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Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
Zeitgeist Films

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary  reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 84 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
9.5 out of 10
based on 19 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 2 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, Dave Moroni, CindyMarie Small, Johnny A. Wright, Stephane Leonard, Matthew Johnson, and Keir Knight

Beautifully transposing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's interpretation of Bram Stoker's classic vampire yarn from stage to screen, Guy Maddin has forged a sumptuous, erotically charged feast of dance, drama and shadow. (Zeitgeist Films)


GENRE(S): Romance  
WRITTEN BY: Mark Godden (ballet Dracula)
Bram Stoker (novel)
 
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: May 18, 2004 
Video: May 18, 2004 
Theatrical: May 14, 2003 
RUNNING TIME: 75 minutes, B/W / Color 
ORIGIN: Canada 

Television Premiere, February 28th, 2002, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Best Performing Arts Program, 2002 International Emmy Awards

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Maddin takes on his first commissioned feature--an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula--and succeeds brilliantly, making it his own while offering what may be the most faithful screen version to date of Bram Stoker's novel.
Read Full Review
100
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The visual style is at once deliberately archaic and slyly postmodernist, slinky and sensuous from first frame to last.
Read Full Review
100
New York Post V.A. Musetto
It's a highly erotic work that at no point seems staged. Credit brilliant use of fog, mirrors, silhouettes, slow motion and special effects worthy of a music video.
Read Full Review
100
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Guy Maddin is a scholar, poet, prankster, and ferociously devoted classicist who likes to resurrect dead cinemas and deader directors and make them vital all over again.
Read Full Review
90
Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.
Read Full Review
90
Washington Post Desson Thomson
Brings kinetic, stylistic and even sexy dimension to the Bram Stoker legend.
Read Full Review
90
LA Weekly John Powers
Maddin's genius is so inescapably idiosyncratic that his work seems destined to remain a cult taste. Although Dracula won't change that, I hasten to add that this is the most inventive vampire picture of the last 80 years.
Read Full Review
90
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
An inspired, original, and gracefully integrated collaboration of theater and cinema that complements not only both forms, but also the seductive, dreamlike qualities of the source material.
Read Full Review
88
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.
Read Full Review
80
Variety Deborah Young
Though it sounds like an offbeat idea even for horror fans, the tech work is so well done that it could disarm unwary buffs attracted by the campy title.
Read Full Review
80
The New York Times Stephen Holden
For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, Dracula is a compelling expressionistic work.
Read Full Review
80
Empire Patrick Peters
This arty approach may dismay hard-core horror fans, but it captures the dark grace of the original with wit and style.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice J. Hoberman
Maddin has created a fascinating hybrid--this enraptured composition in mist, gauze, and Vaseline is more rhapsody than narrative, less motion picture than shadow play.
Read Full Review
75
San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
Succeeds despite that mismatch of artist and material.
Read Full Review
75
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Magnificently sensuous and macabre.
Read Full Review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
A 75-minute tour de force that's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding. So be patient -- the payoff will come.
Read Full Review
70
TV Guide Ken Fox
Dracula fans will appreciate the witty ways in which Maddin has drawn Stoker's troubling racism and xenophobia to the fore, while making the most of the sexual ambivalence that helps make the story endlessly fascinating.
Read Full Review
67
Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
It’s far and away the most original symphony of terror since F.W. Murnau raised hackles and Schrecks with his 1922 Nosferatu.
Read Full Review
50
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 9.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Cameron S. gave it a 9:
Guy Maddin has constructed an unworldly, beautifully elegiac and literarily faithful rendition of Bram Stroker’s Dracula in silent ballet. Up until this film, my favorite contemporary Dracula adaptation had been Francis Ford Coppola’s film, but Maddin’s film has knocked me out of my socks in one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen. Stylistically, the film looks and feels as if it had been stored in a vault for 80 years and has just now been uncovered. It is scrappy and jolty rhythmically and unfolds in ballet sets. The dances are fascinating and compelled me throughout on its hyper driven warp of engagement. What he has obtained is dreamy beyond this time’s comprehensibility. He has used a style of the past of cinema and presents his oeuvre that completely transcends anything that has ever been done with Dracula. The ballet dances invigorate and entrancement of the words, seeing Van Helsing and crew take down Mina is astonishing in how it is delivered. The final product here is rich and sensuous, it invigorates the horror genre in a completely original working and comes out as quite dreamy interpretation of words.

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