DRACULA | DRAMA
BLOOD WORK Lighting vampires, painted backdrops and shooting morphs. We speak to DOP Tony Slater Ling about how he filmed an old-school Dracula for a modern audience
WORDS CHELSEA FEARNLEY / PICTURES BBC / NETFLIX
B ram Stoker’s Dracula has seen countless movie dramatisations, none of which have been a completely faithful translation of the novel. But it seems every other filmmaker is motivated to add their own flavour to it. It’s an almost century-old custom that began with F WMurnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In his film, it is Germany, not England, where the strange, fanged creature aspires to live, and his name is Count Orlok instead of Count Dracula. Surprisingly – for what is now an acknowledged silent classic – Nosferatu was a pirate production, so these cosmetic alterations weren’t so much inspired as they were imposed. Nonetheless, it’s what inspired the dozens of other Dracula movies that succeeded it, and, alongside the verminous and utterly malevolent Orlok, we’ve seen caped seducers in the manner of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi. As well as comedic, cringe-worthy performances of the famed vampire… but we don’t need to talk about those. “The tradition is that you go your own way with it,” says Tony Slater Ling, who was the DOP on episode 1 and 3 of the most recent adaptation, co-produced by the BBC and Netflix. “And that’s what we’ve done.” Claes Bang plays a debonair and viciously funny version of Dracula in the new TV series. The story starts in the same was as the book, from Jonathan Harker arriving at Castle Dracula at the hands of a red-eyed coachman, to escaping and finding his way to Hungary. Episode 2 takes place on the ship Demeter and is a 90-minute expansion on Stoker’s four-page account of Dracula’s journey aboard the ship, so some pretty obvious changes had to happen there. But the furthest departure occurs in episode 3, when Dracula is catapulted into our present day, which clearly didn’t happen in the 1897 novel.
“That was the biggest challenge – and people really got upset about us moving the story to the present day – but we wanted to create our own version of this well-trodden tale that’s been reproduced many times,” explains Slater Ling. LOVE LETTER TO THE CLASSICS Still, the third episode takes place in Whitby, with the Yorkshire seaside town starring as itself in the TV series. “The writers felt strongly about using the real location as a way to stay faithful to the book, so I shot all of the exteriors in and around Whitby,” says Slater Ling. Whitby Abbey, which is popular with fans of the macabre thanks to its inclusion in the novel, also features in several shots, as it’s where the Harker Institute [a
clandestine organisation that was set up by Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancée, for the sole purpose of capturing Dracula] is located. But the writers weren’t just keen to gesture back to the book. Slater Ling divulges that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are classic horror film fans and, throughout the TV series, there are several nods to their love of the genre. The first episode takes place at Castle Dracula, with Slovakia standing in for Transylvania, and its exterior shots use Orava Castle, which is the same castle as the one that appeared in Nosferatu . Orava was difficult to get any light into, however, so its interiors were shot in the less-than-mysterious Bray Studios, in Berkshire, which was also not making its first appearance in the long series
But we wanted to create our own version of this well-trodden tale
IMAGES Claes Bang plays Dracula in the 2020 production, co-produced by Netflix and the BBC
MARCH 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 13
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