#Jonathan: I'm not the protagonist I'm the inciting incident

[wheresjonno2023-complete]

Clearly the rep is trying to convince him to join. That's why the conversation has taken all week.

From the look of things our other Horror Protagonists aren't getting their Hot Girl Summer either, between the fiancé anxiety and the cat debacle and the unseasonable storms and All That.

Maybe they can collectively bargain Dracula into a stakeholders meeting...

[spacetrashpile]

DRACTOBER DAY 2: EVIL OF DRACULA

Welcome back to Dractober, where I watch and rank one film adaptation of Dracula for every day in October! I'll be ranking each film on two one to ten scales (was it a good adaptation of Dracula and did I enjoy it?) and giving the film a final score at the end by averaging out the other scores.

Today's film is Evil of Dracula (1974). This is a Japanese horror film directed by Michio Yamamoto and distributed by Toho films, who you may recognize as the distributors of the Godzilla series, for one. The film follows Professor Shiraki, the new hire at a girls' school in a rural area of Japan, where a mysterious monster is looking to prey upon him and the students. This film is the third in a trilogy called The Bloodthirsty Trilogy, but it stands perfectly well on it's own (I didn't even know it was the last in the trilogy until I looked it up).

This review will contain spoilers, so if any of this sounded interesting to you, I highly suggest checking out the film before you read my review. If you are interested, please keep in mind that this film deals heavily with physical and sexual assault of underage girls.

Now, let's get into the review!

All of the films I'm watching this month (except for the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula and the Francis Ford Coppola film) are ones I've never seen in full before, and Evil of Dracula was no different. As such, when doing research on these films and where to watch them, I tried to keep myself as un-spoiled as I possibly could. From what I did read about this film before I went into it, I was expecting this to be a Dracula adaptation in no more than name. I was pleasantly surprised to find this was not entirely the case!

While the general story of the novel was obviously not adapted, I think this film managed to grasp the spirit of the novel and it's characters quite well. The movie is a slow creep of horror, which suits the tone of the novel quite well. The first 15 or so minutes of the movie, despite the locale shift, feel exactly like what it's like to read the opening chapters of the novel for the first time. You know that Jonathan/Shiraki is in danger from the moment he enters the house. You know that Dracula/the Principal is a vampire and that he only holds bad intentions for our main character. But he doesn't know that yet, and you get to watch in horror (and delight) as he figures it out.

The rest of our main cast also fill in the roles of the rest of the protagonists of the novel. Dr. Shimomura fills a similar role to Dr. Van Helsing, and the girls (Kumi, Kyoko, and Yukiko) fill the roles of Mina, Lucy, and occasionally the suitors (Prof. Shiraki also occasionally fills Mina, Van Helsing, or the suitors' roles, by nature of him being the protagonist and by nature of how many of these characters don't make it out alive). Renfield is also present, with role in the novel split directly down the middle between a previous professor of the school who's now in an insane asylum and a current professor who acts as the principal's right hand man.

To be clear, however, this is far from a one to one adaptation of the novel. Even outside of the very different location and inciting incidents, the similarities to the plot of the novel stall out around the second act. From the third act onward, the film takes it's own spin on vampirism and the fate of our unlucky protagonists- only two of whom make it out of the film alive.

This film takes numerous liberties with the story of Dracula, which is exactly what I expected from the outset. However, it's not trying to be a one to one, it's trying to be a horror film taking inspiration from Dracula, and I think it does that quite well. The two most notable types of horror in the novel (to me) are the creeping horror of the unknown and the horror of bodily violation, and this film does a great job preserving those elements.

So, is this film a good adaptation of Dracula? I'd say it gets a 6/10 in that regard. It's far from one to one, and as the film goes on it takes more and more liberties with the plot of the original novel, but it nonetheless manages to maintain the spirit and tone of the novel pretty effectively.

On to our next category! How much did I enjoy the film?

This film was my first ever foray into Japanese horror and I had a great time. I see why everyone says it's awesome now! I don't watch a lot of horror in the grand scheme of things (mostly because I'm a wuss when it comes to visual gore, lol), but this film really did it for me. I've mentioned the slow, creeping horror of the film already, but I can't stress enough how much that worked for me.

I briefly mentioned above the horror of body violation, and I wanted to get into that more here. As I've said in my previous posts about Dracula, vampirism and blood transfer in the novel is a very sexual thing. It's also a very horrific thing, and sometimes these two traits can be difficult to balance. This film did so very well, primarily because most of the Principal's victims are his students, and it's an inherently horrific thing to watch these girls be preyed upon. I mention this here both because, to me, Dracula is a novel about sexual assault, and I greatly appreciated this film for maintaining that in a way that did not feel like it was pandering to the male gaze, but also because this means this is a film that deals heavily with sexual assault of underage girls. I mentioned it above, but I'd be remiss to not hone in on this fact, both because this is a very sensitive topic and because you might interpret wildly differently than me. While I personally found the film to be focusing on the horror of the situation rather than the sexuality of it, you may think otherwise, and that's fine! But from my point of view, I really appreciated the way in which the sexual themes of the novel were handled in this film, and that's a highlight to me.

This film was certainly not perfect, however. The film relies primarily on lengthy, dialogue heavy scenes to communicate the vast majority of it's plot points. I was personally fine with this, but it can definitely make the movie feel a bit sluggish at times. The acting from our main character also left things to be desired at times, and his acting did not help this feeling in these expository scenes.

The other main issue this film has is it's budget. A lot of the actual horror and fight scenes in the film feel very cheap, and as a result, cheesy. The blood often looked watery, and the special effects weren't great, even taking into account that this is a 70s film. The fight scenes where we actually got to see Dracula/the Principal fight someone rather than just bite them felt particularly comical, like no one really knew how to fake fight but more so how to flail. While the creeping horror of the film was nice, it can't be everything, we have to see the conclusion of that build up at some point, and unfortunately, said climaxes almost always fall flat. In the end, I think this movie gets a 7/10 for enjoyment. I enjoyed the movie, but it was far from perfect.

Overall, I'm giving Evil of Dracula a 6.5/10. The film's loyalty to the novel was a pleasant surprise, and the slow building horror was a great fit for a Dracula adaptation. However, the film was far from an extremely loyal adaptation, and the adrenaline-filled moments that were meant to give conclusion to the slow creep of horror often felt cheap and silly, rather than actually scary. Nonetheless, I recommend giving Evil of Dracula a watch sometime this spooky season!