Quite a few filmmakers want to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula but don’t have access to period costumes, castles, mental asylums, British and continental actors, special effects facilities or the budget apparently required by a complicated novel whose action covers many locations and features a crowd of vivid characters. So there are any number of films out there called Dracula or some variation which set the story in, say, contemporary Los Angeles and stick familiar names on their characters – and it is a book about a real estate agent, a psychiatrist, a cowboy, etc. Most of these films blend together in the memory and have a certain ghostly beside-the-point feel – and are only sought out by Dracula film completists.
Writer-director Chris Schwab faces the same challenges but does something much more interesting with this spare (70m) take on Stoker, radically pruning the text and cast (no Jonathan, no Van Helsing) and setting the whole film in an American interzone (Borgo Pass – your tax dollars at work) all the better to focus on its chosen core characters. It also dispenses with the gothic romance even FW Murnau added to Stoker (Nosferatu dies for love, remember) and presents a rat-faced, burnt-skinned Dracula (Brenton Jones) who’s just malignancy personified. For the first time in a long, long while, someone has made a Dracula film whose fresh take isn’t that he’s a sad lovelorn historical figure or proto-superhero or liberating force but that he’s the world’s worst nightmare given form, spreading pain, decay and cruelty wherever he manifests.
Cutting Castle Dracula, where Dracula gives his backstory, and Van Helsing, who explains who the Count is, means that this Dracula is just there, in an underpass, being evil … which is refreshingly blunt, and restores the monster’s monstrousness in a necessary fashion. Schwab picks cannily on Dr Seward (Eric Toms) as his viewpoint character – he’s Stoker’s most credible human being – and rethinks the key relationships. Here, Seward is bitten by Renfield (Spencer Weitzel), the zoophagous maniac who has already gone over to ‘the Master’, and troubled by his inability to do anything for this patient. Moving into his seemingly windowless apartment building are Mina (Marlene Mc’Cohen) and Lucy (Raelan Mackiewicz), reinvented as mother and child, running from something bad (a husband?) to something worse (Dracula), with Seward again a concerned, would-be helpful bystander. With admirable concision, Mina – who says grace as Seward instinctively tucks into a meal on the table – is established as a Christian, and Lucy – who bonds with Seward over face-pulling – is a handful, thanks to her sleepwalking … which means they are both drawn to Dracula, a living embodiment of the night.
Schwab takes moments from Stoker – Dracula slicing his chest so Mina can drink his blood, the manifestation of his feral brides, Renfield’s progression of predation – and sometimes plays them so we recall previous films as if this were a recurring nightmare. Dracula himself looks different in each of his rare appearances, sometimes like a creepypasta melonhead or gremlin, sometimes like the Nosferatu archetype (as in The Last Voyage of the Demeter). In the opening, a driver picks up a vampire hitchhiker in order to stay awake at the wheel and maybe get a little action on the lonely road – which doesn’t work out well for him. Dracula The Night Around Us has a grainy, foggy, blurry visual texture – it stresses Lucy’s sleepwalking, a minor element of the book, to justify the sense that this is a story half-perceived while fighting off night terrors.
