Anno Dracula (38 page)

HARKER: What did I say?

The INN-KEEPER crosses himself. The peasants mutter.

HARKER: Was it the place? Was it [relishing each syllable] Castle Dra-cu-la?

More muttering and crossing. Harker shrugs and continues with his meal. Without a cut, the camera pans around the cramped interior, to find MINA, Harker’s new wife, in the doorway. She is huge-eyed and tremulous, more impressed by ‘native superstitions’ than her husband, but with an inner steel core which will become apparent as Jonathan’s outward bluff crumbles. Zither and fiddle music conveys the bustle of this border community.

MINA: Jonathan dear, come on. The coach.

Jonathan flashes a smile, showing teeth that wouldn’t shame a vampire. Mina doesn’t see the beginnings of his viperish second face, but smiles indulgently, hesitant. Jonathan pushes away his plate and stands, displacing children and animals. He joins Mina and they leave, followed by our snake-like camera, which almost jostles them as they emerge into the twilight. Some of the crowd hold aloft flaming torches, which make shadow-featured flickering masks of the worn peasant faces. Jonathan, hefting a heavy bag, and Mina, fluttering at every distraction, walk across the village square to a waiting COACH. Standing in their path, a crow-black figure centre-frame, is the Village Woman, eyes wet with fear, crucifix shining. She bars the Harkers’ way, like the Ancient Mariner, and extends the crucifix.

VILLAGE WOMAN: If you must go, wear this. Wear it for your mother’s sake. It will protect you.

Jonathan bristles, but Mina defuses the situation by taking the cross.

MINA: Thank you. Thank you very much.

The Woman crosses herself, kisses Mina’s cheek, and departs. Jonathan gives an eyebrows-raised grimace, and Mina shrugs, placatory.

COACHMAN: All aboard for Borgo Pass, Visaria and Klausenburg.

We get into the coach with the Harkers, who displace a fat MERCHANT and his ‘secretary’ ZITA, and the camera gets comfortable opposite them. They exchange looks, and Mina holds Jonathan’s hand. The Coach lurches and moves off - it is vital that the camera remain fixed on the Harkers to cover the progress from one sound stage to the next, with the illusion of travel maintained by the projection of reflected Transylvanian mountain road scenery onto the window. We have time to notice that the Merchant and Zita are wary of the Harkers; he is middle-aged and balding, and she is a flashy blonde. The coach stops.

COACHMAN (v.o.): Borgo Pass.

JONATHAN: Mina, here’s our stop.

MERCHANT: Here?

MINA (proud): A carriage is meeting us here, at midnight. A nobleman’s.

MERCHANT: Whose carriage?

JONATHAN: Count Dracula’s.

Jonathan, who knows the effect it will have, says the name with defiance and mad eyes. The Merchant is terror-struck, and Zita hisses like a cat, shrinking against him. The Harkers, and the camera, get out of the coach, which hurries off, the Coachman whipping the horses to make a quick getaway. We are alone in a mountain pass, high above the Carpathians. Night-sounds: wolves, the wind, bats. The full moon seems for a moment to have eyes, DRACULA’s hooded eyes.

JONATHAN (pointing): You can see the castle.

MINA: It looks so... desolate, lonely.

JONATHAN: No wonder the Count wants to move to London. He must be raging with cabin fever, probably ready to tear his family apart and chew their bones. Like Sawney Beane.

MINA: The Count has a family?

JONATHAN (delighted): Three wives. Like a Sultan. Imagine how that’ll go down in Piccadilly.

Silently, with no hoof- or wheel-sounds, a carriage appears, the DRIVER a black, faceless shape. The Harkers climb in, but this time the camera rises to the top of the coach, where the Driver has vanished. We hover as the carriage moves off, a LARGE BAT flapping purposefully over the lead horses, and trundles along a narrow, vertiginous mountain road towards the castle. We swoop ahead of the carriage, becoming the eyes of the Bat, and take a flying detour from the road, allowing us a false perspective view of the miniature landscape to either side of the full-size road and carriage, passing beyond the thick rows of pines to a whited scrape in the hillside that the Harkers do not see, an apparent chalk quarry which we realise consists of a strew of complete human skeletons in agonised postures, skulls and rib-cages broken, the remains of thousands and thousands of murdered men, women, children and babies. Here and there, skeletons of armoured horses and creatures between wolf or lion and man. This gruesome landscape passes under us and we close on CASTLE DRACULA, a miniature constructed to allow our nimble camera to close on the highest tower and pass down a stone spiral stairway that affords covert access to the next stage...

...and the resting chamber of Dracula and his BRIDES. We stalk through a curtain of cobweb, which parts unharmed, and observe as the three shroud-clad Brides rise from their boxes, flitting about before us. Two are dark and feral, one is blonde and waif-like. We have become Dracula and stalk through the corridors of his castle, brassbound oaken doors opening before us. Footsteps do not echo and we pass mirrors that reveal nothing — reversed sets under glass, so as not to catch our crew — but a spindle-fingered, almost animate shadow is cast, impossibly long arms reaching out, pointed head with bat-flared ears momentarily sharp against a tapestry. We move faster and faster through the Castle, coming out into the great HALLWAY at the very top of a wide staircase. Very small, at the bottom of the steps, stand Jonathan and Mina, beside their luggage. Sedately, we fix on them and move downwards, our cloaked shadow contracting. As we near the couple, we see their faces: Jonathan awe-struck, almost in love at first sight, ready to become our slave, Mina horrified, afraid for her husband, but almost on the point of pity. The music, which has passed from lusty human strings to ethereal Theremin themes, swells, conveying the ancient, corrupt, magical soul of Dracula. We pause on the steps, six feet above the Harkers, then leap forwards as Mina holds up the crucifix, whose blinding light fills the frame. The music climaxes, a sacred choral theme battling the eerie Theremin.

