Dracula reboot described as faithful yet different.

Another Dracula? Heaven help us.

If they have to do it, they should do a faithful adaptation of the book. Not just “fairly faithful.” In other words:

Mina/Lucy is not Dracula’s lost love. Dracula is an old man with horrible breath and a long mustache who progressively becomes younger. Harker gradually releases he is becoming a prisoner. Dracula’s wives eat a baby, and when the young mother comes looking for her child she’s eaten by wolves (one of the scariest scenes in the book, and not in any of the adaptations, as far as I remember). Dracula crawls down the walls of his castle like a lizard. Dracula is not romantic, or (anti)heroic, in the slightest; he’s an out and out baddy. Mina and Lucy drink Dracula’s blood in a perverse parody of the Christian Eucharist. Dracula attacks Lucy among the graves in Whitby. The climax is an exciting chase back to Transylvania, with Mina gradually becoming a vampire. Lucy had three suitors—Seward, Holmwood, Morris—and Quincey Morris plunges the knife into Dracula and dies.

Now, the Coppola version had many of these things, but it also had that inexplicable and hilarious romance subplot, and Keanu Reeves ruined every scene he was in.

While I’m usually far from an adaptation stickler, it’s remarkable that we’ve never had a faithful cinematic adaptation of the book. The closest is the 1970s BBC miniseries, which is probably the best Dracula adaptation we have, but that wasn’t a movie. And the book is excellent—intelligent, exciting, scary, well-written, and (making the infidelity to source material even more mysterious) cinematic.

So at this point “different” really would mean being faithful to the original book. Hoping that’s what Kusama means—but at this point I can’t get my hopes up.