Blood (and) Lust: “Dracula” as Love Interest

by sambojam

Summary:

An undergrad thesis on the cultural/literary shift of Count Dracula's characterization from strictly erotic threat to desired, romantic figure over the course of his adaptational lifespan.

Chapter 1: “Knowing” Dracula; An Introduction to The Romantic

You know Dracula.

Your friends know Dracula, your family knows Dracula, even your ten-year-old niece reaching for General Mills’ Count Chocula “knows” Dracula as she sneaks the box into her parent’s unsuspecting cart. Unless you’ve spent your life under a rock, you know “Dracula.”

The question is, rather, how do you know Dracula? Whether you get to know him through his initial debut in the titular novel, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, one of his many cinematic or televised appearances, or even the vague impression snagged from a popular culture that slaps his image and likeness onto marked-down Party City costumes, puppets counting on Sesame Street , or a cartoon cereal box, only further proves one undeniable observation: we, as a culture, have come to know Dracula in one way or another as he is relentlessly adapted to comment upon our collective anxieties, desires, and fears. This knowledge has, in turn, widened the variety of literary, visual, and artistic portrayals of Dracula further still, reintroducing him as villain, monster, friend, and even pure metaphor. Missing from this ever expanding list is lover, inspired by the public recently coming to know Dracula as an increasingly sympathetic figure, anti-hero, or even hero in some cases. This idea of Dracula as an object of romantic desire has been applied to both the audience and the characters he interacts with via reciprocation for specific romantic interests, implying he would do the same for the viewer if they were in the interest’s place. In this sense, not only is Dracula becoming more romantic in contemporary adaptations, but we’re also beginning to view him as desirable for ourselves, discovering something in the monster that attracts us even as we know we should be repelled. For even as he delves deeper into the depths of our romantic fantasies, Dracula is still deeply rooted in cultural fears that have fundamentally altered the entire scope of how we come to know Dracula as a monster, both in his historical context and in our present.

This thesis will explore this romanticizing and sympathizing by thoroughly analyzing how these adaptations evolved from Stoker’s original novel and tracing this romanticization through a few key adaptational works, develop a well rounded understanding of what it means to actively and intentionally interpret Dracula as “romantic”, especially in consideration of the source material’s depiction of him as the monstrous Other. Using what I’ve gathered from this research and reflection on existing adaptations, I will then examine from a literary, fictional, and creative standpoint what is at stake in adapting Dracula to be an explicit love interest by authoring my own reworking of Stoker’s original novel.

This introductory chapter examines the cultural shift from the original xenophobic and villainous threat found in Stoker’s novel to the characterization of Dracula in newer adaptations as hero and anti-hero, in which he becomes more monogamous and consensual in his relationships with other established characters from the source material (and subsequently a more unquestionably romantic figure). I will focus on the cultural meanings and implications that have arisen from this shift in representation, mainly on its solidification as the favored interpretation among both contemporary audiences and creators. I will accomplish this largely by elucidating how other scholars and critics of cultural monster theory (such as Jefferey Jerome Cohen) and of Stoker’s work (such as Stephen D. Arata) have viewed Dracula’s “monstrous'' sexuality within the original and evolving cultural contexts these depictions evolved from, so as to carefully track how these original sexual undertones that carried such danger in the novel later evolved into outwardly explicit romantic depictions. If our fear of the monster is really a sort of desire, as Cohen argues, we can begin to understand what this wider cultural shift implies about Dracula—and by extension, us as humans—by analyzing that aspect of desire (Cohen 16).

Chapter 2: Dracula as Monster: Stoker’s Original Vision

While most adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula take a profound amount of creative liberties, oftentimes to the point of being unrecognizable, the original story almost always finds a way to poke through. It begins with Jonathan Harker’s journey to Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania to sell him the Carfax Estate in England, wherein Dracula eagerly welcomes Jonathan, asking him to “‘Enter freely and of your own free will!’” (Stoker 25). Jonathan soon becomes Dracula’s prisoner amidst piecing together his vampiric nature by the time his wives have seduced Jonathan one night, fully intent on draining him of blood. This scene gives us the first explicit sexual encounter of the novel and the line “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (Stoker 46). Jonathan narrowly escapes for home, Dracula following him to England all the while, returning to his soon-to-be wife, Wilhelmina “Mina” Harker, and her closest friend, Lucy Westerna, who has just agreed to marry the nobleman Arthur Holmwood from a line up of three potential suitors; Quincey Morris, John Seward, and Arthur himself. Before she can marry, however, Dracula hypnotizes Lucy, breaks into her room, and drinks from her, eventually turning her into the vampiric Bloofer Lady. After the men (with help from Seward’s former professor, Abraham Van Helsing) put her out of her bloodthirsty misery, Dracula’s scheme to take over all of England is uncovered and the hunt for him begins. In defense, Dracula turns his attention to Mina, forcing her to drink his blood in order to solidify her descent into vampirism, creating a psychic link between him and Mina that Van Helsing exploits to track Dracula down once and for all. Once the five of them defeat Dracula for good by driving a wooden stake into his heart, the effects on Mina wholly reverse.

