Hello! I would like to know your top 10 worst brides of Dracula in adaptation! Thank youu 💕💖💕
I'm glad it brings you so much joy to torment me, my friend! But I am determined to answer thoroughly and completely; I am putting my special Brides of Dracula perfume on to write this and will actually give you a top 14 for your trouble.
First: here's the post I made a while back with recs for fic which did actually deal with the brides in ways that I found interesting. There's not a lot out there, but there are some things!
I'm going to now go in descending order from what I consider least objectionable to most. Obligatory qualifier that these are just my own opinions, etcetera. I also do not have equally clear memories of all of these versions, so I am going in many cases largely based on how angry I feel thinking about them.
14. Count Dracula (1977) - as is often the case with this film, this definitely the most book-accurate adaptation of the brides, but it doesn't quite click for me. It has a legitimately quite upsetting version of the Mina & brides scene, which counts for quite a lot and is more than I can say for any others, and I appreciate how it gets away from some established conventions for representing female vampires (the wedding dresses are an interesting touch, and the focus on the giggling), but the childlike pouting they do really doesn't strike the right tone for me. I find the moment when Dracula enfolds all of them in his cloak honestly touching.
13. Horror of Dracula (1958) - look, it's just one vampire bride in an inexplicable Neo-Grecian dress, but the dress is pretty and I have a soft spot for her. The play of her presenting herself as Dracula's captive in need of rescue and then trying to attack Jonathan leaves room for some compelling readings of what her life in the castle looks like and how she experiences her relationship with Dracula.
12. Dracula (1931) - they're pretty, the dresses are pretty, it's nice that they glide mysteriously, but I don't like that they don't get any lines and just vanish when Bela Lugosi glares at them. Not quite so orientalist though, which I appreciate!
11. Jeanne Kalogridis, The Diaries of the Family Dracul - this series was not actually good, but it does some stuff with intergenerational abuse which I remember finding compelling, and some of that does play out in the way the brides are dealt with. For some reason Erzsebet Bathoy is one of them which is a bizarre but weirdly common choice (it also shows up in Anno Dracula, which I am not including in this list mostly because the brides content there is so incoherent I wouldn't even know how to rank it).
10. The Invitation (2022) - the cattiness/jealousy stuff between the two brides and our protagonist in this movie falls into a number of annoying misogynistic tropes in ways that always irritate me, but at least they get some characterization and shading and their relationships to the protagonist carry some weight in the plot. This one could basically tie with the next, which is...
9. Van Helsing (2004) - this is on the one hand probably the most attention the brides get in any cinematic adaptation ever, but on the other...well, they're goofy orientalist stereotypes. I like that they get names, I like that they have a motivation which drives the plot, I like that they have an affectionate relationship with Dracula in their way. I don't think I could say I like the whole plot line about them wanting to have children, but the vampire babies are cute and I get oddly emotionally involved in that. However. Their death scenes are so misogynistic and make me so very angry that I can hardly deal with it.
8. Dracula the Musical - more orientalism and misogyny! They're basically there to fly around the stage and sing things in bad Romanian as Dracula's backup, and I don't like that their song is all about pleasure and temptation. But there's a pang of a moment for Mina and Dracula at their death which is something.
7. Dracula 2000 - another deeply misogynistic version, and this time they even have terrible dresses. Given the timing of when I started in Dracula fandom, these versions, along with the Van Helsing ones, were all over the fic of the time, which annoyed me more than is perhaps fair. Weirdly Jeri Ryan plays one of them? They do get names.
6. S. T. Gibson, Dowry of Blood - I know a lot of people here love this one, so I try not to say too many mean things about it unless really asked directly, but I've soured on it a lot over the years as I've been more honest with myself about my reaction. It being heralded as the one true vampire bride abuse narrative really doesn't help, and neither does people comparing my fic to it (I was here first!).
5. BtVS 5.1 "Buffy vs Dracula" - I think it is overall a fun episode, but the brides in it are a considerable misstep, simply there for gross misogynistic Xander jokes. Ugh.
4. Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Deathless Girls - like Dowry of Blood but from a slightly different angle, this book feels sort of perfectly calibrated to get under my skin. The combination of a pretense of historical accuracy and trauma sensitivity with a protagonist exceptionalism story about avoiding sexual violence and simplistic vampire turning as liberation narrative drives me sort of out of my mind. The graphic design is really very lovely, though.
3. Dracula (2020) - the bride in this one is one girl kept in a box treated as a disposable mistake and object of mockery. I fucking hate it.
2. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) - I may be biased, but this feels like the most orientalist representation of them all (so far), and definitely the worst offender on the 'sexy versions of the attack on Jonathan' scale. I hate that they gave us a Mina and brides scene (one of very few versions to do it at all!) without any of the moving or interesting parts. So misogynistic. I hate it too.
Kierstin White, Lucy, Undying - putting this one last/first is definitely recency bias, but I found the brides in it intolerably offensive from so many directions that I barely know where to start, and the context of this version which is trying to be queer and feminist and giving agency to female characters added insult to injury. We have the "mean one" and the "mad one" (plus another they literally lose, as if she was an old sock), a whole narrative about them being deluded in their attachment to Dracula, and a plot line in which the "mean one" tricks the "mad one" into going to her death. It is a very particular kind of hell for me in particular that this past decade gives us multiple separate novels about women in Dracula and trauma and they all could not have bothered me more if they had been designed specifically to do so.
