Here's a neat contest for cinephiles: list every Dracula movie you can off the top of your head. Not just adaptations of the novel, but every movie he's ever appeared in. If you've spouted out more titles than you have fingers and toes, don't worry - you haven't even scratched the surface. According to IMDB the not-really-a-dragon-at-all has appeared in 326 movies and TV shows. Attempting to rank the central performance is such a lost cause it needs its keys on a necklace, much like squabbling over the extreme excess in Ebenezer Scrooges. Dracula isn't a story anymore - it's a pageant, a Thanksgiving turkey, anything but vital unless met with an assured hand. Cuadecuc, Vampir isn't Dracula, rather an account of the making of one. The subject isn't the least bit vital. Its chronicler is.
Spanish director Jesús Franco has the unique trait of being un-recommendable to just about anybody. A legend among fans of 70's-and-80's exploitation hooey, his impossibly vast filmography swings between Nyquilled horror and disquieting porn. After attempting to watch his work, I am reminded of the golden Siskel & Ebert law by which it's perfectly fine to walk out on a movie if you fully admit to the act. In 1970 Mr. Franco decided to syphon off some sweet Hammer moolah and pulled out Count Dracula, attaching fangs to Christopher Lee in proper Hammer fashion. I'll save you some time by relaying the stark fact that Count Dracula is worth less of your time than Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and certainly less than Alabama's Ghost (look it up, you won't be sorry). Vaguely atmospheric and mostly vague, Franco's approach uses cheap 70's zoom knobs and opaque padding to create total, devastating detachment in the name of Hurry Up I Start Shooting My Next Movie On Tuesday. Which is why Cuadecuc is not only the only way to watch Franco but also a fascinating piece of contemporaneous upcycling.
Looped synths and smeary B&W photography beckon to us, playing out an early scene from the film with none of the original sound in place (and eventually no sound at all). Soon after the title flies out from the center of the screen, switching over to smooth 60's soundtrack orchestral jazz placed over a car driving through the countryside. A man with a crude fog machine. Bouts of tape collage experiments and semi-comprehensible Dracula moments. Christopher Lee giving us the finger. Fake spiderwebs. Clashes of soft-focus with sharp-focus via hueless exposures. Long stretches of total silence. These are the techniques by which director (later politician) Pere Portabella makes not only one of the best production documentaries ever made, but also his own Dracula adaptation as well as entrancing statements on artifice, meta-fiction, and collective memory. If you thought I was going to agree with the conventional criticisms of this work (which you are of course well-researched upon) and say that a documentary that deconstructs the filming of a bad horror movie is a metaphor for Gen. Franco's regime, then get ready for me to take some more interesting paths.
Rather than following the production schedule, Portabella orders the footage to follow Count Dracula's plot, encapsulating the story in gauzy silence. I'll save you from a plot description because you already know it. Everybody knows it, and fortunately for Portabella Franco doesn't stray too far from the novel that we'd miss serious elements of the story without sound. At the very least you can point at the screen and shout whenever Dracula appears, and I wouldn't want to deny you that small pleasure. It's fitting that a documentary on a Dracula movie also be Dracula itself; Stoker was no stranger to narrative layers. Keeping with the tradition of Gothic Horror, Dracula is told via journal entries, letters, and other types of records to give the illusion that the story was a real event, experienced and recorded by several people and compiled rather than authored by Stoker. Frankenstein also pulled this trick, and its effect is that of a found-footage movie (such as The Blair Witch Project), applying a veneer of stark realism to the supernatural. In the case of Cuadecuc, the veneer is that of a moldy, forgotten reel of film left in a closet in an asylum, or in the attic of an elder relative who had recently passed away, leaving you with their puzzling hobby-art.
