“Bela Lugosi’s dead,” as Bauhaus sang, in memory of the star of 1931’s Dracula. But of course death has never been an impediment to the career of the enfanged Transylvanian blood-sucker. Filmed and televisualised almost as frequently as Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula would doubtless join the cockroaches as the only entities to survive a thermonuclear holocaust.
Whether we needed another new TV version is at least debatable, let alone this lumbering behemoth (for BBC One) from the conjoined brains of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, comprising three 90-minute slabs over consecutive nights. Moffat and Gatiss hit big with their Conan Doyle overhaul Sherlock, which at its best was brilliantly inventive and quick-witted, while featuring a highly successful double act at its core. However, developing characterful relationships isn’t a priority in this new Dracula, with the Jonathan Harker/Mina Murray partnership, the motor of Bram Stoker’s novel, largely parked offscreen (at least for the first two episodes – I haven’t done three yet). Hogging centre stage for most of the time is the title character – it’s all about him, and he’s not going to let us forget it – so how you react to him will define your response to the series.
The job went to Danish actor Claes Bang (star of the 2017 art-world critique The Square), though whether it was sold to him as a comedy, a satire or a plain old gore fest isn’t clear. Elements of grand guignol and squirmy body horror are peppered through the action to make sure we’re still awake. For instance the opening scene zooms in on Harker after he’s escaped from Dracula’s teetering castle, and he looks like a Chernobyl survivor after a detour through Auschwitz. The moment when a fly crawls behind his eyeball is especially loathsome. Slo-mo sequences of blood-drenched artery-sucking are of course de rigueur, along with lurching semi-decomposed representatives of the “undead” and nightmarish shots of a leering skull, with tendons and blood vessels sticking out. Dracula’s gory emergence from the innards of a wolf chalks up another notch for the special effects unit.
But Bang’s Dracula strolls through all this with a sort of James Bond-like insouciance, delivering facetious throwaway lines in a south London accent (there are a lot of vampire puns along the lines of “I don’t drink… wine”, or “I have a particular gift for eliminating suspects”). His qualifications as a harbinger of eternal horror are not enhanced by a puzzling resemblance to David Walliams, with perhaps just a dash of erstwhile Bond George Lazenby (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969).
The upshot is that this Dracula feels slow and ponderous and not quite sure why it’s here, perhaps for the simple reason that there’s too much time to fill (it’s as if somebody in Commissioning said “we’ve got an extra hour going spare lads, if you want it?”). Episode two, which is mostly taken up by an expanded account of how Dracula sailed to England on the doomed ship Demeter, virtually grinds to a halt altogether as the Count stands around smirking and gossiping with the crew, before devouring them.
Gatiss and Moffat seem to have been at such pains to move things around and ensure that their Dracula is “different” that sustaining a compelling narrative line has taken a back seat. Professor Van Helsing, for instance, is now Sister Agatha, a nun in Bucharest (played by Dolly Wells, pictured above, with a thick Germanic accent), while making Harker one of the undead is like making Hamlet swap places with the Ghost. Was this journey really necessary?