It's easy to glance at the filmic iterations covered by the upcoming chapters of this thesis and presume their romantic elements were simple deviations from the original text, or even attempts to rewrite some of the more conventionally unappealing components of Dracula’s monstrous characterization to cater to modern audiences. And while a case could be made for this, I would argue the diverse array of romanticism they introduce to their viewers is extrapolated from a foundational reading of the original. As Arata notes, Dracula provides narrative anxiety against England’s decline, as the end of the Victorian era had brought on rising concerns amongst the English that their “entire nation—as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power—was in irretrievable decline” (Arata 622), a sentiment rooted in colonial xenophobia and a fear of the Other. “Stoker thus transformed the materials of the vampire myth, making them bear the weight of the culture’s fears over its declining status.” (Arata 502) by drawing symbolic and subtextual parallels between vampirism and his readers imagined invaders so that his monster invoked not only the common fears of the supernatural, but also the added layer of cultural and societal fear.

This effect is achieved through a few means, but the implicit sexualized nature of these subtextual suggestions are not to be understated; Stoker’s exoticization of Dracula’s vampirism culturally deviant nature and overwhelming symbolic fertility, enabled by the narrative’s framing and the threat of invasion for both British bodies (such as Lucy’s) and land, emerges not in spite of Dracula’s erotic nature, but precisely because of it .

Lucy as Dracula’s first British female victim holds more significance than one would presume; she’s the subject of most of Dracula’s sexually-coded encounters, as well as the only major character to actively die by Dracula’s hand and become a vampire (an act that elevates her to the same level of monstrosity as Dracula himself, in a technical sense). Her first death scene makes this apparent, with Dr. Steward’s written descriptions of her as “voluptuous” corroborating his assertion that “Death had given back part of her beauty…” (Stoker 157) once Lucy finally passes away. This beauty, enhanced only in death, clearly draws Arthur to her as he leans in to kiss her at her demand, only for Van Helsing to hold Arthur back and warn against it before the man can even reach her lips.

In telling contrast, Lucy’s second death unveils the full extent and entailment of Dracula’s infestation of her person. When the men finally catch up to her, she eagerly drinks the blood of another one of the many children she’s lured, hisses and growls at her former friends/saviors, and “...with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said:— [says] ‘Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!’” (Stoker 200). Promptly after said husband has “...shuddered with horror.” (Stoker 200) at the sight of her, concluded that her “...sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” (Stoker 199), and “...call[ing] the thing that was before us [them] Lucy because it bore her shape”, only afforded her the dignity of her proper name for sheer convenience sake. By the confrontation’s end, Lucy has unimpeachably become a vampire in every right; fully confident and secure in her transformed self, enough to brazenly invite Arthur to join her undead life in the face of his overwhelming (albeit marginally conflicted) revulsion.

Upon coming to this conclusion, her impassioned, persistent calling upon him reveals its double meaning of erotic seduction’s punctuated by lines like “Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” (Stoker 199),  “…her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile” (Stoker 200), and  “…she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile…” ; one that frames the act of becoming a vampire as a complete, unabashed embrace of sexual temptation, thusly insinuating that rejection of deviant sexuality is compulsory when resisting the charms of vampirism. This dichotomy reflects onto the book’s wider framing of vampirism as a force which “...designates a kind of colonization of the body.” (Arata 630) in which “Horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he appropriates and transforms them. Having yielded to his assault, one literally ‘goes native’ by becoming a vampire oneself.” (Arata 630). 19th century readers understand Lucy as appropriated by Dracula, rather than destroyed, by identifying her abandonment of victorian ideals of sexual purity for outward promiscuity as the transformation init of itself, establishing the “unlawful” erotization of Lucy from once chaste to wanton and sultry as Dracula’s vampiric transmutation of her from proper Victorian to degenerate foreigner. The terror stems from Stoker’s suggestion that this transmutational sexualization was irreversible , implicating any supposed pre-existing racial degradation as unsolvable and indelible, something England could only defend against or contain the spread of. Arthur’s internal struggle to decline Lucy’s offer inquiries about whether or not the reader themselves would find themselves unyielding in the face of Dracula’s temptation, haunted by the inferred follow up questions as the read on: If they give in, what’s saving them from the same fate during the forthcoming assault of reverse colonization? What’s stopping the rest of the British empire from “going native” at the hands of racial infestation as well?

