Uncanny Resemblances: Studying Dracula’s Likeness across Literary and Film Adaptations

Resumen

Studies on Bram Stoker’s Dracula have frequently referred to his animalistic qualities, focusing on his appearance in the novel with sharp teeth, hairy body and a predatory disposition. While such studies have critically examined the construction of the vampiric monster and its physical form, they have often overlooked the resemblance of the Count both in the novel and in film adaptations to actual living personages. Adnan Qiblawi, for example, observes how the portrait of a young Dracula on the wall, in the 1992 film version, is a replica of a German Renaissance art piece by Albrecht Dürer called Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight. This paper will try to identify these resemblances of the Count to actual human figures in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). I will also look at the way in which the physical appearance of characters, and their resemblance to other faces are used within the text to create narrative tensions. By doing so, I will establish the centrality of these uncanny resemblances both to faces within the text, and to human figures in the real world, in an attempt to understand the monstrosity of the vampire in terms of the difference in appearance through the movie. In this paper, I will argue that the different appearances of Dracula in the film are based on creating, altering, or erasing the resemblance of the Count to other portrayals within the film or to the face of the actor. However, the realisation that the same face and the same Count underlie all of the different portrayals of Dracula within the film show how such uncanny resemblances, or lack thereof, are manufactured through prosthetics, lighting, makeup, and other technological tools.