to finish the movie. All credit to Anonymous for thinking of it

Part Two would open in flashback to Jonathan's arrival in Transylvania and his captivity at the castle. When he escapes and is hospitalized, the nuns send for Mina, who arrives to marry him and transport him back to England. That's where they learn about what happened with Lucy, and Mina becomes Dracula's new target.

So who plays whom? Let's start with Mina and Lucy, since they're the focus of the first film. Mina was easy for me to cast, because when I think of horror and young actors these days, Anya Taylor-Joy is the first person to pop into my head. From The Witch and Morgan to Split and Marrowbone, Taylor-Joy has embraced the scary stuff and she's extremely good in it.



For Lucy, I like Mia Goth. I mean, to start with, I just love her name. Mia Goth. But she's another cool actor with a lot of horror already in her filmography. She was in Marrowbone with Taylor-Joy, but also A Cure for Wellness and the recent Suspiria remake. She and Taylor-Joy also both have great looks. They're not just beautiful, they're eerily beautiful and will look great running around ruined abbeys, castles, and cemeteries in white dresses.



Lucy's fiancé Arthur is usually cast as blonde and generically noble-looking. And honestly, that's how I usually imagine him. But why not do something different and cast a face with some character? Will Poulter has already played a gothic nobleman in The Little Stranger and he's got this quietly dangerous strength that would bring great tension to the scenes when he's questioning Van Helsing's theories about Lucy.



Quincey Morris is an American cowboy, so I wanted a young, rugged actor from the States and preferably from Texas. After racking my brain to come up with someone in the right age range, I decided that accents can indeed be faked and went with my heart. I'm casting John Boyega.



That leaves Jack Seward from Lucy's suitors. The good doctor will do nicely as a thin geeky type, so I'm casting one of my favorite British young people, Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Love Actually, The Maze Runner).



Sneaking around the background of Part One will be Dr Seward's patient, Renfield, a man whose purpose in the plot won't be fully revealed until Part Two. According to Seward in the novel, Renfield is in his late 50s. This has got to be someone with some range, so I picked Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty, The World is Not Enough, Once Upon a Time).



And finally - for Part One - we need to cast Van Helsing. Anonymous' Christoph Waltz probably would have been my first choice, but since I'm intentionally trying to pick differently, I think Werner Herzog would be really cool. He has the added benefit of having directed his own Dracula movie with 1979's Nosferatu the Vampyre.



In Part Two, we bring in the other two, important characters starting with Jonathan Harker. I like Dev Patel. Harker needs to be heroic; someone to relate to and feel bad about when things go horribly for him. Patel is super charismatic and he's already got experience in the Victorian setting with the upcoming The Personal History of David Copperfield.



And finally, we need a Dracula. A few years ago, I would have hesitated to suggest Benedict Cumberbatch for the only reason that he was on the verge of becoming over-exposed. He's not as ubiquitous these days though and he's easily my top preference for the part: thin, handsome, dangerous, and that voice. (Second choice - after seeing that photo with Mia Goth above - would be Jason Isaacs.) We'll have to age him up for the Transylvania scenes, but I prefer that over casting an older actor to age down.



So that's how I'd do it. I'd love to hear thoughts or suggestions of your own in the comments. This kind of exercise is most fun when discussed.

Dracul by Dacre Stoker and JD Barker

Dacre Stoker is the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker and he's working hard to be Bram's spiritual descendant as well as his biological one. Dracul is the second book Dacre's written (this one with co-author JD Barker) that inserts Bram and other Stokers into the world of Dracula.

Dacre's first book was Dracula the Un-dead (with co-author Ian Holt), a sequel to Dracula that has Bram meet the son of Mina and Jonathan Harker as the young man researches the vampire that destroyed his parents' lives. I haven't read it and don't know if I will. I loved Dracul, but I'm not clear on how well it and Un-dead tie together. I've read some things that make me suspect the continuity is a bit wonky, so if that's the case, I'll skip Un-dead. I need to do some more looking into that, though.

Dracul is a prequel to Dracula that features Bram and his siblings in major roles. In real life, Bram Stoker was a sickly child until around the age of seven. No one today knows exactly what was wrong with him. If anyone knew during Bram's life, they didn't write it down for us. But we do know that Bram suddenly got better around seven-years-old for equally mysterious reasons. Dracul offers a cool, supernatural explanation for the recovery in the form of a necromantic nanny who was helping raise the Stoker children.

I don't always like prequels, because they're often just exercises in checking off items on a list of events that have to happen in order for the original thing to take place. Dracul doesn't do that. It's its own mystery as Bram and his siblings try to figure out what happened to him when he was seven, just who this nanny was, why she disappeared shortly after Bram got better, and why does she still feel so intimately and paranormally connected to the family?

Of course it ties into a deadly, undead nobleman from eastern Europe and the investigation turns up things and people who will go on to inspire Bram's greatest work, but it all goes down in a natural way and I never felt like either the plot or I were being manipulated.

There is one, unnatural thing about Dracul though that I didn't care for. That's the use of the same, epistolary format from Bram's novel. Dracula made great use of it, but it's not needed in Dracul, which feels like a found-footage film straining really hard to explain why someone is recording all of these events as they happen. And then weirdly, Dracul drops it by the end. I was happy for that, but it made me question even more why Dacre and Barker felt the need for it in the first place.

Other than that, though, it's a super engaging book with great characters and I came away wanting to learn more about the real-life Bram Stoker. Best of all, it's actually scary with chilling scenes and images that will haunt me for a while.

