How Dracula’s movie afterlife drained him of the power to chill our blood

In the late 1970s and early 80s the BBC scared late-night audiences witless with a series of horror movie double-bills that spanned the decades and covered everything from classics to schlock.

Among the armchair viewers was my mother who, clutching a cushion, would watch Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula from behind widened palms. Mesmerised and terrorised in equal measure, she would gleefully re-acquaint herself with the X-rated shockers from her teenage years and revel in the hypnotic majesty of Lee’s aristocratic, seductive and utterly deadly vampire king.

I doubt Mum ever read the novel that spawned Hammer’s initial Dracula and the spin-offs that followed. And even if she did she may not have recognised the original villain as conceived by Bram Stoker.

Stoker died on April 20, 1912 and never witnessed his creation’s journey to the screen. From Max Schreck in 1922’s Nosferatu via Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, Frank Langella and Gary Oldman, the Dracula that has bitten deep into the global jugular is almost entirely the product of the scriptwriter’s pen. This is what the movies have largely eschewed:

“His face was a strong – very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.

“The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.”

This is the portrait painted by a distinctly uneasy Jonathan Harker in his journal, and how the Count was introduced to the world in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Re-introducing him to an audience of academics in East Yorkshire last week led to a palpable frisson amongst delegates as most accepted that the blood-sucking fiend of the movies is far removed from the vampire of Stoker’s book.

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, keynote speaker at the University of Hull’s Bram Stoker Centenary Conference, bemoans the willingness of audiences to accept film lore rather than the purity of Stoker’s vision.

“Dracula is like Frankenstein,” says Frayling. “It’s moved from the world of literature to the world of myth where people think they’ve read it. There’s sort of a parallel text going on which is all these accretions that have happened in the 20th-century. The cloak isn’t mentioned in the book and a lot of the famous lines were invented by Hollywood scriptwriters and yet people think they’re Stoker’s lines.

“If you’re studying DH Lawrence you don’t have that problem because the novel probably hasn’t been made into a movie. There’s a kind of purity about your relationship to the text. With Dracula you bring to it all this stuff that’s happened in the last 100 years. It’s almost impossible to actually have an innocent reading of the text. There’s too much noise.”

Stoker began work on what was to become Dracula in 1890; the book was finally published seven long years later. Writing in fragmentary fashion, and often on tour as manager to the feted Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving, Stoker drew on all manner of inspirations.

Multiple biographers have struggled to identify the roots of Stoker’s Dracula. Was it born of his Irish protestant childhood, his supposedly loveless marriage, his alleged struggles with deeply suppressed homosexual yearnings and the controlling relationship he endured with Irving? Such vexed questions are a post-Freudian interpretation and may be yet another element of the Stoker smokescreen.

And can the modern gothic horror novel be traced back to Dracula? Did it all burst forth in 1897 with Stoker building on predecessors like Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin?

Dacre Stoker, the author’s American great grand-nephew, sees a clear route from his ancestor to Anne Rice’s Lestat, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight’s Edward Cullen.

“Bram didn’t start everything,” observes Stoker, “but [he created] a novel that took mythology and placed it in real time. That’s what really made it scary. Bram’s book hit then-popular culture and rode a crest for quite a while. It wasn’t until the 1970s that people like Anne Rice, Stephen King and others picked it back up again. They followed all the rules that Bram created but then they took them a step further.

“I believe Dracula, the story, is an accumulation of everything in Bram’s life. It all comes together, like a perfect storm.”

Yorkshire and specifically Whitby are says Stoker, essential to understanding how Bram Stoker constructed the core of his tale. He had holidayed in Whitby in 1890 on a rare break away from Irving. On the cliffs near the abbey he would gaze out to sea and conjure characters. In his hotel he became acquainted with a mother and two daughters who would eventually feed into his book. He took names from real seamen’s graves.

A wrecked Russian schooner, the Dimitri, became the Demeter. And in a local library he would happen across a name: Dracula.

“The Whitby influence is very obvious,” says Stoker. “You look at chapters six and seven [of Dracula] and you know Bram is in Whitby. He was worked to the bone by Irving and that was okay, but the man’s got to have a holiday every now and then. Whitby was this place where he could be creative and not have to worry about the minutiae of keeping the books at the Lyceum Theatre.”

Christopher Frayling claims the Dracula resurgence erupted in the late 1950s when Hammer Films released its heavily adapted and bastardised version of the book – the first in lurid colour.

Thus modern scholars’ understanding of the novel, the character and its importance has been skewed and twisted. Fatally, he says, Dracula is no longer frightening.

“The last really scary one was Nosferatu in the 1920s where there’s something deeply unpleasant – folkloric and nasty – about his physical appearance with his bat-like ears and his rodent teeth. So it’s not frightening anymore; he’s slowly become domesticated.

“Then you get to Twilight where it’s completely safe. Dracula is a vegetarian, a sallow little romantic who’s allowed to say ‘I love you’. Slowly the fear has been taken out of it.”

Gone are the days when filmmakers would cling to the origins of the tale. Even Francis Ford Coppola entered into role-reversal, making Van Helsing a crazed fundamentalist and Dracula a lovelorn romantic in his 1992 movie. Frayling is convinced that, for purists, there is no road back to the Borgo Pass, Transylvania and the bleakness of mouldering Castle Dracula.

“I’m worried that it’s become too safe – that the academics have turned it into Twilight,” laments Frayling. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when a vegetarian vampire was being taken seriously.

“In the 1960s and the early 70s it was subversive, slightly risqué and radical to study the gothic. Now that’s played out. It’s completely mainstream so it’s lost that subversive edge. It’s like an art school where the avant-garde has become institutionalised.

“Stoker was scared witless by Dracula but there’s no going back to that. Post-Anne Rice in 1976 it’s become completely Americanised. It’s very, very difficult now to put Drac back into his coffin; he’s sort of become something else. And that’s a pity because when you teach the subject it’s almost impossible to get students to go back to the text and unlearn everything that’s happened since.

“And that’s what’s so great about the Stoker centenary: it reminds us that it started here.”

An industry of the macabre

Bram Stoker’s decision to have Dracula come ashore in Whitby may have been inspired by his holiday to the East Coast, but it was to provide a whole new industry for the seaside resort.

Having long celebrated its connection to the book and the numerous film incarnations, the eerie ruins of the Abbey have become something of a Mecca for fans of the gothic.

The bi-annual Whitby Gothic Weekend, which began in 1994, arrives in the fishing port again next weekend for five days of music and events.

This year to mark the author’s centenary, the Bram Stoker International Film Festival will take over the town in October for what is being billed as “four days and nights of gothic decadence.”