Adaptation Angst: Dracula

Frequent OMwG guest-blogger and full-time partner-in-crime Nat alerted me to this upcoming 10-hour adaptation of Dracula NBC is planning. Here, in no particular order, are the elements that give me pause:

• This quote: "This latest version of “Dracula” will be set in London in the 1890s, with the count transformed into an American businessman interested in bringing modern science to Victorian society." Um, what? I like that they're preserving Dracula's "otherness," as part of the power of the novel is how the supernatural count is used as a literalization of anxieties about Britishness intersecting with the foreign, but American? Not exactly a threatening alterity. And a businessman? Okay, if you're going to do some sort of bloodsucking capitalist thing, but what up with the "modern science" angle? It's not like Victorian society was, you know, unfamiliar with or disconnected from encroaching modernity.

• Jonathan Rhys Myers has been cast as Drac. Myers is cute and all, 

See?

BUT, I haven't seen him work the oily seductiveness you need for Dracula since Velvet Goldmine. True, I haven't seen The Tudors, but it seems Henry VIII has a different, shall we say, leadership style than the count?  As an aside, while researching this post (see what I do for you people?) I discovered today is his 35th birthday. No hard feelings and many happy returns, JRM!

• No one else has been cast yet. I'm seeing visions of Kelsey Grammar as Van Helsing and Miley Cyrus as Mina. 

Angst Level: 8