Reeling Backward: Bram Stoker's Dracula in Concert
How does Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 take on the Dracula legend hold up? With the help of the Chicago Philharmonic and Wojciech Kilar's magnificent score . . . it has become immortal.
The Film:
Live performance of Wojciech Kilar’s score:
Halloween has come and gone, but some things are immortal. One of those things is Irish novelist and theatre manager Bram Stoker’s most famous character. Another is Wojciech Kilar’s lush orchestral and choral score to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 take on the Dracula legend, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”
A lifelong lover of opera, Coppola consciously solicited a grand score for his ambitious attempt to return the Dracula story to its roots, in hopes that it would transcend its source material and be worthy of presentation in concert halls all by itself. For this monumental task, he turned to the late Polish composer Kilar, known for straddling the worlds of classical and cinematic music in his native country, where he already had a long résumé of film scores under his belt, mostly for the European cinema.
“I have crossed oceans of time . . .”
Kilar’s work accomplished exactly what Coppola hoped, and it certainly transcended the film for this writer — I discovered the score to “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” long before I ever saw the film, and it has been indelibly linked to the character and the novel for me ever since. In fact, I wrote about my own history with the “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” score over a decade ago for a blog I used to write about film scores – you can swing by there if you’re inclined to read a deep dive into its thematic and stylistic merits.
So, when I learned that the Chicago Philharmonic would be presenting the score live with a full orchestra and chorus for one night only on Nov. 9, 2024 — for the first time in North America — my wife and I booked tickets immediately for a weekend excursion from Indianapolis to Chicago to see and hear it. The result is a magnificent and transformative experience that brings the power and passion of Kilar’s score to the forefront of the audience’s experience of the film.
This experience also afforded me my first opportunity to see “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” with an audience. I first watched it in college on cable TV, and initially found it disappointing, especially as my experience of the score and the novel had created an entirely different set of expectations in my mind. Still, it was compelling enough on its own, especially propelled by Kilar’s music, that I kept revisiting it, through several generations of home video technology (DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K), and over that time it has sincerely become one of my favorite works to revisit during the annual Spooky Season — both to watch and listen. The live presentation gave me an opportunity to reevaluate it once again.
I think it’s safe to say that the critical consensus about “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” has also improved over time, as it initially received a wild variety of reactions from reviewers. This is not an uncommon phenomenon for Coppola, whose oeuvre since his triumphs of the 1970s has divided critics at every turn. As a case in point, this year’s long-anticipated science fiction epic “Megalopolis” currently sits at a 46% aggregate critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Time will tell whether this, too, will be reevaluated. (The Yap’s own Christopher Lloyd fell into the positive camp, but another critic I know personally described it in one word as a “sh*tshow.”) Good or bad, though, one thing that can never be said about Coppola is that he avoids taking risks in his filmmaking.
“I will rise from my own death!”
So, upon viewing Coppola’s “Dracula” again, how have those risks paid off since its release 32 years ago? Well, the film still has its flaws, many of which are directly related to the acting. Keanu Reeves is still hopelessly out of place, as noted by many in 1992, but it’s not entirely fair to single out Reeves here. Across the board, the performances in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” do not necessarily represent the best work in any of the actors’ filmographies. Much of it comes off rather stilted. The trio of vampire hunters played by Cary Elwes, Richard E. Grant, and Billy Campbell are more one-note tropes than fully realized characters. Winona Ryder often seems out of her depth as she is called upon to share a great deal of screen time with masters like Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.
Of course, Oldman and Hopkins always understand the assignment, and as Dracula and his vampire-slaying nemesis Dr. Van Helsing, they dominate the screen and chew the scenery as enthusiastically as Dracula chomps jugulars. (One thing I noticed while watching with an audience this time is how funny Hopkins’ Van Helsing can be, bringing a little of the outrageous wit of Hannibal Lecter to bear on his performance to let us know that he’s not taking the whole thing quite seriously.) And no mention of the “Dracula” cast would be complete without Tom Waits’ dazzlingly bonkers portrayal of the fly-eating asylum inmate Renfield.
When taken as a whole, though, the individually off-kilter deliveries of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” surprisingly hang together in a kind of Grand Guignol hyperbole that fits the overheated, intentionally antiquated style of the whole better than naturalistic nuance could have done. And here we arrive at what I think was Coppola’s point all along, as he roots his style in a deeply informed knowledge of the history of his own medium.
“Are there no limits to science?”
