No Love at First Bite?

Being a Draculaphile, I have eagerly followed the development of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in the many Film Clips featured in Calendar during the last year, most recently on Nov. 8. But neither Coppola nor screenwriter Jim V. Hart acknowledges that the central conceit of their collaboration is neither theirs nor that of the novel’s author, Stoker.

While the themes of vampires and reincarnated lost loves are not new to cinema, the merging of the two should be credited to Dan Curtis, creator of the ABC Gothic soap “Dark Shadows.” Its antihero vampire, Barnabas Collins, sought the reincarnation of his beloved, a suicide (as is Mina in the current Dracula remake).

Stoker’s novel was about a Victorian fiend who travels to London to seek fresh blood to satisfy his demonic needs, and not because of some passionate lust, as the current filmmakers would have you believe.

Postscript: The similarities between Dracula and Coppola are amazing. We all know about Dracula, but here’s a man who continually rises from the dead and drains our life force with cunning and reinvention of himself.

I suppose I will pay to see his new film several times. Then I will fork out bucks to buy the video. I will have to re-buy it when Coppola releases his uncensored “director’s cut.” And then I will have to spend more money when it is edited into “The Godfather Saga” (unless someone tells him that John Landis just did a vampire-meets-the-Mafia film, “Innocent Blood”).

DAVE HUTCHINSON

Mission Viejo