Branaghs "Frankenstein" or Coppolas "Dracula"

(edited 05/10/2019 ... confused LeFanu with Polidori ... fixed. Clarified a couple of things. I would love to hear more from the Baldies on the films, but it may touch personal stuff, and I'm OK with it not being discussed. The sex side of things in Dracula, can be an issue. Only Anne Rice, really touches it well, but even she does not really discuss it, as much as she just makes stories around the possibilities and the sex, which in her stories goes both ways with both sexes.)

If I had to choose, there are elements on both that make it this and that ... but all in all ... goodness ... could you at least compare all the Draculas and then all the Frankensteins? (Peter Cushing wins, btw!)

Branagh's version is interesting, but it lacks the most important part of it all ... the book was written by a woman, with a woman's point of view of things, and in so many ways, guess what the production is missing? The woman feel. 

That, is an odd observation, for a movie, I accept, but it is an important feeling ... since in the book, the majority of things that happen are accidental, and reactionary, whereas the movie changes many of those moments into something else. A bit tough without examples, but this is one of those things that when you start reading the novel, you hear what Mary is thinking and feeling, and you NEVER get that in the film.

Thus, for me, a true version of that book has never been done, and will likely never be done, because the focus of the story will be very different!

The Coppola version, was more about the sexual attraction and the ability to make it connect. There is no doubt that this is a major part of the original story, but Bram Stoker makes it seem like ... not a matter of sex, but a matter of survival ... but for his "victims" (at least in almost ALL the flipping films!) it seems that it is always about the sexual attraction that does the victims in!

Very strange, because it is were the sexual attraction, Bram Stoker would have considered a continual madness of murder on anyone, men, women and animals alike. But it took one of Mary and Percy Shelley's family friends to write different stories ... Lord Polidori had "Vampyr", which was bloody as heck. And 60 years later, Sheridan Le Fanu gave us the two women vampires in CARMILLA, which is still the better known and copied of all the vampire stories. Now, almost 200 years later from Mary's time, the sexual side of it has been looked at some (through a peep hole -- so to speak), but most of it, did it incorrectly by concentrating on the sex only and less of anything else ... and that diminishes the story and value of the whole thing.

I suppose that I find Dracula, the better of the two films, specially as the camera setup and lighting is very well done and the set design is far out ... but when it comes to "color" and "visual", it is nowhere near the great visual treat that Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is, for example. 

The Frankenstein story, in the hands of Kenneth Branagh, for me is not very good ... there was one version way back when done by the same guy that did that TV series ... something of Dark Shadows or other ... and his version was very different, and I would like to see it again, to find out why it looked so different, but I remember its ending as being very out there ... and now I gotta go read the last 50 pages of the book to remind me of them!

Interesting comparison ... although I wish that some other Dracula films had seen a proper release .. the Spanish film done with Christopher Lee, is supposedly the best version of the book ever done, but I have never seen it or found it. And, worse, the whole book is done in diary format, by letters, thus a film of that would be really strange for our imagination, since we would have to "see it" through the words on the paper, rather than be shown the story ... all of the movies, are always about a story, that for all intents and purposes, does not exist in the diaries and letters. 

You can find all of the Hammer releases (the series is GREAT fun to watch specially the births and deaths!), but it kinda stops there.

The Coppola film is more about "the movie" for me, than it is about the story and the book. At least Kenneth Branagh's film had a reasonable interpretation of the book, although I still feel that the woman's touch is missing, and I would like to see someone like Sallie Potter try to do this ... and end up coming up with another "Orlando" ... which would actually make the whole thing truer to its source for me.

But, I admit, I may be reading a bit too much into it, having seen so many Frankensteins and Draculas all these years to the point that most of them bore me silly now!

Also important ... Frankenstein was written right after the guts and gore in France ... a time when the blood seeped into the arts hard, even though Gothic Literature is usually given credit to have been started some 50 years earlier with Horace Walpole, for example, but its "best time" for its works, was in the years following the French Revolution, and its bloody history. The Frankenstein story, has that blood in it, since Polidori (a doctor) was also a part of the fun events and orgies, however most of that blood is usually left out ... specially in the films, thus kinda changing the feel of the place and times ... remember they were in Northern Italy, not too far from where the action took place and still was taking place in France!

My favorite Dracula Movie's?

Jesus Franco's 1970 Dracula

Nosferatu, The Vampyre 1979

Nosferatu 1922