her immediately launching into a run across the table and yanking down the shades, reminds me immediately of the scene from Cinderella III where Charming jumps out the window literal cartoon shit

This is such a distinctly Moffat/Gatiss show, striving for gravitas but constantly undercut by needlessly quippy dialogue

The twist at the end of episode two made me flip my fucking shit. I cant BELIEVE that Moffat can't write a show thats only 3 episodes long and DOESNT include dragging classic literature characters into the fucking 21rst century

dracula adaptations will tell every story but dracula and i respect that

I’m gonna watch this show just for the massive amount of candelabras in it

some goth dude living alone in a huge castle sounds fruity as hell, there is no way any of these shows can see the dedication to the aesthetic and think this guy is straight. gay as hell to be a vampire, whose blood are you drinking? mens?

yk knowing that this was made by the same guys who did sherlock just makes so much sense it feels so much like seasons 3 and 4 of the show where there will be awesome scenes with really good pay off like the cabin 9 scene and then the rest of show is just a mess

Dracula doesnt die from sunlight in the novel either & he can climb walls in there too.

Many of those phrases you had a problem with were directly lifted from the novel. Dracula has always been cheesy lol The beggining of the show is one of the most faithful adaptation there has been (at least on some details), and then it derails so much I have no idea what the hell is happening.

This show has inspired me to write way better vampire fiction

Wtf O neg is universally compatible across humans that's the best blood type *TO HAVE*

Not gonna lie, I genuinely liked the first two episodes of this series despite their faults, I thought Agatha’s character was a stellar take on Van Helsing. The scene where she meets Dracula at the gates lives in my head rent free; I saw really good potential between the two characters there. But that last episode kinda ruined it all for me, it could’ve been so much more than what it was

Shit on episode 3 all you want. But his speech about the house and how amazing it is ending with " I knew the future would bring wonders.. I didn't think it would make then ordinary" Was fucking awesome. Whoever wrote that line , I hope they are getting superb head

The drop of quality in this was outstanding. Dracula fidgeting on a tablet was not something I ever needed to see. The curtain scene is a nod to 'Horror of Dracula' (1958) by the way, you don't have to make sense when you have fan service. And you're right, I SHOULD be watching 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace' instead! 👉👈

I think this show was flawed, but Dracula was hot (or got hot) so I stuck with it. I’m a simple man.

6:12 is genuinely the funniest sequence from any video essay i’ve watched

it's kinda funny, i remember watching this show when it first came out. i really love it (except episode 3) and honestly didn't notice how poorly it was put together because i understood a lot of the references they were trying to make to the book and to history. like when Lucy was proposed to, that was a reference to the book because the book's character was proposed to by 3 different guys. and the graveyard date scene when he's talking about corpses that are still alive, the writers are referencing how historically people might fall under a coma and accidentally get buried alive, it's where the idea of the undead came from because they'd wake up and freak out in their coffin, so people ended up putting a bell system in case people got buried alive. and that scene where the lawyer ate a fly and was writing that he worshiped Dracula was referencing a character in the book that was one of his experiments after he moved to London. the differences between the the book and show are quite interesting to me though, and it's cool to see your perspective of it, I never would've realized these flaws without watching this.

One of these days I just want to see a completely faithful adaptation of the book. I liked the psychological horror in the beginning, zombies and vampire babies aren't scary

Not netflix. BBC Dracula 💀 written by Moffat and Gatiss from BBC Sherlock

The I didn't even know there was a Netflix Dracula, def gonna try it out now

Holy whit, I binged the entire show when it first came out but I totally forgot about it lol. Didn’t realize it went THAT off the rails.

the only “modern day vampires” trope I’ve liked is what we do in the shadows bc it’s not trying to be serious.

I will say there's a good reason "skinny white dude"/Jonathan Harker is there. He's supposed to be the protagonist, or at least he was in the book, so almost all Dracula adaptations have him

I agree totally with your review However, for some of the issues you mentioned. The spiderman thing, in the book he's observed crawling down the side of his castle like a lizard. Sinking the ship is to sink the 50 boxes of earth. He has to return to the soil he was buried in to gain his power. If the soil is sunk far off coast he can't access it. A point they forget kinda quickly. Also in the book he's not allergic to sunlight. He's seen out in the day stalking victims. His abilties are really vague in the book because his abilities aren't really defined as much as they're just things he's seen doing. I think Mark Gatiss was trying to pull apart the lore in the book and challenge it based on that. By far the best bit of episode 3 is Dracula in the house being surprised by a TV, electricity, etc.

