With the recent passing of Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, it’s an appropriate time to revisit one of the more well-known films he scored during a long career. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of the ultimate vampire story, Bram Stoker’s Dracula certainly needs little introduction and is no doubt a favourite among gothic horror aficionados.
With a large budget and an ensemble cast (most notably Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins as Dracula and Van Helsing respectively), Coppola’s Dracula remains one of the few big horror productions from a large film studio that effectively captures the dark, brooding, gothic eroticism of Stoker’s story that normally wouldn’t pass beyond a first draft if a director like Coppola wasn’t attached to it. The costumes, set design, cinematography and overall production of the film alone would have been enough to guarantee its legacy of a cvlt classic were it a flop (it wasn’t), but beyond that, it’s also really entertaining and can be pretty spooky when it wants to be. Of course, there are elements that are inescapable of the Hollywood cheese machine but the rest of it is so well made that we’re prepared to overlook those moments.
Probably due to all those post-Scream teen slasher films that seemed to be churned out on an almost weekly basis back in the mid 90s/early 2000s, horror might sometimes be overlooked by people who might not be as interested in the genre as others. While the underground and cvlt circuit still dishes out straight-to-DVD splatter, slasher, zombie, monster etc films on a very regular basis, it’s sometimes cool to watch a horror film with a big budget production from an excellent director that isn’t made just to appeal to the genre hungry crowd. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of those films that successfully can straddle the line between cvlt and mainstream cinema.
Of course, Kilar’s score is a huge part of this. Notorious among black metal musicians in particular, (I think I’ve seen at least 5 bands open their shows with the title music), the soundtrack is a gothic symphony that consistently builds to devastatingly infernal conclusions within it’s peaks and valleys. As a separate piece from the film it’s terrifying and when accompanying the action on screen, it’s colossal.
This isn’t a film that needs too much written about it. You’ve probably seen it. It’s an excellent interpretation of the Dracula story and always good to revisit if you want a vampire film fix that is about an actual vampire, as opposed to what passes for them today…
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