This review was requested by patron Mathom. If you’d like me to review a movie, please consider supporting my Patreon.
Here’s a recommendation for you if you like vampire stories (and, since you’re reading this post I’m going to assume that you’re at least on cordial terms with them): Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series. The first novel is set in an alternate universe where Dracula succeeded in bringing vampirism to Britain, married Queen Victoria and has become the Prince Consort. The rest of the books detail the history of this alternate Earth where vampires are everywhere with virtually every literary and historical character that Newman could think of nodding their head in at some point or other.
The fourth book in the series, Johnny Alucard, begins in the 1970s where Francis Ford Coppola is in Romania filming a biography of Dracula, who is dead by this point (or is he? Ooooooooooooooh). The whole joke is that the filming of this version of Coppola’s Dracula ends up mirroring the legendary clusterbollocks that was the shooting of Apocalypse Now, complete with storms, the military extras being called away to fight battles, Martin Sheen (Harker) almost dying during a scene and Brando (Dracula) being…well, Brando.
Seriously, somewhere there’s an alternate universe where the dominant life on Earth is sentient gazebos and in that universe Marlon Brando is still an asshole.
The filming of our universe’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Spooky Fun Time Emporium wasn’t nearly as hellish as all that, but it did arise from another legendarily troubled production; Godfather 3. Winona Ryder had been cast by Coppola to play Mary Corleone, but dropped out, leading to Coppola having to cast his daughter Sofia in the role. Ryder was worried that Coppola resented her for that (like the rest of the human race) so she brought him a script for Dracula that she had found as a peace offering. Coppola had been a fan of the book since he was a teenager and was taken with James V. Hart’s screenplay (I don’t know that the “V” stands for vampire, but I also don’t know that it doesn’t stand for that). Filming began in…
“AHEM?”
“Yes?”
“What about me?”
“What ABOUT you?”
Sorry Team Bolts, if it seems like your movie is kind of an afterthought this time around, it’s because your movie is kind of an afterthought this time around. Whereas Dracula was one of the ten highest grossing movies of 1992 worldwide and a veritable icon of nineties cinema, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…well be honest. You’d forgotten it existed, hadn’t ya? If this bout was decided on pop culture legacy alone, Bats would take it in a walk. But is that really fair? Did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein really deserve to be forgotton? Did Bram Stoker’s Dracula really deserve to be acclaimed? Did you know that they actually had the stones to release a novelisation of the movie and call it “Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Fred Saberhagen”? All these questions, and more, shall be answered!
The Adaptations
The whole selling point of these movie’s is that we’re finally get adaptations that are true to the original novels and that’s…sort of…true. In terms of basic story certainly. Frankenstein actually opens with a quote from Mary Shelley read by a narrator who is presumably supposed to be Shelley herself.:
“I busied myself to think of a story, which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature…and awaken thrilling horror. One to make the reader dread to look around. To curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.”
Unfortunately, she lays it on so thick that it sounds like a supervillain monologue.
“And then I! Mary Shelley! Shall rule the world!! MWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA”
I was quite keen to see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein because it has a reputation for being a stinker and yet I remember catching the second half on TV many years ago and thinking that it was quite good. Having watched the whole thing through I can see what happened. The movie is pretty much a stinker but it does the vast majority of its stinking in the front half, and all its best moments are clustered in the south end. It’s a movie that gets noticeably better as time gets on and the variance in quality from one scene to the next could give you whiplash. This movie, basically, has three problems:
- The direction.
- The director.
- How the movie is directed.
Screenwriter Frank Darabont called this movie: “the best script I ever wrote and the worst movie I’ve ever seen” and blamed director Kenneth Branagh entirely for the failure of the film. And, honestly, I think that’s fair. The script is over-written in places but actually remarkably strong and the cast is chock full of ringers (including Branagh himself as Frankenstein, though this is far from his best work). The problem really is the direction.
I get the feeling that Branagh was terrified that his background in theatre would leave him open to charges of the film being too stagey, which is why the camera keeps swinging wildly around whoever’s talking even when there’s no real reason for it to do so. The movie is at its best when Brannagh calms down and stops dancing around like a loon. The very finest scene in the film is just Victor and the monster having a quiet talk in a cave. No camera tricks. No lightning or booming music. Just two incredibly talented actors performing a very strong script. These quiet scenes become more and more frequent towards the end of the movie and as you watch you almost find yourself coming around to the thing. But “half a good movie” is not a good movie, and if the story of Frankenstein teaches us anything it’s that good bits don’t always make up a good whole. Also, while Darabont’s script is definitely better than Branagh is giving it, it’s by no means perfect. Darabont has a tendency not to trust his audience and undercut some otherwise excellent moments.