Dracula (2002)

Who's in it?: Patrick Bergin (Sleeping with the Enemy, Robin Hood, Frankenstein), Giancarlo Giannini (Mimic, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace), and Stefania Rocca (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Love's Labour's Lost).

What's it about?:An adaptation of Stoker's novel set in the 21st Century.

How is it?: I'm impressed with how well it updates Stoker's story to modern times. It keeps all of the main characters, even Quincey, and their relationships to each other are all sound. Jonathan and Mina are engaged. Mina's best friend is Lucy, who has three different suitors before she finally settles on Arthur.

Writer (alongside Eric Lerner)/director Roger Young makes a couple of big changes though, neither or which I like. The first is how he introduces Dracula. In this version, Jonathan and Mina are vacationing in Budapest when the story opens. Jonathan proposes to Mina and surprises her by having all of their friends - Lucy, Arthur, and Quincey - show up. (Dr John Seward doesn't know them yet, but enters the story quickly.) While all of this is going on, a middle-aged man named Vlad Tepes introduces himself to Jonathan with a business proposal that requires Jonathan to travel to Transylvania. I don't mind the prologue to set up the events of the novel, but what's weird is that Tepes claims to be the nephew of Count Dracula, the elderly nobleman whom Jonathan's going to work for.

Bergin plays both versions and he's good, but it's never made clear why he keeps at this deception. I don't see the advantage he gains by switching from old to young and back again multiple times. In Stoker's novel, Dracula appears old at the beginning because he's basically been hibernating in Transylvania for hundreds of years. I'm reading between the lines some, but the impression I get is that the locals are wise to him and it's hard for him to hunt. But once he gets to London's fresh supply of ignorant humans, he's able to drink freely and regain his youth. In Young's version, Dracula's elderly and youthful appearances are just parlor tricks.

The other change I don't like is how Young and Lerner make greed and materialism a theme for some reason. Jonathan and his friends suspect that what Dracula wants Jonathan to do isn't entirely legal, so conversations are had about whether he should agree. The materialistic Quincey is all for it - money justifies everything - while Arthur takes a more conservative approach. Jonathan ultimately agrees with Quincey, but comes to regret it, seeing the horror that follows as the consequence of his greed.

You could make a cool connection between the hunger for wealth and the hunger for blood, but Young/Lerner don't go far enough with it. If anyone is going to be hurt by the deal that Jonathan's getting involved in, that's not made clear. The only risk is to his own conscience (and perhaps his freedom, if he's caught). In order for the greed/vampirism analogy to work, someone needs to be drained of something by Jonathan's actions. The film glosses over other aspects of the caper, too, like just how Jonathan's friends are going to be involved in the scheme and why their agreement to it is important.

But I do love how surprisingly faithful the film is in other ways. I was worried briefly that Mina was getting sidelined and dumbed down from Stoker's version, but that ended up being a trick that the film was pulling on me. Rocca's Mina ends up being pretty awesome, not just as a vampire-fighter, but also as a strong, moral center for the group. And it's also great to see Giancarlo Giannini (from the first couple of Daniel Craig Bond movies). His character's not named Van Helsing, but that's who he's playing and he's a charming one. If it weren't for the changes I mentioned, some of the acting (English is clearly not a strong language for a lot of the cast), and CG effects that are truly horrendous, I'd love this version.

Rating: Three out of five Minas.

The Return of Dracula (1958)

Who's in it?: Francis Lederer (Pandora's Box), Norma Eberhardt (Problem Girls, Live Fast, Die Young), and John Wengraf (The Thin Man Goes Home, Wake of the Red Witch)

What's it about?: Dracula (Lederer) flees Transylvania in the 1950s, pursued by a vampire hunter (Wengraf), and assumes the identity of an artist in order to hide among the man's family in a small, California town.

How is it?: Shockingly great. I always have a fondness for black-and-white films from the '50s and '60s, so I expected to enjoy it visually, but I'm surprised at how well-acted and actually scary The Return of Dracula can be.

The Dracula-in-Smalltown-USA concept could have been cheesy, but everyone plays it straight and gives honest performances. Lederer is a darkly handsome and sinister Dracula; the kind of person you want to like even while fearing that you're disappointing them with everything you do. And that's exactly the situation that his "family" finds themselves in. Greta Granstedt is the widowed head of the family, raising her teenage daughter Rachel (Eberhardt) and young son Mickey (Jimmy Baird) on her own. They all want to welcome their cousin Bellac into their home and he seems pleasant enough, but he also keeps strange hours and is reluctant to communicate or get close to them.

The story follows the Dracula formula by having a friend of Rachel's become Dracula's first victim before he begins focusing on Rachel herself. It's about that time that Dracula's pursuers catch up to him from Europe, replicating the Van Helsing role. Wengraf is competent as the main hunter, but Eberhardt excels as the terrified daughter. I felt her fear. Baird is also very good as the little brother, nailing his own emotional scenes. There's also a neighbor boy (Ray Stricklyn) who's more or less dating Rachel and their relationship feels authentic. They argue just enough to be realistic without ever making me question why they like each other.

The film gets bonus points for setting the story at Halloween, including a procedural detective story as Dracula's pursuers try to locate him, and inserting a startling, sudden splash of color when Wengraf drives a stake into the heart of Dracula's first victim.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Son of Dracula (1943)

Who's in it?: Lon Chaney Jr (Man Made Monster, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb), Louise Allbritton, Robert Paige (The Monster and the Girl, Hellzapoppin'), Frank Craven, J Edward Bromberg (Invisible Agent, Phantom of the Opera), and Evelyn Ankers (Hold That Ghost, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, Captive Wild Woman).

