Your Daily Dracula – Joel Ross, Vampire Symphony (2013)
An unusual Dracula adaptation made in Canada, posted on Youtube in three chapters. It’s dialogue-free and elliptical, with almost through-composed musical accompaniment, and boils the Stoker book down to three more or less self-contained episodes focusing on those who get bitten (but bite back).
Part One is Jonathan Harker at the castle, with the solicitor (Nathan McFarlane) at the mercy of the Count (Joel Ross) – who is mostly seen in close-ups of his eyes or rear views of his cloak and long hair – and the three vampire brides (Beth McRae, Abi Reinhart, Shelly Smith), with the guest sticking a sharpened branch into the chests of the baby-eating women in their crates (perhaps inspired by the rearrangement of the plot in the 1958 Hammer film). Part Two, significantly the longest instalment at 48mins, is from the POV of Lucy (Dakotah Stymiest) and does the three-suitors bit as silent comedy of manners with Dr Seward (Jason Boyle) and Quincy (Shawn Nickerson) stand about like planks eating chocolates while Arthur (Sheldon Garland) gets the girl, if only for a short while. Some of Stoker’s secondary characters are stick figures, so playing them this way works pretty well. Then, we get Lucy’s ailment, the ministrations of Professor Van Helsing (Dennis Hunt), garlic smeared around the windows, the funeral, the bloofer lady and another big impalement. Part Three – which is shorter – is more about Mina than the chase back to Transylvania – some Canadian snow figures here – and has good work from Mercedes Peters as a formidable heroine who barges into the crypt at the end to take up the hammer from the male vampire hunters and pound the stake into Dracula, whose face we finally see as he’s coughing blood and expiring in his crate-like coffin.
Ross is a bit hampered by the attempt to recreate Stoker’s device of keeping Dracula offscreen or only allowing him brief appearances – the way his scenes are shot makes him an absence, like the reflection missing from that shaving mirror, rather than a threatening presence. With Ian Estey as Renfield. Obviously made on a shoestring, it’s an impressive use of limited resources – though period details get a bit wibbly-wobbly as the date is given as a Yorkshire paper in 1897 is listed as costing 3p. Written, directed and photgraphed by Jeff Scott, who also did the music with Kimberly Dykeman (who appears as a maid).
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