Hammer re-reads Dracula: The second time as farce, or, keeping a stiff upper lip in the ruins

Abstract

This interpretation questions the standard critical assumptions about Hammer Studios’ Dracula that despite its transient improprieties, Dracula offered audiences temporary refuge from the strains of contemporary British life by having absolute good (vampire hunters) triumphing over (absolute evil) vampire. My reading explores the film’s agency through its self-conscious relation to its pre-texts in novel and films, showing how its plot conspicuously alters former cultural expectations and assumptions about the ‘rules’ of vampirism. This deliberate slippage in the stability of prior conventions generates tension between two modes of reading Dracula – as a conventional horror movie about the melodramatic struggle between good and evil – or a depiction of domestic life as a tissue of improvisations that highlight the instabilities and contradictions of desire and gender, family organization, personal and class relations. This article shows how Dracula gradually shifts emphasis from the melodrama to agential improvisation, re-reading the horror movie and its pretensions in order to blur the distinctions between good and evil in both its imagined Victorian fiction and modern life.