Coppola did a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the book, including how god damn weird it is, and pretty much respected the story.
Gota disagree with the second half of this. Yes, he captured how weird the novel is, but didn't really respect the story.
The novel is NOT a romance. At all. No where is Dracula a sympathetic character. He's a horrible, ugly, beast of what once was a man. You never feel sorry for Dracula in the novel. You hate him.
Watching the bonus features on the special edition DVD, it offends me that everyone involved with the film(notably Coppola and James V. Hart) were convinced that they made THE faithful version of Dracula. They were also very convinced that the novel was a romance. It's not. Where i'm not sure of the whole thing, on the special features James V. Hart said that Dracula's been alive for 800 years and that it must be very depressing and lonely. And Dracula finally feels the need to love. And that's wrong. Why does he have to be lonely and depressed? The book says in life that he was an evil man. So now he's alive for 800 years. Why can't he decide to be hateful and destroy?
They also ruin the character of Lucy. In the novel, she's a sweet, shy, timid, lovely young woman, who actually doesn't really know how to handle the fact that 3 men are madly in love with her. And when she dies and becomes a vampire, it's devestating. She becomes the complete opposite of what she was in life: Sexual, animalistic, violent. In the film, Hart and Coppola turn her into (more or less) a ****e, who isn't really likable. She plays games around each man who loves her, and would seemingly want to marry all three of the men just so she could have one giant orgy. And when she becomes a vampire, she becomes the same kind of person she was in life, albeit an extreme version: no one really likable.
and in my opinion, if you screw with that, you screw up the story, and when yous screw up the story, you're not being respectful to the story.
