I’m rather sensitive to the perception that Film Forensics is a negative website. After all, our mission statement is to fix broken movies: we obviously concentrate on the bad. Which is not to say that we dislike the films we review. We just want to change them.

For a change, I’d like to do a Film Forensics of a film I think is excellent, and which I would not ordinarily change at all. The film “Pride & Prejudice” was on a hiding to nothing when it was announced. The mini-series was much-loved, and there is a perception that Keira Knightly is a bit of a lightweight - that this would be a version for the MTV version (especially inauspicious signs: the ampersand in the title, and the tagline “Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be with is the one person you can’t be without.”). Much to my surprise, it caught the essence of the book delightfully. The compression to a sub-two-hour film was done with an excellent ear for the pacing that a good movie requires. Amazingly, it didn’t feel like a highlight reel from a longer film. I fell in love with the characters all over again.

So, having seen it done well, I’d like to propose something a little more mischievious. There have been many adaptations of Jane Austin that have diverged in setting, while attempting to retain the themes - “Clueless” for “Emma”, for example, or “Bride And Prejudice” or “Bridget Jones’ Diary”. I’m a fan of silly monster action films, so I’d like to propose a silly monster action film version. How could it work? What genre-change could retain the themes and be, essentially, faithful? Zombies wouldn’t work, though I’m sure someone will eventually attempt it: it’s just so improbable and stupid, it’s inevitable. Likewise, an alien invasion would just dominate over the top of the story. No synergy there. No, what we want is a vampire film.

Blood & Bigotry. Drained & Dateless. Sucked & Suckered. It’s actually a surprisingly good match. Vampires films are primarily tragic gothic romances anyway, with swooning heroines and remote, forbidding, dangerous men.

However, as much as we would like it, Mr. Darcy is not a vampire. He fits too well as a vampire hunter, with Mr. Wickham as the vampire, attempting to seduce Elizabeth at first, and then (when that fails) going after her little sister Lydia. We keep the period setting - it’s just perfect - and we can keep the essential plot of Pride And Prejudice, playing a somewhat different emphasis to “Pride & Prejudice”, bringing out Elizabeth’s choice between Wickham and Darcy as the core of the story. Part of Darcy’s aloofness is because he is hunting a vampire, and suspects the Bennett family of being, if not vampires, at least too-casual-by-far about them. And he’s correct: Mrs. Bennett especially wants her daughters married off, reckless of the danger of having them in a stranger’s house overnight, happily inviting all and sundry into the house at all hours.

The core story, then, is Darcy’s hunt for the vampire, told from the unknowing point of view of Elizabeth. The characters are mindful of the dangers of creatures of the night, but Mrs. Bennett has fits of alarm if the topic comes up, so we don’t discover until part-way through that the hinted-at danger is vampires. Mr. Collins represents not only a safe marriage, but godly protection for the family. Mr. Wickham is a great deal more secretive in this version: Darcy knows he is a vampire (as he already attempted to bite Darcy’s sister, only foiled at the last minute), so Darcy and Wickham don’t actually meet until their end-of-film confrontation. Wickham meets Elizabeth several times, but always contrives to be elsewhere when Darcy turns up. He still convinces Elizabeth that Darcy has ill-treated him, and in this version it’s a good deal harder for Darcy to convince Elizabeth otherwise (perhaps an attempted biting does the trick). Darcy doesn’t even confide in Elizabeth until relatively late - if the whole family are tainted, he doesn’t want to alert Wickham by telling them about him. The romance between Jane and Mr. Bingley comes through here, too - they fall for each other, but Darcy’s suspicion about the family is heightened by the ease with which his friend falls for Jane’s charms, and he contrives to break them up.

Once Elizabeth finds the truth, she does of course tell her sisters, so it’s only Lydia’s extreme foolishness that leads to Wickham stealing her away - her attraction to the romance of vampires. Darcy hunts him down and kills him before the final conversion, saving her. However, in doing so they discover that Mr. Wickham was not the head vampire. His Sire (the vampire who turned him) was, in fact, Lady De Bourg. Her arrival at the Bennett’s house in the middle of the night, to demand that Elizabeth renounce her claim on Darcy, has a slightly different resolution - Elizabeth and/or Darcy stake her to death after an attempted biting. Slightly less letter-writing, slightly more stabbing-through-the-heart. Otherwise, exactly the same.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 5:20 am and is filed under Drama, Forensic Analysis, P, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.