Dracula Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You all remember the romantic rite of passage known as the mix-tape, right? Where you would try and convey how deep, charming, profound, and downright cool you were by compiling a group of songs for your intended? In the world of movies, filmmakers use songs all the time to create a mood, explain an emotional 'state of mind', or even to fill in what they don't have time to explain. As it turns out, so do we, and that's where the art of the mix-tape comes in. But this isn't just about music, and Cinematical is a film site after all, so I thought it would be fun to put together a little mix tape of songs I've come to love thanks to hearing them in the movies.

Now before we start, I should warn you that my mix tape isn't just a collection of run-of-the-mill love songs, because as I keep telling everyone, I'm not a run-of-the-mill girl. Instead, I've put together a 'celluloid compilation', that if given to me would guarantee that I fell head over heels into film geek love.

After the jump; some movie songs that would woo me right off of my feet (in no particular order)...

It's really hard not to love seeing Tom Waits onscreen, but his role as Renfield in the Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 version of Dracula is a highlight. The movie itself is a sentimental favorite as well, with its super-saturated colors and heaving Victorian bosoms and, of course, Gary Oldman, who transforms from Eastern European sexpot to razor-blade licking undead creep with a bouffant and back again. Also, he has this bed that half-naked lady vampires pop out of.

Renfield is in an appropriately dingy Victorian asylum, where people who handle the inmates wear cages on their heads. Just in case. In Coppola's version, Renfield previously held Jonathan Harker's position before he went mad, or was driven mad by his boss' demands. Now he snacks on bugs and worms and wears a pair of most excellent and inexplicable articulated sort of hand braces that's oh so steampunk.

Dr. Jack Seward, the unfortunate asylum shrink, toys with Renfield a bit after noting, "I shall have to invent a new classification of lunatic for you." He points out that spiders eat flies, birds eat spiders, and cats eat birds, which causes Renfield to kneel on the ground and pitifully beg for a kitten.

"Oh, yes. A kitten. I beg you. A little, sleek... a playful kitten. Something I can teach. Something I can feed. No one would refuse me a kitten!" He would also settle for a cat. Obviously, he is not given a kitten or a cat, because he would probably eat it.

Enjoy the clip after the jump. You can watch the full movie for free at Crackle.com.

Everybody loves a bad guy. They usually get the best lines, a great entrance, and a hell of a death scene. But our love affair with the dark side is no secret, and as much as we might love the bad boys, we all enjoy a good 'comeuppance', which is usually where our heroes come in. Hell, probably one of the biggest reasons most of us love the world of make-believe is that at least there, the good guys can win. Occasionally, though, you find a villain with qualities that go a little beyond being the 'man/woman you love to hate', and before you know it, that monster has managed to win you over before the credits have rolled -- which isn't always good news for our heroes.

Now this doesn't mean that I think these villains are model citizens, because well, I'm not that psycho. But when these guys are on screen, suddenly the 'hero' of the piece starts to fade away, and when your audience is bummed when the bad guy goes down, you know that you've created a villain who is just too damn charismatic for their own good. These characters can pop up in anything from a comic book flick to a period drama, but the one thing they have in common is their ability to make you think, "Hey, he's nuts, but he might have a point". So that's why for today's installment of our monthly tribute to villains, I've put together a list of my top 5 movie villains with charm to spare.

After the jump; my top five movie villains that will win you over in the end...

If you're a fan of the classic Universal Studios movie monsters, including Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy, and more, then you've probably found yourself haunted by a severe lack of ginormous books that focus on your obsession. With Halloween just around the corner, Michael Mallory's Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror arrives just in time.

It's chock full of over 300 black and white and 25 color behind-the-scenes photos, original movie posters, publicity shots, and articles from people like James Whale (director of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and many more), makeup marvel Jack P. Piece, FX man John Fulton, and more. It's officially endorsed by the studio, so I'm not sure if this will be the Bela Lugosi tell-all expose that you're looking for. The whole package is 252 pages long, and at 9" by 12 ", it can double as a blunt object if you need to brain anyone.

