Your Daily Dracula – Rubens de Falco, Drácula (1980)

Your Daily Dracula – Rubens de Falco, Drácula (1980)

This Brazilian soap opera – subtitled Uma História de Amor (A Love Story) in publicity but not onscreen – was planned to run for 120 episodes, but the TV channel went bankrupt early in production – and the series was curtailed after only four episodes, though writer Rubens Edward Filho relaunched it on another channel as Um Homem Muito Especial (A Very Special Man), which ran for 137 episodes.  Inspired by the Broadway Dracula revival with Frank Langella, it obviously has a few things in common with the US gothic soap Dark Shadows.

In the 1920s, Count Dracula (de Falco), using the name ‘Count Vlad Vonstoff’, arrives in the foggy Brazilian backwoods community of Paranapiacaba in search of his long-lost son – kidnapped years earlier by his nanny Hannah (Isabel Ribiero), who hoped to raise the lad as a non-vampire.  The town is under the rule of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard-like widowed matriarch Marta de Matos Lacerda (Cleyde Yaconis), whose granddaughter Mariana (Bruna Lombardi) is – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a lookalike for Dracula’s lost love.  In a typical telenovela tangle, the Count finds himself competing with handsome Rafael (Carlos Alberto Riccelli) for the Mina analogue, not knowing that the young man is his own son.  Also in the mix are a perverted hunchback minion and a sexy peasant girl who likes writhing in a local waterfall.  Not much happens in the four episodes besides set-up … though there’s a version of the Jonathan Harker-cuts-his-finger scene, Dracula gets a nice build-up with shots of his hands or his face out of focus behind candlesticks and the like before the full reveal which is curiously staged (he greets Marta and her clique on the station but they’re sat on some sort of raised dais which makes him look like a dwarf).

This take on Dracula has a top hat and beard – de Falco looks like a more presentable version of Brazil’s own horror franchise character, José Mojica Marins’s Zé do Caixão.  At a guess, production values are typical for a Brazilian soap opera in 1980, though it gets out of the studio VT more often than Dark Shadows did to show off nice, soft-colour locations.  The theme music is a funky cover of ‘Classical Gas’, while the incidental score is pillaged from all over – most appropriately with licks from John Williams’ Dracula soundtrack.