‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ feels like a fever dream.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to write that out. I can imagine several critics who first went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of the classic vampire novel wrote something similar in their notebooks as the film played for them. It is a classic of gothic horror, the novel and film both, but there’s no denying that Coppola’s filmmaking eccentricities and prowess contributed to an adaptation bursting at the seams with strange, nightmarish and surreal visuals. The costumes are bold and exquisite. The sets are impressively massive and frequently obvious in their artifice. Sir Gary Oldman as the titular Count, alongside Sir Anthony Hopkins as the eccentric Van Helsing, chew the scenery as only they can, while still delivering performances I mark as career highlights. Wynona Rider and Keanu Reeves do their best to act around atrocious English accents, but even their performances, critically bashed for decades, add to the unsettled, dream-like quality of the film.
It is vibrant, gaudy, visceral, moving, eerie, explicit, charming and strange, and a perfect film for this Halloween season.
I love horror, though I haven’t always. As a child with an overactive imagination, scary was a bridge too far for me in any capacity. Scary scenes in movies and television lingered with me for days, haunting both my waking and sleeping mind. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by it. There was something so intriguing about horror, some elements that I couldn’t help but be drawn towards while being repulsed from it in the same breath. My mind goes back to an uncle taking my cousins and I to the 1996 movie Independence Day, and when the aliens break free from containment and begin to wreak havoc, I excused myself from the theatre “to go to the bathroom” and didn’t return to my seat, though I continued to peek my head around the door for the rest of the movie.
It was the realm of literature that opened the doors to horror for me. I began with Stephen King at entirely too young an age, and was hooked from there. The frisson of fear that ran down my back at his most electric, horrifying writing was a reward, the payoff to mounting tension and dread as King’s protagonists moved inexorably toward their awful truth.
Over time, that same love for horror writing extended to film. I’ve tried to make up for lost time by consuming all of the classic films of the genre from its inception. A theatrical double feature of the classic Universal adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff respectively, is a highlight in my memories, and John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing remains one of the finest horror movies ever made.
So this time of year, which some call Spooky Season, is obviously one of my favourites, even as horror has crept its way into all other corners of the calendar.
But one of my favourite things to do during the Halloween season, is collect stories of scary encounters and experiences that trend towards the true, rather than the fantastical. We live in a small town, and as any horror aficionado knows, small towns are always the spookiest, with the scariest stories. Haunted homes that used to be morgues. Ghostly children running through the graveyard. Strange creatures spotted in the woods at the edge of town.
I want these stories, and I want your stories. I want to collect the creepy small town tales of Fort Frances, of the things that have gone bump in the night, of the old wives tales that whisper of hidden darkness. Fort Frances is a lovely town, but it’s always seemed strange to me that it isn’t also a stranger little town, and I think it might just be that I haven’t asked the right way yet.
So please, do me a favour this month: send me your scary small town stories. Lend me your local legends. Thrill me with your unexplainable encounters.
Let’s celebrate all things spooky before Christmas kicks down the door again.
– Ken Kellar, editor
kkellar@fortfrances.com
