Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Bram Stoker wrote a sex panic, and Coppola shot it like a sex movie.

I’m always on the lookout for horny movies, and somehow I avoided the most famous horny horror movie ever made until this Halloween. It’s as horny as promised.

The story underneath it is Stoker’s, a Victorian nightmare about what happens when women want things. The men spend two hours calling the women whores, and the women who give in get killed for it. Coppola isn’t scared of any of it, and he’s on the vampire’s side the whole time.

You can see it in how the thing looks. Coppola made it all by hand, in camera, and you can see the seams: shadows that move without their owners, a whole world that looks painted on glass. It absolutely holds up, and I love the artificiality of it. It looks like an erotic dream, which is what Coppola said he wanted.

The movie even turns the men’s panic up past the book. James V. Hart’s script gives Anthony Hopkins’s Van Helsing a lecture Stoker never wrote, on “the diseases of Venus,” where he announces that civilisation and syphilisation advanced together. To him, desire is a disease of the blood, and Dracula is how it spreads. It came out in 1992, deep in the AIDS crisis, and it’s hard not to hear what everyone in that theater was afraid of.

Watch who pays for wanting. Lucy says what she wants out loud, and Sadie Frost plays her so hot the story has to kill her. Van Helsing calls her “the devil’s concubine,” and the hunters drive the stake in. The brides go the same way. Coppola’s Mina wants Dracula just as badly, from the absinthe date to drinking blood from his chest, and she still gets a communion wafer branded into her forehead, because the story can’t help itself. Then Coppola gives her a past life the novel never did, true love across “oceans of time,” and lets her desire win. Lucy gets a stake. Mina gets a fresco.

Even the story’s most nervous desire, a man’s, gets the full treatment. Keanu Reeves lies back while three brides rise out of the bed and swallow him up, limp as a Victorian lady on a fainting couch. Then Dracula storms in, not to save him but to claim him: “How dare you touch him! He belongs to me!” He throws the brides a baby instead and keeps Harker for himself.

This goes on my list of horny movies. It’s horny the way Catholic school is horny: all rules, and everyone thinking about the same thing.

Stray thoughts:

• Winona Ryder is so hot in this.
• Gary Oldman is hot in every form Dracula takes, including the top hat and the little blue sunglasses.
• Monica Bellucci is so hot in this.

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