#dracula 1974

[fanofspooky]

Horror movies by year:

1974

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1974) dir. Dan Curtis

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992) dir. Francis Ford Coppola

NOSFERATU (2024) dir. Robert Eggers

[amberkendslacy]

The whole Dracula 'true love reborn' plot thing bothers me not just because it's not in the book but also because I'm pretty sure that plot originated in Blacula.

In that movie, Dracula is the one who killed the main character's wife and turned him into a vampire for trying to end the slave trade.

Like, he just stole his victim's origin story, I guess. Fucked up.

[charnel-grounds]

Dracula (1974) - French program

[schlock-luster-video]

On March 23, 2024, Dan Curtis' Dracula was screened on Svengoolie.

[lonelyvampx]

One day I visited a very distant castle. It was one of the beautiful castles located on a hill overlooking the whole city, and overlooking a small graveyard full of roses. The rainy weather, light fog, rough road, the roofs of the castle and its shape made me see it as a castle that might be inhabited by a vampire, so I edited a vid with music that I like from the movie Dracula 1974 🏰

some pics

[dont-read-the-latin]

watched dracula (1974) and was disturbed to find out that jack palance spends the entire movie making the face that cats make when they smell something stinky

[atundratoadstool]

Where did the big turning point regarding Dracula's character in medium happen where he became a tragic figure angsting about living forever and lost love? Stoker's Count is a being of pure evil who the book implies willingly chose that path and while Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee glamorized the character considerably, Dracula was still portrayed in their films as a wicked monster. So is it purely an invention of Francis Ford Coppola and Castlevania?  

[Spoilers: A lot of Dracula’s cinematic history and various alterations to its plot]

So, I think part of what’s going on with Dracula by the time we hit the 90s is that the literary tradition that Anne Rice more or less jump-started--in which authors look to vampires as tormented outsiders worthy of our sympathy--had reshaped expectations for vampire media in general. At some point in the 20th century, people realized that maybe it was time to take the figures that literature had routinely vilified in relation to apprehensions regarding race, gender and sexuality and to reposition them as protagonists. I think this is a shift that you can see influencing Frank Langella’s 1979 Dracula even if the Count is still very much the villain there.

With regards to Coppola’s iconic Dracula, though, there is a very specific line of media I believe you can trace to show how we got from Lee and Lugosi’s Counts to Oldman’s. In the 1960s, the beautifully low budget gothic soap opera Dark Shadows introduced the world to the sympathetic vampire character Barnabas Collins, which big plot arc involved becoming obsessed with a woman he believed to be the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. While there were prior Gothic texts that featured reincarnated lost loves (the 1932 Mummy film and H. Rider Haggard’s She), a lot of people feel that Dark Shadows really established the basic plot as regards vampires. This eventually made its way into Dracula adaptations in the 70s, and featured in both a 1974 version of Dracula starring Jack Palance and in the original 1972 Blacula (and I will note for all that film’s failings, Prince Mamuwalde handles his reincarnation plot a lot more gracefully than Dracula generally does). While it was Coppola’s film that really popularized the idea of the Count as a tragic romantic lead, it was drawing on about three decades of prior stories with very similar dynamics.