What else could anyone want but Dracula for Christmas?
I got my copy of the Radio Times Christmas Guide last night when shopping. It’s a traditional thing to buy one and go through highlighting everything you intend to watch over xmas. There was an article in it about a BBC adaptation of Dracula. Interesting. Apparently it’s labelled as being all erotic, playing on the repressed sexual desire in the book, and doesn’t actually contain Harker. It just seems to be about Dracula and Lucy.
Dramatically changing the nature of a story is nothing new when it comes to telly adaptations. That I can deal with, though never truly understand when the storyline in the book is perfectly good anyway (I think it’s the scriptwriter wanting to put their little bloody stamp on the story and make it theirs – much like a bad editor does to a book).
What plagues me is this obsession of the erotic vampire. Dracula was erotic without the need to resort to on-page sexathons.
Don’t get me wrong…I write sex in my stories when it suits the plot, but never because an audience demands it. I just can’t comprehend the need to “sex up” Dracula. The UST in that story, and in several of the films it spawned, is enough for me. I don’t need to see the physical act in order to feel the desire. I’ll never grasp while people have to make vampires sex crazy. They’re sexy in themselves, in a naughty, dark kind of way. They don’t really need to be screwing every person they come across, be them male or female. I’ve got scenes in Prophecy with biting in them that are sexier than any love scenes I’ve written.
Of course, all of this talk is just whispers in the wind because people want sex and sex they’ll get. When did we become a world of sex-driven, hormone-fuelled, nymphomaniacs? We buy ebooks for sex, read fanfiction for sex, watch telly for the relationships because Hell they might have sex! Even paperbacks are leaning more towards the sex.
Not really a good environment to bring children up in, telling them the way they’re supposed to be all responsible and grown up, which these days means obsessing over sex.
🙂
I’ll fade quietly into the background now…maybe in a whirl of smoke or something very Dracula like…and a distant creepy laugh.