Stoker’s erotic racialization of Dracula’s vampiric monstrosity is a storytelling element that many, if not most, creatives choose to hold on when adapting Dracula, each trying their hand at a new interpretation or extrapolation of what this monstrous sexuality looks like in the retelling they’ve crafted. Though in a rather curious turn of events, a few of these reinventors, including the upcoming subjects of this thesis, have forged a new path from the book’s predominant and consistent narrative of erotic desirability, diverging to explore the offshoot implications of such an eroticism left sparsely throughout the novel. The result of their efforts? Solidifying their own unique differentiation between the erotic Dracula and its implicit, oppositional form of sensuality: The romantic Dracula.

From her early mentions of the other, Mina is delineated as Lucy’s character foil, preparing the reader for the many contrasting narrative directions their conflicting characterizations will take each other. In particular, the dimetric ends to their shared experience of being extensively pursued and eventually turned by Dracula single handedly lay down the three tenets of what later becomes the romantic standard for Dracula: monogamy, irreplaceability, and reciprocity (or at the very least, consent). “In the novel’s (and Victorian Britain’s) sexual economy, female sexuality has only one legitimate function, propagation within the bounds of marriage. Once separated from that funcion, as Lucy’s desire is, female sexuality becomes monstrous.” (Arata 632); Her occasionally bouts of precocious sexual expression with suiters, as opposed to a husband, transgress past this function, and the Bloofer Lady’s luring of unsuspecting children to drain their blood is a reflection of that transgression of Victorian motherhood. As the motherly figure for the men of the cast—made evident by lines like “We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked…” (Stoker 216) and “... I stroked his hair as though he were my own child.” (Stoker 216)—Mina symbolically represents the “true” motherhood of Victorian society that Lucy transgresses. By targeting her directly, Dracula is able to reverse colonize that motherhood by sexually tainting it, the difference in intent separating Mina from Lucy and his other victims and marking her non-replaceable to him in the subtextual sense.

The components of monogamy and reciprocity are inspired from the reading of the altercation supposing that “Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire” (Cohen 16) of the “forbidden practices'' (Cohen 16) the monster (in this case, Dracula) represents, framing its erotic nature as an expression of desire for propagation against decline, i.e. the ability to reclaim what is lost or being lost in colonization through “The vampire's…virility, its ability to produce literally endless numbers of offspring.” (Arata 631). The lack of penetration on Dracula’s part, the swapping of blood between both parties as opposed to the taking from one, and the mental link that forms between the two all have the effect of raising Mina onto a somewhat level playing field Lucy (and others) never reach with Dracula. Not only does this leveling elevate their sexual relationship from Dracula’s others in a way that carries monogamous implications, but in combination with the fact that the reader is never given a clear enough description of Mina’s state while drinking to infer any hypnotic persuasion (or lack thereof), implies a sort of quasi-consent. These details ultimately lay down the foundation for the later adaptational reinterpretation of Mina’s turning as a distinctly romantic indulgence rather than a wholly unwanted overtaking.

Chapter 3: “The Monster Always Returns”: Rise of the Romantic Dracula

Over the course of this chapter, I will closely study three cinematic adaptations of Dracula in order to track the gradual evolution of Dracula's sexuality from the monstrous eroticism of Stoker’s novel to what I term a “romantic” iteration of the monster. I will begin with Tod Browning’s famous 1931 adaptation, featuring Bela Lugosi’s defining turn as the monster; John Badham’s Dracula (1979), starring Frank Langella as the titular monster and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing; and finally, Francis Ford Copula’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), featuring Gary Oldman as the quintessential “romantic” Dracula. I argue that each of these films offer an increasingly “romantic” vision of Dracula, where Dracula grows to fall for a particular character, influencing his characterization and motivation throughout the whole of the film. This thesis defines “romantic” Dracula, as opposed to the exotic and erotic depiction in the original novel, by the presence of at least one of three key factors: first, he pursues a non-interchangeable romantic love interest; second, romantic reciprocation, where he either actively or tacitly receives consent for his romantic overtures and he refuses to force himself onto the intended party unless he senses they’ve become welcome to his advances; and third, a dynamic that evolves between the two characters that can or does exist outside of solely parasitic means, where Dracula doesn’t just take their blood, but gives them something in return, oftentimes through the form of liberation from the more constricting aspects of victorian society or genuine romantic and sexual connection that other characters within the story have been unable to provide them with.

