Red is the first thing you remember. Not the blood — though there is plenty of blood — but the red of a cloak that pools across a stone floor like spilled wine, the red of a wax seal, the red of an army’s banners burning against a dusk-gold sky. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a film you watch with your eyes wide and your reason held politely in check, because every frame has been composed the way a painter composes a canvas: for the eye first, and the argument second.

Adapted by James V. Hart from the 1897 novel, the picture takes Stoker’s epistolary horror and recasts it as something stranger and more bruised — a love story that refuses to die. The Count is not merely a monster here; he is a grieving man who has crossed centuries to find the reincarnation of the wife he lost. That reframing is the film’s great gamble, and it is the reason the picture still divides a room and still gets watched.

A Dracula painted by hand

What makes the film endure is its refusal of the easy tool. Coppola, working with his son Roman on the effects, built the supernatural inside the camera itself — multiple exposures, forced perspective, miniatures, rear projection, shadows that move independently of the bodies that cast them. Nothing here is weightless digital trickery; it has the texture of a magic-lantern show, of early silent cinema dragged into Technicolor delirium. Michael Ballhaus’s camera glides and then lurches; Thomas Sanders’s sets feel carved rather than constructed; and Eiko Ishioka’s costumes — the reason the film won its Costume Design Oscar — are less clothing than sculpture: armour that looks like flayed muscle, kimono-influenced gowns, a crimson robe with a train that becomes its own weather system.

Wojciech Kilar’s score does for the ear what Ishioka does for the eye: heavy, liturgical, romantic to the point of vertigo. The film closes on Annie Lennox’s “Love Song for a Vampire,” and by then the excess has stopped feeling like excess and started to feel like the only honest register the story could be told in.

Oldman’s Count, and the company he keeps

Gary Oldman is extraordinary — and he is at least four different actors across the running time. He is the ancient, powder-pale prince with the towering coiffure; the rejuvenated young dandy in blue-tinted glasses prowling London; the bat-thing, the wolf-thing, the column of rats. It is one of the great transformations of nineties cinema, and it holds the film’s wildest swings together. Anthony Hopkins answers him as Van Helsing with gleeful, almost unhinged relish, a performance that knows exactly how absurd the material is and leans into it. Winona Ryder gives Mina a genuine ache; Tom Waits turns Renfield into a broken poet of the asylum.

It is not flawless, and pretending otherwise does the film no favours. Keanu Reeves’s Jonathan Harker, saddled with a wandering English accent, remains the picture’s standing weak point, and the London middle stretch sags under the weight of its own plotting. But these are the costs of a film that would rather risk everything than play it safe — and Coppola, the man who made The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, was never going to play it safe.

Why it endures

Thirty years on, Coppola’s Dracula has outlasted most of the prestige horror of its decade precisely because it is handmade. It looks like nothing else, because it was built by hand to look like nothing else. The critics who dismissed it as overwrought on release were not wrong about the temperature; they were wrong about whether the temperature was a flaw. This is opera, not realism, and opera is supposed to be too much.

It remains the most visually ambitious Dracula ever filmed, and one of the few adaptations that takes Stoker’s prose — lurid, breathless, deeply strange — and finds a cinematic language as feverish as the page. Love, the tagline promised, never dies. Neither, it turns out, does a film this committed to its own beautiful excess.