Bram Stoker's Dracula The Movie or my love for Gary Oldman

When watching Nosferatu this morning I couldn’t help but notice the comparisons between Gary Oldman’s performance as Dracula and that of Max Schreck. Obviously this could have been due to the fact that Gary Oldman was playing Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu was essentially the same story. But the play with shadows in both films is really interesting. Seclusion also plays a big part in this film, as each character seems confined in some way, Harker by the castle, Mina by her thoughts, Renfield by the asylum etc.  You have two representations of women in the horror movie, the virtuous thoughtful obedient wife, and the flirtatious frivolous woman.  Obviously it is the latter that dies.  In this movie Dracula is perceived as both the suave romantic with undying love and the horrible grotesque creature that he has become. He begins to have an internal struggle with what is important to him when Mina Harker enters the picture.  Ultimately love prevails in this film but love for whom. Mina seems to do a full 360 and take charge of her own destiny instead of being so compliant with life and she ends up actually choosing the vampire. There is a definite struggle here between the damned and the saved. Lucy is saved but only too late and the question remains if Dracula truly is? You see his appearance change when Mina finally kills him (he was dying anyways) back to that of his “ true nature” so he may have been.  There is also a hint to the fetish quality of vampires when Dracula and Mina finally end up in bed together and only becomes more prevalent as that scene plays out.  The relationship between Dracula and the animals is pretty important here as he cannot only control the “ children of the night” but can also become something of one himself. Again this is the animal sexuality that appears in horror. This is incredibly blatant in the scene between him and Lucy when he essentially rapes her as this man, animal, wolf, bat hybrid.  While this movie doesn’t always mesh entirely with the book it still depicts Vampire Horror in a rather traditional sense then that of the works of today.