If Dracula is about anything, he’s about sex. Renfield, in theatres now, is the latest revamp of the Transylvanian bloodsucker mythos, and it is not about sex. In fact, it is a thoroughly sexless movie which might be why, despite some gusto performances and gloriously icky make-up effects, Renfield is a flaccid, directionless affair.
There is an early red flag that signals where the movie is going. Nicholas Hoult as the titular minion and Nicolas Cage, playing fiction’s most feared set of fangs, are laying low in an abandoned hospital in New Orleans, having fled there after a nasty run-in with some vampire hunters in the old country. Famished for fresh blood, Dracula demands that Renfield bring him ‘a busload of cheerleaders’. ‘Female cheerleaders?’ Renfield queries, with a cynical inflection. ‘Don’t make it a sexual thing,’ Dracula snaps. It is bloodlust, not libido, that drives him.
There is no passion, devilish or otherwise, in Renfield
In Renfield, a horror comedy directed by Chris McKay, Dracula the throat-gashing seductor of 19th-century maidens is reinterpreted as the boss from hell.
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