[00:00:08] Speaker A: On this week's prequel episode, we follow up on our Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Listener polls, learn about Bram Stoker and preview Dracula.
Hello and welcome back to. This film is like the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. It's a prequel episode, but it's a long one because we got lots to talk about. So we're gonna get right in to our patron shoutouts.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: I put up with you because your father and mother were our finest patrons. That's why.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: No new patrons this week, but we have, as always, our Academy Award winning patrons, and they are. Nicole Goble, Eric Rat. Eric Rat.
Combine two names there, please.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Leave that in.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: I will. Eric Harpo Rat, Nathan Vic Apocalypse, Mathilde Cottonwood, Steve Itdraft, Teresa Schwartz, Ian from Wine Country, Kelly Napier, Gratch Justgratch. Shelby says Katie is diabolical for making us choose between Nick Cage, Dracula and Leslie Nielsen. Dracula, that Darn Skag V Frank and Alina Starkov. Thank you all very much. Got Shelby's name change in there this time because she changed it before the last prequel episode, but we hadn't gotten to read the previous one.
Those were our funny Dracula movies, so that's why they squared off with each other. But to me, that's an easy choice because one of those is a Mel Brooks movie.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Our feelings on Mel Brooks are fairly.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Known, at least among our patrons, because we've talked about a few of the movies as bonus episodes or at least.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: But we talked about other Mel Brooks movies on that episode.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Not big fan of Mel Brooks generally. I think Blazing Saddles is a. Is a great movie, a masterpiece, and maybe his only good movie. So anyways, forgot about Young Frankenstein. Young Frankenstein might be his best movie. That's gonna do it for all of our patrons. Thank you all for your continued support. Katie, Stan, time to see what the people had to say about Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion man on Patreon. We had two votes for the movie, zero for the book. Kelly Napier said I went with the movie because the book just seemed to be page after page of Lola hating on Carla Santini. The movie does this too, but it's so often in the book it makes Lola sound slightly obsessed, whereas in the movie there were other aspects to her character other than just trying to one up the antagonist. I also feel like I have to side with the movie since it's the movie I'm pretty sure made one of my exes break up with me. So the movie and I are trauma bonded.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's hard to tell. Yeah, Depends on the ex.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: I know I mentioned this when y'all did Freaky Friday, but I have a special fondness of this era of Lindsay Lohan, evidenced by my ownership of CDs of both her studio albums. And it would be fun to see you try and cover Mean Girls someday.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Is Mean Girls so.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Not really Mean Girls?
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Maybe that's why she said try to cover.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it would definitely be a try.
Mean Girls is inspired by a nonfiction book.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Yeah. About like cliques and like social structure of teenage girls. So I'm not really sure.
I don't know if that would work with our setup.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: It's based on Queen Bees and Wannabes, which is a self help book from 2002 written for the parents of teenage girls that focuses on the ways in which girls in high schools form cliques and handling patterns of aggressive behavior. It was in part large basis for the teen comedy film Mean Girls. Interesting. Yeah, that might be tough.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: So maybe it would be an interesting episode. Yeah, I would just have to. We might have to like revisit how we approach some things to cover something like that.
Kelly also had a number of necklaces that I own guess. And she guessed 127.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: And we'll see how close that is.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Are we doing closest? Are we doing prices right? Are we doing closest? Without going over? Are we just doing closest? Probably just closest.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Probably just closest. We also. We only got a couple guesses. Okay, so our next comment was from Nathan, who said, I'm going with the movie because I watched it back when it came out and have a soft spot in my heart for the film. But I think the book is actually significantly better.
I first watched the movie on an intercontinental flight where I picked it over Mean Girls, which led to 20 years of me proclaiming it the better film. I was definitely wrong about that.
I think the movie really struggles with not being in Lola's head. The book does a very good job of taking the reader on a journey of realizing that Lola is not an entirely reliable narrator. She seems so confident in her head and her proclamations line up with your typical high school story cliches that it's easy to accept her truth. But as things rub up against reality, the facade begins to crumble.
I like the end of the book because Lola realizes maybe even her archenemy Carla is more like her than she realizes. It's maybe a little underdone, but on the last page they realize they might be wrong about each other and even discuss working together, which I think is.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: What the movie was missing, in my opinion.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Yeah, the movie was missing that. And like I said in the episode, I agree here that the end of the book is a little under baked, but the movie was absolutely missing that element. So it's kind of a toss up in my headcanon. Siddhartha Siddharthur was a boy band a la the Jonas Brothers. And thus Stu Wolf was way more.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Age appropriate, I will say in the movie. I kind of thought maybe that could be the case, that they were supposed to be like a teen band.
But he looked old enough that I didn't think that was what they were going for.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: They seem more like a typical kind of rock band to me in the movie.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: I agree the actor looks young enough that he feels like he could kind of. But not really. I don't know. He's. Yeah, yeah.