What's it about?: A Southern heiress (Allbritton) courts a vampire (Chaney) with a familiar name for her own, mysterious purposes.

How is it?: I love the Southern Gothic setting and the complicated morality of Allbritton's Katherine. She's playing a dangerous game for reasons that I won't spoil and don't agree with, but I totally understand why she thinks she's right. I didn't expect that kind of intricacy in a Universal Dracula sequel, though I probably should have after Dracula's Daughter.

Two things don't work for me. The smaller issue is the character of Katherine's boyfriend, Frank (Paige). He has a tragic arc as Katherine's plan has the unintended consequence of driving him insane. That's pretty cool, but Frank goes from normal to crazy too quickly, implying (if I'm generous in my reading of him) that he was already pretty close to nuts to begin with. (If I'm not generous, it's just bad film-making.) As soon as Count Alucard steps in as a rival and lays hands on Frank, Frank pulls out a gun and shoots the count. I don't really know why Frank's carrying a gun to begin with, but he's not entirely the calm, Southern gentleman he presents himself as. After he tries to murder Alucard, he spirals down from there. Once he's on that path though, the rest of his journey is captivating.

The bigger problem is Chaney Jr as the count. He looks great, but makes no attempt at a Hungarian accent or really appearing to be European at all. The effects around his vampire powers are pretty great (especially one chilling scene where he floats across the surface of a bayou), but he still isn't very scary. He comes across as a mundane bully, not Lord of the Undead. I guess it's better not to try an accent than it would be to have him do a horrible one, but if he's not capable, then he just feels miscast.

There are interesting things to think about from a continuity standpoint. The Dracula legend is widespread enough in this world that Alucard is a lousy pseudonym if the count is actually trying to hide his identity. The local doctor (Craven) figures it out in the very first scene and is immediately on Alucard's trail. When he calls in a Hungarian folklore expert (Bromberg) for assistance, they speculate about who Alucard might actually be.

The folklore guy, Professor Lazlo, wonders if Alucard might be a descendant of Dracula. That's as close as the movie gets to explaining the connection or justifying the Son of Dracula title. "Son," in this case, doesn't necessarily mean "direct offspring." And since it's just speculation by Lazlo, there's no reason to believe that Alucard is actually, biologically connected to Dracula at all.

Alucard clearly wants some sort of relationship to exist, though, and sees himself at least as the spiritual heir to Dracula's legacy. That's why he adopts such a ludicrous, easy to decipher alias. He wants people to make the connection. He may not even be Hungarian, or even European. That would explain his accent. I imagine that he's a completely American vampire who traveled to Europe and adopted a connection to Dracula before meeting Katherine and following her back to the States. He's a poseur, but he's a powerful one.

One last continuity observation and it's an important one: In relating Dracula's story to Dr Brewster, Lazlo explains that Dracula was destroyed at the end of the nineteenth century. That fits with Stoker's story, but not with the Universal adaptation that took place in the 1930s. There's no mention of any of the events of that film or Dracula's Daughter, so the easiest interpretation is that Son of Dracula is a sequel to the original novel and not the other two Universal films. Meaning that there are two separate realities.

I don't like that, though. I enjoy Son of Dracula too much to just put it aside in a pocket universe. Instead, I prefer to think that Lazlo is simply mistaken about when Dracula was defeated in the Universal films. It also makes more sense for the other sequels that followed if Son of Dracula takes place in the same world as Dracula and Dracula's Daughter, but I'll get into why that is later. It's a weird mistake for Lazlo to have made, but I think that's the best explanation.

Rating: Three out of five Minas.

Dracula 2000 (2000)

Who's in it?: Gerard Butler (300, RocknRolla), Christopher Plummer (The Sound of Music, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), Justine Waddell (Mansfield Park), Jonny Lee Miller (Dead Man's Walk, Mansfield Park, Eli Stone, Elementary), Vitamin C (The WB's Superstar USA), Jennifer Esposito (Samantha Who?), Jeri Ryan (Star Trek: Voyager), Omar Epps (Major League II, House), Danny Masterson (That '70s Show), and Nathan Fillion (Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, Firefly, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Castle).

What's it about?: A hundred years after the events of Bram Stoker's novel, Van Helsing (Plummer) and a freshly resurrected Dracula (Butler) search for the woman (Waddell) who is the legacy of them both.

How is it?: Much much stronger than a movie called Dracula 2000 has a right to be. I love how it makes itself a sequel to the novel while expanding the mythology in cool ways. I say that it makes itself a sequel to the novel - and it mostly works that way - but there is a weird flashback to Dracula's defeat in the 19th Century that doesn't exactly match up with the way Stoker described it. It's still a cool defeat though. And Van Helsing's method of prolonging his own life into the 21st Century makes sense.

I also love the explanation of Dracula's origin and how it ties together and justifies some of his classic weaknesses. It's a clever bit of speculation and world-building that reminds me of some of the stuff White Wolf Publishing used to do with vampire history in their Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game, tying vampires back to the Mark of Cain in Genesis. Without going into detail, Dracula 2000 has its head in a similar place.

