American films tend to be caught up in notions of myth and timelessness. From The Matrix to even Gangs of New York the ambition is to sum up: set the record straight on American identity, or run the topical gamut from simulacra to technology to the society of spectacle. Some of the best movies are over-the-top, but the challenge for Guy Maddin is altogether different. In his Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, as well as recent modernist films (e.g. Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho), text is always part of context, its ideas pointing to a puzzle of old movies, icons and classic stories.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a movie about Dracula. Only it isn’t, situated somewhere between our familiarity with the characters and the strangeness of Maddin’s aesthetic. Maddin is the artist as hermit, working in anachronistic styles and genres. With reality hardly entering the picture, his films are insulated, derivative, and reflexive. Yet they speak to our world and our times.

What’s striking about Stoker’s novel is that, behind all the supernatural lore, it’s really about modernity—the idea (still relevant today) that history changes with radical breaks and shifts. Dracula evokes the end of one era and the start of a new one, marked by the fall of the aristocracy, the rise of the middle-class, the change in sexual mores, and the spread of science and technology. The temptation for some filmmakers has been to add on any number of readings to a story that’s already rich in subtext. Until Maddin’s version, the most referential adaptation was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), casting the Count in various allegorical molds, alluding to Jesus Christ as well as the birth of cinema.

Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a disparate mix, originally a stage production from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Invited to film, Maddin (who is from Winnipeg) scripted a new adaptation, cutting the length from 110 minutes to 76 while incorporating dance numbers. He shot in silent black-and-white, then inserted color pigments, and added ambient noises (footsteps, trains, steel slashing off someone’s head) and Mahler to the soundtrack. He pays ironic tribute to early film, stealing some shots from silent sources and freely using an iris. At times the focus is slightly blurred, creating the faded hypnotic feel of archival material.

With the scenes all drawn from prior sources (silent films, Dracula films, and Stoker’s novel), this Dracula is really about other Dracula movies—specifically what that character has come to represent over the last century. A penchant for pastiche normally suggests a postmodernist tinge only Maddin’s method shows more depth. In interview Maddin has discussed the sexual phobias in Stoker’s book his film presumably exposes. What is distinctive about Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is how it exposes them.

Take the fanged nemesis, now East Asian (Zhang Wei-Qiang). The casting call is in tune with so many “fear of the Other” analyses. Only Maddin overstates the point mockingly, introducing Dracula with bold intertitles spelling out the apparent xenophobia (i.e. “Immigrants! Others! From the East!”). For him there is no separating Dracula from the conventional post-colonial wisdom on Stoker’s novel. Only as portrayed here, the title hero is hardly a carrier of social anxieties and assorted cultural baggage. With his oddball humor Maddin conveys the opposite, that the academic lingo on Dracula is long since tired.

Maddin depersonalizes his characters, reducing them to ballet-hopping clichés. When Dracula reveals his villainous designs, it cuts him to petty proportions: apart from claiming one victim, all he does is steal a bag-load of cash from England. Likewise Van Helsing, the elderly vampire hunter, is movie-made. Significantly the actor in that role, David Moroni, resembles Laurence Olivier. With Olivier having played the part in a lesser-known 1979 Dracula, this new Van Helsing is less a character in his own right than a hand-me-down from another movie.

Dramatically, Dracula and Van Helsing’s conflict is given short shrift. In past movies, especially Coppola’s, they appear as flip sides of the same coin. Essentially both are vying with each other for two women, body and soul (first the promiscuous Lucy, played here by Tara Birtwhistle, then her prudish friend Mina, CindyMarie Small). Maddin emphasizes their likeness, each registering with Lucy as intrusive. When Lucy hears a nearby asylum inmate bellowing about Dracula’s arrival by sea, “The Master is here!” she falls, shaken. Similarly as Van Helsing’s train pulls into the station, the deafening noise reaches her, shaking the shot’s frame as if the whole room were collapsing.

However unusual Maddin’s past work may be, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is unique. The look, tone, and conception are characteristically his. The subject is out of his league—at any rate more so than his Careful (1992), an incest fairy tale modeled on the obscure “mountain films” from Germany in the Twenties and Thirties. Dracula, a pop household name, overwhelms and explodes a hitherto secluded oeuvre. There are plenty of derivative movies; this Dracula resonates in its cycle of citations. —JULIEN LAPOINTE