Dracula

When I was growing up in the Seventies, Dracula was kind of a big deal. The movies were in the cinemas, and the old black-and-white films were always on T.V. Everybody knew who Christopher Lee was—no, not Saruman—and boys dressed up as vampires on Halloween. And of course there was also the novel to read. But just as with James Bond, most people watched the movie and did not bother with the source material. For me it was only after several decades that I came across a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel in a bookshop and decided to reread it. Well, actually, to really read it for the first time.

I was in for quite a surprise. My first encounter with Dracula when I was a teenager was—as I was only to discover later—with an abridged version, which people with not much faith in kids’ abilities had “rendered more interesting.” I think it is unfortunate that I read the novel when I was about twelve years old. I enjoyed the first third of it: the travels of Jonathan Harker in Transylvania and the beginning of the adventures in England. But all those scenes involving poor Lucy Westenra and her fate—involving a gruesome cemetery scene—absolutely terrified me as a child. Once the light in my bedroom was shut off I was terrified by thoughts of the “bloofer lady” and the children she stalked. The words alone still give me goosebumps.

Still, the sleepless nights did not keep me from dressing up as Dracula at every single Carnival or Halloween party for several years. (I had nearly forgotten about that obsession of mine until I began thinking about this article.) All I needed was pale skin, red blood dripping down from the corner of my mouth, and a set of plastic vampire teeth. The most important bit of the costume, however, was the shiny black cape that went down to the floor and made me feel like part Dracula, part Darth Vader. It smelled slightly of the mothballs that kept my parents’ costume suitcase in order, but it felt fantastic. It swished when I walked and it made me appear a bit aloof; it encouraged people to leave me in peace at parties. Of course I never had the urge to bite anybody in the neck or drink any blood. Looking back, I think I simply liked the idea of being a dark, brooding Byronian stranger with a cape (not an insignificant bit of the Dracula lore). The only time I have felt a similar thrill later on was when I wore a cape (again) and a black tricorn hat in Venice while wearing a white Bauta face mask and gliding through the dark alleys of the laguna city—a throwback to those childhood vampire joys.

Unforgettable for other reasons was my encounter with the movie version from 1931, starring Bela Lugosi. I had read about this film in a book on horror movies before I saw it for the first time when I was fourteen. I was staying in my grandfather’s house, an old castle with dark corridors and stern portraits of ancestors, and I was slightly spooked already because I was totally alone. Then I discovered in the T.V. magazine that Dracula was playing that evening! Soon I was glued to the screen. The film has more of the quality of a stage play than a real horror movie, but because of the music and Lugosi’s mesmerizing acting, the story had me quite in its grip.

I remember at some point in the film a vampire bat flapping its leathery wings in front of a window. It was very visibly a bit of papier-mâché, and I would have laughed it off—but at exactly that moment suddenly a rat tat tat sound crashed against the window in my room, just beside my ear. I nearly had a heart attack. I whipped my head around, fully expecting Count Dracula to be hovering outside. It was only my cousins, who had forgotten their keys and had thrown a handful of pebbles against the window because they wanted me to open the door. Years later, when I watched the same movie as a grown-up, I laughed about the often hokey cinematography, but when that leathery bat arrived, I still felt rather uneasy.

I was not terrified at all but equally mesmerized when I saw the masterpiece Nosferatu a few years later in a Munich arthouse cinema. Although it is a black-and-white silent movie from 1922 (in my case there was live piano accompaniment) I remember having been totally immersed in it and not once thinking it laughable. Even though Nosferatu is an unauthorized adaptation made against the wishes of Stoker’s widow, for me it remains the truest film version of Dracula. The scenes in Whitby alone are spectacular, and no one has ever topped the sheer horror of Max Schreck’s animal-like vampire rising from the grave. (The entire restored film is available for free in fantastic quality online, but watching it on a computer at home is not nearly the same as seeing it in a dark movie theater.) The film version that is theoretically closest to the book, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I found to be rather pompously baroque. And I am ashamed to admit that I never saw a Christopher Lee Dracula movie. Ah, well.

But now, reading the novel again, I have discovered that the original, unabridged version of Dracula is a wild collage of diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and notes. It includes many, many more main characters than I remembered from the movies. (Of course, as a teenager, I was captivated by the book, but I skipped over certain passages which simply seemed too long and did nothing to move the story along. I also remember being irritated by the format of the epistolary novel.) To return to Dracula in the age of Internet is surprising and once again proves that good books should be read over and over again because they are completely different each time you open them. Besides the thrilling and—for the year 1897—very modern story, I noticed for the first time how much of a technology geek Stoker is. He seems to be absolutely fascinated by the latest technological advances, new modes of travel, the telegraph, and, most of all, the phonograph. In the middle section of the story, Mia, the female protagonist, becomes a kind of chief secretary who—in between vampire attacks—types up phonograph-recorded memos and diary entries with a typewriter. By doing this she provides daily status updates for the fearless vampire hunters. Doctor John Seward becomes slightly too fond of the device and even misses it on their journey to Transylvania (“How I miss my phonograph!”). For the reader, the prominence of technology sometimes feels like a little much, but one can’t help but forgive Stoker his enthusiasm.

