Drac's Back
A true immortal, the OG vampire won't abandon us in our hour of need.
One of the first Substacks I subscribed to was
The by-now-annual re-publication of the collected diary entries, newspaper reports, and letters of Bram Stoker’s novel shares them on the day and date they happen, as opposed to the order in which they appear in the book. This chronological approach offers new insights on the familiar tale, synchronously mapping Mina’s concerns about Lucy against the travails of her kidnapped husband against the demonic surges in Renfield’s brain. From now until Halloween you too can follow the epic clash between the vampiric forces of darkness and the self-appointed guardians of the light.
In twenty-first century terms, Dracula is probably the most popular and profitable IP in existence, beating even the Bible (which had a nearly 2000 year head start) in new narrative iterations. Generation after generation clamors for retellings of the war between the mysterious Transylvanian count and the gentleman adventurers who stand between him and his plan to invade England. Everyone has their favorite onscreen Vlad, from Max Shreck to Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman to Jonathan Rhys Myers to Bela Lugosi, and can name their favorite adaptation, from NOSFERATU (1922) to, uh NOSFERATU (2024). There are many other vampire stories out there (I see you, SINNERS), but the Dracula tag attached to a project, via the title or the source material, generates brand-name recognition for every kind of production from Pornhub subcategories to kids’ cartoons.
Why this dominance? Dracula wasn’t the first vampire novel: Stoker was following traditions established by John Polidori, Alexandre Dumas, Sheridan Le Fanu and Florence Marryat, among others. Dracula was his fifth book (of eleven total), none of which set the world on fire during his lifetime. When Dracula was first published on May 26, 1897, reviewers praised the “eerie and gruesome tale…[as] much the best book he has written” (Glasgow Herald, 10 June 1897) and professed it to be “horrid and creepy to the last degree. It is also excellent, and one of the best things in the supernatural line that we have been lucky enough to hit upon” (Pall Mall Gazette, 1 June 1897). The novel sold steadily (it’s never been out of print) but, when Stoker died in 1912, it barely merited a mention in his obituary. Had Dracula remained within the confines of the printed page, it might have faded with its author’s memory, like so many other nineteenth century novels. But it found new life in new formats, beyond anything Stoker could have dreamed.
And Stoker was quite the visionary, a well-traveled polymath well-versed in human behavior. A natural athlete and a less-enthusiastic scholar, he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, then spent ten years as a civil servant before taking a position with celebrated actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker managed the theatre from 1878 to 1905 and accompanied Irving on tours to the United States.
These peregrinations meant he spent time with leading thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic–including luminaries like Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill, William Gladstone, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, and even Buffalo Bill Cody–along with attending salons at his brother, Sir William Thornley Stoker’s house in Dublin. Thornley was a noted anatomist and chair of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Their conversations revolved around a free and eclectic exchange of ideas, ranging from folk superstitions to forensic science to typewriter technology to spiritualism. Stoker reiterated his friends’ multifaceted expertise and perspectives into his text.
Yet Dracula is more than an intellectual rehash of fin de siècle discourse. Stoker was a professional showman, keyed in to what horrified and delighted theater audiences. He knew they enjoyed fantasy, escaping for an evening into Gothic wildernesses peppered with ruined castles and about-to-be-ruined maidens. He understood that theater-goers wanted to take a walk on the wild side both psychologically and geographically, to follow the adventures of characters faced with problematic decisions, and to experience the moral frisson of making the wrong, the anti-social, the depraved choice. They wanted, from a safe distance, sex and violence.
Dracula delivers on both fronts. There’s plenty of constrained gore, as the antagonist leaves a trail of corpses wherever he roams. There’s sex too, as the reader is encouraged to contemplate the thrusting fangs and sucking wet mouths of the vampire and his polycule. However, as Stoker knew only too well what had happened to his friend Oscar Wilde, just two years previously, any carnal indulgence comes at a price.
Poor, prim Harker, our proxy for the push-pull between sex and death, suffers “deadly fear” alongside “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.” Does Harker succumb to this desire? That stays between him and Sister Agatha and the other nuns at Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, Buda-Pesth. On the other hand, it’s no mystery what happens to Lucy “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men?” Westenra. She’s unable to resist the seduction of the vampire’s kiss, and ends up as “the Thing in the coffin” being pounded by her husband, wielding a wooden stake. Her saviors (including those same three marital prospects) cut her head off and stuff her mouth with garlic. The 1890s were a hard time to be a woman.
One of the great joys of Dracula is this variance: while the Count is the foe of all (except Renfield), there’s no single protagonist. It’s a true ensemble piece, with the format offering many different frames of reference. Stoker drew on his diverse acquaintance, his curiosity about different social classes, to give us a wide range of narrators and a range of narrative techniques: Dr. Seward records his observations on phonograph records, Mina uses shorthand to transcribe conversations, Lucy keeps a personal diary, Arthur and Quincey communicate via telegraph, and the doomed Captain of the Demeter makes meticulous entries in his traditional ship’s log (in Russian, which must be translated). Their accounts overlap and aren’t entirely consistent (as in reality, eye witnesses rarely agree on the circumstances of a crime), and the reader is left to parse the evidence and draw their own conclusions about the extent of Dracula’s supernatural powers. There’s no omniscience, except perhaps Dracula’s. The ancient vampire must surely be using his telepathic powers to tune into his opponents chatter–can vampires intercept telegrams?
This polyphonic spree makes Dracula the ultimate source material for adaptation: there’s no singular narrative. An adaptor can pick and choose perspectives, cherry-picking events from one or many accounts and filling in ellipses with their own ideas, or update the action to their own era. The text’s plasticity creates space for countless movie and literary spin-offs and side stories: Renfield, Dracula in Love, Dracula’s Daughter, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Van Helsing, Shadow of the Vampire, Covenant of the Vampire, Dracula AD 1972 et al. That's also what makes it so much fun to dismantle and reassemble, a la Dracula Daily. There are many, many sides to this story and you don’t have to pick just one.
As Dracula Daily rolls out over the summer I hope you’ll share my annual journey from the mountains of Carpathia to the bowels of Carfax Manor. Here on our Path, I’ll be doing some deep dives into a few of my favorite Dracula iterations, some of which share little more than the name in the title, some that go hard on the lore. There’s something for everyone in the Dracula universe.
What is your favorite Dracula adaptation, book, movie, or other format? Do you lean old-school Lugosi or do you stan for Claes Bang in the most recent BBC version? Open your veins in the comments…