Why has horror and romance complemented one another so seamlessly since the dawn of storytelling? It can be scary to put one’s heart on the line, especially when falling for someone whom you don’t know in their entirety. They could be Prince Charming—or a blood-sucking vampire—or, most frighteningly, both.
With Valentine’s Day coming up, I’d like to recommend three movies I’ve recently seen, which could ostensibly be categorized as horror pictures, but on a deeper level, are really about love. Two are re-imaginings of monsters who routinely made guest appearances in my childhood nightmares, “Frankenstein” and “Dracula”. The third contains a more human monster, one who leaves her fiancé, Matt (played by Kevin James), at the altar. (BUT no judgment, is she really a monster?) Though it’s technically a romantic comedy, what could be more horrific in this situation than being the groom-not-to-be?
Sometimes we like our love stories to be sweet, complete with a “meet cute” where a boy and girl fall in love, get married, and have a family, but we know life isn’t always like that. Charles and Daniel Kinnane, the co-directors of “Solo Mio,” begin their picture by showing us all of the pleasant events leading up to the doomed wedding of Matt and Heather (Julie Ann Emery). They appear to be so in love that we are surprised when she strands him on their wedding day. He, however, decides to fly solo to Italy anyway, which was supposed to be their honeymoon destination, and that’s where most of the story unfolds.
Even with the theme of a broken heart, there is a sweetness and a freshness about the movie, perhaps because it largely takes place in Rome and its beautiful surrounding countryside. Perhaps it’s my own memories of watching horse races in Sienna, and listening to opera in the hillsides of Tuscany. Or perhaps it’s simply the fact that I was rooting for Kevin James to come out of this okay. Is it a great film? Not really. This may sound strange for me to say, but for me, it doesn’t matter how one would rate certain movies. Sometimes you just want to see good things happen to good people, and in the case of “Solo Mio,” that alone makes it worth watching.
As a child, I was scared of three monsters—Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man—in part because they all had human qualities. The least scary monsters for me were the amorphous creatures like the Swamp Thing or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. A character like the Wolf Man, is frighteningly real. The fact he has no control over his evil actions after he sprouts fangs under a full moon makes his plight all the more hellish.
I could never have imagined that after all of these years, I would see new imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula that were so exciting. But in the hands of master filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro with “Frankenstein” and Luc Besson with “Dracula,” my interest was piqued. Like The Wolf Man, Mary Shelley’s original character of Frankenstein’s monster was a deeply tragic character, brought back to life against his will and branded abhorrent by a world with which he only wanted to connect.
Nominated for nine Oscars, Del Toro’s epic adaptation remains true to Shelley’s text while casting “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as one of the most sympathetic—and certainly the most seductive—variation on the monster to date. While treated with cruelty by his creator (Oscar Isaac), the tenderness he receives from Frankenstein’s soon-to-be sister-in-law (Mia Goth) forms the heart of the picture. As in Shelley’s novel, the film’s first half is told from the perspective of Doctor Frankenstein. Once the monster takes over the narration duties midway through, the picture comes to life with even greater passion.
In his four-star review, our critic Glenn Kenny wrote that Del Toro “spins out the tale in ways that make the movie not just jarring and frightening in the best horror tradition, but heartbreakingly poignant, expanding the humanity James Whale achieved for in his classic 1930s “Frankenstein” pictures […] Elordi is marvelous in conveying the monster’s intelligence, sensitivity and, yes, inherent gentleness—a shot of him holding and petting a mouse is quietly wrecking—but he puts across the power and rage beautifully as well.”
The same could be said of Caleb Landry Jones’s tour de force portrayal of the title role in Luc Besson’s new screen adaptation of “Dracula,” which in my opinion, is the most romantic of the three titles in this article. It is romantic in the sense that it highlights the kind of love that you hope you will find one day—you meet a person and they fall for you and you fall for them—and nothing will ever come between the two of you. The kind of love that will last forever and ever—even though you don’t foresee it continuing for centuries. The picture begins four hundred years after Dracula lost the love of his very long life, Elizabeth, in 1480. When two intriguing women suddenly materialize—the saintly Mina (Zoe Blue, daughter of recent Ebertfest guest Rosanna Arquette) and the decidedly less saintly Maria (Matilda De Angelis), the vampire’s appetite goes into hyperdrive.
Almost any version of “Dracula” would make for appropriate Valentine’s Day viewing since the Count embodies, at his core, the forbidden sexuality that his puritanical targets strive so desperately to suppress. What I appreciated about Landry’s performance, and the film in general, is how it makes his lovesick-ness so tangible, so relatable, that one can almost taste it.
“Frankenstein” is on Netflix; “Solo Mio” and “Dracula” are in theaters.