Draculas All Around
Jul. 7th, 2022 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crockpotcauldronHaving a good time with the Dracula Daily emails. They're a great combination of weird and melodramatic. It has inspired me to pick up Quincey Morris, Vampire again - I love that dumb soup vampire.
Snail has also unearthed Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in İstanbul), a Turkish movie from the 50s. It was free on archive.org, like the Hollywood monster movies I've been watching. Fascinating movie! Honestly a lot closer to the book than the Bela Lugosi version. The castle sequence was great, the addition of the butler was a great choice for exposition and dramatic tension. I also liked the shift away from wafers n holy water to all garlic all the time - the garlic clove necklaces, brandishing heads of garlic like crucifixes, the concern over how to cook eggplants without garlic.
The Mina character, Güzin, got an unexpected amount of screen time. She has a career as a dancer, she drives her own car, she has her own constellation of connections in the movie. Mina herself was not half as independent as Güzin, and didn't get to spent nearly as much time talking to other women. I also genuinely wouldn't have expected Mina to be portrayed as the sexiest character in the movie, but I didn't see Renfield coming in the Hollywood movie either. Surely people would either go for Dracula the seductive villain or Van Helsing the Gary Stu? Bram Stoker definitely feels like Van Helsing deserves some love and kisses.
Snail has also unearthed Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in İstanbul), a Turkish movie from the 50s. It was free on archive.org, like the Hollywood monster movies I've been watching. Fascinating movie! Honestly a lot closer to the book than the Bela Lugosi version. The castle sequence was great, the addition of the butler was a great choice for exposition and dramatic tension. I also liked the shift away from wafers n holy water to all garlic all the time - the garlic clove necklaces, brandishing heads of garlic like crucifixes, the concern over how to cook eggplants without garlic.
The Mina character, Güzin, got an unexpected amount of screen time. She has a career as a dancer, she drives her own car, she has her own constellation of connections in the movie. Mina herself was not half as independent as Güzin, and didn't get to spent nearly as much time talking to other women. I also genuinely wouldn't have expected Mina to be portrayed as the sexiest character in the movie, but I didn't see Renfield coming in the Hollywood movie either. Surely people would either go for Dracula the seductive villain or Van Helsing the Gary Stu? Bram Stoker definitely feels like Van Helsing deserves some love and kisses.