If we allow for a meta-fiction route of analysis we can safely say that Cuadecuc turns the Dracula structure on its head. Whereas realist elements were added to Dracula to draw the reader into the world of the story, Cuadecuc uses realist elements to draw attention to how fake the whole thing is. The word Cuadecuc translates from the Spanish to "worm's tail," but importantly here also refers to the tail end of a reel of film. Jesús Franco's production foibles are frequently spotlighted, such as makeup sessions with cheesy music, that guy with the fog concoction, and a hilariously awful bat effect, as well as Franco's trademark zoom-heavy photography. And why shouldn't it? Franco stated publicly that he hated most of his movies, and their often-times rushed, lifeless productions end up reflecting that whether he liked it or not. There are few novels more dead-horsed into the public subconscious than Dracula, and so any attempt to make the story seem real is almost a moot point. Christopher Lee had already played the Count in two movies prior, and would go on to play him five more times, so why not wear sunglasses on set and flip the bird? Why not laugh and roll your eyes at the artifice of it all? Consider the last time you went to an elementary school production of the Nativity, and you'll understand that sometimes its okay to joke with tradition.
And for that matter, if Dracula is burned into our gray matter and need not repeating, why not play off that? A tried and true rule of fiction is that some things are more emotionally resonant when a certain amount of distance is woven into the storytelling, evoking rather than imposing, showing rather than telling. One of my favorite adaptations of Dracula is Jon Muth's gorgeous graphic novel Dracula: A Symphony in Moonlight and Nightmares. The plot remains the same as with Stoker, but the presentation splits the pages between lines of dialogue suspended in air with extraordinarily beautiful paintings depicting scenes and moods. Nothing is lost in translation. The disconnection allows the reader to see each half on their own terms and let them experience the power of Dracula with a certain degree of discovery. It's the simple effort of combining the words and the images in your head that gives a boost to your emotional reaction, as if you were the one who found out the true meaning and it's shouting down your door. With the smudgy, ambiguous footage and the largely nonsensical soundtrack, a little extra brainpower is required to glean a complete Dracula from Cuadecuc, seeming more like a distant memory than a sober experience. Consider this piece from the eccentric YouTube video artist Chriddof (and don't worry about watching all 9 minutes):
Technically all the footage is from Dooby Duck's Disco Bus but the effect is an opaque wash of imagery under a D-major drone. The frequent tape damage in the transfer only adds to the disconnection. In a previous upload of the video a comment appeared praising the video as being a perfect representation of nostalgia, consistent with a damaged old tape of a children's TV special. I'd like to posit that if asked, most people would have a memory of the first time they saw a Dracula movie and how old they were, as the 1931 version is often cited as one of the first horror movies people see in their lives. Fans of the genre often have fond memories of their first "real" horror movies (mine being the Universal monster movies followed by Psycho), and the fact that horror movies are often watched on Halloween and/or late at night adds to their dreamy quality in our minds. Cuadecuc is a strange, lovely recollection of a mediocre Dracula movie, allowing the viewer to feel nostalgic for something they may have never personally experienced. Oddly enough, it's nostalgia made contemporaneously with its source, as if we needn't actually sit through Count Dracula to get to the good stuff. And though you may never fully be in the mood to watch Cuadecuc, vampir, it's short enough that you don't really have to be. For the benefit of mankind it's been uploaded to YouTube, so drift with it when you've got a spare 66 minutes and a hankering for cheap surrealism.
~PNK
Looped synths and smeary B&W photography beckon to us, playing out an early scene from the film with none of the original sound in place (and eventually no sound at all). Soon after the title flies out from the center of the screen, switching over to smooth 60's soundtrack orchestral jazz placed over a car driving through the countryside. A man with a crude fog machine. Bouts of tape collage experiments and semi-comprehensible Dracula moments. Christopher Lee giving us the finger. Fake spiderwebs. Clashes of soft-focus with sharp-focus via hueless exposures. Long stretches of total silence. These are the techniques by which director (later politician) Pere Portabella makes not only one of the best production documentaries ever made, but also his own Dracula adaptation as well as entrancing statements on artifice, meta-fiction, and collective memory. If you thought I was going to agree with the conventional criticisms of this work (which you are of course well-researched upon) and say that a documentary that deconstructs the filming of a bad horror movie is a metaphor for Gen. Franco's regime, then get ready for me to take some more interesting paths.
