“Touting its “terror, eroticism, and gothic excess,” Penguin Classics has reissued Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula for a new generation of horror fiction lovers to sink their teeth into. The imprint has enlisted none other than Nosferatu (2024) director Robert Eggers to situate modern readers with a foreword that weaves his own lifelong obsession with the Gothic folktale to”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
It’s impossible to remember a time when I didn’t know the name Dracula. Certainly, vampires have been part of my imaginary playground from as young as I can recall. The first Halloween costume that I chose myself was the Count from Sesame Street. My first Dracula costume was a printed cloth mask with bleeding fangs that I had from around the age of five and kept until it was a rag. I was Dracula for Halloween at least four times from ages 8 to 15.
I would imagine the first exposure to vampires was indeed Sesame Street or some innocent cartoons. But I also had in my possession an illustrated children’s book, Vampires by Colin and Jacqui Hawkins, that detailed some (somewhat erroneous) vampire folklore and explained ways to protect yourself from them. It also related the daily life of a fictional vampire family, seemingly inspired by the Addams Family. I remember reading this book cover to cover, day after day. More than anything it was the image of the vampire that took hold of my imagination: all in black, the cape, the widow’s peak, the fangs, the nails, the hairy palms. That is what kept me enamored of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Like many horror aficionados, for me the theme to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is forever linked with Tod Browning’s Draculareleased by Universal in 1931. Whenever I hear the first phrases of the piece, I never think of ballet or the tragic swan. I think of Bela Lugosi. His image, his stare, his Hungarian accent, his costume he brought from his stage portrayal — these are the trappings that have forever encapsulated Dracula for 20th century pop culture. It was of course the lasting ramifications of Lugosi that inspired the illustrations in the Hawkinses’ children’s book. In spite of interpretations from Christopher Lee (some similar to Lugosi, some less so) and no matter the haunted Max Schreck-inspired Dracula of Klaus Kinski — nor Gary Oldman’s operatic performance with its phantasmagorical transformations to werewolves and were-bats and decked out in otherworldly costume sand hair designs by Eiko Ishioka — it is Bela Lugosi’s Dracula that has overshadowed every other, including the Count from Bram Stoker’s novel.
For a long time, this image was my image of Dracula, too. That changed when, at the age of nine, I saw Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu. Max Schreck’s uncanny performance and makeup design were absolutely mesmerizing, as was the film’s unparalleled haunting atmosphere, made all the more palpable by the grainy 16mm transfer to VHS. The degraded image felt authentic, as if unearthed from the past. What’s more, Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen transformed Stoker’s novel into an enigmatic fairy tale.
From then on, I was open to every interpretation and was consuming any kind of vampire content, from Stoker’s novel to Montague Summers to comic books. I even had a VHS tape of Dracula: A Cinematic Scrapbookwhich attempted to detail every film portrayal of Dracula and included the trailers to nearly all of them.
When I was a sophomore in high school, auditions were held for the Balderston-Dean theatrical adaptation of Dracula (in which Lugosi originated the role), I desperately wanted to play the vampire but was cast as Dr. Seward. Later, as a senior in high school, I co-directed an adaptation of Murnau’s Nosferatu with my friend Ashley Kelly-Tata (now a seasoned theater and opera director). Our version of the expressionist silent film was performed onstage, all in black and white. Black-and-white makeup, wigs, costumes, and sets. And yes, I played the vampire this time.
Edouard Langlois, a formidable dark-bearded gentleman, was the artistic director of the local Edwin Booth Theater. It was the only “cool” theater in southern New Hampshire. Langlois mounted John Webster and Sam Shepard — not Rodgers and Hammerstein. He saw our humble play and invited us to do it more professionally at his theater. This changed my life. It cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director.
I went to drama school in New York, and after graduation my first leading role was Dracula on stage in the Hamptons, again the Balderston-Dean version. I performed in a theater where Lugosi himself had donned the cape in his career decline. In 2024, I released my feature film adaptation of Nosferatua work that seems to have been a lifetime in the making. Even if I’d never made that film, it is clear that Dracula has been and will always be a major part of my identity.
