Dracula’s Marriage of Convenience: The Brides of Dracula (1960) and The Invitation (2022)
Gina and the Young Village Girl in The Brides of Dracula (1960)
Remember the inn-keeper in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who would shudder at the name of the Count being spoken out loud and cross themselves in fear of him? Turns out there are several filmmakers as well who refuse to include any direct verbal utterance of the name ‘Dracula’ in their films for reasons totally different from the innkeepers in Stoker’s novel. Mike Flanagan in a fairly recent interview about his Netflix series Midnight Mass has clarified that he deliberately refrained from calling the monster in the series a vampire to avoid comparisons with Dracula. He wanted people to interpret the series within the context of its own world of religious fanaticism and perverted faith. The 2022 film The Invitation by Jessica M. Thompson similarly contains no verbal utterance of the name ‘Dracula’ despite containing multiple references to it. But while Flanagan’s vision involved a deliberate distancing from Stoker’s timeless classic, the omission of Dracula’s name in Thompson’s movie, coupled with the numerous references to the plot lines in Dracula,is aimed at teasing the audience to find hidden analogies between the two texts.
While the shadow of Dracula looms large over the film, Thompson manages to tell a story that is original in its detailed handling of one significant part of Dracula that has not received much emphasis in adaptations, namely his three brides. Although Coppola’s 1992 film depicted the brides with vivid visual details, they seem to lack a centrality within the overall story of the film that is dominated by the Count. Even in Terrence Fisher’s 1960 film The Brides of Dracula, where Baron Meinster feeds on the blood of young girls and converts them into vampires, the agency of these ‘brides’ is tied to the baron himself.
The first two ‘brides’ of the baron, a young girl from the village near the castle of the vampire, and Gina, a teacher in a school for young girls, have no character development of their own. Their actions are limited to baring their fangs and following the vampire’s bidding whenever he wishes. Marianne, who was the one responsible for freeing the vampiric baron, is the third potential bride of the vampire. In the trailer of the film The Brides of Dracula, the starring section refers to the actress playing the role of Marianne as ‘France’s latest sex kitten’ indicating once again how women’s sexuality within the film is not only commodified but is also restricted and tied to the sexuality of the male vampire. This is also evident in the interactions that take place between the vampire bride Gina and the potential bride Marianne. Gina asks Marianne in an insincere tone to forgive her for letting the baron love her. Therefore, while the undead young girl from the village has no interaction at all with the other brides of the vampire, the only conversation between the vampiric Gina and Marianne are linked to the sexuality of the baron.
The Invitation on the other hand, develops the characters of the ‘brides’ to the fullest extent possible even granting them an autonomy unseen in other adaptations of Dracula. At the outset, Thompson’s film avoids any reference to Dracula whatsoever. The blurb for the film in Netflix reads: ‘Evie’s long-lost cousin invites her to a swanky English wedding, where she uncovers a dark and twisted family secret that threatens to upend her life.’ When I went into the film without watching the trailer or reading up anything about it my first thought was that it was probably a story of ritual horror. Although the film makes it clear that something is off at the manor, even providing clues such as the name of Carfax Abbey (the popular haunt of Dracula in Stoker’s novel), I had not expected it to veer so steeply towards the brides of Dracula plotline.
For one, the other two brides of Dracula, Lucy (once again a reference to the other Lucy in Dracula) and Viktoria are not mindless vampires baring their fangs and blindly following Walter’s (the Dracula figure) orders. Lucy (who it is revealed is the newest bride of Walter) and Viktoria have separate personalities showing an emotional depth which I have not seen in any other adaptation of Dracula. Moreover, their desires, actions, and beliefs are not always aligned and blended into one faceless mass as is the case in The Brides of Dracula. Lucy’s excitement on seeing Evie (who is to be the third bride of the vampiric Walter) and her desire to be liked by her surprisingly surpass the portrayal of the brides of Dracula as motivated solely by bloodlust. Similarly, Viktoria’s character contains an element of jealousy towards the ‘sparkly, all new’ soon-to-be bride Evie, which leads Walter to ask Viktoria to ‘play nice’ with her.
This expression of autonomy and emotional depth is not an isolated case in The Invitation but is explored in much more detail towards the end of the movie where Lucy turns against Viktoria to help the now vampiric Evie escape from the castle. While the movie ends with Evie successfully killing Walter and returning to her human self, the fact that even when she was a vampire she managed to exercise her own free will much like Lucy, shows that the movie in fact treats the ‘brides’ as individual characters in their own right and not just as shadows of the Dracula figure.