The cast is pretty great, too. Plummer is the tired, but determined Van Helsing. Miller is his tough, but sympathetic protégé. Butler plays a sultry and dangerous Dracula. And Waddell is the frightened and confused woman who has to figure out how she's connected to Dracula and Van Helsing, then rise to the challenge of finding her own place in the story. Add to all that cool, smaller roles for Esposito, Epps, Masterson, Ryan, and Fillion and you've got a super watchable story.

One thing keeps me from loving it more, though. Mary is obviously a Mina-like character, which is fine, but her roommate's (Vitamin C) name is Lucy Westerman. That's a tough coincidence to swallow considering that Lucy Westernra is also a person who existed in this world. It's a small thing, but it pulled me out of the story when her name was revealed.

Rating: Four out of five Marys

Blood of Dracula (1957)

Who's in it?: Sandra Harrison (an episode of Adventures of Superman), Louise Lewis (a different episode of Adventures of Superman, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Vampire), and Gail Ganley (sadly not in any episodes of Adventures of Superman).

What's it about?: A teenage girl (Harrison) attends a boarding school where her anger issues are exploited by a science teacher (Lewis) who wants to turn her into a bloodsucking vampire. You know, for science. Ganley plays a fellow student who's also the teacher's aide/lackey.

How is it?: First up, this is not actually a Dracula movie. It's a sequel to neither the novel nor another Dracula film, though I think I can make it one in my imagination.

I don't know why it wasn't officially titled I Was a Teenage Vampire when it was made by the same people who did I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. It also has the same tone as those and really the same basic plot as I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The Blood of Dracula title seems intentionally misleading, especially when the only mention of Dracula is plural and as a synonym for all vampires. The line basically goes, "What if the murders were committed by vampires... you know, Draculas?"

As hilariously ridiculous as that is (and it's not the only hilariously ridiculous thing... hello, vampire makeup), and as disappointing as it is to see someone hypnotized into becoming a vampire instead of becoming one the usual way, I like the boarding school setting and the '50s teen shenanigans (secret "initiations" that are just parties where girls dance to records; midnight scavenger hunts, etc.).

I also like how the hypnosis for the vampire transformation is aided by an ancient amulet from the Carpathian mountains. If I want to work at it, I can imagine a backstory that does somehow involve the actual Dracula. Perhaps the amulet belonged to him and has become corrupted by his evil. Or perhaps it was somehow instrumental in his own transformation from Transylvanian count to undead bloodsucker. Whatever it is, I believe that it's the amulet's power and not Miss Branding's skill at mesmerism that actually transforms poor Nancy Perkins.

Rating: Three out of five vampire Nancys.

Happy Bram Stoker Day!

I do a spotty job celebrating the birthdays of my favorite authors on this blog, but I'm so deep into Dracula lore these days that I can't let Stoker's birthday pass without a mention.

Born 172 years ago today and I'm super glad of it.

Monster Monday | Dracula's Daughter (1936)

I had such a good time watching Dracula adaptations last month that I decided to keep going and watch some of the sequels to those adaptations. And even movie sequels to the novel itself, but that don't follow up a movie adaptation.

Who's in it?: Gloria Holden (Dodge City), Edward Van Sloan (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy), Otto Kruger (Treasure Island, Tarzan's Desert Mystery, High Noon, Black Widow), and Marguerite Churchill (The Big Trail, The Walking Dead).

What's it about?: Immediately following the events of Dracula (1931), Dracula's daughter (Holden) comes to England to properly dispose of his body and hopefully cure her own vampirism.

How is it?: I love that it picks up right where Tod Browning's Dracula left off. Jonathan Harker and Mina have left the abbey, but Renfield's body is still there where Dracula left it and Van Helsing (Van Sloan, reprising his role from the previous movie) is still in the tomb with the count's staked corpse. That's when the police show up.

Van Helsing is arrested for Dracula's murder, but instead of calling a lawyer, he asks Scotland Yard to contact a psychologist friend of his, Jeffrey Garth (Kruger). Van Helsing apparently wants to keep Jonathan, Mina, and Dr Seward out of it even though they could support his story. He never mentions them in the film, but that fits with his personality from the previous film. He's stoic, independent, and strong-willed. He refuses to make up a believable lie about what he did, but he's not going to put anyone else in a position where their reputations are also at stake for claiming that vampires exist.

Jeff is skeptical, but (like Dr Seward in the novel) is a former student of Van Helsing and agrees to help the old professor out. Jeff is helped by his assistant, a cultured woman named Janet Blake (Churchill). Dracula's Daughter came out a couple of years after WS Van Dyke's Thin Man movie and I sense some Nick and Nora influence on Jeff and Janet. They're not married, but they clearly like each other even though they tease and bicker. They're a fun couple and I especially like Janet who has to exercise patience with the grumpier Jeff.

Meanwhile, a mysterious, exotic woman shows up at the morgue, dominates the mind of the guard there, and steals Dracula's body. It's Countess Marya Zaleska, who refers to herself later as the daughter of Dracula. It's never specified if she's the Count's actual, biological child or simply someone whom he turned into a vampire long ago, like his so-called "brides" in Transylvania. I like the second option and it makes sense with what's revealed about Zaleska's character. The term "bride" suggests some consent in her alliance with him. "Daughter" does not. You don't get to choose your parents. And since Zaleska resents her vampiric state, I can see why she might prefer that term.

In fact, she's come to London to make sure that Dracula's body is completely destroyed, hoping that doing so will free her from her curse. Her reluctance about being a vampire gives the film a different tone from Dracula and allows Dracula's Daughter to play with different themes. I've always read her craving for blood as an allegory for addiction that she tries to beat through sheer will power. Sadly, it's a tragic, doomed effort.

