Grave Visions: Visual Experience and Adaptation

Abstract

Rather than approaching the ‘look’ of adaptation through point of view or the ‘vision’ of the adapter, this chapter examines the material, visible texture of screen adaptation. Using two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula, I analyse how each uses mise en scène, cinematography, and editing to thicken and make tangible Stoker’s questioning of the reliability of vision in modernity. The first, Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922) employs the tricks of early cinema to shock spectators, while the second—Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)—uses a neo-baroque aesthetic that ruptures the screen and engulfs the spectator, much like one of Dracula’s victims. This chapter suggests that critical insight into an adaptation can be found quite literally in sight, and embraces how the materiality of adaptation overlaps with the materiality of vision.