Throughout the history of cinema, many directors have attempted to recreate the chilling and unprecedented world of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Probably very few have succeeded, as most directors tend to avoid the pervasive sexuality inherent in the novel. This is a difficult task to achieve, considering the overt imagery surrounding sex and vampirism, such as reproduction following an encounter with a vampire, and the phallocentric nature of violence committed both by and against these creatures: penetration is implicated in hunt them, and you have to stick them with a stake to destroy them. Readers are therefore forced to admit that Dracula is, in fact, a highly eroticized piece of literature, although we cannot be sure whether or not Stoker himself was aware of this suggestion. The most successful effort at capturing that sexual energy on film was Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Indeed, it has often been proposed that Coppola's version is too focused on carnality compared to the original work, leading the viewer to question the purpose of this overt sexualization. It can be concluded that adding copious amounts of eroticism to the film is directly related to Coppola's attempt to portray Count Dracula as more human rather than monster, and the sexuality in his film serves as a balance so that the boundaries between the good and evil are blurred. Evidence for this deduction is found in three scenes in particular: Jonathan's seduction by Dracula's vampiric wives, Lucy's demonic transformation, and the relationship between Mina and Van Helsing during the story's climax. It has long been said that the most explicit scene in Coppola's film occurs at the very beginning of the plot during Jonathan Harker's imprisonment in Dracula's castle. Bram Stoker's original work also managed to make this incident highly eroticised, using words and phrases such as "voluptuousness" and "evil, burning desire"; these descriptions, along with actions in which the vampires “licked their lips like animals,” create an unmistakable aura of sensuality around the scene (Stoker 42-43). For Victorian writing, this is an almost obscenely sexualized piece of writing, as underlined by the way Stoker incorporates the word voluptuous no less than three times in this scene, which was a common term associated with carnality in the literature of that time. There is a certain amount of erotic anticipation associated with Jonathan's involuntary reaction to the inevitable, which hints at a latent sensuality.