They either needed to make him significantly older or very obviously like her age.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Right. But then it would have been way more serious that he was an alcoholic.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Fair. That's fair. But also no less accurate if you've read anything about her.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: I mean, I agree, but I kind of doubt the movie wanted to get into all that.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Nathan went on to say, it made sense to me that Lola would overestimate the age of Stu because in her head he was so deep and. And thus must be older and more mature. They pronounce sep as step throughout the movie. I first noticed it with Carla, so I thought maybe it was her teasing Lola. But that is how Lola says her own name. At the beginning when meeting Ella, I did not notice that movie Sam was lame and just the most generic love interest. I can understand Brian thinking he wasn't really developed due to screen time, but to me it seems like he was on screen far too much because he was just so boring.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: It's possible that that he was on screen more than I thought, but he was just so forgettable that it fel. It wasn't on. Whatever. Either way. It's the same problem either way.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: I like book Sam as a bit of a deus ex machina who was super cool and aloof. He was outside of the fray of the high school drama but willing to get involved where it pleased him.
I ship Carla and Lola hashtag cola, which I love.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: That is great. I was especially works with the necklace. I was actually wondering earlier in Kelly Napier's comment where she said, like the movie in the book, it makes it sound like Lola is obsessed with Carla. And I was like, do you think there's any of that energy there of, like, does she. Is she obsessed with her because she wants to be or because she is in love with her secretly?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: What is interesting about that, and we could maybe get kind of a Queer theory read on this is that speaking of mean girls, that's like the exact same Queer theory read of Mean Girls.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Katie and what's her name.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Of Katie and Regina George.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: We also had a comment from Austin Armino, who said this was in relation to our discussion about Hilary Duff being potentially cast as. Yeah. As Lola in this movie. And who said, the closest I can think of is Hilary Duff had a surprise one episode role in Community as a mean girl girl who bullied Abed.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: That. I realized upon reading that that that was exactly what I was thinking of in the episode when I was like, I feel like I have a memory of her doing a similar character. That's exactly what I was thinking of because I've seen Community, I don't know, half a dozen times.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: I must have memory hold that episode because I don't remember that at all.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: I don't remember which season it's in. And we've only watched. You've only seen it once, I think.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Well, we watched it twice. We watched that through twice. Yeah, okay. At least twice.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Definitely not more than twice. I could have swore we only watched it once.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: But no.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. Anyways. Yeah, definitely. That is what I was thinking of because, yeah, she plays the mean girl. Community.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: And then we have another guess. Also on the Choger question, I'm going to say 55.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: So we have 127 and 55.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: And then mine was 47.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yours was right. 40 something.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Some 40 something.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Over on Facebook, we got one vote for the book and one for the movie.
Paige popped in to say, I didn't even know this movie was a book fair.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: And I mean, I actually, I didn't either.
And I forget how I found out that it was a book, but, you know, not a book that became, like, super popular, I guess.
And then we had another comment from Ian, who said, I'm sorry, but I spent a lot of the runtime of that movie thinking about how awful that necklace was. Shame, Ian, you're wrong.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: It's a great necklace.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Over on Instagram, we had five votes for the movie, one for the book, but I believe that was Tim Wahoo, so doesn't really count.
And two listeners who couldn't decide.
And Young Meliss, AKA my cousin Melissa said this era of Lindsay Lohan movies had a lot of influence on me. As a 9, 10 year old, I was fascinated by teenagers and I thought she was just the coolest in this and Freaky Friday.
You're not wrong there.
Two parts of this episode sent me the DDR outfit comment because I definitely tried to recreate something similar as a fourth grader, completing the look by putting a keychain on a necklace to try to get that chunk slash bold look.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Keychain on a necklace. That is a. That is a.
That is an impressive moment of ingenuity.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: For a fourth grader.
And the kissing posters comment, because I for sure kissed magazine pics of celebrity crushes, but only because I saw behaviors like that in movies like this one.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: To be fair or to be clear, I wasn't commenting or I know that would be a thing like, kiss it. Like, that's not. I didn't find that as, like, particularly stranger in, like, it didn't stand out to me when I saw that in the movie. It was that they were doing it, like, together, like, at the same time. That was what was, like, strange to me. Like, that they were, like, hanging out in their room, like, next to each other, like kissing posters.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Just girly things.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: And that's fine. I'm not judging it. I'm just saying that was what surprised me.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Final note, this role was made for Lindsay Lohan. She ate. And Katie, I think you have 37 neck accessories.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: You really undershot that one.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Brian already knows how many necklaces I have.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: I do. But I thought. I thought my guess was, like, I was being conservative with my guess when I said 40. Whatever.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: All right, so our winner this week was the movie with eight votes to the books, two plus two listeners who couldn't decide. And the number of necklaces that I own, I have in rotation. Necklaces that I keep out, that I wear, some more than others. But these are the ones that I have out.