Other viewers have focused on the seductive side of vampirism and see the film as an allegory for homosexuality. That totally works, too; I just hadn't thought of it. Either way, Dracula's Daughter offers a lot to think about and Holden is a great actor to center the drama around. She's a perfect replacement for Bela Lugosi; aristocratic and exotically attractive in the same way that he was in the earlier film, but because she's also a sympathetic character, I'm more invested in her (and Jack and Janet when she gets involved with them, because they need Dracula's corpse to verify Van Helsing's story) than I am in her dad.

Rating: Four out of five Janets

Dracula Adaptations | Dracula 3D (2012)

Who's in it?: Thomas Kretschmann (Blade II, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, King Kong, Avengers: Age of Ultron), Marta Gastini (The Rite), Rutger Hauer (Nighthawks, Blade Runner, Ladyhawke, The Hitcher), and Asia Argento (xXx).

What's it about?: Dario Argento puts his startling stamp on Stoker's story.

How is it?: Argento makes some interesting choices that I quite like. Instead of having Dracula try to increase his power by traveling to England, the story stays focused on a village near the vampire's castle. In the novel, the local villagers are afraid of the count and on their guard against him. In this version, he's using his wealth and power (political and supernatural) to influence the community and even help them in some ways. But then Jonathan Harker comes to town to work for Dracula as a librarian and when he goes missing, Mina comes looking and starts a chain of events leading to Dracula's downfall. It's a reminder that you can mess around with Stoker's story and still have a cool, valid take.

The cast looks great, too. Kretschmann is bland as Dracula, but the other major characters are all visually exciting even when their acting isn't so hot. Gastini is a lovely and intelligent Mina. The best though is Hauer as Van Helsing. That's inspired.

Sadly, the cheap CG effects are super hard to get past. And there's an especially weird bit where Dracula turns into a giant praying mantis for some reason. Argento goes like two steps into territory I can't follow him, but with believable effects and a couple of tweaks, I could see myself loving this.

Rating: Three out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | All-Action Classics: Dracula (2008)

Adapting classic literature for a younger audience - and keeping it faithful to the literature - is tricky business. Any kind of adaptation has its challenges, but taking a novel intended for adults of a century or two ago and making it exciting for modern kids is super daunting. Especially when that novel has a difficult narrative style and spends a lot of time building dread by prolonging events. And then there's the blood and violence.

Not that younger readers don't also appreciate lots of blood, but I imagine that some of their parents aren't quite as excited about their being exposed to it. Michael Mucci and Ben Caldwell had some hard choices to make. Fortunately, they made all the right decisions on All-Action Classics: Dracula and created an adaptation that's perfect for their audience - including grown-ups in the mood for a fast-paced, exciting version of Bram Stoker's story.

Caldwell's animation-inspired characters and settings look like concept art for what could be Disney's Dracula, though Mucci's script does anything but dumb the story down. The combined result isn't much like a Disney film, but the art has the same level of quality. Jonathan Harker and Mina actually have more of a Rankin-Bass look to their designs. They're fresher-faced and less exaggerated than the other characters, which is appropriate since they're the readers' entry to the story. They seem the most normal of the cast.

Renfield is fully convincing as both a kind, pitiful, old man and a violently energetic lunatic. Van Helsing is a comical old scientist with professorial facial hair and enormously bushy eyebrows. Dr. Seward is a thin, fragile-looking man. You can tell just by looking at him that when he moves he's very careful and measured.

Caldwell draws aristocratic Arthur Holmwood with classical, almost effeminate features. He looks like he's stepped off the side of an ancient Greek vase. Quincey Morris is a big-jawed Western hero with long, Wild Bill Hickok hair and a mustache to match. I want to read a whole series of stories about Caldwell's Morris. Lucy has dark, exotic features that make me believe all of these men would fall in love with her. Her looks also turn her into a hauntingly seductive vampire once Dracula's done with her.

And as for Dracula himself: Caldwell's version is probably my favorite representation of all time. He strikes just the right balance between seductive and menacing. A couple of the film versions have gotten that right, but so often Dracula is either horrendous and disfigured or dapper and handsome. Caldwell's design with its switch-thin frame and terrible, crooked teeth leans toward the horrendous, but Dracula's body language conveys a confident, powerful, compelling presence. This Dracula can seduce, but it's a seduction based on the vampire's awful will rather than romance. It's perfect.

The lettering helps with this image too. The tails on Dracula's word balloons don't point straight at him like everyone else's in the book. They curl and wind, suggesting a silky, hypnotic voice. And this is the book's greatest strength. Not just the lettering, but the ability that the lettering and the character design and the colors and everything else has to quickly tell you what you need to know about each of these characters. There's no need for long, tension-building scenes. The tension and the horror is all visual. That frees the script to just hit the action parts of the plot.

All-Action Dracula lives up to its name. Not that there aren't scenes of people talking, but Caldwell juices those up too with interesting details and animated facial expressions. Mucci uses very few captions - mostly at the beginning and end as the story ramps up and finally settles down again - and even then he's sparing about how much text he allows into a panel. There's nothing in comics I hate more than having to spend a lot of time reading captions on a page. Mucci doesn't make me do that, which is pretty impressive in a Dracula adaptation.