Chapter 4: Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931)

Following in the footsteps of even earlier adaptations of Dracula, specifically the anti-semitic Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula, and its critically praised companion, George Melford’s Spanish-language Dracula (released alongside its English counterpart and filmed on the same exact sets), are some of the first Dracula adaptations of the sound age. Written in 1931 by Garrett Fort and based mostly on the stage play of the same name, the movie follows the same general plot as the novel, turning it into one of the most widely-known pieces of “classic monster cinema” and kickstarting what was arguably one of the most influential and long-lasting pop culture film franchises of all time. Dracula arguably established—with help from Bela Lugosi’s iconic leading performance—the default “Dracula” in the minds of the general public today: a ruthless, menacing, mysterious outsider who sticks to the shadows and terrorizes others for his own personal bloodsucking benefit with little to no sympathetic or redeeming qualities. Here, Dracula is the embodiment of that which is “dark” and impossible for any of the viewers at home to genuinely know or understand his monstrous motivations—the implication being that it would be ludicrous to expect them to even try.

The breakout film was an absolute commercial success for the then struggling Universal Pictures, despite the film’s countless and ever-expansive budgetary restraints, supernatural horror’s risk with audiences at the time, and retroactive censorship after the passage of The Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) which was enacted in 1934. (“Dracula”)

The film, like all adaptations, choose to make certain deviations from its source material on occasion, mostly being cut and added plot points (a few examples being the loss of the altercation between Dracula and Jonathan while the latter shaves and Dracula’s wives seduction, along with the inclusion of a newly-bitten Mina attacking Jonathon). The general core of the book’s horrific tone and its portrayal of Dracula as an unlikeable monster above all else, as well as the characterizations of the rest of the cast, are almost fully retained in the movie.

Post-Hays Code, there were several documented changes to the film’s future broadcasting, cinematic showing, and other releases including the removal of Reinfield’s screams of horror as he meets his demise, Dracula’s dying groans at the end of the film, and a significant change to the film’s final scene, which originally had Dracula decided to outright shatter the fourth wall in order to “quell the fears'' (in a sense) of any still concerned or frightened audience members with this reassuring speech: 

Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen! A word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula…won't give you bad dreams, so just a word of reassurance. When you get home tonight and the lights have been turned out and you are afraid to look behind the curtains—and you dread to see a face appear at the window—why, just pull yourself together and remember that after all, there are such things as vampires! ( Dracula 1931)

Not only do these changes highlight how the film goes out of its way to establish any subtextual sexuality between Dracula and any other character as somehow “threatening” in some way or another (or even an outright, unignorable danger) to said character and their wellbeing (and therefore innately “monstrous”), but it similarly showcases how little censoring was necessary to ensure said sexuality was almost solely defined as monstrous in the eyes of the narrative alongside (perhaps most importantly in regards to the Hays Code) the audience, proving the active intent behind this creative choice and calling attention to the initial expectations of Dracula’s relationship with romance set by the original novel and the few silent adaptations of yesteryear the film feelings the need to go off of.

Fully understanding the reasoning behind this framing of Dracula as monster, especially with the foresight of how later film adaptations so often portray Dracula’s sexuality as more consensual, the film code’s curtailing of Dracula’s sexuality demonstrates how it was perceived as a threat and it requires digging deeper into the creative process behind this adaptive choice and how the film chooses to code it this way in the first place, including the specific literary and creative tools this coding is founded on. A promising starting point of investigation is Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory: Reading Culture, as its detailing of how the concept of the “Monster,” within the wider world media and literature is perceived, learned, and understood by their audiences sheds light on the crafting the perception of this Dracula. One of the seven theses he proposes, “The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis” (Cohen 6) implicates a large chunk of literary monsters as “disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration […] a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions,” (Cohen 6), positing the monster’s foreign and unfamiliar nature as definitely intrinsic to its monstrosity. So much so that it structurally undermines any surrounding human characters’ attempts to conceptualize and/or compartmentalize it by destabilizing the innately human perspectives/worldviews foundational to the methods and methodology of categorization said characters rely on.

In the case with Dracula (1931), this element of monstrosity play off of the book’s previous thesis: “The Monster Always Escapes,” whether that escape be metaphorical, physical, emotional, or even thematic in some cases, as “The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization” (Cohen 4, 6). In essence, the monster escapes understanding above all else, leaving the questioning with only the destruction of these previously unquestioned categories left in the monster’s wake to go off of while trying to make human sense of the innately in human creature they bore such terrifying witnesses to. This understanding of the monster as not only category-defying via pure, unbothered existence alone, but also only understandable on the monster’s terms (to a certain extent) maps beautifully onto the film’s characterization of its Dracula, especially in regards to its chosen style of cinematography and Legosi’s nonverbal acting.

