lil silver lake painting

from 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses, acrylic on paper, currently in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery

penny in vegas, acrylic on paper

#LaneyChantal, #drawing, #penandink

Frankensteining the Perfect Dracula

FRANKENSTEINING THE PERFECT DRACULA

We have all faced this dilemma:

-Dracula is cool -There is no Dracula movie that does not contain many things that are boring or stupid.

Yet: -A lot of Dracula movies have good parts. -The Dracula story is familiar

Therefore: -It’s probably possible to make a perfect Dracula movie by editing together clips from all the Dracula movies - - So what would we use?

Right off, we want to use a lot of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, sure. But every single man in that movie except Gary Oldman does a really bad job.

So, obviously we want Peter Cushing from the Hammer movies as Van Helsing as much as we can get.

Once Dracula gets to England, we’re gonna want some Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, and maybe some Frank Langella Draculas. We definitely need as many of Miriam Giovanelli’s scenes from Dario Argento’s Dracula as we can get.

Also I think we could jam some of Castlevania and the recent gay british Dracula in there and I hear good things about the 1931 Spanish version of Dracula that was shot on the same sets and at the same time as the Lugosi one, but I haven’t seen it all the way through.

Can we fit Herzog's Nosferatu in here? It is already a perfect movie but how much of it can be repurposed as Dracula?

So here are the minimum scenes you’d need for a perfect Dracula. If you got ideas for which Dracula does which scene best, let me know:

1. Jonathan Harker, English real estate rube, goes to Transylvania to try to close a deal and meets Transylvanian villagers who warn him about Dracula

2. Harker approaches castle Dracula.

3. Dracula invites him in.

4. Dracula is creepy to Harker in his castle in a number of scenes.

5. Dracula tells him he can’t leave at some point.

6. Harker meets the three hot brides of Dracula.

7. Meanwhile, in England, Harker’s fiancee Mina frets about Harker being away.

8. Mina’s friend Lucy is dealing with 3 suitors: Dr John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and the American, Quincey Morris.

9. Lucy wants to be poly, but its 1897, so she chooses Holmwood.

10. Dracula’s put on a ship bound for the UK and kills everyone on it.

11. The ship wrecks in England.

12. Lucy begins acting weird, as if, say, a vampire is draining her blood at night

13. Dr Seward contacts his teacher, Professor Van Helsing.

14. Harker gets back with the rest of the cast in one way or another.

15. Van Helsing is like “What you got here? That’s a vampire”.

16. Something goes wrong and the anti-vampire precautions he proposes are ignored or reversed.

17. Lucy is killed by Dracula in wolf form or some other way.

18. Van Helsing and crew go to Lucy’s tomb, she’s eating a baby, they stake her.

19. The entire human cast gets together and is like We Gotta Kill Dracula

20. Meanwhile Renfield, one of Dr Seward’s mental patients who has been under Dracula’s spell this whole time, helps Dracula attack Mina.

21. Mina is turning into a vampire. Oh no!

22. The stakes (no pun intended) then having been established, action ensues as Harker, Van Helsing, Seward, and the two disposable male cast members chase Dracula down wherever he is and kill him.

That’s only 22 scenes, and I’d say Coppola alone could handle scenes 2-6 and 18, no problem. Probably one of the Hammer movies handles the actually killing of Dracula best, though the non-Dracula scenes in those movies are soooooo slow I don’t have the heart to rewatch them and see.

That leaves about 16 scenes. I’m all ears.

if you have game questions, email me: zakzsmith AT hawtmyale dawt calm .

After I did that book I eventually went hunting for another--but I found that even though I had many other favorites, very few of them were told in that hallucinatory way where you _really want_ to see visually what the author has already painted in words. Or, more specifically--ones where pictures on every page would be adding something rather than limiting the text. I looked at Nabokov: wonderful writing but any honest illustrations would be page on page of talking heads. There's that great Martin Amis passage in "The Information" about genres of hangover--the western hangover, the comedy hangover, the horror hangover--nothing anyone could draw would make that better, it would just nail it down to a certain style or mood that the segment actually benefits from not being nailed to. If I have time I might eventually do M John Harrison's "Empty Space"--which is an obscure choice, but it is written in such a way where the words form their own universe, that would not be hurt by a variety of visual takes. And it's a great book.

I don't know how much time I have.

One way to do it is to do the black underpainting very sloppily, just glop it on there, with a lumpy mixture of paint and water. Then when you paint over it in colors, paint thin. The thin paint will sink in the cracks unevenly and make texture.

Oh that's very hard. I like Bob Pepper's album covers a lot.

for game questions, email zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm

If you're in Los Angeles--bring a Chris or just watch and vote!