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SUMMER ACTIVITIES 4 ESO A 2014

Dracula
Read Bram Stoker's Dracula and watch Francis Ford
Coppola's film version of the novel. Then do the following
activities.

ACTIVITY 1

DIRECTIONS: Answer all of the following questions in complete sentences.

1. Where and when was Stoker born?
2. Why did Stoker spend most of his childhood in bed?
3. How did doctors cure him of this illness? How did this influence his writing?
4. Why did Stokers Masters in Mathematics ultimately see little use?
5. Why did Stoker write theatre reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail?
6. How did Henry Irving contribute to Stokers life?
7. Who did Stoker marry?
8. What year did Stoker write Dracula?
9. What traumatic event happened in 1905 and how did that impact Stoker?
10. What kind of genre is Dracula? What elements does it combine?
11. During what time period was Gothic literature popular?
12. Who are some examples of Gothic writers?
13. Give 3 of the elements of Gothic literature.
14. What is an epistolary novel? What does the word epistola mean in Latin? What does this add to
the novel?


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ACTIVITY 2

DIRECTIONS: Read the film's review and answer all of the following questions in complete
sentences.
Film Review Bram Stokers Dracula
Think of the monstrous ego of the vampire. He thinks himself so important that he is willing to live
forever, even under the dreary conditions imposed by his condition. Avoiding the sun, sleeping in
coffins, feared by all, he nurses his resentments. In "Bram Stoker's Dracula," the new film by Francis
Ford Coppola, the vampire shakes his fist at heaven and vows to wait forever for the return of the
woman he loves. It does not occur to him that after the first two or three centuries he might not seem
all that attractive to her.
The film is inspired by the original Bram Stoker novel, although the author's name is in the title for
another reason (Another studio owns the rights to plain "Dracula"). It begins, as it should, with the
tragic story of Vlad the Impaler, who went off to fight the Crusades and returned to find that his
beloved wife, hearing he was dead, had killed herself. And not just killed herself, but hurled herself
from a parapet to a stony doom far below, in one of the many spectacular shots which are the best
part of this movie.
Vlad cannot see the justice in his fate. He has marched all the way to the Holy Land on God's
business, only to have God play this sort of a trick on him. (Vlad is apparently not a student of the
Book of Job.) He embraces Satan and vampirism, and the action moves forward to the late Victorian
Age, when mankind is first beginning to embrace the gizmos (phonographs, cameras, the telegraph,
motion pictures) that will dispel the silence of the nights through which he has waited fearfully for
centuries.
Coppola's plot, from a screenplay by James V. Hart, exists precisely between London, where this
modern age is just dawning, and Transylvania, which still sleeps unhealthily in the past. We meet a
young attorney (Keanu Reeves) who has been asked to journey out to Dracula's castle to arrange
certain real estate transactions. The previous man who was sent on this mission ran into some sort of
difficulties . . . health or something . . . all rather vague . . .
Reeves' carriage, driven by a man whose hands are claws, hurtles at the edges of precipices until he
is finally discharged in the darkness to be met and taken to Dracula's castle. There, everything is
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more or less as we expect it, only much more so. Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) waits here as he has
for centuries for the return of his dead bride, and when he sees a photograph of Reeves' fiancee,
Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), he knows his wait has been rewarded at last. She lives again.
Back in London, we meet other principals, including the fearless vampire killer Prof. Abraham Van
Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), and Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), a free spirit who has three suitors and
is Mina's best friend. When Dracula appears in town, Van Helsing's antenna start to quiver. And the
movie descends into an orgy of visual decadence, in which what people do is not nearly as degraded
as how they look while they do it.
Coppola directs with all the stops out, and the actors perform as if afraid they will not be audible in the
other theaters of the multiplex. The sets are grand opera run riot - Gothic extravaganza intercut with
the Victorian London of gaslights and fogbound streets, rogues in top hats and bad girls in bustiers.
Keanu Reeves, as a serious young man of the future, hardly knows what he's up against with Count
Dracula, and neither do we, since Dracula cheerfully changes form - from an ancient wreck to a
presentable young man to a cat and a bat and a wolf.
Vampire movies, which run in the face of all scientific logic, are always heavily laden with pseudo-
science. Hopkins lectures learnedly on the nosferatu, yet himself seems capable of teleportation and
other tricks not in the physics books. And the Ryder character finds herself falling under the terrible
spell of the vampire's need. Many women are flattered when a man says he has been waiting all of his
life for them. But if he has been waiting four centuries? The one thing the movie lacks is headlong
narrative energy and coherence. There is no story we can follow well enough to care about.
There is a chronology of events, as the characters travel back and forth from London to Transylvania,
and rendezvous in bedrooms and graveyards. But Coppola seems more concerned with spectacle
and set-pieces than with storytelling; the movie is particularly operatic in the way it prefers climaxes to
continuity.
Faced with narrative confusions and dead ends (why does Dracula want to buy those London
properties in such specific locations?), I enjoyed the movie simply for the way it looked and felt.
Production designers Dante Ferreti and Thomas Sanders have outdone themselves. The
cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, gets into the spirit so completely be always seems to light with
shadows.
Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess,
and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.
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Questions

1. How does the reviewer introduce the review in the first paragraph? What features does he
mention in particular?
2. Why is the film called Bram Stokers Dracula and not just Dracula?
3. What does the reviewer consider to be the best part of the movie?
4. Why did Vlad reject God?
5. Why does the Late Victorian Age spell the end for creatures like Dracula?
6. What is the contrast between London and Transylvania?
7. What features (last paragraph p.1) does the reviewer say make this film a gothic extravaganza?
8. What forms does Dracula take during the film?
9. Pseudoscience (fake science) is important in Gothic novels- why is it important in stories like
Dracula and Frankenstein?
10. What is the main flaw of the film according to the reviewer?
11. What does the film director (Francis Ford Coppola) focus on and what does he neglect in this film?
12. The film is flawed but give several reasons why the reviewer enjoyed the film.
13. Find synonyms or phrases in the text that mean:
a. Characters:
b. To shake:
c. To throw:
d. Gadgets:
e. Over the top:




ACTIVITY 3

DIRECTIONS: Write a short essay (100 - 150) about the differences between the movie and the
novel which stroke you the most. Mention at least three differences.