Guy Maddin on his sensual, threatening Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.

In Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), the inhabitants of a mountaintop village are forced to refrain from sexual pleasure, lest their passionate throes trigger a fatal avalanche. If the villagers had watched one of Maddin’s movies, you can bet the town would’ve been buried under tons of ice and rock, but at least they would’ve died with smiles on their faces.

Maddin is at once the most decadent and most rigorous of filmmakers. Though his movies draw from the sticky well of silent melodrama by the bucketful, often capping their intertitles with a flurry of exclamation points, complications lurk beneath their attractive surfaces. They're like gilded booby traps, waiting to be sprung.

Pleasure is just as dangerous in Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, a sensual adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, which returns to the Prince this weekend. The teetering between indulgence and the suspicion thereof seems to come directly from the film's maker. On the phone from an editing suite in Toronto, where he's putting the finishing touches on his next feature, Maddin blames the four-year gap between Dracula and 1997's Twilight of the Ice Nymphs on the temptation of creature comforts. A job teaching film in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, provided much-needed stability, but, Maddin says, "I was enjoying it too much, and always postponing the hard work that you have to do sooner or later to get a film off the ground. So I quit the job, just to make myself broke and desperate."

It worked. Maddin, a fan of neither vampire nor dance movies, accepted an offer to transfer the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel to film, purely "on account of being broke. I would never have done it had I not quit working."

For a director as fiercely individualistic as Maddin, being chained to an oft-adapted source and an already choreographed ballet would seem to be something of a nightmare, but instead, Maddin found the challenge invigorating. He likens the situation to being an old Hollywood director forced to make a Western. "You'd think it would terribly confining, because there's only about five things you can do: ŒOK, let's circle the wagons!' But actually, it's very freeing. I could do whatever I wanted."

Maddin added self-imposed constraints as well, deciding after watching numerous other versions of the tale that what he really wanted "was to be as faithful to the novel as possible, since it's something no other film adapter had done. It just happens to be a danced version, but I think it's the most faithful." Well, there's that, and the fact that Maddin's Dracula, Zhang Wei-Qiang, hails from China, not Eastern Europe. Or the fact that Mina and Lucy, constantly at each others' sides in the novel, never appear on stage together, so that their halves of the ballet could tour separately. "It's not my favorite structure for a movie," Maddin admits.

Still, plot has never been a major concern of Maddin's, though he says he fought to make the movie "less abstract" than the original production. What he wanted was to restore the novel's core. Cautioning that he aimed to leave "lots of space" for viewers to bring their own interpretations, Maddin offers his own: "Stoker seemed to have drawn, in kind of blandly written prose, an amazing portrait of male jealousy during mating season." Perhaps that's why Lucy, with her three battling suitors, becomes the movie's de facto protagonist, while loyal Mina has to wait three-quarters of an hour for her entrance. It's a Dracula where Lucy's suitors quarrel over which of them will be allowed to give her a life-saving blood transfusion (one that Maddin allows is "really more of a gang rape"). Afterwards, one carps to Van Helsing, "Doctor, you allowed him to give more blood than I!"

Maddin found researching previous dance movies tough going, and when he asked the company and choreographer for suggestions, "they told me they didn't like any dance films." So Maddin unpacked his trusty Super-8 camera and stepped onto the stage. "That's how I discovered what dancers see when they're dancing," he says. "They can see each others' faces straining slightly; you can hear muscles straining and panties ripping and tutus shredding." Though Maddin's up-close style inevitably cropped out some of the dancers' bodies, he found them surprisingly enthusiastic at the idea. "If dancers had their wish, they'd have a Jumbotron above the stage with close-ups of their faces. They do perform with their faces, whether people see them or not, and they're fine melodramatic performances, not method at all. The dancers really started to become interested when I started attacking their faces with the lens. I could feel them rising into the camera, almost."

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary plays Fri.-Sun., June 13–15, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700.