Best example?
In the cave, the monster asks Victor about the people who were used to make him and Victor callously mutters that they were just “materials”.
Later, when Victor has agreed to create the bride, the monster brings Victor the body of Justine, Victor’s maid who was murdered by a mob who thought she had killed Victor’s little brother William. This is a woman that Victor was raised with and who he cared for deeply. Victor looks at the monster in unbelieving horror.
“Why her?” he whispers.
The monster fixes him with a cold glare. “Just materials” he says.
See? That’s a fantastic moment. The monster confronting Victor with his own cruelty and callousness, showing him the body of someone he loved to shatter the screen of dehumanisation that Victor has erected to allow him to commit his crimes against nature. Excellent stuff.
But Darabont can’t let it rest and then has the monster say “Your words. Remember?”
Yes Frank. We remember. It was less than five minutes ago.
But what about fidelity to the source material? That’s what these two movies were all about, right? Well, Frankenstein’s story follows the plot of the novel quite faithfully (though excising the long passage where Victor ends up in Ireland just so Mary Shelley can make it very, very clear that she thinks the Irish are a plague sent by God to punish a sinful world).
Meanwhile, Dracula is so faithful to its source material that we even get Quincy Frickin’ Morris! All my Quincy Morris fans, lemme hear you say “HEY!”
“Yee-haw! I do not contribute much to this story, no-siree I do not.”
Hand on my heart, I can’t honestly tell for certain if Dracula is good or not but I’ll say this for it, it knows what it wants to be and if you don’t like it you can go whistle. It’s tonally consistent in a way that Frankenstein isn’t, and that tone is extra as fuck. “Lurid”, I think, is the word that sums up this movie. Everything from the costumes to the performances to the music (the menacing, stalking score by Wojciech Kilar is by far the best thing in the whole show) is operating on a ridiculous, gothic wavelength that is, make no mistake, very, very, very silly. But I hold it a sacred truth that the only bad movies are the ones you don’t enjoy watching and by gum it’s never dull, I’ll give it that. Like Frankenstein, it occasionally looks stagey but Copolla is better than Branagh at making the sets look like somewhere people actually live. In fact, Dracula’s staginess is an aesthetic choice. Copolla (unlike his Johnny Alucard counterpart) was dead set against filming on location in Romania and decided to film his version of Dracula like a contemporaneous film from the birth of cinema, with almost no exterior shots. At it’s best, the movie looks like a Victorian dollhouse, unmistakably artificial but no less beautiful for that.
Frankenstein, on the other hand, just looks cheap.
For all its pretensions to textual faithfulness, however, Dracula practically inverts the morality of the novel and presents Dracula as a tragic romantic hero cursed by a cruel God while Van Helsing and the Too Many Dudes are presented as cruel, hypocritical, perverse or puritanical. Problem is, the text that the movie is so faithfully following can’t really support this reading because it keeps too many of the literary Count’s actions in the script.
Short version: Your main character can be a tragic Woobie who deserves your sympathy, or he can be someone who feeds a baby to his coven of vampire groupies. He can’t be both.
WINNER: BATS
The Monsters
While getting The Greatest Actor of All Time ™ to play the monster might seem like stunt casting (and it was definitely derided as that at the time), De Niro proves why, in a time long before Little Fockers, he was considered one of the all time greats. De Niro studied stroke victims to perfect his character’s awkward, shambling gait and he really brings home the awful tragedy of the creature’s existence. More than any screen version of the monster, this guy has it rough. Even the process used to create him is uniquely horrendous. No jolt of lightning this time around. Imagine waking up in an airless, lightless coffin filled with amniotic fluid and hundreds of electric eels zapping you in the dick. Hell, even the other Doctors Frankenstein would probably draw the line at that.
“What is WRONG with you!?”
“I did it for science.”
“Idiotic. Though, I must admit, it does sound rather diverting.”
Technically, Robert De Niro plays two characters in this movie, the creature and the peasant whose body Frankenstein uses to create the monster. This peasant, incidentally, is executed after killing the doctor who was trying to give him a cholera vaccine because he was afraid it would kill him. I was going to make an anti-vaxxer joke about that but in the 18th century inoculation really was super dangerous (safer than cholera, but still) so we’ll give the dude a pass.