Giving that the girl's name was Lucy Westenra I'm guessing one of those boys was named Arthur, really feels like fan fiction

The female vampire not being freaked out by the crucifix… Is that what they call an Easter egg? Dracula said that he was afraid of the cross because everyone he ate for centuries felt the same way. From the dialogue between Harker and the vampire woman, it sounds like count Dracula only fed her babies, and so she never learned anything or became more educated through the blood. She could’ve eaten. After all babies are little sponges, they’re learning everything but they’re not gonna teach her a foreign language or science. Dracula kept her helpless and ignorant. I’m wondering what his big deal was about having a bride. He said Harker could be his bride, but the Director of the Dracula sitcom made a very good point about Dracula’s so-called bisexuality. When you or I eat a hamburger, we’re not thinking about whether the meat was a cow or a bull …It’s just meat. But Agatha Van Helsing immediately asked Harker if he had had sexual intercourse with Dracula, so that leads me to believe that Dracula does have sex, or can have sex and maybe he’s not particular about which sex he goes for. So that lets credence to the bisexuality idea. But is it really sexual interest or is it just another way for the vampire to make his meat taste different? Dracula did mention to one of the deckhands that being startled spoils the flavor. Maybe sex makes the blood taste better? Who knows.

The modern "engaged girl" is Lucy and Lucy was a character from Dracula's novel but they did her dirty.

I’d wondered if this show was also terrible to anyone who wasn’t super familiar with the original book. When you are, it’s so grating and obnoxious. Lucy, aka Engaged Girl, is a symbol for the youth and innocence Dracula destroys. Skinny white guy and the fiancée are actually heroes who try to save a Lucy through blood transfusions before they end up needing to kill her. And taking down Dracula requires a group effort even while he’s asleep. OG Dracula wouldn’t be done in with a single yank of the curtains. But above all else, this show did Mina dirty. She is a powerhouse in the original and carries the men through the mystery they can’t solve. And here they give her 5 minutes of screen time then she’s gone.

The third episode almost killed me with boredom.

I don't know why, but I feel like writing a novel feautring a vampire or twelve.

My ex put this on one night as we were falling asleep while I was sick and until now I would have sworn the “Dracula under a spotlight” scene was just a fever dream.

I’m sure someone else has said this in the comments but the deal with sinking the boat to prevent Dracula is another old lore facts about vampires that they can’t cross running water and you could argue the ocean isn’t running water but it does have currents so I think that’s what they’re getting at.

Liked it at the start but kept watching and was like: ??????? TF?! So I'm glad i'm not the only person who suffered ABSOLUTE CONFUSION

I wish it was just a straight adaptation of the book

To anyone that’s read the book, the “smiles” Dracula kept giving in the series..is that an accurate portrayal of Count Dracula? I for one loved the first two episodes…I could’ve done without the third..maybe they changed writers on that third episode.

I loved Dracula. The two main actors were very charismatic.

I know the 1992 “Dracula” has some cheese moments, but at least that adaptation was little more faithful to the book! Why does Sister Agatha Van Helsing have more screen time than Lucy or Mina?

tysm for reminding me that castlevania exists

32:38 It has nothing to do with "their DNA matching". You know that Dracula can acquire thoughts and memories from blood. Dracula drank Agatha Van Helsings blood so he has her memories and thoughts within his mind now. Zooey infected herself with the vampire "virus" or "curse", and at the same time, also ingested his blood. This gave her access to the memories and thoughts from Agatha. The scene of Agatha and Zooey comminicating is an artistic abstract representation of Zooey's mind reconciling the thoughts and memories of Agatha with her own. You are watching this show and taking everything at face value and literally. This is why you dont understand so much of what is going on. You seem to forget that you are observing an artform. And you are watching it like a documentary.

The first and second episode are really enjoyable and quite tense, I don’t know what happened with eps 3? Maybe the writers all had a aneurysm simultaneously…

Nah nah nah. This title got it all wrong. See Dracula don't suck he scrape and lick.

i know it’s a nitpick but at 8:44 you could NOT tell that she’s from holland from that accent. it always breaks my immersion to hear terrible dutch accents, they can’t be that hard to do, right?

The our god edit is iconic

I watched this so long ago and made it to Lucy and Dracula in the graveyard. I'm not very good at being critical on a first viewing but the first two eps got outlandish and I stuck around for the cinematography. The third ep was boring and now I see the plot holes just got too big.

This show is the cheesiest cheese. I occasionally enjoyed it because of this but many parts were so cringe. Lucy Westenra burned to a crisp and being like "kiss me 👹" was so built up and dragged out for literally no reason other than ick factor I guess.

As a Dracula and vampire enjoyer the story and the lore of this bothers me so hard like dude vampire lore is so fucking cool and you can find so many fun loopholes and variants that’s the fun with it its not hard to make something new and exciting with the base lore of it all like why make it so damn boring??

