Caleb Landry Jones in 'Dracula'. Photo / Vertical Entertainment
There is an infection running throughout Hollywood. Or is it a curse?
The dead have awakened.
The symptoms are eerily similar: the old made new again, over and over, without reason or cause, most becoming monstrous imitations of their original bodies, unholy resurrection after unholy resurrection.
We could assemble thought leaders of science and religion, of the arcane and the occult, to investigate. Or, more likely, we could just ask a finance guy.
I’m speaking, of course, of the sudden obsession with our Gothic horror classics that now seem to be annual tent-poles at the megaplex.
I’m not quite sure when it began, this wave of zombies, vampires, Frankenstein’s monsters and one magical wooden boy. We’re overrun! There’s Robert Eggers’ faithful remake of Nosferatu (2024); Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio (2022); Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (also 2022); Frankenstein (2025); Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, an upcoming reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein; André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) and Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023).
Perhaps the most interesting part is that most of them are being made by titanic Hollywood figures, the ones who could arguably do anything but choose to root around in yesteryear’s graveyards. The stories do, I suppose, have good bones.
Dracula, which is also known as Dracula: A Love Tale and which hits theatres Friday, is the latest. It comes to us from the French film-maker Luc Besson, known to film nerds for Natalie Portman’s debut film Leon: The Professional (1994) and to most of the rest of us for the sci-fi The Fifth Element (1997).
Well, bring your garlic and your crosses, maybe even a wooden stake. This one should have stayed (un)dead.
Dracula is one of the most confounding, and worst, movies I’ve seen in a long time. I’m so flummoxed, I’m not really sure where to begin, which is probably why I’ve been prattling on about the state of Hollywood remakes.
The movie begins with the transformation of Prince Vladimir of Wallachia into Count Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones) after he renounces God (and kills, who I believe is a bishop) following the death of his beloved wife. It then jumps ahead 400 years, to when a priest simply billed as Priest (Christoph Waltz) is called to Paris, where a couple of other priests have trapped a vampire. Meanwhile, Dracula learns his wife has been reincarnated and heads to France to find her – bloodshed in his wake.
The film-making itself is fine, at times even inspired. The script is, well, awful. Here are a smattering of quotes from it, all delivered with a heavy handiness that betrays the cheese the movie seems to intend: “That’s enough, my Lord. War calls!” “God is deaf.” And this couplet: “I do not believe in God.” “Let’s hope God believes in you.”
The movie never settles on a tone. It wants to be campy but also scary. It wants to be ornate but tosses in terribly rendered CGI gargoyles. Its pacing is glacial, but every once in a while, we have a goofy flashback to when Dracula made a perfume to entice his reincarnated wife but used too much and ended up entrancing scores of women simultaneously. It’s hyper-violent in spurts and humdrum in others.
It isn’t violent enough, or funny enough, or sexy enough, or arty enough or pop enough. One problem with trying to be everything is you can end up being nothing.
How did this come from Besson, the kind of film-maker whose work you obsess over when you realise you want to make movies a major part of your life? It feels like he completely lost his grip.
In a telling scene – iconic in the book – a young Parisian solicitor travels to Dracula’s castle to negotiate a real estate deal, having no idea who (or what) the count is. A tense and eerie dinner follows. This same scene was also recently re-created in Eggers’ Nosferatu, where the director was so focused on realism, he had a costume designer make about 20 versions of iron-shod leather slippers to find the right ones, even though they appear on-screen for mere seconds. His version of the scene is dark, moody, evocative and, frankly, terrifying.
Besson’s take, in contrast, looks like a cheap costume drama. It feels flat and tired. When Dracula plucks up a mouse and squeezes it like a tangerine, extracting its blood into a wine glass, I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to laugh, or grimace or dry-heave.
Most damning is that I did none of those things.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.