Vampires are sexy, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula knows it. With Francis Ford Coppola at the helm and a cast including Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Gary Oldman, it’s a lavish, stunning and highly erotic horror movie that’s so tense it’s almost unbearable.
It’s grand. It’s operatic. It’s wildly over the top. And it’s not scared to be silly. No wonder it’s so beloved. It’s one of the best Prime Video movies for goths, for movie lovers and for anyone else who wants a movie they can – oh yes – get their teeth into.
They did things differently in the past, and by the past I mean 30-odd-years ago: when Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in 1992 it was a breath of fresh – if slightly coffin-fragranced – air compared to the rather tired Dracula movies we’d become accustomed to. That’s not to say there weren’t some great vampire movies in the years leading up to its release – The Lost Boys, anyone? – but we’d drifted some way from the true gothic horror of Bram Stoker’s 1897 story.
As Stoker’s name in the title indicates, this movie was an attempt to address that, but he was mainly there to avoid a lawsuit: the author’s name is in the title because another studio had the rights to the singular Dracula.
It’s a beautiful production. Roger Ebert wrote that “the sets are grand opera run riot, Gothic extravaganza intercut with the Victorian London of gaslights and fogbound streets, rogues in top hats and bad girls in bustiers,” and that lushness helps distract from some of the more clunky dialog and Keanu Reeves’ less than stellar performance: “I enjoyed the movie simply for the way it looked and felt,” Ebert said.
Gary Oldman was an inspired choice for the count. As The Guardian put it in a 2022 retrospective review, “Oldman’s performance is outstanding”; he is “the fierce and anguished count who hundreds of years ago renounced God and embraced an eternity of parasitic horror in his rage at the unjust death of his countess”. As for Keanu, he was just Keanu: “Reeves plays Jonathan with that innocent, faintly torpid calm which audiences would come to know and love for the next three decades.”
As far as Esquire is concerned, this is “more than gothic horror. It’s a love letter to movie making,” a “deafening thunderclap in an endlessly long line of otherwise mostly forgettable Dracula films”. Reviewer Dom Nero argues that the movie “is not unlike Apocalypse Now, an awesome work of terror that is so filled with ideas and ambition that it always seems on the verge of complete self-immolation.”