Since I first read All-Action Dracula and reviewed it for Comic Book Resources several years ago (a lot of this post is based on that review), Ben Caldwell and I have become pals. He was nice enough to send me some behind-the-scenes designs and other miscellany a while ago for me to post on the site. It's really cool stuff, so just click that link if you want to see it.

Rating: Five out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Dracula (2006)

Who's in it?: Marc Warren (Wanted), David Suchet (Agatha Christie's Poirot), Stephanie Leonidas (Mirrormask, American Gothic), Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey, The Guest, The Man Who Invented Christmas) Sophia Myles (Underworld, Thunderbirds), Rafe Spall (Prometheus, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Men in Black: International), and Tom Burke (The Musketeers).

What's it about?: The BBC creates the craziest version of the story yet.

How is it?: Apparently, I don't like any Dracula adaptation after 1979. This one weirdly inserts an English devil-cult that's actively working to bring Dracula (Warren) to London. They sent Van Helsing (Suchet) as their first unwitting agent, but when Dracula decided to keep him captive, they needed a new plan. Fortunately (for them), Arthur Holmwood (Stevens) is persuaded to help in exchange for their promise to use Dracula's powers to cure him of syphilis. He contracted it as an infant from his parents, but the revelation that he has it makes it impossible for him to marry Lucy (Myles) until he's healed.

When Arthur meets Lucy's friend Mina (Leonidas) and her fiancé, Jonathan Harker (Spall), Arthur hires Harker to go to Transylvania and bring back Dracula, knowing full well that there's danger involved. Harker goes missing, but Van Helsing escapes and follows Dracula back to England where he teams up with Mina to defeat the vampire. Helping them is Dr Seward (Burke), a friend of Arthur and Lucy who also happens to be in love with her.

The cast is really really good, especially Sophia Myles and David Suchet. Lucy is probably closest out of any adaptation to whom I imagine in Stoker's novel; updated slightly so that she has more intelligence and power. She's beautiful and sweet, but she knows that Seward wants more from their relationship than she wants to give and she handles that gently and firmly. As she does Holmwood's determination to keep postponing their wedding.

Suchet is a determined, half-mad Van Helsing; a whirlwind of a character who has all the passion and drive to defeat Dracula, but doesn't always know the best path to achieve that goal. I wish he was in a better version, but sadly, in spite of these bright spots, the plot is so mixed up that it's not at all Stoker's story, even in spirit.

Rating: Two out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Little Book of Horror: Dracula (2005)

In addition to all these movie adaptations of Dracula, I've been reading a couple of comics adaptations as well. The first is from the Little Books Of Horror series written by Steve Niles and published by IDW. There were three volumes in the series, including a Frankenstein adaptation drawn by Scott Morse and a War of the Worlds adaptation with Ted McKeever.

The Dracula volume may be my favorite though thanks to the art by Richard Sala. Sala is one of those artists whose aesthetic I just really connect with. His stuff is gloriously gothic and sexy while also being funny. And it works especially well here with Niles' text.

Instead of going for a straightforward adaptation (as he does in the other Little Books of Horror), Niles reinterprets the story into a fun, adventurous take. It's entertaining and funny with Mina and Van Helsing teaming up to hunt Dracula back to Carfax Abbey, getting trapped by the Count, and then a huge, dramatic, last minute rescue by an unexpected other character. Not too faithful, but I love it.

Rating: Five out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Who's in it?: Gary Oldman (Air Force One, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Batman Begins), Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice, Alien Resurrection, Stranger Things), Anthony Hopkins (Magic, The Silence of the Lambs, Thor), Keanu Reeves (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Point Break, John Wick), Richard E Grant (The Age of Innocence, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Logan), Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Kiss the Girls), Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer), and Tom Waits (The Dead Don't Die).

What's it about?: Francis Ford Coppola attempts a faithful adaptation and fails spectacularly.

How is it?: It bugs me more than it should that this is called Bram Stoker's Dracula, because it really, really isn't. It gets the characters and their relationships to each other right and the casting is exactly correct, at least visually. When I picture Mina, I imagine Winona Ryder. Keanu Reeves makes a very good-looking Harker. And I have much respect for including the one and only faithful version of Quincey Morris (Campbell), a great, cool character in the novel, but one who's either dropped or merged with Arthur Holmwood in other versions.

Another positive thing is just how visually inventive and gorgeous the film is. To distraction, in some parts, but I appreciate the thought and artistry that went into the film's look and visual language.

But what I absolutely can't get over is the way the film makes Mina a consensual participant in an actual romance with Dracula. I hate that more and more with every viewing. There's at least one other version where Dracula believes that Mina is the reincarnation of his wife, but that's not what bothers me. It's that she acknowledges it and embraces it. The "Love Never Dies" tagline is shameful. Coppola's Dracula owes more to Anne Rice than Bram Stoker.

And that's not even getting into Van Helsing's (Hopkins) humping Quincey's leg. There are so many weird, unexplainable choices in this film and it kills me that the title presumes to herald it as Stoker's vision brought to the screen. The fact that I do keep rewatching it is a testament to its look and mood and Quincey Morris.

Rating: Two out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Dracula (1979)

Who's in it?: Frank Langella (Masters of the Universe, Superman Returns), Kate Nelligan (Wolf, US Marshals), Laurence Olivier (Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Clash of the Titans), and Donald Pleasence (You Only Live Twice, Halloween, Escape from New York)

What's it about?: Universal remixes elements from the novel into a lavish, gothic spectacle.