I have 75.
Then I have a caboodle in my closet where I keep jewelry that I don't wear but that I keep for sentimental reasons. And there are 21 necklaces in there for a grand total of 96 necklaces.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: And then also a couple. You said maybe.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: There are probably a couple in the Ren Faire cabinet. Yeah.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: And like, costume stuff. Yeah. So probably, I would say right at 100.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Probably right at 100. And if not, read at 100. I only need a couple more. And I think I should shoot for 100 necklaces even. I might as well.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Might as well, so who was our closest? Who won? Who won? It wasn't me. It was not Melissa.
It was not Kelly. I think it was Nathan. 55 is the closest.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: That was Austin or Austin. Sorry, guessed 55. Yeah.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Didn't guess. Sorry, Austin. I think unless somebody else gets Kelly's on here.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Well, if, if we're just counting, like how many removed. Oh, you're writing. I was going over. I think Kelly was close.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: I was thinking. I was looking at the 75.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Counting all of them. Sorry. Yes, it is Kelly.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Congratulations, Kelly. Well done.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: See, Kelly gets me.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Austin got the closest to what is actually in rotation. He was just thinking practical.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: He was like, right.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: All right, thank you all for your feedback on Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. We always love talking about what you all have to say. Katie. We have a Learning Things segment this week and what we're learning about is the author, Bram Stoker.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: No matter what anybody tells you, words.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: And ideas can change the world.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Abraham, Bram Stoker.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: I just learned something. I literally had no idea. I've always thought Bram Stoker because my mind has only ever associated with Dracula.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: It sounds like a fake name.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: It does. Yeah, it does.
It sounds like a really good pen name.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Yes, it does. It sounds like a pen name, but that is.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: That is his actual name.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: So I never even thought. My brain never even thought. Thought about, like, even if there was a real guy named or girl or whatever named Bram Stoker and then on top of that, what their name actually could be. So finding out that it's Abraham is a little bit of a mind blowing revelation.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: So Bram Stoker was an Irish author now best remembered for his gothic horror novel Dracula, which is widely considered a milestone in vampire fiction and one of the most famous works of English literature.
Stoker was born in 1847 in Dublin. He was bedridden with an unknown illness until he started school at the age of seven, when he made. When he made a complete recovery. I don't know if the illness was unknown at the time or if it's just unknown to us now. Yeah, right.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Probably unknown at the time. It's 1847. Or when I say unknown, I mean they probably had a name for it, but it was probably not like he had whatever rickets or consumption or.
I don't know.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Well, we know what rickets.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: I know we know what consumption is. Not either those things, whatever. I couldn't come up with a made up disease anyway.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: So he. He was really sick as a kid, but he recovered and of that Time Stoker wrote, quote, I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.
So I guess he had a good outlook on it. Yeah, he was like, you know what? I was sick, but it gave me a lot of time to think.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: As. As a six year old, after finishing school, Stoker worked for the Irish Civil Service. But his real interest was the theater and he eventually became a theater critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. And then In December of 1876, he. He gave a favorable review of Henry Irving's Hamlet. Henry Irving was one of the most famous actors of the time period in England. And Irving would go on to invite Stoker over for dinner at the hotel that he was staying at. And they became really good friends from there. And as some historians have theorized, perhaps more than friends, per chance. Perhaps. Who's to say? Not me. And then in 1878, Stoker married Florence Balcombe, a celebrated beauty whose former suitor had been Oscar Wilde.
And Stoker and Wilde. Actually, I know she was. Well, she was a celebrated beauty, clearly.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: And Stoker and Wilde actually knew each other from school. They were more like acquaintances than friends. Like they weren't super close. But to Stoker's credit, he maintained that friendship after Wilde was convicted of, quote, unquote, gross indecency and sent to prison. A lot of people didn't do that. Yeah. Did not maintain contact with him. So I will credit that one to Bram Stoker. After they got married, the Stokers moved to London where Bram became an acting.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Maybe evidence too, of the more than friends, perhaps, you know, if he was, you know.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe he's not so straight himself.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Maybe he was more sympathetic than other people would have been.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Stoker's moved to London where Bram became acting manager and then business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theater in the West End. And because of that line of work, Stoker was able to travel extensively and meet many big names of the era, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Teddy Roosevelt and Walt Whitman, among others.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Real who's. Who's of people who make appearances in Doctor who episodes.
