Yet Dracula’s undead potential to rise again and again in new forms is evident in Stoker’s novel: Dracula overflows with tantalising images and (sometimes undeveloped) ideas. They might expect him to burn up in sunlight, but that would be Max Schreck ( Nosferatu, 1922) or Christopher Lee ( Horror of Dracula, 1958) the original Dracula walks in the daylight without smouldering.Īs these titbits suggest, Dracula as we popularly know it today is almost a palimpsest, its story overwritten with multiple iconic portrayals and imaginative revisions of its monster. New readers might expect Dracula to say that he will ‘never drink…wine,’ but that’s a line of Bela Lugosi’s ( Dracula, 1931) and, much later, Gary Oldman’s ( Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992). And as the vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing tells it, he is of a ‘criminal type’ with an ‘imperfectly formed mind’-a selfish creature with a ‘child brain,’ incapable of progress or real, modern intelligence. He communes with wolves, scales castle walls like a lizard, sleeps in the dirt, and feeds infants to the vampire women who, mysteriously, roam his castle. Rather, he is a monstrous ‘creature…in the semblance of a man.’ Dracula first appears as an old man with a ‘cruel-looking’ mouth, an ‘extraordinary pallor,’ and a profuse amount of hair, even in the centre of his palms. He is no antihero, no handsome, tortured stranger who shares an immortal love with the heroine. He can be identified in Sesame Street’s puppet Count von Count and the cartoon on the cereal box for Count Chocula.īut what draws us to this king of the undead? How has he become such a prolific and contradictory figure of evil and seduction, glamour and horror, pathos and comedy?Īs he appears in Stoker’s text, Dracula is hardly the figure new readers might expect him to be. He is an African prince, the leader of the monster squad, Gary Oldman in a top hat, a nemesis of slayers such as Buffy and Blade, and even (heaven help us) Adam Sandler as a hotel proprietor.

But he is also a handsome Hungarian man in a tuxedo and cape. He is a balding, long-fingered, shadowy ghoul. He is a menacing spectre in a foreign castle. He is, as he is called in Bram Stoker’s 1897 text, the King Vampire. They cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world Abraham Van Helsing

Dracula stars in more than two hundred films, appears in numerous television shows, has taken to the stage not only in drama but also musicals, ballet, and opera, features in video games and comics, and, of course, appears in many vampire fictions in addition to the original novel that bears his name. There are few names from literature and popular culture that are as well known as that of Dracula.

Dracula bram stoker