Wait, how was she playing chess with him after the boat, if she died on the boat?

As expected of another Steven Moffat adaptation

watching this after Dracula Daily is so weird

A lot of the ideas from this show seem really interesting, they would have been fantastic if they had a better execution or were just in a different vampire story

Dracula just does what he wants and fucks around he doesnt need a plan

The graveyard scene was very effective if my mother's reaction was anything to go by. Apparently there are many old-timey rumors/superstitions that are essentially all that graveyard scene stuff.

I gotta say I loved this series. I know that’s not a popular opinion. I’ve watched twice. The cheesy dialogue never bothered me. I never thought about Sister Agatha thinking it was the cross, not the sun, that hurt Dracula. That is pretty silly in retrospect. However, Sister Agatha and Dracula’s chemistry and back and forth just saves the show for me. They make episodes one and two really enjoyable. Episode three is a mess in my opinion but still bearable because of their acting. The subplot is garbage IMO. All in all, a little cheesy but so worth watching if even just for the first two episodes.

18:55. If you’ve seen RalphtheMovieMaker before, he did an awesomely hilarious review of the movie “The Bye Bye Man” that I love, and he shows how they use a sort of sideways distortion effect like that. It doesn’t look good here either. Like it looks like a distortion effect instead of something supernatural or psychological, which is what I’m guessing they were going for.

this was so good i hope you do more series recaps and reviews like this

I really liked Agatha so much in the first episode, but then she got annoying, also Mina was great, and they axed her, Also I was hoping Harker and Dracula would get together (I just wanted them to kiss, even when I was reading the book)

Stoker's descendants murdered Nosferatu for this. What a lonely life that must be

the scene where lucy approaches white dude and he looks like 8 mile

Right with all of it, I couldn’t put my hands on it. You’ve explained it perfectly!

I actually quite liked this version of the story. Ive never seen a dracula movie, show, or series and been blown away. The best ive seen is the castelvania animated series. But dracula is kind of like robin hood, not quite defined to a T, so pretty much anything goes when adapting the tale. However, the ending kind of does make sense, as it establishes him as more human than monster. That is gleamed somewhat during the chess game they play in the second episode where he genuinely enjoys her company. He seems to like that she isnt afraid of him, that she in fact wants to know what he is, and how he works. You know, kind of acknowledging that he is more than a beast to be feared. Subverting the story tropes of sunlight, crosses, and being invited in is honestly fine with me, because they never really made sense in the first place. I mean, a powerful human eater cant break into your house? A crackhead can break into your house, and will! So to me, destroying those plot devices are fine, especially when done by someone who actively studied him and wanted to know why these stupid tropes existed in the first place. And maybe when she finally revealed to him that she knows who he is, and understands him on a level deeper than "aaahh a monster, run" he finally accepts that he doesnt need to be a monster anymore and chooses to die with the only person who gave even the slightest damn about him. Maybe thats not what the show is about, but thats how i percieved it and thats how i choose to think of it. I do concede that the dialogue is sometimes cringy, and horrid. The third episode is pretty not good also. The pacing is off sometimes, as with almost every single dracula movie ever, its just hard to write an all powerful vampire not doing what he should be doing, even though you know he has the power to do it. But all in all, i think the show was good, and thats just my two cents.

Loved that Garth Marenghi shout out. Love your work.

The FFVII soundtrack and darkplace splices are really what make this video extra special for me.

Best recap ever thank you for this. I couldn’t have reviewed this better…I’m subscribed💯💯💯

Thank u sm This was on my watch list cause it seemed interesting but I was also skeptical. Thanks for saving me time lmao

Dracula being the voice of the peoples fear of the church would be so sexxyyyyyy

I really liked this mini series. I thought it was clever and original and seductive. I watched it a few times… not just once. Just goes to show you that an opinion is just an opinion. It was fantastic.

Skinny white dude is John Seward

Thank you because I watched the first 2 episodes and didnt have the energy to watch the rest

in between the "I'm so conf-- what??"-s, the Marenghi stuff... bless you for that. any Darkplace reference endears a person to me forever 😄

So episode 2 is just a protracted version of the final arc of Jojo part 1?

I hear sly cooper's music from mugshot's world :) EXTRA happy to follow this channel now!

the persona music made me double take at the 33 minute mark hahahaha--ethan are you...a GAMER??

Just found out you're Nick's editor, badass. Anyway, the show mostly sucked, I can't believe more folks haven't made videos about it. I thought the gal who played Agatha was freakin' awesome, and I'm in love with Claes Bang (seriously, I have a problem) so it says something that I mostly really disliked the show.

