Dracula
Bram Stoker
An Eastern aristocrat who studies England in order to invade it from within.
Postcolonial CriminologyThe Count buys a house near London, prepares to pass as an Englishman and crosses Europe to feed on the people of the imperial capital. In 1990 the critic Stephen Arata read the novel as a fantasy of «reverse colonisation»: an empire’s fear of being invaded by those it considered inferior. The novel itself goes as far as classing the Count as a criminal type in the manner of Lombroso and Nordau. Postcolonial criminology sees in this how the figure of the foreign criminal is manufactured.
Dracula
Tod Browning · Bela Lugosi
The monster fits in a drawing room: charm, good manners and hypnosis.
PsychopathyBased on Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston’s stage play rather than directly on the novel, the film turns the Count into a charming nobleman who hypnotises Renfield and tries to do the same to Van Helsing. The danger is no longer invasion but seduction. That is why psychopathy, in Cleckley’s sense, reads him best: a flawless mask of normality hiding a lack of scruples and a taste for controlling others. Lugosi’s foreign lilt is still there, but now it sounds like elegance.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Francis Ford Coppola · Gary Oldman
A widower who renounces God and turns his loss into eternal rage.
General strainCoppola adds a prologue the novel does not have: in 1462 Vlad returns from war to find that his wife Elisabeta has taken her own life after false reports of his death. When a priest tells him her soul is damned, he renounces God and becomes a vampire. Centuries later he believes Mina is Elisabeta reborn. It is Agnew’s general strain theory: losing what you value most breeds anger, and anger looks for an outlet. The predator becomes a wounded lover.
The 1897 novel feared the foreigner arriving from the East; the 1931 film feared the seducer who glides through polite society; the 1992 film looks for the wound that explains the monster. The shift reflects an age that is no longer satisfied with an evil villain: it wants to know what happened to him.
The archive reads them with Postcolonial criminology · Read the case file →
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki · thesmartset.com/?p=12843 · emergencejournal.english.ucsb.edu/?p=641 · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · es.wikipedia.org/wiki. All the villains with versions.