The Count shocks and disorients the remaining cast by threatening the categorical, societal, and cultural distinctions they make within the realm of romance and eroticsism that have left them so woefully unprepared, and therefore entirely at his mercy. He shocks and disorients the viewers by proving these distinctions, presumed as so universally well-understood and widely-believed, they, the human audience, must depend on them too, as fallible.

A prime, almost obvious example is the first half of the scene where Jonathan and Dracula interact face-to-face for the first time, beginning with Jonathan confusedly looking around for a face to introduce himself while in complete silence before the camera finally cuts to Dracula slowly walking down the stairs as Jonathan first meets his gaze. Throughout their meeting, conversation, and Dracula’s serving of dinner, Jonathan does his best to be pleasant (or, at the very least, civil) with Dracula, who does his best to appear hospitable and behave in a fairly unassuming and unsuspicious manner.

At this point in their story dynamic, they are both clearly attempting, to a certain degree, to follow the other’s lead as best they can. This leads the two to mimic each other’s behavior a few times, some examples being how both hold an arm out during their introduction and greeting and Jonathan’s looking around to take in the view in the same vein as Dracula, but the most blatant (and the most telling) is the way they both find themselves traveling up to the dining room.

Starting with Jonathan not even on the stairs yet, the viewer is forced to watch Dracula slowly make his way down, getting closer to Jonathan before stopping. The two fall into a pattern of Dracula turning away from Jonathan, walking up a few steps with Jon taking that as his cue to follow, before Dracula stops (prompting Jonathan to do the same) to turn to check on Jonathan (presumably to make sure the man isn’t having any trouble keeping up and that he hasn’t left his guest too far behind) before exchanging an eerie line or two with his visiter. Throughout this cycle’s entirety, the camera positions itself as looking directly up toward Dracula in tandem with decidedly looking down on Jonathan, cutting between the two whenever the other speaks. The only time it doesn’t default to one of these two styles of closeup is when it cuts to a wider shot that’s perfectly level to its axis, in order to break the illusion these closer shots build and remind the audience of both how far apart the count and his host are from each other and how much higher up Dracula is positioned on the stairs.

Everything about this section of the scene’s construction outright implies some sort of unnamed difference or obstruction between Dracula and Jonathan, from the camera work, to the way Dracula’s conversational interjections—clearly intended to be friendly—only serve to bewilder Jonathan more, down to how the individual motions of walking, stopping, and turning around are each acted out (more noticeably by Legosi) as if they are separate, incidental actions, each completely independent of the movement before it.

The final nail in the coffin takes place after Dracula has already passionately waxed poetry to Jonathan about the high delicacy that is “the night” within the means of both types of shots: A few consecutive close-ups of Jonathan observing the Count somehow making it past a row of cobwebs (just missing the exact moment he presumably phases through them), the young traveler visibly hesitating once he gets to them, Dracula staring intensely (almost expectedly) at him, unmoving and wholly unreadable, and then Jonathan finally awkwardly and unsurely brushing away the cobwebs to continue up the stairs, followed by a lingering wide shot that completely breaks the scene’s established routine. With the camera facing them both on a downward angle, it shows the audience Dracula and Jonathan side by side for the very first time, immediate focus entirely on each other, gaze lingering as Jonathan finally takes the lead based on what he presumes is Dracula’s go-ahead. This sequence juxtaposes the elements of sexuality floating mainly around Dracula’s character (his intense, unprompted staring, stopping to make substantially one-sided conversation, refusal to break apart the close proximity and forcing Jon to do it.) with the “Othering'' of Dracula from Jonathan (the camera implying Dracula’s perspective by ''looking down” on Jonathan, the effect exaggerated via their positioning on the stairway, how quite literally everything Jonathan does is a reaction of some kind to Dracula’s actions, slowing him down to Dracula’s unnatural pace). Doing so fully solidifies the implication this juxtaposition carries: Dracula’s entrapment of those he takes interest in (fueled by pure curiosity for that which is unlike him) is made possible only through the inherent draw of his monstrosity. The yearn to better understand him is stirred up out of hopes of somehow categorizing him while simultaneously acting as the dooming, hindering element that leaves them vulnerable to his any and all whims, allotting him a narrow “escape” (whatever form that escape might take) from categorization.

