Reading Between the Images in Browning’s and Coppola’s Dracula Adaptations

OpenAlex İngilizce

This study compares two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), using Linda Hutcheon’s theory of literary adaptation. Although listed as box-office oriented films, Dracula and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are important examples of adaptation, because each production adapts the novel in a different cultural and historical milieu; thus they each paraphrase the same text according to the anxieties of their times. The study explores the author’s and directors’ takes on the conflicts about class, gender, and “the other,” with close reference to the historical background of the novel and of each adaptation: the Victorian Age, the Great Depression, and the decade of the 1990s. Moving from Hutcheon’s theory, the study claims that each adaptation with its own loyalties to the text not only reveals the problems of its period while offering its unique interpretation of the novel, but also comes up with new texts that enable the audience to find new meaning in every choice made by its director. This is what “adaptation” means.