I cherish Stoker’s novel. I have read it at least ten times cover to cover. The first time, I knew I was holding the source of my passion. The text seemed like holy writ. And when I was a kid, it felt that way. I had Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Draculawhich my grandfather had picked up for me at a used bookstore. I devoured it. The novel is never more engaging than it is in Transylvania, where Stoker’s detailed research shines and transports the reader to this rich, unfamiliar world. The horror and action set pieces are riveting.
A tender and perturbing piece of Victoriana that has always stuck with me is Mina giving Lucy her shoes when she finds her barefoot in the churchyard swooning over a gravestone, and daubs her own feet with mud — lest either of them be judged for leaving home with bare feet! However, as an adult, one cannot ignore the grim truth that Stoker was a bit of a hack. Yet this repressed Victorian somehow stumbled upon creating a versatile and adaptable story at the turn of the century.
When I picked up Dracula again about 10 years ago to begin my screenplay of NosferatuI realized that truly reading Stoker’s text was going to be an act of forgetting — of unlearning. As I have made clear from my own experiences, in the century-plus since the publication of the novel, the cinematic vampire has had a profound impact on the themes and motifs of the undead and of Dracula; I realized that, as a young person reading the book, I had been synthesizing the film adaptations and infusing the book with mythology and story points that simply weren’t there.
Yes, most people know that Dracula in the book has a mustache, can walk in sunlight, and is not dispatched by a wooden stake — but no matter what Dan Curtis, James V. Hart and Francis Ford Coppola would lead you to believe, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not Vlad the Impaler. He has come to England seemingly for world domination and never lusts over the portrait of Harker’s fiancée, who is neither his long-lost love nor a woman possessing “a beautiful throat,” as Murnau’s Count Orlok would have it. That scene doesn’t exist.
But as a kid, I somehow inserted it without ever reading it! Well, in truth, Lucy and Mina just happen to be in Whitby (although Lucy, being a somnambulist, is an easy first victim). But it is only fair that Stoker has been cannibalized. Stoker’s Frankensteined creation was born from the history of the Anglo-literary vampire that begins with Polidori’s Ruthven, the first aristocratic, Byronesque and demonic seducer.
The real-estate motif is taken from the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, a strange plot device that I myself as a storyteller was stuck with. Stoker’s research on Transylvanian folklore is primarily from Emily Gerard, whose work has continued to be a mainstay of English-language Transylvanian lore to this day.
In my personal quest to discover the folkloric roots and power of the vampire, I ultimately had to unlearn Stoker, too. The vampire of folklore does not turn into bats. In the earliest recorded cases of Eastern European vampirism, the creatures look more like zombies and rarely drink blood, and if they do, it is usually from the victim’s heart rather than the throat. The vampire is ever evolving. As much as Lugosi’s impact hijacked Stoker and will always be the visual shorthand for Dracula, there has continued to be room for Anne Rice, Blade, and even Stephenie Meyer’s sparkling vampire Edward Cullen.
As recently as 20 years ago, in southern Romania, a man believed to be a vampire was exhumed, and his corpse was ritually mutilated. In life he was a difficult man and a heavy drinker. After he died, his family said he returned as a strigoi, attacking them at night. His daughter-in-law particularly suffered from these nocturnal assaults and became ill. When his body was destroyed, as per the folkloric procedure, the vampiric visitations stopped. His reign of terror ended. His daughter-in-law was cured.
What is the dark trauma that even death cannot erase? A heartbreaking notion. This is the essence of the palpable belief in the vampire. The folk vampire is not a suave dinner-jacket-wearing seducer, nor a sparkling, brooding hero. The folk vampire embodies disease, death and sex in a base, brutal, and unforgiving way. This is a very different vampire from Stoker’s. Yet Stoker harnessed the same power of sex and death in an approachable tale of a demon lover and the clash of modern and medieval.
The story, in its heart, is now one of the great fairy tales of Western culture. Stoker’s singular work of universal appeal ushered in the 20th century, and it has never lost its ability to inspire. The power of the vampire is that it will never die. It is always undead.