It was his own childhood fascination with Dracula, and those nights at a camp lake, that drew Coppola into the project. Before Dracula, Coppola had even made the far more artistically compromised The Godfather Part III (1990) for Paramount Pictures-and that was a movie he once swore never to film. After a series of commercial and financial missteps in the 1980s, the panache associated with the director behind The Godfather(1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979) wasn’t what it once was. While the legendary filmmaker has spent years recounting stories of his fondness for Stoker’s book, particularly how he would read from it at night as a camp counselor in the ‘50s, determined to terrify his wards, the truth is Coppola came into the film as a gun for hire. For no matter what the title says, this was most decidedly Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. What I failed to grasp at the time was that I would be enduring what many literary admirers of Stoker’s paterfamilias vampire novel experienced some years earlier when Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released into cinemas in 1992. And to the basic cable censors’ credit, I was exactly one such viewer: a lad of 12 or so who had devoured Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel and was eager to watch what was credited to be “ Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” It was right there, in the title! It was in the middle of a Saturday afternoon on a fuzzy TNT cable broadcast where much of the gore, and pretty much all the eroticism, had been edited out in case a younger viewer was watching. First, my introduction to Gary Oldman’s fright wig, and the luminous crimson cloak that accompanied it, came not at the theater or even on VHS.

This irony rings true for a number of reasons. But then, it could be argued, I didn’t really see the movie Francis Ford Coppola had made. The first time I saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula on television, I hated it.

Drácula by Bram Stoker