A coffin shivers and bursts its locks. An elegant dowager in scarlet and black invites a beautiful young teacher to a glass of wine and takes her home to her opulent, empty chateau. A well-dressed young man emerges from the shadows, as fair and shackled as a lion. A girl in her winding-sheet breaks from the earth as stiff and smiling as an archaic koure. It is above all a Gothic film, full of dreamily charged encounters and the shape-changing sexuality of fairy tales.
Even the occasional narrative hiccup or clumsily executed bat effect cannot ruin the mood. Van Helsing reintroduced after being previously dismissed as unnecessary with Dracula himself on board.
The seduction which renamed the story The Brides of Dracula failed to survive the next draft, but the title stayed. Patch jobs created new plot holes. Deadlines loomed. When the film finally made it to the screen, it did so retaining fragments and echoes of previous drafts, nothing ever quite ironed out or gone. And yet what all these skips and flaws and divers hands add up to is something strangely more evocative than a straightforward adaptation like Dracula.
Dreams are not logical. They do not proceed from point to point. They flicker and scar, freeze and recur; they are images and atmosphere and the taste they leave in the brain on waking. Before we plunge into the dark forests of Brides , a word on its predecessor seems instructive. A middle-aged GP by the name of Dr. Quincey Morris is not missed, being often elided in adaptation, but there is a notable absence of Renfield. Boy, howdy, though, has it got to do with sex.
His Count is a gliding, courtly aristocrat whose moments of violence actually startle in a film where every sight of blood is a lurid carmine splash; he commands a room when he enters it, with none of the Byronic angst that attends on many a latter-day vampire. He rarely needs to overpower, because he can mesmerize. With Lucy and Mina, he barely even needs to speak.
