For the 25th Toronto Film Festival, 10 prominent Canadian directors were commissioned to submit a short "Prelude" to be shown in rotation throughout the 10-day event. Most took the assignment as an obligation to pay tribute to the festival or romanticize movies in general, but experimental retro-stylist Guy Maddin decided to squeeze an entire feature-length silent film into six frenetic minutes, dubbing it "the world's first subliminal melodrama." As it turns out, Maddin's deliriously obsessive The Heart Of The World was itself a prelude to an even more ambitious undertaking: a 75-minute version of Bram Stoker's Dracula that brings the same mock-silent surrealism to bear on a dance interpretation by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. What might have been a conceptual nightmare instead becomes an inspired, original, and gracefully integrated collaboration of theater and cinema that complements not only both forms, but also the seductive, dreamlike qualities of the source material. Designed like a mad hybrid of early Soviet montage and the Baroque touches of German Expressionists, Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary looks as if it's been unearthed from a time capsule circa 1925. Though he cheats by adding certain sound effects, Maddin slavishly re-creates a period where film was driven purely by images, with intertitles in lieu of dialogue and occasional color tinting or dramatic splashes of red over the washed-out black-and-white photography. Staging his film in three distinct acts over Gustav Mahler's first two symphonies, Maddin renders a surprisingly faithful version of Stoker's story, but as with The Heart Of The World, his talent for spastic compression becomes another form of abridgement. In concert with ballet director Mark Godden, who deserves much of the credit for his witty interpretation and choreography, Maddin begins with the first act in a cycle of entrancing pas de deux, as an immigrant Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang) transforms the virginal Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) into a baby-devouring monster. The time crunch adversely affects the meeting between the Count and real-estate broker Jonathan Harker (Johnny A. Wright), which was perhaps the most enduring section of F.W. Murnau's classic Nosferatu. But Maddin and Godden close with a few mesmerizing setpieces, including Dracula's seduction of Harker's fiancée Mina (CindyMarie Small) under a shimmering snowfall, and a climactic showdown with slayer Dr. Van Helsing (David Moroni) and Lucy's strapping suitors. Though he tries his best to preserve the theatrical continuity of ballet while indulging in his usual cinematic flourishes, Maddin is more concerned with movement than technique, which may explain why he obscures much of the footwork in billowing clouds of fog. But only ballet purists would carp at a film this expressive and entertaining, from the high comedy of vampires recoiling from crosses in backwards tiptoe to the hypnotic eroticism of the Count drawing women toward the infernal red lining of his cape. Leave it to Maddin to produce something truly one-of-a-kind, even in the wake of countless film adaptations of Stoker's book.