The birth of Dracula intersected directly with the dawn of film – the first appearance of the “cinematograph” of the Lumière brothers was 1895, and hot on their heels, the magician George Méliès became the first to use its unique properties to create what we would now call special visual effects. “Dracula” was published in 1897, when this technology was in the bloom of youth, and while Stoker himself never mentioned it, Coppola consciously unspools his own tale through the lens of the early days of cinema itself. He almost can’t help himself, as he has always celebrated film history — his own production company, American Zoetrope, refers to a proto-cinematic device that animated still photographs. The Count even makes a point of visiting the “cinematograph” in this version, where the Lumières’ “Arrival of a Train” plays in the background.
While there have been dozens of cinematic Draculas since F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” in 1922, Coppola directs his own as though he were traveling back in time to precede all of them. He famously sticks to the “naïve” style of visual effects of the silent era throughout, rather than embracing the slick, high-tech effects of the ‘90s, and the results are shocking and unique.
In retrospect, the in-camera effects achieved by this method have aged better than some of the films considered on the cutting edge at the time, the very early days of the CGI revolution, since they don’t quite look like anything else from this or any other period. Multiple exposures allow Dracula’s menacing presence to hover over characters in other times and places. Miniatures and forced perspective give the Count’s haunts a sense of Gothic immensity. Mirrors and puppetry cause shadows to move independently from the actors who cast them. Even Dracula’s first appearance in London opens with the jerky, slightly accelerated frame rate of the manually cranked cameras of silent film. Combined with the uncanny environments created by production designer Thomas E. Sanders and the lavishly operatic costumes of Eiko Ishioka, “Dracula” lives in a handcrafted visual world of its own.
“The children of the night. What sweet music they make!”
Over this world, Wojciech Kilar layers his own musical sensibility to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It has been said that a film score is like a second screenplay that comments on and reveals the first, and this is certainly true of Kilar’s “Dracula.” While Coppola’s visual interpretation puts the sex and blood up front for its R-rated audience, Kilar embraces the spiritual core of the story of a man at war with God.
In a pre-show talk given by movie and music scholars before the Chicago Philharmonic’s concert presentation, one of the panelists noted that Kilar bases his Dracula theme on the ancient dies irae, the “day of wrath” described by the requiem mass for the dead. This is by no means a new phenomenon, and it’s written all over cinema history. But Kilar’s score carries this much farther. Just as Dracula’s consumption of human blood is a travesty of the Christian eucharist, Kilar makes his entire score into a kind of black mass, alternating between soaring religioso melodies that yearn for absolution and a frantic choral exultation of evil.
The performance of the Chicago Philharmonic and the Chicago Chamber choir, under the direction of Diego Navarro, brought this evil mass to glorious life in their single performance. Freed from the constraints of movie theatre sound mixing, which all too often pushes the score to the background, these musicians explored the full range of “Dracula’s” horrific bombast and haunting romance on stage with a giant screen. An ethereal soprano (Victoria Schemenauer) floats above the screen images to evoke the lost love of Dracula, possibly reborn in the form of Ryder’s Mina Murray. A male chorus chants its own sinister devotion to the dark lord, giving us not a traditional liturgy but the Latin phrase sangris vita est - the blood is the life. Every instrument of the orchestra seemingly has its time to shine, from growling low strings to delicate double reed woodwinds, even a French horn that rips into one cue with desperate romantic longing.
“Then I give you life eternal.”
Presenting a film score live is a unique challenge for which any orchestra deserves an enormous amount of credit. First of all, nearly every film score in history has been recorded in short pieces, individual cues which are assembled with the film to form a whole performance. Furthermore, few scores survive the editing process entirely intact, as loops and cuts are inevitably made to make the recorded music fit the final shape of the screen picture. And in some cases, recording techniques are used to create effects that are hard to replicate live.
Such was the case for “Dracula,” whose score had to be specially reconstructed to enable the orchestra to play it as a continuous piece, synchronized precisely to the film. I was especially astonished by their live rendition of “The Storm,” in which multiple themes are laid over one another in different keys and tempos, building to a chaotic frenzy of terror as Dracula’s ship arrives in London. I had always assumed that this was accomplished on the original soundtrack by combining different recordings, but the Philharmonic and chorus pulled it off live, in a masterful display of focus, timing, and precision that almost defied belief. This was just one of many cues that inspired rapturous applause from the audience even as the movie still played. If anyone had the power to redeem Dracula’s soul, I believe it very well may have been the Chicago Philharmonic, gorgeously pouring forth its own soul on a stormy night in the Windy City.
Mr. Coppola wasn’t there in the theatre that night (though Chicago’s own homegrown horror host Svengoolie was), but I can’t help but think he would have loved the whole experience – not only because of his original aspiration to have a score that could fit the concert hall, but also because most of the films of the silent era itself had live accompaniment, sometimes with a full orchestra! Just as in Coppola’s “naïve” filmmaking techniques, everything old is new again; and through its live score, this unique performance of “Dracula” transcended time and space to create something truly immortal.