"That's not all I can do to your skin..." Van Helsing vs. Dracula 2004

In most movies, we always see the hero of the story portrayed as the strong, handsome, masculine male who swoops in to save the day. He always finds a way to save the people and win over the damsel in distress. All of this is prevalent in Van Helsing. Van Helsing, played by Hugh Jackman, is the rugged hero of this story who has to capture and kill even beings because he is considered to be doing God's work from the monks. In the beginning of the movie Van Helsing is told he is to travel to Transylvania to kill Dracula. That is where we meet the Valerious family, specifically Anna and her brother Velkan. Velkan fails to kill Dracula's werewolf and gets bitten, so now Anna is left on her own with Van Helsing to save everyone from Dracula and to send her family to heaven because her father made a promise to God that until his family kills Dracula, he shall stay in Purgatory. 

From the moment we first meet Anna in the movie, played by Kate Beckinsale, we already know that she is the stereotypical beautiful character in the story. She fights in high leather boots and wears tight revealing clothing. Although she is an extremely powerful character, and she can clearly fight very well, one of the first things we see in her first scene is her brother telling her to stay back and not to fight. Already we know that the men in the story are thinking of her as just a weak woman, even though she is extremely powerful. When she first meets Van Helsing, in one of the fight scenes she lands on him with her legs spread sitting close to his face. That is just another example of how even though this is a strong woman who is very independent, she is extremely sexualized in the movie. They are shown rolling around on the ground together, and Van Helsing is another man telling her to stay back and trying to keep her safe.

Anna is not the only sexualized character within the movie. Just like in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dracula has three female vampires almost as his "mistresses" doing his every command. When we first see them they are flying around like bats, but when they transform into their "human" looking form, we see that they are very beautiful women dressed in barely there clothing with their breasts popping out of their dresses. Here again is another example of the female needing to be beautiful, or something to look at. We see a scene with them where Dracula punishes them for loosing one of their own, but tells them to come to him where he kisses them and brings them into his chamber to make his "children". He says he is incapable of love, so he keeps them around to kill for him and mate with him. 

At the point in the movie where Anna gets captured by Dracula and they are dancing together at the ball, Anna is only awakened with a kiss. She fights him but he tells her that she is going to be his bride because she is "very beautiful". He also tells her they are going to have children and stay together forever. When she tells him he makes her skin crawl, he threatens her back saying "That's not all I can do to your skin," basically saying if you do not do as I demand I will kill you. Here we see a representation of typical gender roles, the male telling the female what to do. While this is going on, Van Helsing is being the hero he is portrayed to be literally swooping down to save Anna. Although Anna is supposed to be very powerful, she needs to be put in compromising positions because she is woman who always needs saving.

Throughout the entire movie, all these female characters, who are continuously fighting, never look like they've been through battle. They all are made up to look completely perfect even after the vicious fighting that goes on. However, the men in the story always look beaten up after they have been fighting because that is what realistically will happen. 

Although Anna and the three female vampires are portrayed as strong characters, this movie does nothing to break stereotypical gender roles. However, this does not mean that this was not an extremely fun movie to watch. It was very interesting to watch this movie through the eyes of gender and very eye opening to see how movies and books in general portray women and men so differently.