Rather than following the production schedule, Portabella orders the footage to follow Count Dracula's plot, encapsulating the story in gauzy silence. I'll save you from a plot description because you already know it. Everybody knows it, and fortunately for Portabella Franco doesn't stray too far from the novel that we'd miss serious elements of the story without sound. At the very least you can point at the screen and shout whenever Dracula appears, and I wouldn't want to deny you that small pleasure. It's fitting that a documentary on a Dracula movie also be Dracula itself; Stoker was no stranger to narrative layers. Keeping with the tradition of Gothic Horror, Dracula is told via journal entries, letters, and other types of records to give the illusion that the story was a real event, experienced and recorded by several people and compiled rather than authored by Stoker. Frankenstein also pulled this trick, and its effect is that of a found-footage movie (such as The Blair Witch Project), applying a veneer of stark realism to the supernatural. In the case of Cuadecuc, the veneer is that of a moldy, forgotten reel of film left in a closet in an asylum, or in the attic of an elder relative who had recently passed away, leaving you with their puzzling hobby-art.
If we allow for a meta-fiction route of analysis we can safely say that Cuadecuc turns the Dracula structure on its head. Whereas realist elements were added to Dracula to draw the reader into the world of the story, Cuadecuc uses realist elements to draw attention to how fake the whole thing is. The word Cuadecuc translates from the Spanish to "worm's tail," but importantly here also refers to the tail end of a reel of film. Jesús Franco's production foibles are frequently spotlighted, such as makeup sessions with cheesy music, that guy with the fog concoction, and a hilariously awful bat effect, as well as Franco's trademark zoom-heavy photography. And why shouldn't it? Franco stated publicly that he hated most of his movies, and their often-times rushed, lifeless productions end up reflecting that whether he liked it or not. There are few novels more dead-horsed into the public subconscious than Dracula, and so any attempt to make the story seem real is almost a moot point. Christopher Lee had already played the Count in two movies prior, and would go on to play him five more times, so why not wear sunglasses on set and flip the bird? Why not laugh and roll your eyes at the artifice of it all? Consider the last time you went to an elementary school production of the Nativity, and you'll understand that sometimes its okay to joke with tradition.
And for that matter, if Dracula is burned into our gray matter and need not repeating, why not play off that? A tried and true rule of fiction is that some things are more emotionally resonant when a certain amount of distance is woven into the storytelling, evoking rather than imposing, showing rather than telling. One of my favorite adaptations of Dracula is Jon Muth's gorgeous graphic novel Dracula: A Symphony in Moonlight and Nightmares. The plot remains the same as with Stoker, but the presentation splits the pages between lines of dialogue suspended in air with extraordinarily beautiful paintings depicting scenes and moods. Nothing is lost in translation. The disconnection allows the reader to see each half on their own terms and let them experience the power of Dracula with a certain degree of discovery. It's the simple effort of combining the words and the images in your head that gives a boost to your emotional reaction, as if you were the one who found out the true meaning and it's shouting down your door. With the smudgy, ambiguous footage and the largely nonsensical soundtrack, a little extra brainpower is required to glean a complete Dracula from Cuadecuc, seeming more like a distant memory than a sober experience. Consider this piece from the eccentric YouTube video artist Chriddof (and don't worry about watching all 9 minutes):
Technically all the footage is from Dooby Duck's Disco Bus but the effect is an opaque wash of imagery under a D-major drone. The frequent tape damage in the transfer only adds to the disconnection. In a previous upload of the video a comment appeared praising the video as being a perfect representation of nostalgia, consistent with a damaged old tape of a children's TV special. I'd like to posit that if asked, most people would have a memory of the first time they saw a Dracula movie and how old they were, as the 1931 version is often cited as one of the first horror movies people see in their lives. Fans of the genre often have fond memories of their first "real" horror movies (mine being the Universal monster movies followed by Psycho), and the fact that horror movies are often watched on Halloween and/or late at night adds to their dreamy quality in our minds. Cuadecuc is a strange, lovely recollection of a mediocre Dracula movie, allowing the viewer to feel nostalgic for something they may have never personally experienced. Oddly enough, it's nostalgia made contemporaneously with its source, as if we needn't actually sit through Count Dracula to get to the good stuff. And though you may never fully be in the mood to watch Cuadecuc, vampir, it's short enough that you don't really have to be. For the benefit of mankind it's been uploaded to YouTube, so drift with it when you've got a spare 66 minutes and a hankering for cheap surrealism.
~PNK
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