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When I saw him four days ago down in this own place he looked queer.
Bram Stoker, Dracula1
Since its release in 1992, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula has made a deep impression upon the vampire community, or more likely left an infamous hole in it.2 Critics received Coppola's movie with closed fangs. To Fred Botting, Bram Stoker's Dracula is 'The End of Gothic', the final metamorphosis of a faltering convention into some strange and alien form that destroys all of Gothic's power.3 Stoker's novel brought to greatness a war between the establishment of gender roles, threatened by the overtly (homo)sexual presence of Count Dracula, who turned women into harlots and men into sissies, before Abraham Van Helsing and his Crew of Light end Count's reign of terror to reaffirm their own faltering masculinity. Coppola's version creates a new heterogeneous blend of the corrupted legends of Prince Vlad the Impaler woven together with the literary Dracula within a Harlequin Romance format. The homoerotic undertones of Stoker's novel disappear under the overly-exaggerated romantic quest of Coppola's new vampire. However, like the vampire, any attempts to reduce the innate homoeroticism of vampire lore to dust will only result in it rising from the grave in the next generation.
In creating his new Dracula, Coppola intended to portray more accurately the story of the original Dracula-figure whom Stoker depicted in his novel. Sifting through the ancient titles of the Romanian Prince Vlad, Coppola became confused in details, mixing together traits of the alleged historical Dracula with Stoker's literary character. According to biographer Michael Schumacher, 'The problem with the various movie adaptations of the Dracula story, Coppola believed, was their deviation from the Stoker novel, and from the way Stoker had taken a historical figure -Vlad the Impaler - and made him a protagonist in his novel.'4 Coppola set out not only to re-establish Dracula as the central figure of Stoker's story but also to re-invent the figure. Schumacher continues with Coppola's comments on his goals: "I wanted to make a woman's movie", he explained, "as opposed to a Victorian guys movie, where the Victorian guys go out and get the bad guy".'5 Although Coppola intended for his project to mimic more precisely the original tales of the...