Because Lucy is openly sexual, Dracula takes that as carte blanche to use her as he pleases. It's difficult to look past the connection to Lucy exploring her sexuality prior to Dracula using her and then abandoning her, and her ultimate fate. However, instead of both characters being treated as victims, Lucy is swiftly punished and ultimately killed. What happens to Lucy and Jonathan are both violations. At the end of both of these scenes, Dracula lures away his brides and then does the same with Lucy, leaving both Jonathan and Mina to witness his carnal horrors in different ways. Shortly afterward, a Dracula-induced storm appears to encourage Mina and Lucy to explore their sexualities with one another following Lucy's agreement to a proposal and Mina's latest 'Everything Is Fine' letter from Jonathan. In his utter despair over her death, Dracula enacts a gory Nightmare on Elm Street-esque deal with the devil to become the immortal vampire that we know him as. Though he manages to defeat the enemy, his bride-to-be (Ryder's Elisabeta) receives false news of his death and, in full Romeo and Juliet fashion, she kills herself.

The cold-open of the film gives way to theatrics almost immediately as Gary Oldman's Dracula goes to war as a Transylvanian knight. While I highly doubt that that was what director Francis Ford Coppola was going for, it certainly still made for an enjoyable enough viewing experience here in 2022.

I can confidently say that I was wholly unprepared for what awaited me with this film – especially since my primary knowledge of it was that this was the film in which Winona Ryderand Keanu Reeves accidentally got legally married.ģ0 years after its initial release, Bram Stoker's Dracula has evolved into a monstrously high-camp spectacle. Having also been born in 1992, I felt like this was a perfect time to finally watch the seminal Dracula adaptation for the very first time. This weekend, Bram Stoker's Dracula celebrated its 30th anniversary.

Dracula bram stoker keanu reeves