I don't actually. I think only one of those people have. But they're the kind of people that show up in Doctor episodes.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: One of the things that I love about, like this kind of general era of literature is how they all just like, knew each other.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: It is so funny that they're all just.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: They're all just like they're friends or their acquaintances or their bitter Enemies. Or they're all three.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Because nowadays it doesn't feel like that's the case at all anymore, to be fair. Yeah, there's just a lot more writers and blah, blah. But it's just like. Yeah, it is interesting that back then it just seems like all of the, like, well known authors just knew each other.
Or all of the well known Western authors, British authors or whatever knew each other.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: So. While Dracula is far and away Stoker's most famous and well remembered.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Shouldn't call Bram Stoker British. That's really offensive because he's Irish. I apologize.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Anyways, okay.
While Dracula is far and away Stoker's most famous and well remembered work, he wrote many other novels and short stories including the Primrose Path, the Lair of the White Worm and the Jewel of Seven Stars.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: I've heard of the Primrose Path, but I've not heard of those other two.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: I had no idea what to include in this section because, gun to my head, I could not tell you anything other than Dracula that people read of his.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: That's fair.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: I feel like I've heard of the Lair of the White Worm, but I don't know anything about it. So. After suffering a number of strokes, Stoker died in April of 1912. Some biographers attribute the cause of death to overwork, while others think he had tertiary syphilis. Who's to say?
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: He was cremated and his ashes were placed in a display urn at Golder's Green Crematorium in North London. And I assume that you can go see them.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess. I have no idea, but that would make sense. It seems like the kind of thing, like we have Bram Stoker's ashes, people.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Can come in and look at them.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: That exactly. Like that kind of thing would be a tourist attraction. Yeah. All right, now that we've learned a little bit about the author Bram Stoker, let's learn a little bit more about his most famous novel, Dracula.
Here occurred the frightening and shocking history of Prince Dracula and the woman he loved. I have crossed oceans of time to find you.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Dracul.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: There is a sinister, darker side to him I find irresistible.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: I have never met any man with such a passion for life.
He is unlike any man.
What are you?
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by the aforementioned Irish author Bram Stoker.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Learning he's Irish, Bram makes a lot more sense as a name now or as a nickname, I guess.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: It is an epistolary novel featuring an ensemble cast of characters who tell their portions of the Narrative through journal entries, letters, newspaper articles, et cetera.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: I did not know it was an epistolary novel.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: You're learning so much in this episode.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: To be fair, I don't know if I. Other than Nosferatu 2024, which we saw in theaters, I don't know if I've ever consumed another entire Dracula story. Like, I don't know if I've consumed Dracula as a story. I guess Van Helsing, technically, kind of.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: But, like, I mean, that is.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: I've never seen any of the classic Dracula movies. I've never read the book. Yeah. I don't know if I've. I mean, I'm sure I've consumed derivations of it through popular media, like episodes of TV that are doing a play on Dracula or whatever. But I've never.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: It was on Buffy.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. But I've never watched a Dracula adaptation in its entirety other than Nosfront 2024 or read the book. So I have, like. No. And I just. And it's one of those things, too. It's like such a cultural.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: Right. Well, that is really the interesting thing about it is that it is.
Has transcended what it originally was so much that you really like. Everything you know about Dracula is through cultural osmosis.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: And that's kind of what I was getting at, is that it's. Because it's become so ingrained in society and culturally, just prolific.
What the original thing was, my brain doesn't have any knowledge. Like, nobody talks about what the original Dracula novel was like.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: It's.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: And people do, but it's just, you know, that's not what is permeated. What is permeated is vampires.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Right. Notably, we are going to talk about it. I did know that it was an epistolary novel. I did not know that Bram Stoker was Irish. I was very excited to discover that. Right around. Right around St. Patrick's Day. Yeah. So seasonal. So Stoker began researching for Dracula in the spring of 1890. That research was extensive, totaling over 100 pages of notes, including chapter summaries, plot outlines and scrapped concepts. He made heavy use of libraries to do so, like a good lad. Most notably the London Library, which still has possession of some books that he made footnotes in.
You shouldn't write in library books, but we'll forgive him for that one.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: You can do it if you're Bram Stoker in 1895 or whatever.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Stoker took the name Dracula from William Wilkinson's History of Wallachia.
Wallachia, I think, and Moldavia. Copying the following footnote from the book quote. Dracula means devil.
Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.
This, however, may have been a slight misunderstanding.
At least that's my understanding of it. The name Dracula means son of Dracul. In the Romanian language today, Dracul means the devil. Drac is devil. Ul is the the. But it is derived from the Latin draco. Dragon. Dragons have been historically associated with Satan, hence the evolution.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: That makes sense. That all tracks.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Scholars have suggested various historical figures as the inspiration for Dracula, including Vlad the Impaler and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah, those are the two you mainly hear.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Yeah. But neither of those allusions can be, like, conclusively proved. Another popular theory is that Dracula was inspired, at least in part, by Henry Irving.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Scholars note the Count's tall and lean physique. And is it aquiline?