Check out a very cool exclusive pic from the book over at Horror Squad.

Bloodsuckers are back, baby! If you happen to own a television, visited the fantasy section of your local bookstore, or clicked onto a certain high-quality film site (*ahem*), then you've probably noticed the pigment-challenged are everywhere. Before you get all worried, I'm not just talking about the Twilight saga, which has become the scourge of so-called 'serious' vamp fans everywhere. Nope, this trend goes way beyond the Cullens, and vampires are now everywhere.

Just yesterday we got our first look at the trailer for Cirque de Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, and now that Guillermo del Toro's Strain is also on its way to TV screens, I doubt our fanged friends are going to be disappearing anytime soon. Which is fine by me, because I always thought the best thing about vampire mythology was that everyone has their own take on which kind of monster they want to create -- I mean, how else could we have Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? So whether you like your bloodsuckers funny, romantic, or just downright bloodthirsty, there's a little something for everyone these days.

I have to admit, though, I'm a little picky about my vampire movies, and there are just certain things I cannot abide. So, because there is nothing I love more than a list, I decided to compile the best and the worst when it comes to bloodsuckers on the big screen.

After the jump: my picks for the top five best, and worst vampire movies...

One of the coolest chapters in Bram Stoker's Dracula (the book, not the Coppola movie) is the one in which the titular bloodsucker is on a boat ride from Bulgaria to England, and he uses the crew as a rather messy all-you-can-eat buffet. It's a sequence that certainly seems spooky enough to warrant its very own film, so I say it's good news that Marcus Nispel is on board to direct The Last Voyage of Demeter.

Variety describes the story with a bit more clarity than I can muster at 6am on a Sunday morning, so here goes: It's "based on a chapter in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" describing the arrival of the vampire count in England on a cargo ship that has crashed into the rocks at Whitby with no crew and the dead captain lashed to the steering wheel. Stoker tells the story via the captain's log of the voyage, which begins in Bulgaria and becomes increasingly disjointed as members of the crew disappear."

Given Nispel's affection for tackling old-school horror (like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th), it'll be interesting to see what he does with Dracula. It's not like Demeter could be any more outrageously ridiculous than the Frankenstein adaptation the director did for the USA Network a few years back.

For starters, I just want to make it perfectly clear that I have nothing against Winona Ryder. Veronica Sawyer will remain as one of my favorite characters of all time, and her Bjork on Rock N' Roll Jeopardy has yet to be matched. But, let's be honest, period pieces were never her thing (maybe with one exception ... but that's a big maybe). In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola released Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I've never been able to look at her the same way again.

Dracula is hardly a perfect movie, and by no means am I dumping all the blame on Winona's doorstep. But all the beautiful costumes and references to La Belle et la Bête couldn't save what was once described as a "fruitcake of a movie"; and the cherry on that fruitcake is this scene between Gary Oldman (as the bloodsucking Prince of Wallachia) and Ryder as Mina Harker. What should have been romantic and emotional (not to mention hot) is for me the cinematic equivalent of watching an amateur lightweight get into the ring with Muhammad Ali (and can you guess who the lightweight is?). Ryder's delivery is stilted and awkward, Oldman is hamming it up for all it's worth, and I will forever be cringing in my seat.

Dracula Fun Facts (Courtesy of IMDB):

• In an attempt to elicit more emotion, director Francis Ford Coppola shouted "whore" and "slut" at Winona Ryder while filming the scene when Van Helsing catches Mina with Dracula.
  
  
• Prince Vlad's scream after he drives his sword into the cross is not the voice of Gary Oldman. Lux Interior, lead singer of punk band The Cramps, recorded the scream and it was dubbed in.
  
  
• Earnings from the film was enough to save Zoetrope (Francis Ford Coppola's studio) from bankruptcy after suffering from financial difficulties and liabilities of $27 million over the past 3 years.

Take me away from all this Twitter!

