I Watch TV: Dracula (2020)
Gattiss and Moffat are BACK with 3 90 minute episodes in the new year, loosely adapting a late Victorian story. It’s not Sherlock Holmes this time, it's Dracula the king vampire himself.
I say 3 90 minute episodes, for reasons (perhaps to sell elsewhere than the BBC) each splits neatly into two acts giving us:
- Episode 1, 1st half, Jonathan Harker tells the tale of his trip to Castle Dracula to Sister Agatha
- Episode 1, 2nd half, after various revelations Count Dracula lays siege to the convent, bantering with Sister Agatha
- Episode 2, 1st half, a mismatched set of passengers set sail on the Demeter to England and various misfortunes befall them
- Episode 2, 2nd half, after a couple of revelations Count Dracula is revealed to be behind the misfortunes and a spectacular ending occurs
- Episode 3, 1st half, Count Dracula reaches England and is captured, various characters are introduced for the finale, Dracula “escapes”
- Episode 3, 2nd half, everyone is forced to confront their own fears and weaknesses and in the end even Dracula must come to terms with the meaning of his own existence
Anyway, they try to get into the life-and-death, religion, sex and especially the flies of the original. It’s a bit scattershot! The attempts to merge the already weird-for-Victorians moral centre of the novel with modern ideas is kind of odd. Maybe this succeeds at being a bizarre hybrid or perhaps it is a spectacularly watchable failure. At the very least they’ve given us some new Dracula, which after 120 years of adaptations is an achievement.
Watch This: For some Dracula-themed horror melodrama
Don’t Watch This: If you’re squeamish about blood or disfigurement or flies, or if you want it to actually tie up rather than go off the rails at the end.
Comments