Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary (2002) Director: Guy Maddin Dracula: Zhang Wei-Qiang This Guy Maddin film, originally intended for Canadian TV but given a theatrical release thanks to its rapturous critical reception, is simultaneously by far the most audacious and nearly the most textually faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel. Foregrounding the novel’s subtexts of immigration […]
Antioch, CA, a city of about 100,000 in the San Francisco Bay area. Mr. Verity meets the team in a sleepy old-fashioned coffee shop catering to truck drivers and retirees. He lays out your next assignment as follows: “A local medical doctor and hobbyist paranormal investigator named Randy Harb has been raising awareness of a […]
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) Director: William Beaudine Dracula: John Carradine And now for something completely different. This perfunctory, sleepwalking movie should not be as terrible as it is. Indeed, the premise and even the plot are sound: Dracula is in the Old West, and a recently reformed Billy the Kid, jealous of the […]
Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) Director: Terence Fisher Dracula: Christopher Lee Oh Hammer how you vex us. The studio’s best director, Terence Fisher, takes on another story of good and evil, of God and Satan, of art and budgeting. Unable to afford both Lee and Cushing, Hammer recruited Andrew Keir (the future definitive Professor Quatermass) […]
Dracula 3D Director: Dario Argento Dracula: Thomas Kretschmann It may seem like special pleading that I give the universally-panned Argento Dracula a pass while kicking the box-office-smash Coppola Dracula in the fangs. The differences, however, are significant. First and foremost, of course, Argento subverts Coppola by having his Mina’s love for Dracula be the result […]
The Icon Riffs series offers inspiration for adventure design and improvisation at the table. The ideas presented aren’t numbered, because numbered lists imply a certain consistency between results. These lists are evocative rather than consistent. They’re also not thorough. This isn’t an attempt to list all the things that could be associated with the icons. There are huge numbers […]
In the latest episode of their delight-making podcast, Ken and Robin talk existential mysteries, love locks, character names, and humanzees.
Dracula (2006) Director: Bill Eagles Dracula: Marc Warren When you give me a secret history behind the story of Dracula, it makes it very hard for me to hate on your movie’s flaws. This ITV-WGBH production casts Arthur Holmwood (!) as the prime mover of the action. Discovering the death sentence that is his congenital syphilis, […]
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Director: Francis Ford Coppola Dracula: Gary Oldman Whatever happened to Francis Ford Coppola? It beggars the imagination that the director who made five masterpieces in ten years (Patton, The Conversation, Godfather I and II, Apocalypse Now) also made this chemical fire of a film. Even the uneven Eighties Coppola was better than this, […]