Logical Interpretation Of Dracula In Bram Stoker's Dracula

The story of Nosferatu is a tale of xenophobia that used heavy expressionism to display its stances. Without all of the expressionist elements for it, it would just be a bunch of people fearing migrant citizens as they don’t want their culture to be taken over by them. The added expressionism in the makeup, cinematography, acting, and set design added a more fearful and anxious tone to the film. The people of yesterday and today fear everything that Orlok stood for such as madness, disease, and lust as they still believe foreigners will bring all of those things to their home countries. The imagery in the film warned us about the power of Nosferatu and that he was something not to be tampered with. All of these techniques formed Murnau’s masterpiece film and it set the standard for the horror films of yesterday and today.

This paper was prepared for Introduction to Film History, Module 1 Homework Assignment, taught by Professor Stephanie Sandifer.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is highly acclaimed and has received many different interpretations which deal with complex symbolisms and metaphors. These interpretations often require a great deal of knowledge in psychology, political science, anthropology, and other non-literary disciplines. These interpretations may be valid, as they are related to the disciplines on which their arguments are based, but the true power of the novel is due to a very simple theme that lies beneath the other, more convoluted interpretations. This theme is the universal concept of identity: us versus them. This criticism sets aside outside disciplines and focuses on the literary motif of identity. John

Defined by www.news.artnet.com/, German Expressionism is defined as “an artistic genre that originated in Europe in the 1920s, and is broadly defined as the rejection of Western conventions, and the depiction of reality that is widely distorted for emotional effect.” In Nosferatu, the film contains a plethora of distorted realities in an attempt to evoke the “emotional effect” from the audience. This is shown by the director of the film, F.W. Murnau’s usage of lighting and makeup & costume design.

FW Murnau’s 1921 film Nosferatu is an appropriation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Despite it being an appropriation, explicit gothic conventions remain evident, which explore societal fears and values. These fears and values differ from Dracula, due to distinct contextual influences of different time periods.

The battle of the natural world and the transcendental is one that shall never cease to exist. This concept has been carried over for ages through media, literature and various other art forms. Due to the shifts in society, the pinnacle of fear faces alterations however, the basic objective remains the same; to petrify the reader or viewer while conveying underlying views on society. This characteristic is evident in two of its most promising masterpieces, Bram Stocker’s Dracula and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Stoker’s literary classic was created in 1897 during the Victorian era in order to defy the normalities of society whereas The Exorcist was released in 1972 so as to challenge the change in the belief system and, “to scare a new

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a story of horror, suspense, and repulsion. The main antagonist, Count Dracula, is depicted as an evil, repulsive creature that ends and perverts life to keep himself alive and youthful. To most onlookers that may be the case, but most people fail to see one crucial element to this character. Dracula is a character that, though it may be long gone, was once human, and thus has many human emotions and motives still within him. Let us delve into these emotions of a historically based monster.

In Stephen King’s somewhat subjective essay in the 1984 Playboy magazine, Why We Crave Horror Movies, King describes his reasoning behind why so many people are fond of watching movies residing in the horror genre. The content of his essay, though inserted in an unconventional area for

In everyday life, as in literature, there will always be an opposing force to evil. In the novel “Dracula,” by Bram Stoker, Professor Van Helsing acts as Dracula’s main antagonist. An antagonist is the character who acts against the main character, which increases the conflict of the story and intensifies the plot. Through the use of theme, characterization and specific events, the author shows readers how Dr. Van Helsing effectively fits the role of Dracula’s most threatening adversary.

The first inspiration that the Dracula novel has on horror movies is the use of

Bram Stoker’s ingenious piece of work on writing Dracula has set the expectation for gothic novels all over the world and time to come. The mindset of writing Dracula through the Victorian Era really sets the tone for the reader by creating a spine-tingling sensation right through the novel. With this in mind, Stoker wouldn’t have been able to succeed his masterpiece without the effective uses of symbolism, imagery, foreshadowing, and its overall theme.

Stylistically, M appears to be a continuation of the style that was established in cinema through the German Expressionist movement and developed through the Kammerspielfilm, which focused on the actors, lighting, and set design to further investigate the psychological foundations of characters in middle and lower-class environments (150). M can be considered to be part of the third type of film that was produced during the Weimar period that is known as die neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which portrays "fatalistic and grimy lower-class realism" through the cinematic lens (150). M is able to marry characteristics found in each of these three periods of German cinema.

The literal dislocation between East and West Germany was a major factor in the suffering of German cinema

New German Cinema was a movement to find an opposition against the Hollywood culture. The movement lasted from the late 1960’s into the 1980’s. This new type of cinema was a cinema of disillusionment either through politics, gender norms, conformity, etc. The New German Cinema was fueled by a fire of differentiation and nationalistic pride which was very political. It wanted to show the audience what they needed to see rather then what they wanted to see through the exposure of moral hypocrisy in terms of social justice, counter culture and shocking subject matter. It was ushered in by young, innovative, and politically radical directors who refused to conform to West German Society and expressed the desire to improve its failing film industry.

As a result of the monstrosity of vampirism often are depicted from the sexual and violent behaviour that society generally considers abnormal, the source of the horror of monstrosity in vampire films usually comes from the monster itself. In contrast, Let the Right One In (2008), a social realism film written by John Ajvide Lindqvist and directed by Tomas Alfredson, presents an intertwined storyline of coming-of-age and vampire horror(Oskar and Eli respectively) in which during the course of the film not only we as the viewer will ambivalently sympathise with the monster(Eli) who lives off the blood of victims but also perceive the ending where a runaway child and thriving monster as a satisfying happy ending. And also how it wasn 't the gruesome blood shedding vampirism behaviour of the monster(Eli) that disgusted us, but the broken behaviours of the society like the unjustified bullying which had been inflicted on Oskar was. To achieve this, cinematography, sound, editing and narrative are used to highlight monstrosity from both storylines and to differentiate between them. In the end, despite Eli 's monstrous actions in between her and Oskar 's shared moments, we still wish their innocent pre-sexual relationship/friendship would remain unharmed from the monstrosities around them, and because we sympathise with Eli, our perception of monstrosity then becomes whether the monstrosity is justifiable.