"This is an area you always need to address when you're dealing with Dracula is the fact that there is something kind of attractive in his darkness - which there isn't in other horror characters"
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Dracula only works when the audience feels the pull before the push. Richard Roxburgh is naming the tightrope every actor and filmmaker has to walk: if the Count is only a monster, he’s just another set of fangs in the horror lineup; if he’s too seductive, the story collapses into gothic perfume. The “attractive… darkness” is the franchise’s core asset and its moral hazard.
Roxburgh’s phrasing also betrays a performance note: you “address” it because it’s a problem to be solved, not a vibe to luxuriate in. Dracula’s danger isn’t merely physical; it’s aspirational. He offers an escape from ordinary rules - sex, death, power, immortality - packaged as elegance. That’s why he survives cultural shifts that flatten other villains into jump scares. Freddy and Jason don’t invite identification; they punish it. Dracula courts it.
The subtext is about complicity. The genre usually reassures us that evil is repulsive. Dracula breaks that contract: he makes the audience briefly want what they’re supposed to fear, then indicts them for wanting it. It’s the dark charisma of aristocracy, of predation with manners. Roxburgh, speaking as an actor, is really talking about calibration: make the darkness legible as desire, but never let the desire look harmless. That tension is the character’s engine, and the reason every new Dracula has to renegotiate the same question for its era: what kind of darkness are we still tempted to call beautiful?
Roxburgh’s phrasing also betrays a performance note: you “address” it because it’s a problem to be solved, not a vibe to luxuriate in. Dracula’s danger isn’t merely physical; it’s aspirational. He offers an escape from ordinary rules - sex, death, power, immortality - packaged as elegance. That’s why he survives cultural shifts that flatten other villains into jump scares. Freddy and Jason don’t invite identification; they punish it. Dracula courts it.
The subtext is about complicity. The genre usually reassures us that evil is repulsive. Dracula breaks that contract: he makes the audience briefly want what they’re supposed to fear, then indicts them for wanting it. It’s the dark charisma of aristocracy, of predation with manners. Roxburgh, speaking as an actor, is really talking about calibration: make the darkness legible as desire, but never let the desire look harmless. That tension is the character’s engine, and the reason every new Dracula has to renegotiate the same question for its era: what kind of darkness are we still tempted to call beautiful?
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