Vintage 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula Pin Back Button 📌 Francis Ford Coppola Film Promo - Gothic Vampire Horror Movie Collectible Pinback

Remember That Face From the 1992 Dracula Poster? 📌 A Vintage 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula Promo Pinback Button, A Francis Ford Coppola Film

Size: 2 1/4"

A round pinback button with the fanged, bat-winged demon face from the movie's poster art staring out of a black ground, BRAM STOKER'S over Dracula in dripping red letters, and A FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA FILM in white. Around the rim in tiny red type: 1992 CPII, All Rights Reserved - CPII being Columbia Pictures Industries, the studio that held the film's copyright. Plain metal back with a wire pin.

🧛 Coppola's Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula opened in the U.S. on November 13, 1992 - made under Coppola's own American Zoetrope banner and released by Columbia Pictures - Coppola going for something lush, theatrical and old-fashioned, with Gary Oldman as the Count, Winona Ryder as Mina, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing and Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker. It famously did its tricks the old way, in the camera, shot by Michael Ballhaus with production design by Thomas Sanders, and Eiko Ishioka's costumes - the red armor, the ornate gowns - won her the Academy Award. The movie opens with a prologue that ties the Count back to Vlad the Impaler - Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia who fought the Turks, son of Vlad Dracul, which is where the name Dracula comes from.

🦇 The legend behind it

Long before Stoker published his novel in 1897, local legend in the Carpathian villages held that some of the dead didn't stay buried - strigoi, unquiet souls you kept away with garlic and wild rose. Stoker, by most accounts, never set foot in Transylvania and built his Count out of library books and travelers' journals, but the name stuck to the region for good, and collectors and horror fans still pass along the story of pilgrims climbing to the ruins of Vlad's fortress in the Carpathian foothills.

📌 Promo buttons

The celluloid button itself goes back to the 1890s in Newark, New Jersey. Benjamin S. Whitehead of Newark patented a badge in 1893 with a clear sheet of celluloid laid over the printed design, and in 1896 the Whitehead & Hoag Company of Newark got the patent on the "badge pin or button" with the pin fastened right on the back, George B. Adams's design, signed over to the company. Buttons like this weren't sold in stores - collectors say they went out through the studio's promotion, to theaters, the press and fans in the lobby. There were other promo buttons for the film too, like the BEWARE THANKSGIVING one; this is the demon-face design from the key art.

📅 How old is it?

1992, printed right on the rim.

🦇 About these

Every one I have is this same button, 2 1/4 inches across. It's a great one for a horror fan, a Coppola or Gary Oldman fan, a Halloween display, a jacket or a bag. The supply is finite - nobody's making new 1992 Dracula promo buttons, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.