What makes dracula popular

Indeed, one of the features that makes Dracula so successful is his tremendous adaptability—perhaps more than any other literary figure in recent memory, Count Dracula evolves to fit the prevailing ethos of the society depicting him. Simply put, you can tell what your culture values by the way it portrays its Draculas.

As Stoker knew, vampire lore had existed in many cultures throughout recorded history. By the time Stoker took pen to paper with his creation, he had a long line of predecessors to build off. What made Dracula such a figure of horror, however, was not simply his appearance or his abilities; it was the way in which Stoker was able to use him to embody almost every fear and insecurity of the late Victorian British Empire. The novel Dracula was fairly well-regarded at its publication but not wildly popular; at the time, Stoker was probably still best known as the manager of the Lyceum Theater.

But when motion picture technology emerged, the lure of the vampire proved irresistible. The German director F. Ironically, though Florence Stoker sued successfully to have the film almost entirely destroyed, Nosferatu remains in essence if not in detail perhaps the most faithful adaptation of Dracula. After Nosferatu, however, film depictions of Dracula began to change. While not traditionally handsome, Lugosi combined an intense screen presence with a deliberate, heavily accented speech to create a Dracula who was almost as mesmerizing as he was repellant.

From the s on, vampire movies generally—and Dracula movies specifically—became a staple of cinemas. More importantly, directors and actors went the Lugosi route in representing the title character. From the s to the s, eras of more mainstream moral conservatism in film, the figure of Dracula was always distant and dangerous, yet all the more alluring for those very qualities.

Rather than a pure villain, he was becoming the forbidden anti-hero resisted by generic protagonists who were nowhere near as fascinating as he was. A key moment in this development was the Hammer film Horror of Dracula, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee in the role that would define him for years to come. Horror of Dracula tips its hat to tradition by killing Dracula in the end only to bring him back for subsequent sequels , but with free-flowing blood now in full color , seductive vampires, and seductive humans, the movie enjoys the ride far too much for the ending to be morally cathartic.

This was the wave of the future for vampire films, including new adaptations of Dracula. So popular was Christopher Lee that he reprised the role for Hammer in several further films, and his smoldering rendition then became the model. New Draculas were all around age forty, and they provided genuine temptations to the repressed Victorian women he vampirized.

Dracula went from being a sexual predator to a sexual liberator; the true dark forces were nineteenth-century inhibitions. Both Jonathan Harker and his wife who is a woman of character and Dr. Seward are my friends and have been so for many years, and I have never doubted that they were telling the truth….

Bram Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction, but as a warning of a very real evil, a childhood nightmare all too real. Changes would need to be made. Factual elements would need to come out, and it would be published as fiction or not at all. Tens of thousands of words had vanished. In the s, the original Dracula manuscript was discovered in a barn in rural northwestern Pennsylvania.

Nobody knows how it made its way across the Atlantic. That manuscript, now owned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen , begins on page This raises a question: what was on the first pages? What was considered too real, too frightening, for publication?

Bram Stoker left breadcrumbs; you need only know where to look. Some of those clues were discovered in a recently translated first edition of Dracula from Iceland titled Makt Myrkranna , or Power of Darkness. Within that first edition, Bram left not only his original preface intact, but parts of his original story — outside the reach of his U.

Then there were his notes, his journals, other first editions worldwide. Unable to tell his story as a whole, he spread it out where, much like his famous vampire, it never died, only slept, waited.

Dacre Stoker is the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker and the international bestselling co-author of Dracula: The Undead. He manages the Bram Stoker Estate. Together, they are the authors of the novel Dracul , available now, the research for which informed this piece.

The tower was not destroyed until Contact us at letters time. Abraham Stoker - the Irish writer who wrote the classic horror story 'Dracula' in By Dacre Stoker and J. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up.

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