How is it?: Let's get the movie's big problem out of the way first and that's Dracula's costume. He looks like he's wearing a white turtleneck with a vampire cape from the Halloween aisle at Target. But there's nothing wrong with Langella's performance and he's an excellent, good-looking, suave, and charming Dracula. I believe it when characters fall under his spell. (His hair is too poofy to be believable in the nineteenth century, but oh well.)

The rest of the cast is good, too. I've read somewhere that Pleasance was offered the role of Van Helsing, but turned it down because it was too similar to Dr Loomis in Halloween. I agree and I'm extremely happy with him as Seward: a monster hunter, but sort of a reluctant one and certainly not the obsessed pursuer that Loomis and Van Helsing are.

Speaking of Van Helsing, Olivier disappears into that role. He's doing a convincing (to my ears, anyway) Dutch accent and his facial hair threw me off so that I had to actually go and remind myself who was playing him.

Kate Nelligan brings extra gravity to her role as Lucy. For some reason (that I'll have thoughts about in a second), Mina and Lucy are switched in this version, so that Mina is Dracula's first victim and Lucy is the one whom everyone's trying to save for the rest of the story. Because the movie plays up the seduction angle, Lucy doesn't try to resist in the same way that Mina does in the novel. Instead, she's intrigued by the gorgeous count and starts to fall for him, even though she suspects that something's not quite right. It's more similar to real-life romantic attraction than the novel or the Lugosi film are with their emphasis on Dracula's supernatural will.

And yet it never asks viewers to believe that Lucy is completely consensual in her attraction to the Count. That's a big problem I have with Coppola's version, but this '79 version walks the tightrope nicely. Dracula exerts power, so Lucy isn't just abandoning her commitment to Harker, but Nelligan plays her more or less as a woman who's heart and head are telling her different things and there's a real struggle as she tries to choose between Harker and Dracula. I believed her falling under Dracula's spell much more than I do in other adaptations.

About the switching of Lucy with Mina: It annoyed me at first, because I didn't see the point, but as the movie went on, I started to see how it affected the characters of Van Helsing and Dr Seward in a powerful way. Like in other adaptations, Lucy is Dr Seward's daughter, but in this one, Mina is actually Van Helsing's daughter. So when Van Helsing arrives in England too late to save his own girl, it adds a layer of tragedy and motivation to have him trying to save the daughter of his friend. Pleasence adds to this by being pretty helpless in the whole affair, while Olivier is acting the crap out of his failure to protect Mina and his determination to not let the same thing happen to Lucy.

Describing it that way makes it seem like Lucy's story is subservient to Van Helsing and Seward's, but the movie is concerned about them all. I felt the stakes in a way that's pretty rare for Dracula adaptations.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Who's in it?: Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More, Doctor Zhivago, the 1970 Jesús Franco Dracula adaptation) and Isabelle Adjani (this is all I know her from, but she played Emily Brontë in the French film Les Soeurs Brontë that I'm all interested in now).

What's it about?: Werner Herzog remakes the 1922 silent classic, but with sound, color, and the original names of Stoker's characters (mostly).

How is it?: As much as I love Murnau's version, I was all about seeing an update. I don't know that I've ever actually seen a Herzog-directed film, but he's a legend and I do love it when he appears as an actor in various things, like Jack Reacher or that episode of Parks and Recreation. I also thought it was cool that he cast Kinski as Dracula after Kinski played Renfield in Franco's adaptation. So I was quite looking forward to this.

It was great going for a while. It moves slowly, but it's a rewarding quietness with lots of lingering shots of landscapes and beautiful, atmospheric music. It's a gorgeous film. And Kinski makes a surprisingly sympathetic Dracula even under all that horrifying makeup. He also has a temper and of course a very nasty thirst for blood, so I was never on his side, but there's an ironic humanity to him that I liked a lot.

Adjani is the film's standout though as the extremely sensitive and heroic Lucy. Like in Murnau's version, she's susceptible to premonitions and would be sort of maddeningly paranoid if she weren't so unbelievably sweet and of course right. As much as I love her and her heart though, I have a couple of big issues with the character.

First of all, the script insists on calling her Lucy for some dumb, nonsensical reason. She's clearly the Mina character from the novel. But that's the lesser of my problems. I'd heard that Herzog changed the ending from the silent version and even thought it sounded interesting, but when I actually watched it, I hated it. Like in Murnau's film, Mina (I still think of her that way) sacrifices herself to defeat Dracula and hopefully save her town. But Herzog robs the action of power by having it be effectively meaningless. Her act of courage is invalidated and I was left wondering what the point was.

Rating: Three out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Count Dracula (1977)

Who's in it?: Louis Jourdan (Anne of the Indies, Octopussy), Frank Finlay (the George C Scott A Christmas Carol), and Judi Bowker (the 1981 Clash of the Titans)

What's it about?: The BBC makes a faithful mini-series.

How is it?: Seriously, it's the most faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel. Cinemassacre agrees. (Thanks, Erik, for sharing that with me.) It only makes two major changes and they're both fairly benign. Mina and Lucy are sisters rather than just good friends, and Arthur Holmwood has been combined with Quincey Morris to become Quincey Holmwood, an American diplomat from Texas. That last one's an especially weird change, but all it does is let Morris out of the story (he's a cool character in Stoker, but superfluous) while still paying homage to him. Otherwise, the adaptation is so faithful that it even shoots on location in Whitby for the parts of the story that take place there.

Jourdan is an impressively suave and smart Dracula. He feels dangerous not just because he's a superpowered monster, but also because he really seems to know what he's doing. He has a plan, as of course, Stoker's version does.