I haven't read Twilight, but a friend who has described it as chapter upon chapter of Kristen Stewart's character swooning over Robert Pattinson's youthful 108-year old vampire. Males the world over are running for the hills -- but maybe they shouldn't. After all, the horror-romance has a long and venerable history. The juxtaposition makes sense: just like clowns can become scary with just a small tweak in their make-up, love stories can turn into horror stories by edging just slightly toward the sinister. I have some hope that Twilight might be creepy rather than gooey; we'll see soon enough. In the meantime, here are a few examples of films that have done a nice job with the horror-romance combination.

1. The Fly (1986) - I actually think that Cronenberg's take on The Fly is the scariest movie I've ever seen, albeit for reasons having little to do with the romance between Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle and Geena Davis's Veronica. (I'm generally freaked out by genetic weirdness.) But the film gets much of its poignancy from their relationship, which both sets things in motion and brings them to a close. Consider that Brundle tries his invention on himself out of jealousy, imagining an infidelity that didn't exist. And Veronica's final heartbreaking gesture is one of both pity and love.

Call me crazy, but Bram Stoker's Dracula (the book, not the movie) ends pretty definitively. Dracula gets a bowie knife in the heart, and crumbles into dust in the red sun of the Transylvanian dawn. The wiggle room has been taken care of in a score of movies, books, and television shows -- and we have plenty of new vampire stories, so must we really dig up Dracula again? Well, according to ShockTillYouDrop, yes.

They say a sequel is coming -- and this time it's getting a literary and big screen outing. For the first time, the Stoker estate has authorized an official Dracula sequel titled Dracula: The Undead. Written by Dacre Stoker, Bram's great-grandnephew, and Dracula historian Ian Holt, the story uses characters and plot threads that were edited out of Stoker's original novel in 1897. It hits store shelves in October 2009, just in time for Halloween. And don't think it's the only sequel you'll be getting -- publishing house Penguin-Canada (who describes the book as having done a"fantastic job melding the old with the new"), has already signed up for two more.

But you won't get to read it before film production starts -- Holt and Alexander Galant have already completed and sold the script, and production is slated to begin in June 2009. Jan DeBont is one of the producers and I'm sure he's debating whether or not to direct as well.

I might be interested in this if estate authorized sequels were ever good -- I can't think of one that was, but there's always a chance this could be it. Besides, I think the definitive Dracula sequel has already been made -- Dracula 2000, starring a baby-faced Gerard Butler. I just know you've all forgotten about it, like Butler and Christopher Plummer probably want you to, but why wait until 2009 for sexy vampire times? Just rent this one.

Her last horror outing, of 10 biblical plagues and The Reaping, wasn't the most loved piece of scary cinema to hit the screens, but the 2-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is trying again. I'm not sure what has brought about her recent attraction to fantastical horror, but Variety reports that Swank will star in an upcoming adaptation of John Marks' recent novel, Fangland -- a project that she will produce with Das Films and Blumhouse Productions. Mark Wheaton, scribe of The Messengers, handed in the project's first draft just before the strike -- and he's the same guy whose Unfinished Country script just got Samuel L. Jackson to take the lead.

John Marks is a former producer of 60 Minutes, and Fangland merges Bram Stoker's legend of Dracula with his experience on the news show. Yes, that means Hilary is heading back to the vamps, but with a little more drama than her role on Buffy. Evangeline Harker (Swank) is a producer for a television news show who takes an assignment to go into Romania and investigate a criminal legend, Ion Torgu, to get him on camera. This will put Swank face to face with more stories about crazy plagues, first, because one can't get enough of terrible disease. Soon, Torgu accosts her, impersonating Dracula. Like Stoker's tale, Harker finds herself held for months, before she pops up in a Transylvanian monastery as this Torgu Dracula gets introduced to New York City. Since only the first draft has been completed, this production will, most likely, be in the works for a while yet. I wonder... will Swank get accosted by the same, lustful vixen vamps? If you've read it, or would just like to comment on Swank taking on Dracula, please chime in!