Start the week with a film: ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ has bite and beauty

Adam McKay’s upcoming comedy Renfield reimagines the fate of the vampire Dracula’s most fanatic devotee. In McKay’s version, which is set in the present, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), rather than begging to be granted immortality, decides to liberate himself from his undead lord (Nicolas Cage).

Renfield brings us back to the cult of Dracula, created by Irish writer Bram Stoker in 1897 and sending gleeful shivers down the spine ever since. In 1922, German director FW Murnau directed the first unofficial adaptation, Nosferatu. The first official adaptation came from Hollywood in 1931. Among the numerous directors who have tackled Stoker’s novel, Francis Ford Coppola’s version is one of the finest.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which is available on Netflix, stays largely faithful to the source material while also paying tribute to previous films on Dracula, notably the ones starring the dangerously attractive Christopher Lee. Coppola places the novel’s erotic subtext at the centre of the narrative, in the bargain giving a crucial role to the woman who lures Dracula out of his castle in Transylvania.

A back story reveals Dracula’s origins in the fifteenth century and the tragic suicide...

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