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Francis Ford Copula’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula throws all of this out the window by its very first scene.
Despite literally being subtitled “Bram Stoker’s”, the film takes loads of creative license from its creative source, much like the aforementioned Dracula (1979). Before the film can even get to the original novel’s plot, it showcases a pre-vampire Dracula—a concept made entirely of the movie’s own accord, as the book never directly states a specific cause, reason, or explanation for Dracula’s being a vampire, nor implies there ever was one—leaving his wife, Elisebeta, to go off to war in the church’s name, returning after his victory only to discover her dead, having fallen under the impression he’d died in battle. In response to the local priest's insistence that suicide irrevocably damns her, Dracula asks him, “Is this my reward for protecting God’s church?” (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 4:22-4:27) and chooses to join her in hell by loudly forsaking God and assuring Him that he will “...rise from my [his] own death to avenge her with all the powers of darkness.” (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 4:32-4:41), blood pouring from candles and the eyes of statues, marking this the act that turns Dracula vampiric.
The original plot is then kickstarted—almost identically to the actual novel—with Jonathan’s heading of to meet Dracula at his manor and all that occurs during his visit, Lucy’s choosing of a husband and transformation into a vampire, her defeat by the hands of the men, and Dracula biting Mina, before finally culminating in Dracula’s defeat by Lucy’s same fate. The deviation lies in how Dracula reacts to and interacts with Mina, from her picture becoming the catalyst for his travel to England upon realizing she’s Elisabeta’s reincarnation, to his meeting of and subsequent fully original romantic scenes with her, to the final scene in which she comforts Dracula as he passes while the film utilizes parallels and certain effects to imply forgiveness from God, his curse’s reverse, and his eventual meeting Elisabeta/Mina in heaven.
Unlike Dracula (1979), however, Bram Stoker’s Dracula allows Lucy and Mina their original narrative roles from the source material, choosing to instead expand on Mina’s by romantically connecting her to this film’s Dracula through the reincarnation subplot, in which she is awarded Dracula’s explicit love and desire as the next life of his once deceased wife. This approach works well to narratively justify the borderline rewriting of Dracula and Mina’s relationship in what he claimed to it, but Francis Ford Copula knew full well that justifying its place in the plot wasn’t enough to give this more creative reading of Mina and the Count’s dynamic genuine meaning and impact within the realm of an otherwise near identical telling of the original Dracula story. Instead, Dracula's love serves as a drain on Mina’s freedom (a stark contrast to the themes of self-liberation and romantic and sexual freedom from the previously discussed movie), binding her to him with what seems to mostly ensure his own personal benefit and further his character arc.
By framing their romance via this almost parasitic lens, Copula is able to cast Dracula specifically as “...The Monster [who] Polices the Borders of the Possible” (Cohen 12), therefore assuring that “...the monster stands as a warning…” (Cohen 12), meant for both Mina and the audience, “...against exploration of its uncertain demesnes.” (Cohen 12); straying from God's path, in the case of Dracula. By forcing the viewer to bear witness to how “The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but…is [also] something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular.” (Cohen 12) through Dracula’s diligent seduction of Mina and the unwavering, ever-passionate devotion it leaves lingering even after his defeat at the hands of the remaining cast, it becomes clear that the learned men’s combined skill and efforts are no match for, their distinctly human understanding and perception of the world around them is no match for the utter monstrosity that is Count Dracula “…From its [his] position at the limits of knowing…” (Cohen 12). Altogether, this subtextual understanding transforms any and all desire between Mina and the Count into Bram Stoker’s Dracula ’s strongest thematic ammunition, the tides of Mina’s story arc turning it into the audience’s strongest concession: as the monster, Dracula is perpetually “...delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside [as Mina did] is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol [i.e. Dracula] or (worse) to become monstrous oneself [i.e. vampiric]” (Cohen 12).
In both Mina’s and the audience’s defense, Bram Stoker’s Dracula does its absolute darndest to obscure both their sight of the forest with the trees.
Carrol L. Fry and John Robert Craig best describe the character as “...a tragic figure from the Byronic tradition…a monster, but…[one] with a ‘mind not at all degraded/Even by the crimes through which it waded’...” (Fry and Craig 272) in their 2002 academic dissection of the film, “‘Unfit for Earth, Undoomed for Heaven’: The Genesis of Coppola's Byronic Dracula”. Born out of comparison to the Dracula of the original novel, Fry and Craig offer this description as leading evidence of how “...Coppola's mix of Byronism with the Gothic tradition…[of] Stoker's Dracula…offers a fascinating collision of values systems that reflects a change in the post-modern audience.” (Fry and Craig 272). That very clash—Dracula’s modern-ish priorities, thematically legitimized through the narrative of Byronic framing vs. the gothic remnants of the source material’s Victorian ideals and sensibilities—comes to a head majoritively during Mina and the Count’s boundless happenstances and interactions.
Over the course of the film, the viewer endlessly witnesses Mina’s struggle between her natural instinet (in the form of the rules and standards of her gothic background) and the more contemporary internal leanings living inside her, all while the Byronic archetype Dracula lives within forces her to confront her interest in both by enticing her to explore those leanings, through which he represents. We see it in her dining on Dracula’s blood even after he reveals his hand in Lucy’s death. We see it as Dracula slowly but surely convinces her to lend him her fair company by the end of their first meeting, while he draws her further into danger and the pouring rain, only for her to just miss him as he hides away in shame and anticipation. But before the film can even get around to the weighty thematic and narrative importance of the latter, it has to cover its most innocuous, yet succinct, yet determinedly rich example: their shared encounter with the wolf.