Ngl, at first I thought you meant Castlevania and was like "Wait, that's really good though."

The clip from Darkplace earned you a sub 😁👍

The”skinny white dude” is Adrian from “kiss me first” in case anyone didn’t know..

cackling at the christian dance mix edit

It was so entertaining in my opinion. Worth it

I want the nuns to be super ready for this and just casually defeat him in the end, and the reason nobody came to them at first is because they assumed that the nuns would be helpless.

why did i see two actors from ted lasso in here at different moments

I honestly had a lot of fun with this show. Claes Bang was having a lot of fun with this character and it showed.

I remember one day i watched this baked outta my mind and had no idea what happened to me Vampire shit always the worst lol Great vid

fun fact the curtian scene is a reference to one of the hammer dracula movies along with descendant of van helsing in modern day

They literally ripped of Jojo part 3 with the escaping and exploding ship in a coffin and coming back in a few centuries though

That pulling the drape down scene is a re-creation of the scene from Horror of Dracula (1958), the first British made Dracula film, starring Christopher Lee.

I remember watching the first half of the first episode and thinking it had so much promise. Then all that good will was progressively squandered....

23:11 Ok I just wanna jump on this because god I fucking wish that this was just some teen drama. It's SUPPOSED to be an adaptation of one of the side plots in Dracula, which is that Mina's best friend, Lucy, has been proposed to by three separate men, and she genuinely cares about all of them, but ends up marrying the third man who proposed to her, Arthur Holmwood. There is some stuff about the original book I don't like, since it was written in 1897 and so after Lucy becomes a vampire, she goes from being a pure innocent maiden to hypersexual, and that's supposed to be part of the horror. But most adaptations I've seen make this even worse by completely fucking missing the point and saying "you know what, Lucy was a slut the whole time actually". No adaptation has angered me more than this though. Because what basically happened is that in the series, they combined Arthur Holmwood with another suitor, Quincey Morris, but made him the biggest fucking asshole on the planet. I cried real tears watching the series for the first time, because in the book, Quincey is just some random ass cowboy dropped in the middle of a gothic horror novel who goes on the weirdest fucking monologues, but also REALLY REALLY loves Lucy. When she rejected his proposal, he said that he was sad, but that even though he wouldn't have her as a wife, he could still keep her as a valuable friend, and basically ends up setting up the engagement party for Lucy and Arthur BECAUSE HE IS FRIENDS WITH BOTH OF THEM. Then there's Jack Seward, and in the book he's also a cringefail loser, but the show makes me want to rip my hair out because yeah, maybe the book should have been a little nicer to him instead of just calling him a dingus who can't get laid every five minutes, but the series just goes out of its way to say that Seward is SUCH a nice guy, and Lucy is a whore who just doesn't see that. I have no patience for that incel shit, and it made me hate Seward. Which is a damn shame, because even though he was low key abusing his position as a doctor in an insane asylum, I really liked him in the book. There's actually very little differences between Seward in the book vs the series, but whereas the book frames him as a man with flaws, the series tries so hard to make you feel bad for him even though he has done absolutely nothing to earn that pity. So yeah, if this was just some teen drama bullshit it would be stupid, but they dragged these characters through the mud and I will never forgive Moffat and Gatiss for that

Almost watched this show after seeing that Sacha Dhawan was in this show

the dialogue sounds like it makes no distinction between how the characters think and what they actually say. ETA: all i could think during the selfie scene was how cool it could have been if they had directed it differently. if they’re going to make her look normal on the phone right up until the picture is taken, why not make that the big reveal? why not hide her appearance up until the picture? the way it was directed, zoe might as well have taken her picture and just shown her.

I've got to say the first episode is masterpiece to me

First 2 episodes were FIRE!!! Third was admittedly jacked up and really off the rails.

It's solid overall, like a back and forth between dracula and the van helsing bloodline is interesting. The only real gripe I have with the show is the time jump at the end of episode 2 and the start of episode 3. The whole of episode 3 was kind of strange but still interesting in terms of the van helsing vs dracula story. The 2 primary side characters, "pretty girl" and "nerd guy," could've been better, I think. It really seems like a character study show more than a horror thriller like people always associate with dracula.

Everyone should just go in cold and watch Midnight Mass.

For those who havent watched it yet, dont bother after ep. 2. It’s as if the director, writers and the whole film production crew quit after the 2nd show & the series was scrapped after a team of pampered 20-year old british university students took over.

First episode: great Second: good Third: terrible

i loved this version

The last episode was such a disappointment. The first two were great.

This show slapped what are you on about

I watched this right off the heels of both of the Nosferatu movies Talk about a dive in quality(of writing, the acting in this show is superb)

This show is fucking insane lol, good review!