Dracula's Final Scene

In Stoker's novel, Dracula is killed at the end of a climactic chase, crumbling into dust and almost instantly ending the story. None of the three film adaptations we screened are entirely faithful in their rendering of that scene, an in fact they diverge quite a bit from the original plot in unique ways.

Murnau's Nosferatu is the only iteration of these Draculas in which the antagonist does not die a violent death. Instead, Ellen learns from the vampire book that the only way to destroy Count Orlok is to use herself as bait and lure him into a trap. As Hutter leaves Ellen's side to fetch Professor Bulwer, Orlok enters her room and begins to feed on her. He is so involved that he forgets the dawn until he hears the rooster's crow. The scene is cut with shots of Knock, Orlok's insane lackey, who realizes his master's fate and shouts out in agony. As Orlok removes himself from Ellen, understanding what has happened, the music becomes unexpectedly melancholic, and he makes a dramatic gesture before vanishing in a puff of smoke. Hutter arrives with Bulwer in time to find Mina in her last moments. They embrace and she dies, Bulwer in the foreground, tearing up.

A decade later and thousands of miles away, the first Hollywood version of "Dracula" streamlines the plot, dispensing with the entire pursuit across Eastern Europe and instead laying Dracula to rest in Carfax Abbey, London. As Dracula carries Mina into his lair, killing Renfield along the way, he is hunted by Harker and Van Helsing. With dawn approaching, the vampire is forced to rest in his coffin, where the heroes find him lying prone. Harker rushes to the hypnotized Mina as Van Helsing, off camera, stakes Dracula. There is a low groan, and Mina is freed from her psychic bonds. The couple exit together up the abbey's steps in a ray of light as church bells ring in the background.

Finally we have Coppola's postmodern version, which follows Stoker's original closely until Dracula is stabbed in the heart by Morris. At this point Mina fends off the hunting party with a rifle, and follows the wounded Dracula into his castle, heading to the chapel in which he originally cursed himself with undeath. There, Dracula--in a beastly form--asks, "Where is my God? He has forsaken me." When Mina kisses his bloodied lips, the room lights up and the cross that Vlad had damaged hundreds of years earlier heals itself. A light shines on Dracula's face and it transforms him back into Vlad, first as an old man and then back through time to his original state. Mina then thrusts the sword deeper into his heart and he dies, his eyes rolling slightly upwards, presumably to God. The string music fades, Mina kisses him one last time, and then choral music begins. Mina chops off Dracula's head and looks up at the mural that features the two lovers.
__________________

The differences in the way that Dracula dies onscreen certainly reflect the eras in which the three films were made, most importantly in the way in which the earlier films avoid showing explicit violence, while the later film was made in a time when extreme onscreen violence was not only accepted but encouraged in mainstream. Thus, Murnau has his count vanish, while Browning uses a groan and Mina's reaction to suggest the sudden death, and Coppola revels in the visceral possibilities of blood and romance intertwined.

Perhaps more interesting than the manner of death is emotional tone of the final scenes. In the novel, there is no sense of loss when Dracula dies, and Stoker is content to kill off only some gypsies and Quincey, who is perhaps the least important of all the main characters (and he even softens that blow by resurrecting him in the Harker and Mina's child). The death comes as a sigh of relief at the end of a drawn-out, tortured tale. But in Nosferatu, the first cinematic adaption, the vampire's death is far more ambiguous. Not only does the music suggest a certain sympathy with Orlok, but he is mourned by Knock, giving him a kind of oblique humanity. And in death he takes Ellen with him, leaving Hutter alone and Bulwer a failure. In making an attempt a historical relevancy, it is impossible to ignore the fact that this film was made only a few years after the First World War, which left Germany bankrupt, ashamed and with huge casualties. Sweeping narratives with clear heroes and villains and perfectly happy endings would have seemed cheap and hollow in the aftermath of the war's devastation.

Contrast this with the 1931 version, released to an America that has just seen its decade-long party end in a crippling depression. Superficially it might seem a similar context to Weimar Germany, but a depressed nation is not the same as a defeated nation; it is perhaps more willing to take at face value the type of escapism that Browning's version provided. If the charming monster is defeated tastefully off screen and the lovers make it out okay in the end, everyone can leave the theater satisfied.

Furthest removed both historically and thematically, Coppola's death of Dracula takes the sympathy from Nosferatu and pushes it into entirely new territory. Dracula is more than sympathetic, at the end of the film he is actually the hero, having fought through centuries of darkness for his true love, and being granted salvation for it. This postmodern reversal, which may have been unthinkable to earlier viewers, is almost natural to the contemporary audience. Dracula's association here with disease (specifically HIV/AIDS) is apparent. Yes, he is cursed, but is it really his fault? Shouldn't he be given a chance? Coming at a time when HIV/AIDS was still shrouded in ambiguity and stigma for most people, this Dracula examines that ambiguity closely, and it is during the death scene that this becomes apparent. Notably, Mina is not freed from any bond upon Dracula's death, and there is no suggestion that she will go back to a happy life with Harker, for she is now of the same soul as Dracula.