Vampyrs from Winnipeg

It makes perfect sense to combine Dracula with ballet. In fact, it makes perfect sense to combine any of the classic gothic novels of the 19th century with ballet. why isn't it done more often? The director Guy Maddin had the brilliant idea of taking the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's version of Dracula and giving it his own brand of celluloid treatment. The result, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, is more art film than horror, more kitsch than camp, more oddity than abnormality.

The film references classic silent films, but exists in a world of itself: Van Helsing is a pants-sniffer; Jonathan Harker is a virgin that won't let Mina give him a blowjob; and Dracula is a lustful bisexual from Asia that "invades" the West. The intriguing thing about Maddin's style, in my opinion, is that he exists purely in the present. You never get a sense of the past or the future in his films; everything takes place in a kind of dream-like, stagey, out-of-focus present that can be quite seductive. This works particularly well when the dramatic soundtrack and the dancing come together over the main themes of the novel: repressed sexuality or fear of death and the unknown. At other times, it doesn't work so well and you become aware of Maddin's low budget and reliance on kitsch.

Kevin and sor_eye_ah were my companions last night. We met inside the BFI's canteen and drank beer until the film started. Soreyeah was kind to get us a plate of chips, which in retrospect was a smart move: I'm just not used to drinking on an empty stomach. We talked about skin cancer in Australia, dance lessons and taking the family's brunt of responsibility, while the sun set behind Soreyeah's head, giving her a kind of halo.

Shadows Choose Their Horrors, shown before Guy Maddin's film, almost forced me to worship at the porcelain god's temple. It was nothing to do with the quality of the film, but a few scenes where a dancing woman was superimposed over flashing images that resembled blood vessels and cracked tiles, perhaps not meant to cause motion sickness on the likes of me.