Gary Oldman, coincidentally, is also playing two characters but I don’t think he’s supposed to be. Oldman’s one of my favourite actors, hands down, and he is very, very good as Dracula…both of them.
See, sometimes he’s a hissing, Palpatine-esque villain with an accent so ripe you could serve it with crackers and wine. And in other scenes he plays it real low key. Really real. When he’s talking about his long dead love there’s no show boating, no grandstanding. It’s just intimate, heart-felt, honest. Beautiful stuff. And then suddenly he’s yelling about “AHTILLA WHOSE BLAHD FLAWS THROUGH ZEES VEINS!” and you’re like “WHO ARE YOU PLAYING YOU MANIAC?”
I get a distinct “Tim Curry in Congo” vibe from some of Oldman’s line readings and when I say a performance reminds me of Tim Curry, understand that that it is the highest compliment Mouse may pay a gentleman. But the fact remains that Oldman’s performance, much like the movie that surrounds it, is wildly entertaining but leaves you completely unsure of what tone and level of seriousness it’s going for.
De Niro, on the other hand, knows who he’s supposed to be, and he plays that guy consistently and excellently throughout the entire thing.
Go to reward craft over flash.
WINNER: BOLTS
The Scientists
Branagh’s conception of Victor Frankenstein as a callow, Byronic hero is a good one and I’m more or less on board with the performance but the movie makes one very important change that I feel fatally weakens the character: In this movie, Frankenstein doesn’t actually figure out how to create the monster himself. Instead, he uses the research of his dead mentor Waldman (John Cleese playing against type to excellent effect) to create the monster and it’s strongly implied that Waldman actually succeeded in creating his own monster before Victor. Which is lame, right? Frankenstein should be a genius whose hubris led him to tamper in the very domain of God, not some stupid kid coasting on someone else’s hard work.
But if I have a few issues with Branagh’s Frankenstein, I take umbrage, sirrah, at what Copolla’s done with poor Abraham Van Helsing. Because Dracula is now a sad-eyed springer spaniel in a top hat who just wants wuv…
…Van Helsing has to be a cruel, callous, horny religious zealot. Even though, y’know, Dracula is still feasting on the blood of innocent young women and Van Helsing is trying to knock that shit on the head, the movie ties itself in knots trying to make him look as repulsive as possible. There’s one moment where Van Helsing gleefully yells at Quincey Morris:
“We are dealing with forces beyond all human experience, and enormous power. So guard her well. Otherwise, your precious Lucy will become a bitch of the Devil! A whore of darkness! Lucy is not a random victim, attacked by mere accident, you understand? No. She is a willing recruit, a breathless follower, a wanton follower. I dare say, a devoted disciple. She is the Devil’s concubine!”
And I swear to God, there’s a moment halfway through that speech where you can see Anthony Hopkins asking himself “What the FUCK am I doing?”
I don’t know, Tony. I don’t know.
WINNER: BOLTS
The Dashing Young Men
I think this needs to be said right up front: Keanu Reeves is a damn fine actor.
Great presence, fantastic physicality, possibly the greatest action star of all time and by all accounts a gentleman and consummate professional to work with. Well sure, he’s great as John Wick and Neo, but can he do drama? Can he fuck. Watch A Scanner Darkly for his heart-breaking performance as a drug addict whose sense of reality is crumbling around him. Want to see his comic chops? Uh, Bill and Ted anyone? Oh, and there’s the little matter of him being one the great stage Hamlets of the 20th century. No, seriously. That’s true.
So yeah. Keanu Reeves. Serious acting chops. Cool? Cool. Okay.
JEEZY PETE’S HE IS TERRIBLE IN THIS.
For what’s worth, everyone knew and everyone’s really sorry. Reeves, Copolla, everyone. Reeves was completely burned out from doing too many movies. Copolla has said that he would have recast him after it became clear he couldn’t do the accent but he couldn’t risk delaying the production so they just tried to muddle through as best they could. Look, sometimes terrible things happen and it’s no one’s fault. The Black Death. The Hindenberg. Keanu Reeves in Dracula. Let us speak of it no more.
Looking at the rest of the Dudes of which there are Too Many, Carey Elwes has fun playing Arthur Holmwood riding in on a white horse after a hard day’s kicking my ancestors out of their filthy hovels. Confirming that the movie is less a faithful re-telling of the original novel than a Dark Fic, Richard E. Grant’s Doctor Seward is a bug-eyed loon running a Bedlam-esque nightmare of an asylum apparently designed by Tim Burton (whereas Stoker was at pains to present Seward’s hospital as a modern, humane institution).