[00:25:59] Speaker A: I don't know how to pronounce that word. I've seen it, but I actually have never heard it pronounced aquiline. Aquiline.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: We'll say aquiline knows. With Dracula scholar William Hughes specifically citing the influence of Irving's performance as Shylock in a production of the Merchant of Venice.
Vampires themselves, of course, predate the novel by centuries. If you're interested in a breakdown of the evolution of the vampire mythos, we actually discussed that in the prequel to our episode on Interview with the Vampire, which we covered in 2019.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: There you go. You have homework.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: However, Dracula looms large in the modern concept of the vampire. Many popular vampire characteristics, such as methods of survival and destruction, vampires as aristocracy, and even the association with Eastern Europe. Europe were solidified by Stoker's novel.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Also them being sexy. Right. Or at least seductive.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: Seductive, maybe not sexy, sorry.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Sensuality.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: And, like, sensuality.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Sexuality being part of it is. I think prior to that maybe wasn't as much.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Right. And, you know, we're all tied up in with, like, Victorian morals and, like, anxieties around sex.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: So, yes, actually, I have notes about that in my part, kind of.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: There's a. There's a very, very suggestive scene at the beginning of the novel. I was, like, fanning myself reading it. I was like, God damn. Okay, Bram.
So Dracula was published in May of 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company.
Unfortunately, the novel, while well reviewed, failed to earn Stoker much money and did not establish its critical reputation until after his death.
But since its publication, Dracula has never been out of print.
It is considered an enduring work of Gothic literature. The novel is characteristically gothic in its depiction of the supernatural, preoccupation with the past and embodying of the racial, gendered and sexual anxieties of late 1800s England.
However, it does deviate from a lot of other Gothic tales by firmly establishing its time as the modern era. So it's not. He didn't set it in the past, he set it in the current time period.
Contemporary reviewers frequently compared the novel to other Gothic writers, including Wilkie Collins and Ann Radcliffe. The Daily Telegraph called it the best vampire story ever written. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent a letter to Stoker after reading Dracula, writing, quote, the old professor is most excellent, and so are the two girls. I congratulate you with all my heart for having written so fine a book.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: The two girls, Mina and Mina and Lucy.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Dracula was also considered quite frightening by contemporary reviewers. And you know what? I agree with that.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: I was gonna say, what is your experience?
[00:29:07] Speaker B: I think. I think it's scary. All right, I do.
But not everybody liked that.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: They hadn't figured out the horrors, like, as a media yet.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: Well, I have. I actually have some. Some like, pull quotes here. A review appearing in the Manchester Guardian in 1897 praised its capacity to entertain, but concluded that Stoker erred in including so much horror. Likewise, Vanity Fair said that the novel was praiseworthy and absorbing, but could not recommend it to those who were not strong. A reviewer for the San Francisco Wave even went so far as to call the novel a literary failure, elaborating that coupling vampires with frightening imagery such as insane asylums and unnatural appetites made the horror too overt.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Okay, I can understand maybe the critique of it being too overt, but just being too spooky or too scary seems strange because it's not like. I mean, it's not like, came around like, 50 years before the book came out.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: We already had Poe, we already had Shelley, a bunch of other stuff, but apparently this was something about it. This was too spooky for some of these reviewers, but the joke was on them. Dracula would go on to capture popular culture's imagination like perhaps nothing else. The novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games, animation over 700 times, with nearly 1,000 additional appearances in comic books and on the stage. Those numbers are all as of 2011, according to the Wikipedia footnotes. So it's probably more now.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: Gotta be. Doesn't even include what we do in the shadows.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And in 2015, the Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character of all time.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Gotta imagine I can't. I'm trying to scour my brain. Short of, like, God.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Which could be debatable for some people, I guess. But I would argue he's a literary character and he may show up in it, may show up in more things than Dracula, but usually not portrayed as a character, necessarily. Yeah, it's gotta be.
What even would be close, Maybe.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: And maybe the Guinness Book of World Records was not counting these as literary characters, but maybe, like, kind of in line with your comment about God, like mythological characters. Maybe.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: Maybe. Yeah. But even that.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Even that, I. Yeah, I don't know.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. I totally believe it, so. Especially because it's character and not like.
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Yes. And not like a full adaptation of the text. Because think about how many random things Dracula just shows up in. Like, probably every cartoon you could think.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Of has had, like, a Dracula episode or whatever.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Oh, no, it's Dracula.
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Exactly. All right. That was everything we needed to know about Dracula the novel. Let's learn a little bit about Bram Stoker's Dracula the film.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Vampires do exist.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: This one we fight, this one we.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Face.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: Can take on many forms.
He is both young and old.
He can appear as mist, as vapor, as the fog, and he can vanish at will.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Oh, my love.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: The power of his evil desire has no end.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: You've got to go to him and you've got to love him.
