Dracula has traditionally been a character that you can’t compare to the title character of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula has taken on a cultural image of his own over the years. Tons of films have been made about the vampire named Dracula that have little to do with Stoker’s original idea. So, you would think that in a film titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we would get something that actually represented Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But we don't.

Now to be fair, Dracula does follow the basic outline of the book. All of the major characters and events are there and take place in such a way that does reflect the story in a general sort of way. Other than that, it fails in almost every respect. Not that a film has to follow its origin word for word, frequently multiple changes need to be made to make a story work for the screen, especially in a book as long as Dracula.

But some things in Bram Stoker’s Dracula were really unnecessary. Probably the single biggest mistake was to make Mina Harker (Winona Ryder), wife of Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), an adulterous reincarnation of Dracula’s (Gary Oldman) former wife. The original Mina is one of Dracula’s strongest characters. The sweet, smart, faithful, problem-solving Mina, who is one of the lead factors in bringing about the demise of Dracula, is non-existent in the film. Not to mention that in the film, the warm, sagacious Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) is nothing but a bloodthirsty vampire hunter and the colorful Renfield (Tom Waits) is a static psychopath. In fact, all of the characters are pretty bland.

The problems go deeper. Dracula is a smart book. Through the juxtaposition of the gothic and the modern as well as the mystic and the scientific, it allows for the development of many ideas about religion, society, and culture. Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula is about as mindless a horror film as any given Friday the 13th. If it weren’t so nicely filmed (and some scenes really are beautiful), there would be nothing to distinguish it from your average B-horror movie. Similarly, Dracula is successful in its tension precisely because of its subtle, uncanny, unsettling nature. There is nothing subtle about Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s nothing but sensational, in your face blood and carnage.