And Billy Campbell is also there, playing Quincey Morris, who is also there.
As our Frankenstein this time around is a younger, sexier version…
“I beg your pardon?”
As our Frankenstein this time around is a younger version, most of the story beats that would be given to Dashing Young Men are here taken by Victor himself. This leaves us with Tom Hulce as Clerval, who’s perfectly serviceable.
WINNER: BATS
The Perpetually Imperilled Ladies
As we established in our last BvB, ladies love playing vampires and Sadie Frost and Winona Ryder are no exception. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Sadie Frost is to the role of Lucy Westenra what Christopher Lee is to the role of Dracula; absolutely definitive. I honestly doubt anyone will ever play this role as well as she does.
In fact, this is a rare horror movie where the ladies get the best of it. It’s a mad, mad, mad bastard of a film but there are definitely moments where it taps into something. Whereas Frost plays vampirism as a descent into pure, gleeful, unbridled sluttiness, Winona Ryder instead finds rage; lashing out against the stifling, suffocating strictures of Victorian society. There’s one scene where she fixes Dracula with this desperate pleading stare and hisses “Take me away from all this death.”
It’s not a great movie. But there are moments, guys. There are moments.
Frankenstein, likewise, also does rather well by its female characters by giving us an Elizabeth who (oh wonder of glories) ACTUALLY CALLS VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN ON HIS BS. Helena Bonham Carter is really quite excellent in the role and the script actually allows Elizabeth to feel like a real character with her own agency and inner life. Darabont’s script keeps Elizabeth’s death as in the original novel, but adds Victor re-animating her as the Bride, a change so perfect and obvious in retrospect that you have to wonder why Shelley didn’t do it herself.
It’s here, and only here, that Frankenstein succeeds as horror, when we see what Victor’s obsession has reduced his wife to: a scarred, voiceless, lobotomised child. Bonham-Carter sells the hell out of it.
Right up until she decides she’s had enough of this shit and dumps a lantern over her head and runs through the mansion setting it on fire. Which, of course, causes the whole place to explode because apparently those old timey lamps were full of napalm. Look, it was the nineties. If a movie didn’t end with everything blowing up, the audience rioted.
WINNER: BATS
Are either of these movies actually, y’know, scary?
Both of these movies make me afraid, but the way a drunk woman dancing on a balcony makes you afraid. I’m worried they’re going to hurt themselves.
Dracula has one pretty decent jumpscare.
Frankenstein has the final scene with Elizabeth’s revenant realising what Victor’s done to her which is more creepy and upsetting than scary.
WINNER: BATS
Best Dialogue:
Frankenstein coming in hard with:
The Creature: Did you ever consider the consequences of your actions? You made me, and you left me to die. Who am I?
Victor Frankenstein: You? I don’t know.
The Creature: And you think that I am evil.
But Dracula counters with:
Mina Harker: How did Lucy die? Was she in great pain?
Professor Abraham Van Helsing: Ja, she was in great pain. Then we cut off her head, and drove a stake through her heart, and burned it, and then she found peace.
WINNER: BATS
FINAL SCORE: Bats 5, Bolts 2
NEXT UPDATE: Unshaved Mouse is going on hiatus for a while as I start work on my next novel. See you all on 12 September!
NEXT TIME: I feel like this movie was made for me.
unshavedmouse 
Oh God, I haven’t seen “Mouse Hunt” since I was 5 or 6! I remember renting it from a video store that was a block or two away from my house…and yet, I remember virtually nothing about the film itself. (And that the video store closed when I was 7 or 8.)
Okay. I try to be positive in general. I try to not approach things from a negative standpoint…but I hate hate HATE Coppola’s Dracula. I hate the stupid reincarnated lover plot that every other adaptation seems to have picked up, shunting what was an amazingly charming romance between John and Mina (and doubly amazing considering the attitudes of the author and the time it was written) away in favor of making Dracula–who as you pointed out still does all his murdery Dracula stuff–the hero. I hate how it decided that the heroes should be a bunch of awful Victorian stereotypes. And I hate how well cast and beautiful to look at it is, because the plot makes me want to punch the screen.
Ahem. Deep breaths.
I like Frankenstein okay. Soundtrack’s good. Acting’s good.
