Remember in that post of mine about erotic horror-movie scenes, when I said that all erotic-horror roads for me lead back to the bathtub scene in The Shining? I take it back.
Why? Because Horror Roundtable participant Joakim Ziegler of Mexploitation reminded me of the sexual splendor that was Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
This film came out when I was 14 years old–and I could probably leave the explanation there, couldn’t I? But it was almost uncanny just how many of my nascent buttons this film, on retrospect, well and truly pushed.
In 1992, for young men of a certain outcast-type bent, there was no more attractive individual on Earth than Winona Ryder. So try to imagine what it was like to watch a film in which she depicted obsessive sexual abandon. In an English accent, no less.
And then, of course, they paired her Mina up with Sadie Frost’s Lucy.
I’m not sure if this film inaugurated pale brunettes and pale redheads as “my types” or simply confirmed them, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.
And oh, when I said they paired Winona and Sadie up, I meant they really paired them up.
In the rain.
Ah, lipstick lesbianism. What would an adolescent boy do without you? Though to be honest, I think that in this case I preferred Sadie solo.
Or with a vampire werewolf.
Say, did I mention my thing for pale brunettes and redheads?
One of whom was a young Monica Bellucci?
I’m making light of things in an effort to cut the jibberjabber and skip to the pretty pictures, but in all seriousness, I remember Bram Stroker’s Dracula as a powerfully, almost disconcertingly erotic film. In part it’s because the women involved perfectly lined up with the archetypes that, for whatever reason, I find attractive. But Coppola and his collaborators made much out of the occulted, transgressive sexuality of Stoker’s original–embellishing it to the point of camp and losing a good deal of the horror by literalizing it, sure, but that stuff was ripe for the picking. The lesbian kisses, the three-on-one vampire bride orgy, mind control, female-on-male penetration, S&M, semi-bestiality, male terror-arousal at the sight of a woman happily (mindlessly?) lost in sexual pleasure–it’s a hornily heady brew, and I lapped it up.