Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002)

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Pages from a Virgin’s Diary recasts the Transylvanian story into a black and white ballet, with the use of grainy B&W film stock, intertitles, filters, and iris lenses that are Maddin’s trademark. The cast comes from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and Dracula himself (Wei-Qiang Zhang) is presented as an eroticized creature, angling slowly towards the seduction of Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) as Harker (Johnny A. Wright) and Dr. Van Helsing (Dave Moroni) plot the vampire’s stake-driven murder. The death scene is one of the most richly compelling ones in the Dracula oeuvre, giving us his heart in red, shimmering in the midst of the dark black and white world that surrounds his world.

But the plot itself matters less than the melancholy world that Maddin creates on film. Anchored by a somber Mahler soundtrack, we get Dracula’s castle as a haven for sexual transgression, as his pursuit of Lucy and later her friend Nina (CindyMarie Small) takes on a uniquely scary grace. This isn’t a ballet of leaping and bounding, but of the subtle slidings of darkly-lit men and women the kind of Dracula you’d conjure up in a 3 a.m. nightmare after an all-night bender of Murnau and Lang. For Maddin, the main character of a Dracula story isn’t Dracula himself but the blood he works in the way it defines our bodies and how it lives and dies. And if all that seems too esoteric for a horror story, you and Maddin may never get along. But anybody who’s willing to bring their own ideas about sex, love, and bloodletting to the film will likely find themselves sucked into Maddin’s growing cult.

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