Deadlights: Grody to the Max

There is no grosser, more decadently rancid movie than Bram Stoker's Dracula, a rock-solid late career classic from The Conversation director Francis Ford Coppola. It's a movie in which the titular vampire is introduced as an obscene and wrinkled ghoul like a candle of melted flesh, a movie in which Dracula turns into a werewolf and eats a hypnotized Lucy's pussy while sucking her blood, a movie in which a group of clerks, dandies, and doctors behead a woman buried in her wedding dress as she vomits gore all over them in appalling crimson fountains. It's like someone spiked the punch with acid at a tittering Victorian banquet and now all the prim ladies and fussy gentlemen are ripping their clothes and jerking off into the decorative fountains.

Dracula is a movie about being nasty and pitiful and alone and about the powerful vulnerability of living in that state. In placing a melodramatic love story at the center of Stoker's novel, Coppola ties the thing together in a far more interesting and ugly way than it originally stood. First there's the incredibly demeaned, abject nature of the love story. Dracula's wife commits suicide in the film's prologue, leading him to renounce God and live in darkness for hundreds of years until she's unexpectedly reincarnated. When he finds her again in the person of Wilhelmina "Mina" Murray he attaches to her like the parasite he's become, crying tears of blood and degenerating into a pitiful beast when she abandons him to marry Harker.

This love affair across time is the most potent source of emotion in the film. It's a dangerous, all-consuming love, much more interesting and affecting than Mina's staid relationship with the clerk Jonathan Harker. Emotions like this are part of horror's animating appeal. They let us revel in the denigration of becoming slaves to our impulses and to our hearts, the shameful pleasure of making self-destructive decisions, of gorging ourselves on dizzying, drunken, stupid love. It's telling that in the film's final moments Mina doesn't go to Jonathan to reassert the sway of acceptable social mores; instead she stays with the Count as he dies, weeping over his body and the ruin of their great romance.

As much as horror exists to show us the dark spots in our own consciences, it also serves to let the rotten buds of our neediness, our hunger, our selfish desire bloom into full flower. Watching Dracula is like peering through a keyhole into a world where nothing matters but raw, needy emotion. It may not win out in the end, but that's the tragedy of loving without restraint or reason: it's an act of self-destruction that it rips everything it touches to red rags. Through Coppola's film we get to touch those towering storms of emotion and know our own inner passions better.