WHY THE perennial fascination of horror movies? If we are to believe Gore Vidal (in Screening History) it is that “any confirmation that life continues after death has an appeal to almost everyone except enlightened Buddhists. No one wants to be extinct.” But extinction may be preferable to afterlife as a vampire in a Francis Ford Coppola movie. The latest, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, tries to be for Dracula what Apocalypse Now was for Vietnam, and the Godfather trilogy for the Mafia: gigantism as an end in itself, lusher as a synonym for better.
Perhaps I am being hopelessly oldfashioned but I don’t trust people who can’t tell the difference between lie and lay as far as I can throw up. In this movie, we keep hearing “lay down” and “lay back,” and in the screenplay by James V. Hart (scenarist also of the hopeless Hook) we read: “Panels pull apart to reveal Dracula laying in his ‘day coma.’ ” Would you, mutatis mutandis, commission a score from a tone-deaf composer?
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