No horror story has been done to death more than Dracula, meaning that it is by now almost impossible to come at it with anything approaching novelty or originality. Sure, you can make your movie in artistic black and white, it would hardly be the first time, or perhaps go all out retro and make a silent film, but that would just hearken back to the best screen Dracula yet, the unofficial F.W. Murnau Nosferatu. But what if you made that black and white silent movie Dracula entirely as a ballet? Or cast an Asian actor as the eponymous vampire? Well, then you would have something truly unique. Installation artist, writer and director Guy Maddin is one of Canada's most individual filmmaking voices. His offbeat, sometimes surreal style and love of obsessively recreating the look and sound of early film, whether tinted colours of silent film, early technicolour or monochrome, would become more widely known with The Saddest Music In The World and the metafictional sort-of-documentary My Winnipeg. It was this unique Dracula, though, that bought him first to international attention. The film started out as simply the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's filmed version of the stage production by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Even at that point, it is an interesting take on Dracula, a story that works well when characters, the living and undead, are defined by their movement. It is Maddin's decision to shoot the movie like no other ballet picture, though, that really lifts it to another level, not focusing long shots and long takes on the dancers, but filling the picture with close ups and jump cuts. The casting of Zhang Wei-Chang in the lead is a case of necessity, with the dancer being the company's ballet master, but creates an extra layer to the other characters' exoticising and xenophobia towards the vampire. Similarly, lead ballerina Tara Birtwhistle in the role of Lucy creates a different focus in the story to usual, starting with her rather than Jonathan Harker's Transylvanian incarceration. Once again Pages From A Virgin's Diary is a horror film you won't see anywhere else. So, next time you have strange nightmares - blame Canada.
