North America is awash with competent feature directors who can point a camera, move actors about, and get a picture done on budget. But where oh where are the visionaries? Our Krzysztof Kieslowski or Andrei Tarkovsky? Someone whose every buoyant, dizzy frame is a winged migration?

Well, there’s Guy Maddin, for one, the wizard-in-residence of Winnipeg, and each shot in his œuvre is sculpted, a starry night of wonder. Maddin is a comic visionary, his work as loopy as it is luminous. His warped, dream-fever fables — Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, Heart of the World, etc. — are punctuated with Grand Guignol jokes and bemused homages to German Expressionism. His movies have barely opened in the USA, being mostly banished to midnight screenings. But his cult status keeps spreading, and fans are getting with it, discovering his masterly œuvre via video.

The Brattle Theatre is giving this weekend (June 13-15) over to Maddin’s new, mostly brilliant Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. The project began as an assignment to capture on film the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Mark Godden’s adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel. But a Dracula story is prime Maddin material. What rises from the grave and onto the screen becomes, at least for two-thirds of the picture (the last section loses focus and energy), made-in-Maddin heaven.

There’s ample dancing, much of it well-turned, as Godden’s choreography is complemented by Maddin’s supple, swing-through-the air cinematography. I especially like the part when Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) roars out of her grave, an undead refusing the stake to her heart; also Lucy’s sensual pas de deux with her attentive vampire master, Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang), and the amazing moment when Dr. Van Helsing (David Moroni) unwraps a scarf around Lucy's neck and she leaps forward, a brazen, bitten victim. " Vampyr! " , Van Helsing declares, via title card.

What does a girl want? According to Godden and Maddin, it’s to go down for the count, to have Dracula pin your body and sink his notorious canines into your waiting swan flesh. Their revisionist Stoker is unabashedly pro-Dracula. The count is a red-eyed, back-door man in high heat who gives the girls what the other guys won’t, or can’t. Here, lustful Lucy is pursued by three twit suitors, secondary dancers who flit about her but never, never go for the jugular. And poor love-starved Mina (CindyMarie Small) is given the shivery shoulder by her fiancé, Jonathan Harker (Johnny Wright), who wants to save it for after the marriage; I presume he’s the unnamed virgin of the movie’s title.

Maddin puts his stamp on the film early, with Gothic-lettered tabloid headlines warning of " Immigrants! The Other! From Other Lands! From the East! " The men all look like pale Canadians except for the princely Chinese dancer portraying Dracula. Zhang Wei-Qiang’s count takes on a perverse relevance with the film’s release this spring: he’s the Yellow Peril updated as SARS. Another Maddin touch is the casting of one of the director’s regulars, Brent Neale (so great as the incestuous-minded brother in Careful), as the non-dancing " Renfield! Eater of Bugs! " He’s the wormy, slobbering, bootlicking sycophant who does the bidding of Dracula. A Guy Maddin kind of kooky guy!

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary initiates a cool Brattle week of classic Dracula movies. Four other renditions of Stoker’s vampire lurk on screen, including, on Monday (June 16), Max Schreck’s hideous, humorless rodent in Nosferatu (1922) and, on Tuesday (June 17), Béla Lugosi’s smirky, ironic, drippy-accented Transylvanian in Dracula (1931). The Wednesday (June 18) offering is definitely recommended: Christopher Lee, tall and speedy of foot and a knockout lady killer, in The Horror of Dracula (1958). It’s the best of the British Hammer Films horrors, which in their tame day, the late 1950s, seemed mighty bloody (at least a couple of gushing scenes per movie) and a tad risqué (all the women wore plunging blouses and showed gratuitous cleavage).

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com