I spent some time last week with a fictional prince and a fictional Count, each of whom wears an inky cloak and is (in his own way) preoccupied with death and the afterlife. Each has also had many notable cinematic avatars, though it would have to be a genre-bender of a movie - a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, perhaps - that would have speaking roles for both Dracula and Hamlet.
First, Vishal Bhardwaj's excellent Haider (a.k.a. Hamlet in Kashmir) gave me an excuse to revisit Shakespeare's play as well as earlier movie versions of it, such as Laurence Olivier's 1948 Oscar winner (with the camera winding through a castle's nooks and crannies, almost as if it were standing in for the old king's ghost), and the lavish, four-hour-long version made by Kenneth Branagh in 1996. ("Lavish" is an understatement, really: so comprehensive and detail-heavy is Branagh's film that it even cast the legendary John Gielgud - 92 years old at the time - in a one-minute part as the Trojan king Priam, during a dramatisation of the Player King's speech!)
Around the same time, I was also reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, which led me back to some of my favourite vampire movies, including the silent classic Nosferatu (featuring a repulsive, rodent-like Dracula) and Roman Polanski's goofy Fearless Vampire Killers; or, Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in My Neck, about the misadventures of an old professor and his wide-eyed assistant as they bumble their way around Transylvania. Along the way I couldn't help noting the little connections between Shakespeare's prince of melancholia and Stoker's Prince of Darkness. Hamlet's "dread of something after death - the undiscovered country" is well-known. His father is technically undead, just as any self-respecting vampire would be. And take the scene with the grave-digger, culminating in our hero's near-dash into the open grave meant for Ophelia: which famous coffin-dweller does that remind you of?
More From This Section
To an extent, this is also true of Stoker's novel. Dracula doesn't have the literary stature that Hamlet does, but it's a bloody good book, pun unintended - brilliantly constructed and paced. And for me, it was a revelation: after years of watching horror films, I knew characters like Dr Van Helsing and Renfield so well that it came as an atavistic pleasure to meet them in their "original" form. Despite all the familiar things in it, the book was still full of little discoveries: I hadn't realised, for instance, that the line "Listen to them, the children of the night - what music they make!", so memorably spoken by Bela Lugosi in the famous 1931 film version, was originally from the novel. Or that Renfield, whom I had thought of for years as a caricatured henchman, was a more fleshed out character in the book.
It is often pointed out that cinema doesn't permit the power of imagination to flourish in the same way that literature does, because when you adapt a book for the screen you are giving the viewer a single, fixed representation of characters and incidents. But this view doesn't quite account for the books that have been filmed many times, in varied ways, as Dracula and Hamlet have been. On the banquet table hosting all those films, you can have many Haiders feasting alongside many Nosferatus; you're spoiled for choice.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
