How To Resurrect Universal's Monsters

Dracula

If the Universal Monsters were like The Justice League, Dracula is their Superman. The most popular of all the monsters, and one of the most famous characters in the world (second only to Sherlock Holms as the most-portrayed character on screen), the king of the vampires needs no introduction. Of course, the tale has been told so often, Universal have a problem. Why the hell should people fork out for yet another Dracula movie? This is a fair point, and one they need to work hard to answer. The simple solution is to make it scary, give it to a unique visionary director, and above all keep it simple. Make an adaptation of Bram Stoker€™s novel, but not like Coppola did, because the novel is for the most part very dull- I trudged through it but gave up with 80 pages left, because it was too long and the effective parts were few and far between. Do not rigidly stick to the text, but simply put this type of Dracula would not work in the modern world like Steven Moffat has done with Jekyll and Sherlock. In fact, the film would to well to draw from €˜Nosferatu€™ if anything- in my mind, Max Shreck€™s Count Orlok is more definitive than Gary Oldman, Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi. The imagery, score and Shreck€™s performance stay in your mind forever, and not in a nostalgic way, but in a disturbing way. That€™s closer to the tone the film should try to strike. This should be the first film the studio puts out, and it should reintroduce the world to the series. It should be as people imagine it, in Victorian times and without any clever spins to make it special or unique, like putting it in the modern-day or making everyone but Dracula a vampire or something. Make it genuinely bloody terrifying and creepy with gore and nudity (the gore should not be gratuitous as it will lose the genuine terror and turn into another €˜gorno€™, and the nudity serves two purposes- 1. This will show audiences that it is not some 12A rubbish intended to sell toys, but an honest-to-god crowd pleaser for older audiences that they won€™t have to be dragged to by children- which would limit the budget of the film but enhance the creativity of the production, and 2. Because this is adapting the source novel to some extent, which has been interpreted by many as an allegory and commentary on sexual parasitism and perversion, so without any sexual elements it€™s just a safe, hollow adaptation that doesn€™t understand or capture the spirit of the source text). Add to that a director with a unique visual style and a composer who gives it a distinctive sound (Much like Christopher Nolan did with the Dark Knight Trilogy with Wally Pfister€™s cinematography and Hans Zimmer & James Newton-Howard€™s score), and you have a fresh, definitive Dracula for a new generation to usher his friend in to meet a responsive audience. Perhaps Darren Aronofsky and John Williams? And a different type of Dracula, someone who is physically distinctive and unnerving to play up the parasitism theme, like Sean Harris- for reference, rather than €˜Prometheus€™, see him in €˜Creep€™ or €˜Harry Brown€™.