After all, that final “catching up” to Dracula and closing that gap between them led straight to Jonathan visibly feeling the need to search for Dracula’s permission in order to finally surpass his place below him, holding himself from crossing that physical and metaphorical threshold because of Dracula’s individual whims, while Dracula meets his gaze only out of curiosity and/or intrigue, forcing Jonathan to stay close to him for a few seconds longer.

Such a deliberate and careful contextualization of Dracula’s sexuality through such sudden and socially-forward emotional and physical intimacy as a source of danger for characters (and by proxy, the audience) to fear that continues throughout the film with multiple other characters through multiple other instances simply could not exist without a motive, however. One could easily make an argument that the filmmakers behind it were simply taking inspiration from the erotic undertones found within the book, but that explanation doesn’t account for why the opportunity to turn that subtext into the cinematic equivalent of text with this adaptation.

For the answer to that question, one need look no further than the previously mentioned axed scene a few paragraphs ago, courtesy of the aforementioned Hays Code.

Allegedly, the scene was only done away with out of concern of the effect Dracula’s phasing could have since it was clearly intended to imply that vampires were a genuine threat to the audience watching. Despite the playful and wholly unserious intentions behind this scene, it still raised questions of potentially instilling supernatural belief in some moviegoers. This fear may seem frivolous (or, at the very least, wholly unfounded) to the average moviegoer nowadays, but this fear was genuine to those running the film industry at the time. Audiences simply hadn’t been exposed to films with supernatural elements that weren’t explained away at some point within the film in a long time, which was part of what made this iteration of Dracula such a big risk for Universal Studios. So the fact that, out of all the standards and expectations the company could have set, these were the boundaries the company was willing to push against—and with a standalone scene sans no narrative or thematic objective besides going out of its way to (either genuinely or jokingly) try and convince the audience that every logic-defying thing they were witnessing was very much real, no less!—hints at a very different purpose behind these more romantic implications than the original novel it was based on.

In the eyes of Tod Browning and his fellow cinematic collaborators, the sexualization of Dracula’s character was simply another offhand way to paint Dracula as this mysterious “Other” to be feared by the masses, as opposed to his monstrosity being the bolstering characteristic behind that sexuality.

Notes:

Correction (curtesy of Erimia): Renfield travels to the Count’s castle & meets him in the aforementioned scene, not Jonathan.

Chapter 5: Dracula (1979)

Dracula (1979), on an extremely othered note, did not begin its creation with this understanding of the potential of a Dracula as a deliberately cultivated and intended romantic depiction in mind. As with many explicitly visual adaptations of Stoker’s novel, the film begins with Dracula’s travel to England, trusting within the confines of a sopping wet (and likely rotting) wooden crate or coffin and the chaotic lull of storming, crashing waves to bring him safely (and secretly) to his (narratively) eventual “washing up” on land.

It ends with Dracula getting “the girl.” The girl, in this case, being Lucy.

Albeit only in the (debatably) distant future, once Dracula and his beloved “‘...have left behind those who would destroy us [them].’” (Dracula 1:36:29–1:36:33) so that she can “‘...join me [him] on a higher plane, feeding on them.’” (Dracula 1:36:36–1:36:42) in hopes the two may one day “‘...create more of our [their] kind.’” (Dracula 1:36:42–1:36:45). Passionate declarations follow the steady, gradual growth of their dynamic from two strangers that independently spark a small mutual interest in each other to a complete understanding of Dracula on Lucy’s part that inspires enough devotion (shared equally on the Count’s side) in her to forsake her lover (Johnathan) in favor of  him. By this final moment between the two, the underlying message rings unabashedly clear: Dracula (1979) was written with demonstrably dissimilar romantic intentions in its interpretation of not only Dracula’s own character, but the remaining Dracula canon as well.

Though the movie covers the majority of the plot found in Stoker’s novel, it introduces a few sharp changes to the original novels established via a few original scenes of the Count staying at Lucy’s father’s place and one scene of Lucy tucking Mina into bed before coming downstairs to tend to the baby of one of her father’s mental patients at the same time Mina sneaks out to discover Dracula transforming from wolf to human; Lucy and Mina’s swapped characterizations and the Count coming to do business in the audience’s neck of the woods (i.e. England), opportuning him a chance to strike up a romance with Lucy and a bloodthirsty interest in Mina. In tandem, Jonathan airs his jealousy over Lucy’s romantic happenings with the Count in plain sight of an eavesdropping Dracula, Mina is bitten, Dracula recruits Renfield, Mina dies, and Lucy visits Dracula’s castle, bonding with him and gleefully surrendering to his bite while the men plot Dracula’s downfall. The movie’s rising tensions culminate when Lucy, carrying with her an abundance of confidence the audience has never seen on her before, sternly confronts them on their lethal stance against her newfound lover right before she finds him, resigning herself to his promise to come back so they can finally live out their eternal undead lives together, free from persecution. All that tension subsides with the reveal of Dracula’s escape to safety, a triumphant Lucy and dejected Jon watching him fly out of reach, to return for her another day.

