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Dracula’s Long Shadow
Literary Essay
by William Weger
I have pleasant childhood memories of my first encounter with a vampire. I wasn’t even a teenager yet.
One Friday, near midnight, I quietly closed my bedroom door and tuned in to Sir Graves Ghastly. The vampire television host, dressed in a full cape and costume, presented classic horror movies from the comfort of his coffin— in a funny yet spooky fashion.
I’ll never forget his blood-curdling cackle: “Nnnnyeah-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaah!”
That scary night, Sir Graves introduced me to the 1931 Universal Studios version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. The black-and-white film remains the gold standard for Dracula movies.
“The blood is the life.”
The 1931 Dracula still delivers a chilling mix of gothic elegance and old-fashioned horror. As a kid, Lugosi’s strange accent and his hypnotic gaze, the eerie castle, and the raving lunatic, Renfield, sent chills up my spine.
In high school, I read Bram Stoker’s classic and was surprised to discover that the original plot was substantially different from the 1931 film. In the book, it’s Jonathan Harker, not Renfield, who travels to Transylvania and meets the Count at his castle.
In the history of horror, perhaps no character has cast a longer shadow than Count Dracula.
Nearly 130 years after Bram Stoker introduced the Transylvanian count in his 1897 novel, Dracula and vampires still have a lasting bite on the horror genre. They have appeared in hundreds of movies, television shows, books, plays, documentaries, video games, comics, and even comedies. While stories of blood-drinking supernatural creatures had existed for centuries, Stoker helped create the model for the modern vampire.
There have been many adaptations and reinterpretations of Dracula. Among my favorites are Horror of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee in 1958, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula in 1992. The 1922 German silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror transformed Dracula into a haunting, rat-like figure. Max Schreck played Count Orlok in the classic film.
A new version of Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers, was released in 2024 and stars Bill Skarsgård, best known for playing Pennywise in the horror films It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019), based on Stephen King’s best-selling novel.
Another King novel, ’Salem’s Lot, features a writer who returns to his Maine hometown, only to discover that it has been overrun by vampires. The novel inspired a classic 1979 television miniseries that brought its chilling small-town evil to life. It remains one of my favorite vampire adaptations.
Stoker himself wrote a stage version, Dracula, or The Undead, which was performed only once at London’s Lyceum Theatre in 1897. Hamilton Deane’s 1924 play was the first authorized stage adaptation and eventually led to the famous stage production starring Bela Lugosi.
The Vampyre and Carmilla
Of course, Dracula wasn’t the first vampire. Vampires appeared in European folklore and earlier literature, including John Polidori’s The Vampyre, published in 1819. The 1872 gothic novella Carmilla also heavily influenced Stoker’s gothic classic. He borrowed from these earlier works, but his novel gave the vampire a personality and mythology that audiences could easily recognize.
Famously, Dracula could transform into a bat or a wolf. He possessed supernatural powers and survived by feeding on human blood. The gifted Stoker brought the ancient supernatural world into modern society—moving Dracula from the mountains of Transylvania to the streets of London.
In doing so, Stoker created a clash between the old world and the new—a clash that continues to haunt popular culture more than a century later.
Dracula didn’t just become one of horror’s most famous characters. He became a dark, glorious and mythical model of vampires to come.
William Weger is the founder and creative director of Books & Bards. He is an editor and staff writer for Bookstonian, the company’s online literary magazine.
Bookstonian offers literary enthusiasts thoughtful book reviews filled with insights and critiques of classics and contemporary works—whether fiction, nonfiction, biography, or poetry.
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