In this version of Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder put a medieval spin on a 19th century ghost story.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) was an earnest attempt to remain faithful both to Stoker's novel and to medieval legends about Vlad the Impaler and vampires. It evoked both Walter Scott's romantic view of the Middle Ages and Stoker's nasty and dirty view of medieval times as Dark Ages. This was a strange combination that sat well with neither critics nor filmgoers.
Dracula (Gary Oldman) is Vlad the Impaler, the baddest crusader of Eastern Europe (about as close as this film gets to the real Vlad Dracul). A staunch defender of the Church against the Turks and equally devoted to his beloved wife, Elisabeta (Winona Ryder), he goes off to war. Elisabeta swears that if he dies in battle, she will not survive him. He triumphs, but false reports of his death precede him home. Elisabeta jumps from a tower to her death. Horrified and grieving, Dracula foreswears the Church. He is condemned to walk the Earth as a vampire, an outlaw to the Church and everything living. Naturally, come the Victorian era five centuries later, he meets Mina, a reincarnation of his lost love. Because this is Hollywood.
Francis Ford Coppola does a fairly good job of evoking some medieval images of vampires, when he's not distracted by the romantic angle. The idea of a vampire being a type of revenant or zombie of a man who was too evil to rest in peace comes from 11th and 12th century England. Stories about such unnaturally risen bodies rising from their graves to annoy the living appear in the accounts of an abbot of Burgh (1090), William of Newburgh (1190s) and Walter Map (late 12th century). These bodies are subdued by a combination of decapitation, a stake to the heart (or tearing the heart out) and burning.
Actual bloodsucking vampires appear in Eastern Europe during the same period. Vampires are quite ancient in origin, appearing in ancient Babylonian myths. But medieval vampires, and the imagery used in both the book and film, are mainly Slavic and Romanian in origin. They prey on livestock as well as humans. One Old Russian work that was hostile to pagan religion claimed that in the old days, Russians sacrificed to vampires, indicating that they were originally more than monsters. This myth also contributes to the idea of Dracula as a great lord, rather than just a filthy undead predator. As in the book, the movie fosters the myth of vampires as the type of medieval lord no peasant would want. Maybe Stoker was on to something.