She is a willing recruit, a devoted disciple.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: She is the Devil's concubine.
Bram Stoker's Dracula is a 1990, 1992 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, known for the Godfather, the Godfather Part ii, and all the Godfather movies, obviously. Apocalypse now, the Conversation, the Outsiders, Megalopolis. It was written by James V. Hart, who wrote right before this hook and then would go on to write after this. Muppet, Treasure Island, Nice Contact, which we'll do eventually.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: Tuck Everlasting, which we'll do eventually.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, the Cradle of Life, which we will not do, because don't believe that one's based on a book. Sahara and August Rush, among other things. The film stars Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Carrie Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, Tom Waits, Monica Bellucci, Michaela Berkew and Jay Robinson. It has a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, Nice, a 57% on Metacritic, and a 7.4 out of 10 on IMDb. It made $215 million against a budget of $40 million and won three Oscars, one for Best Costume design, one for best effects, Special or Sound. Effects Editing. Sorry, Best Effects. Sound. Effects Editing was like the category. Then they changed them. It's not the same category anymore. And Best Makeup, and it was also nominated for Best Art Direction. So Winona Ryder was actually the person who brought the script to Coppola. Apparently, they were meeting in order to clear the air because Ryder had pulled out of the Godfather Part 3 late in pre production or at some point early in production, and it caused a bunch of delays, a bunch of issues. And they were meeting because she was worried that he was furious, and so she wanted to.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: She was gonna blackball her into Hollywood.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: And so they were meeting to chat about it or whatever. And so she brought him the script. I believe that the writer of James Whatever had written. And according to her, she said, I never really thought he would read it. He was so consumed with the Godfather 3. As I was leaving, I said, if you have a chance, read this script. He glanced down at it politely, but when he saw the word Dracula, his eyes lit up. It was one of his favorite stories from camp. Ryder explained that her own interest in playing or in the movie or she explained her own interest in the movie, saying, quote, what attracted me to the script is the fact that it's a very emotional love story, which is not really what you think of when you think about Dracula. Mina, like many other women in the late 1800s, has a lot of repressed sexuality. Everything about women in that era, the way those corsets forced them to move, was indicative of repression. To express passion was freakish, end quote. Gary Oldman, however, on the contrary, was not particularly attracted to the character of Dracula. He said it wasn't like a character he was super interested in playing, but he took the role because it was an opportunity to work with Coppola, who I considered one of the great American directors. That was enough, really. It was my first big American movie made on a big set with lots of costumes. For a young actor, that was a tremendous experience, end quote. He also said that it was worth playing the character, just so he got to say the line, I've crossed oceans of time to find you, end quote. He said he read that line in the script and was like, it'll be worth it for that line.
Christian Slater apparently was offered the role of Jonathan Harker, but turned it down. He would go on to regret that decision in his. According to him, Coppola did explain the reason for casting Keanu Reeves, which is a very controversial performance, shall we say? He said, quote, we tried to get some kind of matinee idol for the part of Jonathan, because it isn't such a great part. If we all were to go to the airport, Keanu is the one that the girls would besiege, end quote. Basically saying, we got Keanu because we needed some sex appeal for the girl when for a female audience to get them into the theater. And Keanu was that in 1992, on the famously bad accent by Keanu Reeves, Francis Ford Coppola said that that Reeves actually worked very hard on the accent, saying, quote, he tried so hard. That was the problem, actually. He wanted to do it perfectly. And in trying to do it perfectly, it came off as stilted. I tried to get him to just relax with it and not do it so fastidiously. So maybe I wasn't as critical of him, but that's because I like him personally so much to this day. He's a prince in my eyes, end quote.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: That's so nice.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: It is. Coppola's a mixed bag, but that. I thought that quote was very, very fun. Designer Eiko Ishioka was given a ton of freedom to design Dracula's wardrobe in the film, as well as kind of his overall vibe and aesthetic, because Coppola thought that the costumes were kind of one of the most important elements of the movie. And Iko said that she designed for Dracula to be, quote, male and female, old and young, ugly and handsome, animal and human, kind of what she was going for.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: Sounds like she understands what Dracula is.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, to be fair, this movie seems like it understands what Dracula is. From what I've read so far. The film's hair and makeup designer Michelle Burke, recalled, quote, francis didn't want the typical Dracula that had already been done in Hollywood. He wanted something different, a new Dracula without the widow's peak cape or pale white skin. She used her Catholic upbringing and angelic imagery for some of the design inspiration, as well as 19th century attire that was created by Ishioka. So this next part I'm reading directly from Wikipedia, which most of this is all the time. I just read all the stuff from Wikipedia anyways. But this is literally copy pasted because I didn't want to, like, tweak it, because this is an interesting. This is a complicated topic.