Finlay may be my favorite Van Helsing yet. It's hard to beat Peter Cushing's awesome, dangerous vampire hunter, but that's not really Stoker's character. Finlay plays the literary version with competence, but also humor and a fantastic bedside manner.

Bowker's Mina is pretty great, too. She's the one version I've seen that portrays both the character's gentle naivety and her intense intelligence. She never crosses into buttkicking hero territory, but she's brave and figures out what's going on ahead of most of the dudes around her.

My one complaint about this version has to do with the look of it due to its being shot on video tape and the limits of its special effects. I appreciate that it uses video effects to try to convey some things that were missing from earlier versions, but some of them look silly to today's eyes.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Count Dracula (1970)

Who's in it?: Christopher Lee (Horror of Dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave), Herbert Lom (Mysterious Island, A Shot in the Dark), Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More, Nosferatu the Vampyre), Maria Rohm (The Blood of Fu Manchu, Ten Little Indians), and Soledad Miranda (100 Rifles, Vampyros Lesbos)

What's it about?: Spanish exploitation director Jesús Franco tries to create the most faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel to date.

How is it?: It was advertised to me as "the most faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel ever filmed" and the tagline on one poster was "Finally! The Original Version!" Neither of those statements is true.

It's cool that Franco brought in Christopher Lee to play Dracula. Lee was in Hammer's 1958 adaptation of course, and had made a couple of sequels by the time Franco hired him. And since he went on to make several more sequels for Hammer after this, he's one of the most iconic Draculas ever. So it's cool to see him in this non-Hammer version. (It's also cool that Renfield is played by Klaus Kinski, who's not just a great actor in general, but also went on to play Dracula in Werner Herzog's version at the end of the decade.)

One of the elements in this that's very faithful to Stoker is Lee's makeup. He begins the story as an elderly, mustached count who gets younger as the story progresses. I've never been able to imagine a mustached Dracula that seemed cool to me, but Lee pulls it off. Of course he does.

The opening scenes at Dracula's castle are pretty faithful to the novel, too, but it all falls apart when the story shifts to England. Rather than waking up in a Transylvanian convent after his ordeal, Harker regains consciousness in an English asylum run by Van Helsing (Lom), with Dr Seward merely an assistant there who never plays an important role in the story.

Harker is soon visited by his fiancée Mina (Rohm) and her close friend Lucy (Miranda), so their relationships are all the same as in Stoker. And as in the novel, the asylum is next door to the ruined abbey that Dracula has purchased, which is how the count discovers and begins persecuting the women: first Lucy; then Mina. But while Lucy is engaged to a British lord, his name is weirdly Quincey Morris (Lucy's American suitor in the novel); not Arthur Holmwood. There's a lot that's true to the book, but already the film makes some weird changes.

The biggest flaw though is how the script abridges the story in a way that makes Van Helsing seem like a fool. He ignores or disbelieves crucial information for dramatic reasons that are very unlike the literary professor. For example, he doesn't buy Harker's story of what happened at Dracula's castle, even though Harker has bite marks to prove it. And later, when it's more convenient to the abridgment, Van Helsing claims to recognize the marks as Dracula's work. So there's a lot of his being clueless and then later saying, "Ah! Just as I suspected!" Sure you did, Doc.

Maria Rohm is beautiful, but generally forgettable and disappointing as Mina. She's as much a helpless victim as Lucy; merely a second chance for the heroes to defeat the villain rather than being an asset or even really a full character. Like a lot else with the film, I appreciate the effort, but Franco's version is ultimately unsatisfying.

Rating: Three out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Horror of Dracula (1958)

Who's in it?: Christopher Lee (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Devil Rides Out, The Man with the Golden Gun, Sleepy Hollow, The Lord of the Rings, Attack of the Clones), Peter Cushing (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr. Who and the Daleks, Star Wars), Melissa Stribling, and Michael Gough (Konga, Batman, Sleepy Hollow)

What's it about?: Hammer makes a lurid, action-packed adaptation.

How is it?: Originally titled just Dracula in the UK, but renamed Horror of Dracula for US release, Hammer's version takes a lot of liberties with the novel, but it's so good. Christopher Lee perfectly captures both the menace and the sensuality of the Count. Peter Cushing is excellent as the super-competent Van Helsing who always knows what to do and just needs to find Dracula so he can do it. And even though it's a huge departure from the book, I love that Jonathan Harker is Van Helsing's agent sent to Dracula's castle not as a lawyer, but as an assassin to destroy the vampires.

It simplifies the supporting characters by having Mina (Stribling) be married to Arthur Holmwood (Gough) with Lucy (Carol Marsh) as his sister. When Lucy is killed by Dracula (as in the novel), Arthur and Mina assist Van Helsing in taking down the Count. There's a Dr Seward, but he's just the local physician and doesn't play a real role in the plot. There's no Renfield and frankly I don't miss him. There's certainly no Quincey Morris, whom I do miss, but he's been cut out of every adaptation so far and I understand why. From a plot standpoint, he's superfluous.

Mina has been young and innocent in every adaptation so far, but Stribling's version is an aristocratic matron with confidence and power. Her concern for Lucy feels like the duty of an older sibling, not the love of a dear friend. I like that she's so capable, but one of the things I love most about the literary Mina is the combination of her great intelligence with the flaw of self-doubt. That's missing in this version.

Rating: Four out of five Minas