Transcoding, Intertextuality, and Neo-Victorianism in the Film Adaptations of Bram Stoker’S Dracula

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chapter 16 Revisionist Vampires: Transcoding, Intertextuality, and Neo-Victorianism in the Film Adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Frances Pheasant-Kelly and Natalie Russell

Abstract

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has undergone numerous adaptations for stage and film since its publication, its filmic versions including one directed by Tod Browning in 1931, Terence Fisher’s Hammer production in 1958, and a postmodern interpretation by Francis Ford Coppola (1992). These three reworkings differ in the ways that they sig- nify their translation to film (transcoding) through subtle variations in their respective visual styles and aesthetic motifs. However, certain similarities unrelated to the novel connect the films, suggesting a knowing intertexuality between them. Coppola’s version not only points towards a reflexive, neo-Victorian reading, but also invests Count Dracula with qualities that attenuate his villainy. By exploring the textual features of Stoker’s novel, together with its various cinematic incarnations, this essay considers the filmic deployment of transcoding, intertextuality, and neo-Victorianism.

Keywords

Bram Stoker – Dracula – Hammer Horror – intertextuality – neo-Victorianism – transcoding – villainy – pastiche ...

Numerous scholarly analyses have already addressed Stoker’s novel and the film adaptations of Dracula with regard to their Gothic traits (Hopkins 2005); gender differences (Williamson 2005); the contexts of their adaptation (Sadoff 2010); genre (Weinstock 2012; Wells 2000; Worland 2007); the films’ relation to Victorian literature (Amigoni 2011; Thomas 2000); and vampire mythologies (Abbott 2007). Individual studies of the films also exist, including an analysis of the Hammer Horror version by Peter Hutchings (2003), and several works pertaining to the postmodern and/or neo-Victorian aspects of Coppola’s film

(Corbin and Campbell 2000; Cordell 2013; Montalbano 2004). However, there is limited discussion of the intertextual connections between each film and how these adaptations might affect an understanding of villainy. The adaptations of Dracula discussed here generally follow the source text but each varies according to the technologies and influences relevant to their respective time of production, which impacts on how villainy is conveyed. Even so, there are certain connections between them that are not apparent in the novel. Moreover, in addition to clear mimesis between novel and films (where there is identical speech, and exact correlation between characterisation and setting), at other times the respective filmmakers have developed more dif- fuse analogies for reinterpreting the novel’s events. In other words, analysis of three key film adaptations – those by Tod Browning (1931), Terence Fisher (1958) and Francis Ford Coppola (1992) – suggests that it is possible to adapt a set of images or tropes from the source text without necessarily reproducing exactly the same sequence of events, emplotment or perspective. This is generally in line with adaptation theory which likens adaptation to either language translation or paraphrase (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013: 16) in that meaning and its conversion is inherently pliant. Such pliancy is especially apparent in Coppola’s version, which not only self-consciously references its Victorian origins through conspicuous visual strategies, but also provides a postmodern inflection of intertextual elements, including the pastiche of early filmmaking techniques and imagery specifically associated with Victorian cinema.

1 Transcoding, Intertextuality, Pastiche, and Neo-Victorianism

In considering the subject of adaptation Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn bring together several established concepts to explain the conversion of one text into another. These include, first, the process of “transcoding” (or trans- lating), which “can involve a shift of medium (a poem to a film) or genre (an epic to a novel), or a change of frame and therefore context” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013: 8). A second aspect that they describe entails the “process of creation [because] the act of adaptation always involves both (re-) interpretation and then (re-) creation” (Hutcheon and Flynn 2013: 8; original emphasis). Thirdly, the authors state that “from the perspective of its process of reception adaptation is a form of intertextuality” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013: 8; original emphasis). The latter term is understood to indicate the associations that one work generates with another, and was originally coined by Julia Kristeva, who describes the phenomenon as “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another” (Kristeva 1980: 15). As Graham Allen further explains,