Also, Anno Dracula is awesome. It’s just so much fun and it’s sort of the Penny Dreadful version of an Eye Spy book with all the cameos.
Oh, thank heavens. I thought it was just me.
Frankenstein is definitely not one of Branagh’s greats, but the movie at least respects the moral point of the book.
…is that a prequel to Ratatouille? 🤔
Have you seen Crimson Peak? It has some nice gothic horror and it has some Hammer throwbacks.
Not yet, been meaning to.
– Yeah, the sympathetic Dracula doesn’t really do it for me this go-around. It ain’t even the baby so much as Lucy Westenra. I remember Mina and Lucy having great chemistry that the movie made clear could’ve gone romantic at times, but it undercuts the whole relationship by making Dracula sympathetic and Mina seriously goes along with this shit. “Hey, you remember my best friend with benefits? C’mon, you know her! You turned into a werewolf and raped her in a graveyard, you made her sick and horny for her dad, you turned into a wolf and ripped her throat out, and you possibly damned her soul to hell, if souls exist, which I suppose they do since I, your dead wife, am here. BUT OH PWEASE STOP CWYING BWOODY TEAWS SWEETUMS.”
– I have not seen Branagh’s adaptation of Frankenstein, but I have played the pinball machine adaptation of Branagh’s adaptation of Frankenstein, and it was great!
– Keanu Reeves is a bit played out as the internet’s golden boy, but I grew up with him being derided as a charisma-less piece of drywall, so I’ll take it.
– I think Guillermo del Toro has said he wanted to make his Frankenstein movie based off Darabont’s script, or at least take inspiration from it. Hope he gets to it before he dies. (The guy takes on half a dozen projects at a time and only one ever actually happens. It’s time to think like Tarentino, Guillermo. Time is limited!)
– Good luck with your novel, Mouse! You’re making it farther than me and many others ever have. See you in September!
Also, I forgot to mention: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a very serious movie that has Sir Anthony Hopkins hump another dude’s leg during that monologue you mentioned. This friggin’ movie.
I remember liking this “Frankenstein” movie very much back in my younger years, when I watched it twice. I think I wacthed this “Dracula” movie at some point, but I remember hardly anything from it. Maybe I stopped half way through or something?
Anyway, I’m a big fan of historical movies/adaptions of Classic litterature. But on the other hand, I really don’t like horror movies. So I guess I maybe will watch these two again some day, but I can’t promise you that I will.
Okay, this was gold. Giggled my way through the whole thing. Some of your funniest work, sir!
I have a love/hate relationship with both of these movies. Frankenstein I sorta resented because I loved the book as a teen, but found the parts of the movie that actually resembled the book kinda dull, and the only parts I really liked were the original stuff like the bride twist. Which made me question how much I really loved the book to begin with, to find a loyal retelling uninteresting while loving In Name Only takes like the Universal and Hammer ones. But mostly I just found it forgettable.
Dracula, on the other hand, I completely hate the substance but adore the style. Making Dracula, who shows not one redeemable trait in the book and is a fantastically detestable villain throughout, into a weepy woobie sucks. Making Mina, the paragon of rationality and modernity and the heart of the good guy team in the book, into him was just as bad. And Van Helsing is straight up character assassination. But the performances, and soundtrack, and sets, and effects, and the whole gloriously camp tone of the work makes me love it nonetheless. Also Tom Waits is Renfield, and he always will have been. It’s real and we can all bear witness.
I vaguely recall seeing Mouse Hunt, and I vaguely recall enjoying it, but anything concrete eludes me. The only detail my brain is willing to summon is that there was a string factory, and I couldn’t tell if that was a joke or not. Like, the idea of a string factory seems deliberately twee, but string must get made somewhere, right?
My kingdom for an adaptation of Dracula that engages with the proto-feminism of the book. For all it’s many (many) flaws, it’s actually one of my favourite books, but I don’t think there’s ever been an adaptation that did its imagery justice or that really conveyed how disturbing its sexuality is (the scene where Dracula attacks Mina is so much more unsettling to read as an adult than as a teenager). I think Christopher Lee is the only actor who really understood that Dracula had to be alluring and repulsive simultaneously – most actors can only manage one at a time.
That said, I have a slight fondness for Coppola’s Dracula – it’s not what I’d call good, but it’s like a really great film and a really terrible one have been tied up in a sack together and are fighting it out. I’ll never love it – and I think Oldman was miscast (he’s just not an imposing enough physical presence for me) – but I can see what it was trying to do.
