I’ve had a bit of Dracula on the brain since Halloween, so I’ll say…Van Helsing.
I haven’t actually seen VH, because once I read what they’d done it sounded like a colossal missed opportunity.
You see, in the wake of the Coppola movie I read the novel for the first time (up until then, all I’d read was an abridgment for younger readers–granted, a very good one, with some excellent illustrations). Because I liked Anthony Hopkins so much, I was especially drawn to the character of Van Helsing in the movie, and one bit I found in Stoker’s novel especially intrigued me. (Spoilers for the novel here, if you don’t mind spoilers for something that’s over a century old.)
After Lucy’s death, Arthur, her fiancé, tells the others that he feels that he and Lucy were already married, in a way, since he had given her his blood in a transfusion to try to save her life. He has no idea that Van Helsing himself and Lucy’s other would-be suitors had also given her blood. Once Van Helsing and Dr. Seward are alone, Van Helsing laughs grimly at the irony of it all. During the following conversation with Jack, he reveals that he had a son, who seemed to have died quite young, and who would have been Arthur’s age by now and bore some resemblance to him.
Even more intriguing is Van Helsing’s sorrowful musing on the irony of Arthur’s “marriage” to Lucy:
“Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church law, though no wits, all gone–even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist.”
Very interesting–Van Helsing’s son is dead and his wife is insane, possibly even catatonic, but Van Helsing, devout Catholic that he is, will not divorce her or even allow himself another love. Which reflects very poignantly on the depth of his feelings both for his God and for his wife. And how did his son die? And what drove his wife insane? It’s implied that it’s the death of their son–or could there be an even darker reason? (An anthology of short stories that came out around the same time as the Van Helsing movie explored those ideas.)
So there was a whole wealth of possibility that could have been explored in a Van Helsing-focused movie. I heard at the time that they were considering a spinoff with Sir Anthony, and looked forward to seeing it. Instead, it must have morphed into the one we got…that was basically just Abbott And Costello Meet The Monsters played without laughs, that didn’t touch on any of the backstory that Stoker had given the professor, and that COULDN’T EVEN GET VAN HELSING’S FIRST NAME RIGHT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!! (Well, in all fairness, Hammer didn’t quite get that right either.)