Retained from its source material are the motivations of Van Helsing and the original suitors and Dracula’s dynamic with Reinfield and Van Helsing, along with a few of the original plotlines (the distressed woman’s begging for her baby back, the final showdown between Dracula and the men ending with a stake through the Count’s heart, etc.) dealing with Draucla’s violence and his move towards England’s downfall.

Directed by John Badham and written by Walter Duch Richter, Dracula (1979) is one of the earlier Dracula portrayals to go the route of a concrete, explicit romance between one of the lead woman instead of the far more commonly-used (at the time) innocuous world of subtext. Despite also being produced by Universal Studios and utilizing the same source material, the film’s wild shift in priorities never limits itself to the relationship between Dracula and romance, a clear ripple effect spilling over to the film’s many character dynamics (both including and excluding Dracula), characterizations (most notably their character development over the course of the story), tone, cinematography and blocking, and story/plot, (most notably the events of the third act), all in indirect response to the oh-so (at the time) unorthodox core concert of the film that shapes the movie’s understanding of the monstrosity that makes up its monster (i.e. Dracula) through its more fleshed-out romantic angle: The idea that “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire” (Cohen 16). In layman’s terms, a desire that, instead of acting as a weapon actively held against the other character (sometimes by Dracula, and sometimes by the narrative itself), works as a representative of that which is taboo despite still holding appeal as a source of freedom that ultimately serves as a direct path to liberation from a few of the more confining elements of what’s “normal” or ”appropriate” for certain characters (particularly Lucy), displaying how “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies…” (Cohen 16-17) for the audience through what Cohen describes as “...the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constant.” (Cohen 17) for the character of Lucy.

This thematic framing of Dracula’s character can be pointed to in a number of scenes, however, the details of Lucy’s solo dinner with the Count provide the most clear cut evidence of how it takes effect within the film’s narrative. It begins with a shot of Lucy and the Count at the table, with Lucy’s face out of frame and the camera far away from the both of them. The camera stays there as they broach the subject of Mina’s death, but begins the pattern of cutting between individual shots of the two of them as each one takes their turn speaking once, the camera zooming in closer and closer as the scene continues and often facing opposite to the current speaker to show the effect their words have on the listeners, once Lucy refutes Dracula’s insistence that there are fate worse than death. Dracula explains how he has lost all he knew to the violence he and his “kind” used to wage and Lucy hesitates before cheerfully answering in an attempt to play off his words, showing how they took her off guard, forcing her to take them to heart. Dracula then playfully tricks her into smiling for him, again showcasing how much effect he has on her, before warning her that “If at any time my company does not please you, you will only have yourself to blame, for an acquaintance who seldom forces himself, but is difficult to be rid of.” ( Dracula 48:31-48:45) as the camera comes closest to him and then her as she stares back at him, the bundles of candles that have been framing them now fully out of focus, removing the visual (and metaphorical) barrier between them (and thus, everything the Count speaks of).

Dracula, so confident in his entrancement of Lucy, outright admits himself as something that allures her not by being any type of threat to her or coercing/tricking her, but something that simply hints at opportunity for that which Lucy has never been granted access to, implying that her growing emotional and romantic involvement with him—and therefore the darkness he represents—is of her own choosing, framing it as an act of autonomous self-liberation rather that unwillful corruption or tainting of her person on his end.

This idea is reinforced as the movie continues. In their later discussion of the night (meant to represent the monstrosity Dracula embodies), she kisses him in response to his suggestion that, unlike the dawn, it must be embraced and reveled in, brushing off his apology for “For intruding on your [her] life.” (Dracula 51:55-51:57) by assuring him that she “...came of my [her] own accord.” (Dracula 51:57-52:01). Lucy’s vampiric turning is done through the act of making love with Dracula, divorcing her from her monogamous relationship with Jonathan and gifting her the sexual freedom Jon, the rest of the men she knew, and society at large (in the metaphorical sense) have always denied her. This metaphorical freedom is further signified through Lucy’s constant outstretching of her arms, the exploding circles of red light illuminating their silhouettes that seem to expand with the effect of the retracting camera, and the inclusion of a flying bat and gathering of candles, color-graded in the same red and symbolizing the darkness Lucy has finally chosen to succumb to as they pan across the background above the silhouette of her body. This concept of desirability stemming from what Dracula’s monstrosity allows Lucy access to finally comes to a head, however, when as she and Jon bear witness to Dracula’s escape, with Jonathan’s despair at the sight representing the failure of goodness instead of monstrous to offer the smiling Lucy what the monster could.

