Aspiring screenwriters could be forgiven for feeling a stab of envy at the ease with which Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss managed to get their new big-budget BBC1 version of Dracula off the ground.
“It started as a joke,” says Gatiss, who came to fame as part of The League of Gentlemen before writing for Doctor Who and co-creating BBC1’s Sherlock with Moffat. “We were shooting Sherlock series three, and we came back to London for an awards ceremony and I had just taken a picture of Benedict [Cumberbatch] in his cloak with his collar up in silhouette against Mrs Hudson’s doorway. I showed it to Ben Stephenson, who was the drama commissioner at the BBC, and I said, ‘It looks like Dracula doesn’t it?’ And he said, ‘Do you want to do that?’”
Over seven years later, their new three-part version of Dracula hits our screens on New Year’s Day, showing on consecutive nights. Its cast features Danish actor Claes Bang in the title role, acclaimed stage actor John Heffernan as Jonathan Harker, the English solicitor who has the misfortune of visiting Dracula’s castle, and Dolly Wells as a wise-cracking nun (Gatiss himself has a minor role).Dracula, of course, has been a stock horror figure since the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi portrayed him in 1931, the vampire’s most famous iteration since Lugosi being Christopher Lee’s portrayal in the Hammer horror films of the late 1950s onwards. The 1970s saw both Andy Warhol and Werner Herzog have a bite at the myth, while Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic and misleadingly titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula (it is not actually all that faithful to the book) had Gary Oldman as the blood-sucking aristocrat. Since then, he’s been tamed enough to become a children’s cartoon character, Count Duckula, as well as an antagonist for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while Robert Pattinson’s non-threatening blood-sucker was the teen heartthrob of the Twilight series. And those are just the tip of the iceberg, let alone the Halloween costume industry.
Unsurprisingly, then, Gatiss and Moffat couldn’t quite take seriously the idea of resuscitating such a hackneyed icon of horror fiction. “But then we started thinking we could actually do something with Dracula,” says Moffat, when we meet in the bowels of the British Film Institute in London ahead of a premiere screening. “And we started liking it so much that we went and pitched it to Sue. And she liked it and so here we are…”
“Sue” is Moffat’s wife, Sue Vertue, but, more to the point, she is also the producer who runs Hartswood Films, which made Sherlock. So why have Moffat and Gatiss, who became close while writing for Doctor Who and sharing train journeys to and from London and Cardiff, finally decided to engage seriously with their Dracula?
“These things go in cycles,” says Gatiss. “And because we’ve been through so many iterations of Twilight sorts of vampires, somehow it just felt right to be able to do castles and moonlight and capes. Horror should be transgressive. Horror over time becomes cosy. Dracula and Frankenstein, within 10 years [of their first screen portrayals] they were meeting up with Abbott and Costello…”
The castle they chose as Dracula’s, Orava Castle in Slovakia, betrays the duo’s keen sense of the material’s artistic legacy, as it was here that Nosferatu, the first (unofficial) screen version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, was filmed in 1921. FW Murnau’s silent movie, which only just survived a brush with Stoker’s copyright lawyers, is a masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema – and remains properly scary to this day.
Source: How do you solve a problem like Dracula? | The Independent