In Name Only

‘In Name Only’ means nothing more or less than using a brand or franchise name people connect to a certain story or type of story, but without really using the content of the intellectual property. Whenever a movie or novel is ‘in name only,’ it is using a well-known name, but presenting something different.

 

The most well-known company to use ‘in name only’ material for their movies was, of course, Hammer Studios. The British horror film studio used big names like ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein,’ but never kept to the stories which are connected to the names. Often, they would redefine the characters, leave some out, add others, and twist and turn everything to suit their needs. Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” is a love letter to Hammer films, both in its ‘in name only’ use of Washington Irving’s story of the headless horseman and in its colour pallet and liberal use of gore. Two more recent and much less pleasant examples would be Disney's “Artemis Fowl” movie which barely keeps anything from the books and twists the few bits it keeps around to be almost unrecognizable and the BBC’s “Dracula” mini-series by Steven Moffat which should not even have borne the title ‘Dracula’ (it makes Hammer’s Dracula movies look like a true-to-the-book version).

 

First and foremost, ‘in name only’ isn’t necessarily bad. Hammer made good horror movies while only using the lightest touches of the original material. The stories are well-written and well-paced, the actors are superb, the special effects are excellent for the time, and every one of the movies (except, perhaps, for the very last) is an enjoyable ride, even today. Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” is just as entertaining and much better than the original story would be when stretched to the length of a full-blown movie (the short story simply doesn’t have enough content to stretch it to 90 or more minutes). In both cases, ‘in name only’ doesn’t hurt the enjoyment of the stories and it doesn’t matter much that there’s not much of the original story left.

In the two more recent examples mentioned above, however, the ‘in name only’ treatment gives the impression of coming from the creators not realizing what was at the heart of the property. “Sleepy Hollow” is there to scare people and leaves the reader with a slight uncertainty as to Ichabod Crane’s fate (was he killed? was it the real horseman or Brom Bones?). Even though the uncertainty doesn’t happen in the movie, it still scares and gives us enough of a thrill to enjoy it. ‘What happened to Ichabod?’ is replaced with ‘what is the deal with the horseman?’ Hammer’s Dracula series still focuses very well on Dracula and the ‘outside evil’ he represents, so the names of those he destroys and threatens don’t matter that much (and this aspect is where the last Dracula movie with Christopher Lee fails). The duality of Lee’s Dracula and Cushing’s van Helsing (in most movies) is what people enjoy and what works so well for the movies. They’re old-fashioned ‘good will triumph, but evil will never be fully conquered’ movies and all the better  for it.

 

Compared to Moffat’s version of “Dracula”, the problem becomes obvious early on. Hammer has always been a studio for gore and sex, so the gory parts of the new series aren’t the main problem here. Today, a lot more is possible than at that time and that’s okay. One big problem is that Moffat wants for Dracula to be the hero of the tale and, honestly, Dracula doesn’t have the necessary depth for that. He’s the outside evil which forces a group of Victorians to face the horrid truth that there are monsters in the age of science and technology and turns them into vampire hunters. He doesn’t really work as a hero, only as the outside source of evil the heroes have to fight.

The gratuitous gore and blood and body horror don’t help the series here. In the Hammer movies, the gore and blood are there, but they’re used at appropriate times - when vampires (Dracula or his victims) die. Seeing Dracula crumble to dust (until the next time…) is cathartic, it’s the end we’ve been waiting for (especially a few movies in when expectations have been built up). Seeing Dracula split a wolf to emerge a human before killing a convent full of nuns is … violence for violence’s sake. It serves no deeper purpose.

Slotting a ‘whodunit’ mystery into a horror story doesn’t do either part a favour, either. Making Dracula trade quips and one-liners with a vampire-hunting nun whom he kills only to meet her descendant (huh?) later isn’t making him threatening, it’s just turning him into an undead version of Moffat’s Sherlock (and, to a smaller degree, Moffat’s Doctor Who).

The whole time skip from part two to part three makes little sense and does the story even less favours. Yes, Dracula could have lived unnoticed and unchallenged for a hundred years, but in different circumstances, not locked in a coffin and underwater.

 

Yet, “Dracula” has had a lot of different versions already, one more isn’t hurting the intellectual property. Things look much worse for “Artemis Fowl”. Why Disney thought that a story about a preteen criminal mastermind successfully taking a big ransom of gold from the fairies was for them, I can’t say. That, however, is the core of the first Artemis Fowl novel - a highly successful book from a highly successful series which has by now spawned a recent spin-off in “The Fowl Twins”. The series works its way through a long development of Artemis’ character from full-blown villain to full-blown hero throughout eight books.

Even the very first trailer clearly showed that Disney, the writers, and the director had no idea what they were doing there. They changed an awful lot of things - destroying the whole story in the process and ending up with a generic ‘nice boy hero gets supernatural help’ movie. That is, very much, the polar opposite of the original. A lot of changes in an ‘in name only’ adaption could be forgiven - even taking Holly’s big arc about being the first female officer in LEP Recon -, but the movie doesn’t even recognize any basics. It’s like Hammer had made a Dracula movie about taking over Wall Street (and that at least makes sense for the ‘man of power’ character of Hammer’s Dracula). The only basics left are a boy called Artemis Fowl with a bodyguard called Butler (but not to his face) who encounters fairies. The ransom story is out of the window, the Fowl family suddenly knows about fairies already, Artemis’ father is alive (he’s officially dead in the first book) and his mother is dead (she is alive throughout the series, later on giving birth to his younger brothers, the aforementioned “Fowl Twins”), and Opal Koboi, Artemis’ nemesis if he has one, is simply wasted on the story. The movie might be entertaining, but calling it “Artemis Fowl” is simply not suitable. This is a generic fantasy story for kids and should have gotten a different title.

 

‘In Name Only’ can work under the right circumstances and in the right hands. The first thing you need to make sure of, though, is that you do not remove the core of a story. You can change a lot of the things in the story as long as you keep to what makes the story tick. Hammer Studios did that, Tim Burton did that, Steven Moffat and Disney did not.