Here Be Vampires!

[flippyshark]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Vampire movies, maybe. But Dracula has been a romance story since at least the 1930's.

Lugosi certainly made Dracula a more handsome devil, charming yes, but romantic? He's still all "sneak-in-bite-your-neck-while-you-sleep." His victim(s) go from Victorian prim to slightly immodest and sorta alluringly predatory, but they don't seem to fall in love. The moral center of the story is "we've got to save her," as opposed to the later "we don't get to choose who we fall in love with" angle.

Christopher Lee's bosomy victims were his slaves after they had made the transition, but none of them, to my memory, went through the "isn't he a heart-throb" phase.

Frank Langella (in the 1979 movie) strikes me as the first "cue the violins, it's true love" Dracula. Here, the romance is clearly completely reciprocal, as opposed to merely bait for a trap. We're meant to root for the vamp and his new bride at the end, and see the vampire hunters as short-sighted fools, unworthy of our broadminded heroine. It's a shame that the final scene of that film is botched so badly, because they came so close to achieving something tragic and lovely.