Luc Besson’s 2026 movie adaptation Dracula seems to be based largely on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. To clarify, I do not mean Besson’s movie was inspired by Stoker’s classic 1897 horror novel: On the basis of his Dracula, I’m not certain Besson has even read the book. Instead, he appears to be adapting the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, right down to imitating its significant deviations from the novel. In the United Kingdom, posters for the Besson film even bill it that way: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, just like the Coppola movie. The idea should be laughable — the Eurotrash maven Besson clumsily approximating Coppola approximating Stoker. But in a strange way, Besson has made a Dracula true to the experience of consuming Gothic/romantic horror at an impressionable age.

Besson is actually in his not-that-impressionable mid-60s, but an adolescent impulse has run through much of his work over the years, including (and maybe especially) in his best-loved movies, like The Professional, Lucy, and The Fifth Element. In the latter, a seemingly average guy in a futuristic city saves the world (universe?) alongside a waifish-yet-badass Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who remains one of cinema’s great discomfiting fantasy objects. Rather than downplaying that part of his fantasy, Besson reaches further: Leeloo turns out to be the actual physical embodiment of love.

Dracula opens with similarly grandiose gestures. Like the Coppola film, Besson’s movie declares more explicitly than Stoker’s novel that Count Dracula is actually real-life warrior-prince Vlad the Impaler, whose name (“Vlad Dracula”) inspired Stoker. In both Coppola and Besson’s tellings, Vlad renounces God and embraces vampirism following his wife’s death. In........

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