Dracula

I very much enjoyed the version of Dracula that the BBC screened over the Christmas holiday and I also watched a documentary that Mark Gatiss made on this history of the Dracula story. As a slight digression it was also a surprise to find that one of the supposedly Transylvanian locations was actually pretty close to where we live, i.e. at Mottisfont Abbey:
Dracula filmed at Mottisfont Abbey
I’d grown up watching the Hammer versions and I’d seen the Bela Lugosi version in a late night double bill but I’d never seen the FW Murnau silent version (which he called Nosferatu but which was essentially the Dracula story and I understand that m’learned friends had a few exchange about copyright infringement). As a result of this I subsequently watched both Nosferatu and the 1979 remake with Klaus Kinski as Dracula.

However it was only after seeing recent news reports about the number of deaths from the Coronavirus that I began to seethe parallels with Murnau's film (which on this point departs quite markedly from Stoker's novel). In Nosferatu the ship carrying Count Orlok (ie Dracula) also delivers plague-infested rats to Wisborg and as the local inhabitants succumb there are shots of lines of coffins being carried through the streets:



The 1979 remake by Werner Herzog, with Klaus Kinski as Dracula, gave more emphasis to the effects of the plague:

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