I didn’t get it when it came out. 

I first saw what was then called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in 1992 at the Wehrenberg Greentree Theater, a wobbly three-screener in a non-offensive strip mall in Flagstaff, Ariz.

I don’t know why I didn’t like it. 

I was, still am, a fan of the director, Francis Ford Coppola. 

The cast is terrific: Gary Oldman as Dracula, Winona Ryder as Mina Murray, Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing and in less prominent but still important roles, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes and Monica Belucci. 

The movie did well at the box office. It won a bunch of awards, including three Oscars. 

If I remember right, hazardous to guess, given how much time has elapsed, I think among the things that rubbed me wrong was the melodramatic music, florid camerawork, over-the-top expressionist acting and comical eroticism. 

Maybe I was just kind of lame at the time, because upon second viewing, earlier this month as part of my household’s embrace of spooky movies in October, those are the things that make it go for me now. 

I love Dracula’s cackling as his brides suck on Harker in Transylvania, the constant propulsion of the chase scenes, the numerous seduction rituals, the awkward humor horror of the mental institution, the elaborate costumes of late 19th Century London and the many boobs-a-flying.

I also like it when a cast looks like they’re having a good time, and the deadpan delivery of the story’s many ghoulish encounters. 

It’s hard to pin just one quote down, but the scene over a meal when Mina asks Van Helsing how her friend Lucy, one of Dracula’s victims, died, is among my favorites. 

“Yeah, she was in great pain! Then we cut off her head, and drove a stake through her heart, and burned it, and then she found peace,” Van Helsing says, tearing into a hunk of meat.

Great line. 

Maybe I just got older and now appreciate what Coppola was doing, how gothic stories work, and have experienced more of life, like absinthe, which wasn’t even legal at the time the movie came out. 

Why zoom in on absinthe? Aside from being delicious, it’s the subject of another great quote, this one from Dracula himself as he courts Mina in London. 

“Absinthe is the aphrodisiac of the self. The green fairy who lives in the absinthe wants your soul. But you are safe with me,” he says. 

I’ll let that serve as the digestif.

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