2: CU on the ancient face, points of red in the eyes, hair and moustaches shocks of pure white, pulling back to show the whole stick-thin frame wrapped in unrelieved black.

THE COUNT: I... am... Dracula.

The Other Side of Midnight Cast and Credits, as of January 1981

Production Company: Mercury Productions. Distributor: Miracle Pictures. Executive Producer: John Alucard. Producer: Orson Welles. Director: Orson Welles. Script: Orson Welles. From the novel by Bram Stoker. Director of Photography: Gary Graver. Production Designer: Ken Adam. Special Make-Up Effects: Rick Baker. Optical Effects: ILM. Music: John Williams.

Jack Nicholson (Jonathan Harker), Richard Gere (Arthur Holmwood), Orson Welles (Van Helsing/Swales), Shelley Duvall (Mina), Susan Sarandon (Lucy), Cameron Mitchell (Renfield), Dennis Hopper (Quincey), Jason Robards (Dr Seward), Joseph Cotten (Mr Hawkins), Jeanne Moreau (Peasant Woman), Anjelica Huston, Marie-France Pisier, Kathleen Turner (Vampire Brides), John Huston (The Count).

Welles had rewritten the first scenes - the first
shot
- of the film to make full use of a new gadget called a Louma Crane, which gave the camera enormous mobility and suppleness. Combined with breakaway sets and dark passages between stages, the device meant that he could open
The Other Side of Midnight
with a single tracking shot longer and more elaborate than the one he had pulled off in
Touch of Evil.

Geneviève found Welles and his cinematographer on the road to Borgo Pass, a full-sized mock-up dirt track complete with wheelruts and milestones. The night-black carriage, as yet not equipped with a team of horses, stood on its marks, the crest of Dracula on its polished doors. To either side were forests, the nearest trees half life-size and those beyond getting smaller and smaller as they stretched out to the studio backdrop of a Carpathian night. Up ahead was Dracula’s castle, a nine-foot-tall edifice, currently being sprayed by a technician who seemed like the Colossal Man, griming and fogging the battlements.

The two men were debating a potentially thorny moment in the shot when the camera would be detached from the coach and picked up by an aerial rig. Hanging from the ceiling was a contraption that looked like a Wright Brothers-Georges Méliès collaboration, a man-shaped flying frame with a camera hooked onto it, and a dauntless operator inside.

She hated to think what all this was costing.

Welles saw her, and grinned broadly.

‘Gené, Gené,’ he welcomed her. ‘You must see this cunning bit of business. Even if I do say so myself, it’s an absolute stroke of genius. A simple solution to a complex problem. When
Midnight
comes out, they’ll all wonder how I did it.’

He chuckled.

‘Orson,’ she said, ‘we have to talk. I’ve found some things out. As you asked. About Mr Alucard.’

He took that aboard. He must have a thousand and one mammoth and tiny matters to see to, but one more could be accommodated. That was part of his skill as a director, being a master strategist as well as a visionary artist.

She almost hated to tell him.

‘Where can we talk in private?’ she asked.

‘In the coach,’ he said, standing aside to let her step up.

The prop coach, as detailed inside as out, creaked a lot as Welles shifted his weight. She wondered if the springs could take it.

She had laid out the whole thing.

She still didn’t know who John Alucard was, though she supposed him some self-styled last disciple of the King Vampire, but she told Welles what she thought he was up to.

‘He doesn’t want a conjurer,’ Welles concluded, ‘but a sorcerer, a magician.’

Geneviève remembered Welles had played Faustus on stage.

‘Alucard needs a genius, Orson,’ she said, trying to be a comfort.

Welles’s great brows knit in a frown. This was too great a thing to get even his mind around.

He asked the forty-thousand-dollar question: ‘And do you believe it will work? This conjuring of Dracula?’

She dodged it. ‘John Alucard does.’

‘Of that I have no doubt, no doubt at all,’ rumbled Welles. ‘The colossal conceit of it, the enormity of the conception, boggles belief. All this, after so long, all this can be mine, a real chance to, as the young people so aptly say, do my thing. And it’s part of a Black Mass. A film to raise the Devil Himself. No mere charlatan could devise such a warped, intricate scheme.’

With that, she had to agree.

‘If Alucard is wrong, if magic doesn’t work, then there’s no harm in taking his money and making my movie. That would truly be beating the Devil.’

‘But if he’s right...’

‘Then I, Orson Welles, would not merely be Faustus, nor even Prometheus, I would be Pandora, unloosing all the ills of the world to reign anew. I would be the father-in-darkness of a veritable Bright Lucifer.’

‘It could be worse. You could be cloning Hitler.’

Welles shook his head.

‘And it’s my decision,’ he said, wearily. Then he laughed, so loud that the interior of the prop carriage shook as with a thunderbolt from Zeus.

She didn’t envy the genius his choice. After such great beginnings, no artist of the twentieth century had been thwarted so consistently and so often. Everything he had made, even
Kane,
was compromised as soon as it left his mind and ventured into the marketplace. Dozens of unfinished or unmade films, unstaged theatrical productions, projects stolen away and botched by lesser talents, often with Welles still around as a cameo player to see the potential squandered. And here, at the end of his career, was the chance to claw everything back, to make good on his promise, to be a Boy Wonder again, to prove at last that he was the King of his World.

And against that, a touch of brimstone. Something she didn’t even necessarily believe.

Great tears emerged from Welles’s clear eyes and trickled into his beard. Tears of laughter.

There was a tap at the coach door.

‘All ready on the set now, Mr Welles,’ said an assistant.