Dracula is widely considered the most adapted work of fiction in history, with innumerable film and television retellings, not to mention the stories it went on to inspire. It’s near impossible to have seen them all but I’ve watched an awful lot of them, from the 1930s Universal monster movies to Hammer horror classics to the multiple versions of Nosferatu. Yet before now I had never gone back to the source, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Each adaptation builds on the last, altering the mythology slowly but surely over time, and returning to the origin proved to be a revelatory endeavour, stripping the iconography back to its more simple roots.
The greatest surprise was one I’ve heard discussed and have understood to be true yet have never felt until now: Dracula has always been a modern story. It’s hard to imagine now with many film versions opting for a period setting, the story eternally existing in 1897 while the world around it charges into new centuries. But the entire point of the novel is that it is modern, set in the present day. Old world supernature juxtaposed against the then modern world. Dracula is an ancient evil encountering modernity for the first time. It’s not like the old days, picking off women from villages. Here he comes up against real estate, psychology, modern medicine, and perhaps the true evil of 1897, lawyers.
Part of why Jonathan Harker is kept captive is so he can teach Dracula of this modern world, and that fact is lost in many adaptations. He’s essentially an English teacher, with Dracula wanting to learn the language and have no accent by the time he travels to London. Stoker’s point in telling this story was that old horrors are still out there and can adapt to the modern world. The novel is set in the present, and even the famous 1931 adaption is set in the year of its production with modern traffic heard in the background, hard to imagine though it is. Given how much has changed in the past 128 years, granted, the novel no longer feels modern, yet there is one detail which shocked me: a real estate agent whipping out a Kodak camera to take photos of a home he wants to sell. By that metric, we haven’t changed at all.
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film adaptation is one of the closest to the source material, and should be considering it’s called Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and there was always one detail which confused me. A swirl of blue flame appears outside Dracula’s castle for little reason, which Keanu Reeves with his terrible English accent infamously draws attention to with one of his funniest lines: “bloody wolves chasing me through some blue inferno.” Finally, I have an explanation. Kinda. The novel states that blue lights flicker above where treasure is buried. It’s an odd detail but one which supposes that so many old world superstitions and supernatural occurrences exist in this world. Dracula is but one of them, the only to move into modernity.
“He was in life a most wonderful man.” This description of Dracula is far removed from the monstrous warlord most adaptations paint him as before his vampirism. He’s a solider, that is made clear, but not a bad man, which makes the threat of vampirism even greater. Any of the novel’s heroes could end up as evil as Dracula in the end. And he is pure evil. The book never romanticises the character in any way, he’s not charming or seductive like onscreen portrayals. He’s disgusting, causing Harker to gag whenever he gets too near, like a rotting corpse, much more like Orlok in Nosferatu.
The brides however are entirely different. Stoker doesn’t make them disgusting and overuses the word “voluptuous” to describe every part of their bodies. I know there are modern readings which question Stoker’s sexuality and homoeroticism in the novel but it’s the scene with the brides which still stands out as incredibly horny rather than anything with Dracula. The best he does is let Harker take a dump the minute he arrives in his castle (“You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your toilet”) before making dinner for him. It’s funny to get confirmation in the book that it’s Dracula making the meals himself but initially pretending he still has servants. Harker sees him quickly preparing the food between a crack in the door.
Dracula is a very rule-focused story, establishing the laws by which vampires both live and die, yet the novel includes a few details not often returned to. Wisely, the films ignored the idea that Dracula “throws no shadows” because the scariest and cleverest visuals in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu are all to do with his shadow. We also learn “a sacred bullet fired into his coffin kill him,” which now feels more fitting for lycanthropy, and a sacred wafer holds the same repelling power as a crucifix. We learn vampires can pass through cracks as thin as a knife would have difficulty, explaining how they leave coffins undetected, which is also wisely eliminated in adaptations. The one aspect I wish would get translated onscreen is that, as well as fog, Dracula can control snow. How has there never been a proper ‘Dracula in the snow’ movie?