I really don’t think Branagh was a good choice for Frankenstein – he’s never convincing playing someone unhinged, he comes across as too sane for that – but this production is goo-ey and gross in a way that feels very true to the novel. I suspect the problem with the story is that everyone who’s ever tried to film it has been rational, and Mary Shelley wasn’t – at least, not at the time she wrote the novel.
That’s an excellent description of Stoker’s Dracula.
Starting out with a HEY! and a YEEEEEEEE-HAW! for the late, lamented and outstandingly Texan Quincy P. Morris esquire (Mouse, I could tell you haven’t spent much time in the more Dracula obsessed corners of the Internet by virtue of the fact that you asked a holler for Quincy P. without expecting to be deafened by the reply … not to mention the veritable Fourth of July as people fire off a six-gun salute!).
On a more serious note, I definitely agree with a good many of your thoughts r.e. these 90s entries into the Bat/Bolts canon; I would also be remiss in failing to point out that a significant part of the reason Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula LOOKS perfect is that Mike The Mighty Mignola was involved with the production design (hence its outstanding Gothic Ambience).
Also HURRAH! Mouse Hunt draws nigh!
Ten minutes ago: “BRANAGH MADE A FRONKENSTEEN MOVIE WITH DENIRO?! WHY DOES NO ONE TALK ABOUT-”
Now: Oh.
MY NAME IS FRONKEN-STEIN!!!!
Destiny, destiny, no escaping that’s for me!
(I couldn’t let a good Mel Brooks reference opportunity pass.)
Would you like a roll in the hay?
Actually it’s pronounced Eye-gor.
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEY!
Quincy Morris is wonderful. The book would be far poorer without him. I haven’t actually seen either of these movies but after reading this, I’m curious to try both of them.
“whereas Stoker was at pains to present Seward’s hospital as a modern, humane institution”
When I first read that line the first thing that popped in my head was that gag from “Dracula Dead and Loving It.”
Renfield: No! Not 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 enema!
Dr. Seward: Yes! Another, another and another until you come to your senses!
Anyway, great comparison Mouse. And speaking of which, I remember watching that when it came out as a kid. And that’s about it.
In fairness, Mary Shelley’s foreword to Frankenstein, honestly, reads like something the not-actually-doctor could have penned himself.
On the subject of Arno,there is one public-domain fictional character conspicuous by his absence: Sherlock Holmes. He never shows up, because it’s a mystery novel and Holmes in a mystery novel would be like The Hulk in Civil War: Having him there would end the conflict nigh-instantly.
I definitely prefer Frankenstein this time around.
I think Anno Dracula having him marry Queen Victoria is really lame and boring. It’d be more interesting if he married her granddaughter Princess Victoria and then eliminated everyone ahead of her in the line of succession.
I suspect that Count Dracula is too shrewd a strategist to waste time murdering a whole line of succession (undoubtedly attracting a great deal of unwanted attention from rivals living & undead) when he could simply exploit Queen Victoria’s fears of the haemophilia that had been bred into her children & grandchildren (with fatal results in the case of Prince Louis, her youngest son).
There’s also ample evidence of Queen Victoria being more than able and willing to maintain relationships with ‘unsuitable’ individuals like John Brown or Abdul Karim the ‘Munshi’ (who was in some ways the former’s successor as Royal Favourite) to a degree that simply would not have been tolerated in a mere princess, making the older lady the more logical choice by far as puppet (not least because Count Dracula, a manipulator of some skill, could almost certain twist Queen Victoria’s great lost Love for Prince Albert into a similar deference to another Prince Consort who could deal with a great deal of Queen Victoria’s Royal Business – albeit without the genuine affection, devotion and decency seen the late Prince Albert).
By the way, I remain devoted to my Pet Theory that Mr Peter Cushing’s very British Van Helsing is what happens when Doctor J. Seward graduates from the Abraham Van Helsing correspondence course in Vampire Hunting.
He even has a Victorian dictaphone in the first Hammer Horror DRACULA – if that doesn’t scream JACK SEWARD to a Stoker loving audience, then I don’t know what will! (-;
RIP Richard Williams.
My question about Reeve’s accent is why they didn’t just have him play Harker as an American. There’s nothing about the character that requires he be a native Briton.
Except for the fact that Mr Harker is so much more fun if you imagine him as a sort of Victorian Hobbit! (-;