Winona Ryder has said that she found the intensity of Oldman's acting style too much at times. And the two fell out early in the filming process and had difficulty working then on, which was actually apparently surprising to a lot of people in the movie. They were, like, very confused because they. They became very. The two of Them apparently became very good friends during rehearsals, and they were, like, inseparable. But then there was. They shot some of the movie, and then there was, like, a scheduled break or something. And then when they came back from the scheduled break, they, like, wouldn't talk to each other, and nobody knew what was going on. Coppola said, quote, they got along, and then they got along, and then one day, they didn't. Absolutely didn't get along. None of us were privy to what had happened, end quote. Ryder has referred to, quote, the trauma of the experience and said that she felt there was a danger while working with Oldman. Oldman. However, she would also refer to her friction with Ullman as, quote, teen drama, saying, quote, he was. Or he, being Gary Oldman, was going through a divorce. And I think I can say this because he's pretty open about it, but he's been sober for a long time now, and he's raised three kids, and he's a dream. He's a good friend of mine now. End quote. So it sounds like he sucked ass back then.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: And was an asshole.
And they've since made up. But yeah.
So Francis Ford Coppola wanted to ask you all modern special effects in the movie, he really wanted to ground the film in the antiquated techniques of early cinema to match the film's setting and its history as a classic film and a classic story. So apparently he hired an effects team and told them that his request was like, no, no cgi, no compositing. I want to do this all practical in camera, all that sort of stuff. And they were like, this is impossible. We can't do this. So he fired them and hired his son to do it.
Roman Coppola. So supposedly, according to Wikipedia, which is never accurate, or not that Wikipedia is never accurate, but these kind of blanket statements are never accurate, which it was immediately contradicted by something I found on IMDb. Every. Supposedly every effect in the movie was achieved on set or in camera. Then on IMDb it says that there's some blue flames effect that were an optical effect and not done in camera. I don't know. It's hard to know because sometimes in camera. Yeah, how effects are done is complicated. And something can be kind of a. Not. I don't know it. Most. The vast, vast majority of the shots are practical or done in camera. For instance, composite shots that would normally be achieved with, like, green screen or blue screen or some sort of computer compositing were achieved with rear projection, which is where you have a screen behind the actors and you project what it is you want them. So like in old movies, when they're driving a car and you see the road behind them moving, and it's a car that's just sitting there, that's a rear projection screen behind them. It's basically just a movie screen. So that's one way they did it. Or they used multiple exposures and mattes where you block off, you shoot the film. Once you reel it back, you shoot it again, but you block off part of the exposure so that only what you want gets exposed on part of the film. So you can put two things, two different shots on the same piece of film. So they did all that stuff in camera, which is how they used to do all those special effects way back in the day when they did them at the first cast meeting for the film. And this is where we're getting into IMDb trivia here. I believe the first cast meeting for the film, Coppola decided that he wanted to get all of the principal actors to read the entire novel out loud to get a feel for the story. According to Anthony Hopkins, it took two whole days for them all to read together.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: Like, not enough, actually. Yeah, that seems pretty 500 page book.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: I mean, if you do like 10 hours a day, I guess just read it out loud and yeah, I could see it. But yeah.
Apparently Gary Oldman hired a singing coach to help him lower his voice by an octave to give Dracula a more sinister quality. Again, these are IDB trivia, so take them all with a grain of salt. Liam Neeson was considered for the role of Van Helsing, but then when Anthony Hopkins showed interest in the role, they were like, nope, we're gonna go with Anthony. Sir Anthony Hopkins. And Neeson was turned down. And then getting into some reviews of the film again, generally positively reviewed at the time, not only for a bunch of other Oscars, but here we go. Vincent Camby described the film as, quote, having been created with an enthusiasm of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft, end quote. Which. Which is true of a lot of, from my understanding, a lot of Coppola's films. I've heard people say similar things about Megalopolis or sorry, but not the master's command of that, more so the budget of somebody.
But yeah, Coppola has always kind of had like that film student energy in some of his films. I wouldn't say Godfather has that. But anyways, Richard Corliss said, quote, coppola brings the old spooky story alive. Everyone knows that Dracula has a heart. Coppola knows that it is more than an organ to drive a stake into. To the director, the count is a restless spirit who has been condemned for too many years to internment in cruddy movies. His luscious film restores the creature's nobility and gives him peace.
Writing for the Radio Times, Alan Jones said, eerie, romantic and operatic, this exquisitely mounted revamp of the undead legend is a supreme artistic achievement. As the tired count who has overdosed on immortality, Gary Oldman's towering performance holds center stage and burns itself into the memory.