The novel spends less than a quarter of its page count at Castle Dracula, which is a shame because that’s always my favourite part in the films and its true for the novel as well. My interest in adaptations always wavers the further they get from the castle, which is probably why I love the Hammer films that never stray too far from the location. Instead, Dracula travels to England to reside at Carfax. I was surprised to learn Carfax is just a house in the novel, albeit a big one with a chapel, and not an abbey like in many films. It must have been conflated with Whitby Abbey, a different location in the book. He buys the house under the alias Count De Ville, which might be Stoker at his least subtle. And considering one of the novel’s heroes is Lord Godalming, the author isn’t trying to hide that this is a deeply religious battle between good and evil, God and the Devil.
And so begins the slow, slow, so very very slow death of Lucy Westenra at the hands/fangs of Count Dracula. Our band of heroes are introduced as they fight to save Lucy’s life, visiting her over many nights and performing many blood transfusions. It’s not bad but it certainly takes a longer than it needs to. But the realisation that Lucy is now un-dead is great, as is the ultimate destruction of her at the hands of her loved ones. It’s brutal, and the novel can still find ways to be shocking. Her death and beheading remain tough to read, and the image of a baby wriggling in a sack, the vampires feeding on children rather than adults, is horrifying. It’s also clear from this section that ‘The Un-Dead’ was supposed to be the title of the novel considering how often those words are uttered.
I’ve never particularly liked the character of Dr. Seward in any adaptation but I feel I understand him much better after reading the book. Or at least, understand his purpose. He works as a POV character, a narrator for much of the story rather than an active participant, while in films such a role is superfluous. We can watch the action unfold; we don’t need to read his journal entries to get caught up. Quincey might still be an unnecessary character in the novel, however. Meanwhile Mina is the glue that holds the band of impromptu vampire hunters together, the beating heart of the group, described by Stoker as having “a man’s brain and a woman’s heart.”
A passage I found very effective was Dracula feeding on Mina, and her being forced to feed on him, while Jonathan was also in the bed, hypnotised in a stupor. That’s deeply unsettling, and usually the young woman is sleeping alone when preyed on in films. Upon learning what has occurred, Harker’s hair turns white overnight, like Leland Palmer. I like the use of Mina although was surprised she wasn’t in the story more. Dracula doesn’t learn of her until well into the novel (there’s no looking at Harker’s personal picture of her in the castle) and while I like the weird psychic bond she has with the vampire, she has little to do at the end. She survives but doesn’t confront Dracula. There isn’t really a final confrontation: in the end he’s a body in a box, promptly beheaded and turned to ash just before he reaches the sanctuary of his castle. Dracula is barely in the book past the opening, kept offscreen (or offpage) like a movie villain more so than he is in the actual movies.
Van Helsing is written as a very odd character, enjoyably so for the most part. He so intensely wants to be everyone’s friend, declaring his undying love for people he’s only just met. He meets Mina and demands they be friends for life within minutes, claiming he’d do anything for her, and cries over Lucy more than the people who have known her for years. It works as a complete flip to Dracula, with intentional parallels drawn between the two. Both are foreigners, traveling to England, with three devout followers. The characters embody Stoker’s ultimate thematic statement: love and community with combat selfish and lonesome evil.
To defeat this ancient evil, it’s as if the modern heroes have to themselves retreat to the ways of old. The men are written like knights, pledging love and fealty to a fair maiden in Mina. I was surprised at just how melodramatic the novel becomes at points, with characters speaking in grand proclamations of deep emotion. The language and style may be rooted in the Victorian era but the themes and ideas remain universal, a staple of genre storytelling. A community of friends forming to battle an individual; familiarity vs strangeness. Dracula is a story I was already intimately familiar with but the aspect most unique to the original novel, impossible to adapt, is the style in which it is written. A series of letters and newspaper articles and journal entries brought together to form an epistolary story. It works wonderfully, creating a real sense of verisimilitude to ground the supernatural occurrences. And the thing that shocked me: Mina is the one to compile all these documents together, the author of the story within the story. The novel not only charts Dracula’s incursion into England but also the creation of the novel itself. Dracula is less a record of hunting a vampire and more a record of a record of the admin required to hunt a vampire.
