8:14:22

Rewatching Coppola’s Dracula many years later, over two days, has done a number on me. The movie is incredibly intense and emotional, even the sound of it. A score of (bloody) loss. The high-density of the last decade of pure genre. For Coppola, the narrative of blood sucking is not about living forever, or even simply contagion and contamination (Van Helsing tells his medical students: “Civilization and syphilization have advanced together.”). It is about dying over and over again. It is about no longer knowing how to live without love and becoming ruinous because of it. Time becomes ruinous because of it.

It is Mina who understands what love is and what it takes to be set free by it.