Erotismo y profanación. La representación de la violencia misógina en Drácula de Bram Stoker

Abstract

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) creatively re-interprets the two representations of violence in the original literary work: sexual bestiality, and the ritual of vampire death. This re-interpretation relies on the devices of postmodern cinema and the iconographic references of decadent painting like dark romanticism or symbolism. As a result, the eroticization of the beauty of the decadent eye transforms the extreme sadomasochistic violence that characterizes the sexual encounters between Lucy and the Vampire, Harker and the women-beasts in voluptuous scenes where the spectator’s scopophiliac pleasure is notably increased by postmodern cinema’s mechanisms of immersion inviting the viewers to submerge themselves in this universe of pleasure and pain. Also, in the representation of of the woman-beast’s execution a distance is mantained and there is pleasure in illustrating the tremendous brutality with which the beloved destroys the body of his dead fiancée, and establishes the civilizing order of Victorian society.