Even more interesting are Stoker’s other structural effects; some of the faux newspaper articles cited are pointed and even parodic. In a novel that is largely rather dramatic in tone, we find here some glimpses of the humor and media satire seen in Stoker’s short stories (which are much sharper and more gruesome than even the scariest passages in Dracula). I know it is perilous to imagine what Stoker would have written if he were he alive today, but I suspect he would probably write Dracula as a website filled with YouTube news clips, vlogs, and mockumentary-style riffs. He clearly enjoyed harvesting little details from one medium and planting them in another, a clever little jigsaw puzzle. Through the very believable articles, the novel gains an element of realism.

I haven’t even started on the story, the characters and themes, the thrills and the moments of horror, or the incredible nobility and uprightness of its band of heroes—let alone the Catholic streak brought into the story by the quirky Dutch professor and vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Dracula, like The Lord of the Rings, is ultimately a book about hope and friendship in the face of insurmountable horrors and seemingly unbeatable evil. Although the novel is frequently noted for its erotic undertones, it is deeply moral. Like Tolkien’s hobbits, Stoker’s vampire hunters are a noble brotherhood, always ready to give their lives for the cause and each other. Van Helsing keeps them all together with his wisdom, his faith, and the endearing oddness of his funny little way of speaking. And yes, there is a lot of speaking on his part, but at least it is always amusing to read.

Finally, there’s the count himself: charming, proud, from a very old family, deeply evil and violent in his soul, cunning and perverse, ready to use nature against his foes. Being proud, he is bound to underestimate his human adversaries. By the way, I will never forgive him for boasting that his family can boast “a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs” can never reach. Up to then, I might have taken his side. Not after that. Oh, and while I’m at it, the actor Bela Lugosi is Hungarian, but the historical model for Dracula is not. Stoker mixed up some historic details. The inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, is from Wallachia but is not Hungarian. (Never tell Hungarians that Dracula is Hungarian.)

As I re-read the novel, I found myself filled with a wistful melancholy for the (relatively) slower-paced nineteenth century. I know that to Stoker himself, in 1897, the story might have seemed like a rapid-force ride. From London to Vienna, to Budapest, through the Borgo Pass and back, the uncanny ship journey to England on the Demeter, in which Dracula becomes the stuff of nightmares for the ship crew, all across London and back again to Transylvania in the end—it all sounds very hurried. Yet it is striking how much time a courageous vampire hunter had back then, how he could find time between stops to go sightseeing, read books, and have conversations. All of this seems so very calm and therefore so very long ago. Even when Jonathan is a guest at the count’s house there are long, long days of reading and exploring before Dracula reveals his true face—deliciously quiet days where nothing happens. It is shocking to us nowadays how much time people used to spend doing next to nothing.

On the other hand, one must not lament the modern age too much. A single cell phone in the Borgo Pass would have ruined all of Dracula’s plans in an instant. Without one, Jonathan must wait and wait while his friends obliviously race to their doom. And after all those pages, when you least expect it, Stoker speeds up his story and the stakes even more, higher and higher, until in a very thrilling finale at . . . Well, I won’t tell you what happens and where. You will have to read it for yourself.

Dracula is very much worth the read, possibly even more for adults than for teenagers, who might not know what to do with these long passages where nothing seems to happen. And afterwards, read Stoker’s short stories, where he really excels. The best are from the collection Dracula’s Guest, which was published in 1914. Here you find grim and spooky tales, crisp, weird, and cruel. “The Squaw,” “The Burial of the Rats,” and “The Judge’s House” are classics of the genre. And of course the title story, which seems to have been an episode of an earlier draft of Dracula, set near Munich. It is good, though not as polished as the rest of the famous novel.

Stoker churned out thirteen other novels, but they are unknown nowadays—so probably not very good—and that makes Dracula an even greater miracle of a book. The only other novel by Stoker I have read is The Lair of the White Worm. This was really a chore to suffer through. While it is supposed to be a fantasy horror story, it is endlessly talky, the plot is catastrophically clumsy, the dialogue cringeworthy, and Stoker disregards the old maxim “show, don’t tell” to the bitter end. While the mythical idea behind the story is really interesting, I must urge you to stay away from that book at all costs. That’s many hours of your life you will never get back. Oh, yes, Ken Russell made one of his patented deeply weird but passably spooky movies of it, in 1988. It even has Hugh Grant in it. If you must, watch that.