A little more critically, Jonathan Rosenbaum said, the film, quote, suffered from a somewhat dispersed and overcrowded storyline, but it remains fascinating and often affecting thanks to all its visual and conceptual energy. For the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turin called the film not particularly scary, not very sexy, and dramatically over the top, and criticized the tone in some of the casting decisions. My guess would be Keanu Reeves.
Tom Hibbert, writing for Empire, was also unimpressed, giving the film two out of five stars. He said, quote, has a film ever promised so much yet delivered so little? All we're left with is an overly long, bloated adaptation instead of what might have been a gothic masterpiece.
For the New York Review of books, Jeffrey O'Brien also had reservations, saying the romantic makeover of Dracula Registers is little more than a marketing device designed to exploit the attractiveness of the movie's youthful cast. It rolls on a patina of the feel good uplift endemic in recent Hollywood movies.
And finally, Roger Ebert liked the movie, giving it three out of four stars, saying, quote, I enjoyed the movie simply for the way it looked and felt, which is everything I've ever heard about this movie. Most people who like it are like, it's fun to watch and it looks cool.
Production designers Dante Ferretti and Thomas Sanders have outdone themselves. The cinematographer Michael Ballhaus gets into the spirit so completely, he always seems to light with shadows. Ebert did, however, voice criticism of the film's narrative confusion and dead ends.
All right, so Ebert was a fan mostly, but a little bit of, you know, veiled criticism in there as well. As always, you can do us a favor by heading over to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, not Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, threads, bluesky, Goodreads. I think those are all the places. Follow us, interact. We'd love to hear what you have to say about all the stuff we talk about. You can shoot us a nice little review over on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, all those places and you can Support
[email protected] thisfilmislay it. Katie, where can people watch Bram Stoker's Dracula?
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Well, as always, you can check with your local library, especially if you are in America, because library funding is under attack.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Who's surprised? Not me.
So, using your local library and getting their subscript statistics up, I can't think.
[00:45:59] Speaker A: Of the word not rotation.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: Yeah, not rotation.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: Like it's a word like rotation.
[00:46:03] Speaker B: It's a word like rotation.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: Circulation.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Circulation. Their circulation statistics up. Or if you have a local video rental store, you can check with them. Barring any of that, you can rent this for around $4 from Amazon, YouTube, or Fandango at home.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: There you go. I'm very excited to watch this. I was. I don't know if I was rooting for it, but it was one of the, like, four, three or four that I really wanted to watch. To be fair, all four that made it into the finals were like, the four I wanted to watch.
Although actually, one of them that lost very early was one I did want to see, which was Nosferatu, something of the Vampyr or whatever, which is Nosferatu.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: The Vampir.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Yes. That is a.
What's the German nihilist guy?
[00:46:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: Werner Herzog film. Yes.
I don't think he's a nihilist, but sometimes he says that sound very nihilistic when he talks. Sometimes. But I don't actually know if he's. Point being, I believe that's a Werner Herzog film, and I've heard it's very interesting, so I kind of wanted to see that one. But I've always heard really interesting things about this movie, about Bram Stoker's Dracula, that it's kind of a weird mess, but also like a fascinating and gorgeous and fun weird mess. So I'm very much looking forward to watching it. And obviously I really enjoyed it. 2024's Nosferatu. So that being the runner up is fine with me because we still get to talk about it. So, yeah.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I kind of expected this one to win. It's like, right in line with our demographic, which is mostly millennials.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: Millennials, yeah.
[00:47:39] Speaker B: Some Gen X. But I would have been happy with a lot of the movies that were on the bracket.
I mean, there were some that I wouldn't have been happy with. Mel Brooks.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that was the main one. I don't really have a lot that.
[00:47:53] Speaker B: I think I would have thought about, and there are definitely some that I think would have been extremely difficult to do a main episode on, like, I love the movie Van Helsing. I think it's so fun and campy. I think it would have been a nightmare to do a regular full episode on. Very difficult. Yeah. It's not even the same story.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: No. So, yeah, I think this will be very interesting.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it'll be interesting. I think it'll be fun.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: It'll be like my second Coppola film because I've now seen Godfather and I will.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: It'll be my third Coppola film because you reminded me that the Outsiders was directed by Copa.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: So. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:32] Speaker B: But, yeah, I'm looking forward to it and I'm. I'm really enjoying the book.
[00:48:37] Speaker A: Yeah, you've. You've remarked several times, like very early on in the reading, you were like, this is really good. And like, you're like, I get it. This is very good. And then several times since then, as you've been making your way through it, you been like, yeah, no, it's very. I get it. It's very good. I understand why it's a classic, which is always fun. Cuz sometimes, especially for a longer book, it's good when it's not a slog to get there. So that's going to do it for this episode. Come back in one week's time, we're talking about Bram Stoker's Dracula. Until that time, guys, gals, I'm B pals and everybody else, keep reading books, keep watching movies and keep being awesome.
