Nuance and detail is pervasive, picking up on skittering, gravity-defying rodents, wind wisping in, creaky floorboards, and echoing castle rooms, and disseminating it exquisitely across the array, crafting an encompassing, engaging, engulfing track that embraces the innate style of the production and delivers it right into your ears. X. Feeney; the second also features Roman Coppola, and delves into the process of his collaboration with his father. Unlike many adaptations, Bram Stoker’s Dracula follows the novel not only by (at least partially) utilizing an epistolary approach, but also by embracing communications technologies that would have been considered newfangled in 1897.

Although at the time of publication we were unable to directly compared the 2017 HDR10 edition with this new Dolby Vision version, we'll be sure to update once that's been done. There’s a music video for the Annie Lennox song, “Love Song for a Vampire,” that plays over the film’s end credits, and a behind-the-scenes piece that has relatively little overlap with the making-of featurette on the Blu-ray disc that’s included in this set. Another reason some might not have predicted too many Oscar noms for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” was the academy’s aversion to recognizing horror films, and that was certainly the case for previous “Dracula” adaptations.

But the biggest praise at the time came from Hal Hinson in The Washington Post, who declared, “It is Coppola’s most lavish and, certainly, his most flamboyant film; never before has he allowed himself this kind of mad experimentation. But this video presentation - reportedly identical (but for the Dolby Vision pass) to the 2017 remaster - is absolutely masterful in its rendering of every single damn frame, seemingly respectful to Coppola's craft, revelling in the palpable visual atmosphere evident throughout the production, and more than prepared to capture every moving shadow, and every flickering candle in all of its majesty. Being an R-rated film, I wasn’t immediately allowed to see it so my parents bought me off with the condition that if I read the book then I could see the new movie. Black levels are off-the-charts fabulous, the miniatures and elaborate sets all look stunning, and the thirty-year-old classic has simple never looked any better. I was ten years old when this film came out and I’ve had a love of classic monster movies for as long as I could remember, and this was something I desperately wanted to see.

Considering the classic nature of the novel, character, and how many times we’ve reviewed Bram Stoker’s Dracula here at High-Def Digest, you’ll have to forgive me for not starting with my traditional story teaser recap of the film. Back in the early 90s, horror was not really a flashy genre, let alone having one of the great American directors at the helm. Although the film wasn’t unanimously loved by critics, many of them were quick to sing the movie’s praises. We definitely see that in a few scenes, both implied and explicit where you can feel the sexual tension along with the “will they, won’t they” energy.In keeping with the operatic and overly histrionic approach to the material, the film’s performances are almost uniformly dialed up to 11. It raised a few eyebrows in Hollywood for the director of classic films like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Outsiders to sign on to direct a vampire movie. Lavish and luxurious, Coppola's magnificent ode to Bram Stoker's epistolary novel is the auteur's last great feature, a flawed but fabulous fable that puts the heart back into this ancient icon, giving audiences a reason to actually care about the fact that everybody seems to want to shove a stake in it. The film is definitely a bodice-ripper, literally so on several occasions, that unabashedly traces out the arc between sexual repression and erotic liberation. Engendering empathy in his repositioning of a previously devilish villain, Coppola found perfection in lead casting and lavish costume design evident right from the opening Fall of Constantinople setpiece, one of the single greatest sequences in the entire movie, which introduced the world to Gary Oldman's seminal Dracul, née Vlad the Impaler, replete with some of the finest battle armour designs in the history of cinema (the kind of design that feels like it inspired visionary artist Tarsem Singh's ideas for costumes in The Cell).