Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 26, 2013 13:05:40 GMT -5
Bram Stoker’s Dracula Swoops Down on Dublin in the Dark
Kim Newman, best known for his Anno Dracula novels, which imagine the count surviving Van Helsing’s hunt, is also promoting Johnny Alucard, the latest in the series. In the novels, Dracula pops up in various times and places, from marrying Queen Victoria, to fighting in the First World War, to appearing in a La Dolce Vita-inspired Rome.
Newman says he has cultural permission to redeploy Dracula for his own purposes. “I see this material as open-source,” he says. “When you think about it, when Dracula was published, there was a 15-year period where you had Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, The Invisible Man. It was an extraordinary time. With industrialisation, the rise of popular culture, the growth of literacy, for whatever reason, we get these amazing characters – and all our popular culture, really.” These characters appear in Newman’s fiction, as do Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. Johnny Alucard has scenes on the set of an imaginary 1970s Dracula movie made by Francis Ford Coppola.
The four Dracula films selected by Newman will be screened outdoors in Temple Bar. The four “represent the range of approaches, from the classical to the subversive, the horrific to the romantic,” he says. They don’t come more classic than the Bela Lugosi’s Dracula from 1931, a film more responsible for the popular image of Dracula than the book. “I had to have one of the big Draculas,” says Newman. “I went with the Lugosi for practical reasons: FW Murnau’s Nosferatu and the 1958 Hammer are due for re-release, so they will be around. It would be silly to show something that everyone could see in a few weeks.”
Christopher Lee is another iconic Dracula, but Newman has decided that the re-release of the 1958 Hammer, Horror of Dracula, will sate audiences, so he has chosen the sequel, Brides of Dracula, from 1960. The midnight screening is Blood for Dracula, Paul Morrissey’s elegantly gruesome film from 1974, produced by Andy Warhol. Out of left-field is Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, a ballet, and “one of the best adaptations of the novel,” says Newman. Though filmed in 2002, the black and white used by director Guy Maddin gives Pages a 1930s feel. Newman hasn’t forgotten the children. He has chosen an 80s classic, The Monster Squad, and Hotel Transylvania, a cartoon from 2012 in which Adam Sandler plays a widowed Dracula.
“The open-air screenings, with the party atmosphere, horror works really well for that. You can jump at the scary bits,” says Newman. “Stoker on the Square,” a series of films curated by Kim Newman, will be screened at Meeting House Square from October 26-28.
Source: Alan O’Riordan, The Irish Examiner, October 24, 2013.