Dracula Di Dario Argento [Italian Import] [DVD]

When Johnathan Harker finds work in the library of Count Dracula's castle, his young bride Mina sets out to join him, and stops at her friend Lucy's house. Here she discovers a country shocked by the barbaric killing of a girl, attacked by a wolf, and she has to postpone the meeting with her husband because Lucy falls ill with an inexplicable fever and eventually dies. After meeting the count and being seduced by his extraordinary power of persuasion, Mina is increasingly suspicious of the strange happenings of the place and relies on the only person who seems to know what to do: Abraham Van Helsing, an expert on vampires. For him and his family, over the centuries, books have always been the most important thing: this is what Argento makes Dracula say, at his first meeting with Johnathan, and this is the bridge he launches with Bram Stoker's book, at the same time betraying him (in the original Mister Harker is an agent in charge of a real estate transaction) and yet recovering the characters and part of the plot. By choosing to eliminate the many journeys of the literary protagonists to concentrate on a single place, the director designs a small and successful universe of reference, between the fairytale (the forest) and the western (the mayor's house, the tavern), over which he dominates , geographically and not only, the Gothic represented by the castle.