Lucy’s choosing of the monstrous Dracula over her once-beloved Jonathan reminds the audience how that which is human can lose to the monster by coming up short solely via the inadequacies of that which defines it as human, unable to provide a better alternative to the escape the monster offers because it and it’s human limitations is the exact thing the monster’s prey is so desperate to escape from.

Chapter 6: Francis Ford Copula’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Francis Ford Copula’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula throws all of this out the window by its very first scene.

Despite literally being subtitled “Bram Stoker’s”, the film takes loads of creative license from its creative source, much like the aforementioned Dracula (1979). Before the film can even get to the original novel’s plot, it showcases a pre-vampire Dracula—a concept made entirely of the movie’s own accord, as the book never directly states a specific cause, reason, or explanation for Dracula’s being a vampire, nor implies there ever was one—leaving his wife, Elisebeta, to go off to war in the church’s name, returning after his victory only to discover her dead, having fallen under the impression he’d died in battle. In response to the local priest's insistence that suicide irrevocably damns her, Dracula asks him, “Is this my reward for protecting God’s church?” (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 4:22-4:27) and chooses to join her in hell by loudly forsaking God and assuring Him that he will “...rise from my [his] own death to avenge her with all the powers of darkness.” (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 4:32-4:41), blood pouring from candles and the eyes of statues, marking this the act that turns Dracula vampiric.

The original plot is then kickstarted—almost identically to the actual novel—with Jonathan’s heading of to meet Dracula at his manor and all that occurs during his visit, Lucy’s choosing of a husband and transformation into a vampire, her defeat by the hands of the men, and Dracula biting Mina, before finally culminating in Dracula’s defeat by Lucy’s same fate. The deviation lies in how Dracula reacts to and interacts with Mina, from her picture becoming the catalyst for his travel to England upon realizing she’s Elisabeta’s reincarnation, to his meeting of and subsequent fully original romantic scenes with her, to the final scene in which she comforts Dracula as he passes while the film utilizes parallels and certain effects to imply forgiveness from God, his curse’s reverse, and his eventual meeting Elisabeta/Mina in heaven.

Unlike Dracula (1979), however, Bram Stoker’s Dracula allows Lucy and Mina their original narrative roles from the source material, choosing to instead expand on Mina’s by romantically connecting her to this film’s Dracula through the reincarnation subplot, in which she is awarded Dracula’s explicit love and desire as the next life of his once deceased wife. This approach works well to narratively justify the borderline rewriting of Dracula and Mina’s relationship in what he claimed to it, but Francis Ford Copula knew full well that justifying its place in the plot wasn’t enough to give this more creative reading of Mina and the Count’s dynamic genuine meaning and impact within the realm of an otherwise near identical telling of the original Dracula story. Instead, Dracula's love serves as a drain on Mina’s freedom (a stark contrast to the themes of self-liberation and romantic and sexual freedom from the previously discussed movie), binding her to him with what seems to mostly ensure his own personal benefit and further his character arc.

By framing their romance via this almost parasitic lens, Copula is able to cast Dracula specifically as “...The Monster [who] Polices the Borders of the Possible” (Cohen 12), therefore assuring that “...the monster stands as a warning…” (Cohen 12), meant for both Mina and the audience, “...against exploration of its uncertain demesnes.” (Cohen 12); straying from God's path, in the case of Dracula. By forcing the viewer to bear witness to how “The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but…is [also] something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular.” (Cohen 12) through Dracula’s diligent seduction of Mina and the unwavering, ever-passionate devotion it leaves lingering even after his defeat at the hands of the remaining cast, it becomes clear that the learned men’s combined skill and efforts are no match for, their distinctly human understanding and perception of the world around them is no match for the utter monstrosity that is Count Dracula “…From its [his] position at the limits of knowing…” (Cohen 12). Altogether, this subtextual understanding transforms any and all desire between Mina and the Count into Bram Stoker’s Dracula ’s strongest thematic ammunition, the tides of Mina’s story arc turning it into the audience’s strongest concession: as the monster, Dracula is perpetually “...delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside [as Mina did] is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol [i.e. Dracula] or (worse) to become monstrous oneself [i.e. vampiric]” (Cohen 12).

In both Mina’s and the audience’s defense, Bram Stoker’s Dracula does its absolute darndest to obscure both their sight of the forest with the trees.

Carrol L. Fry and John Robert Craig best describe the character as “...a tragic figure from the Byronic tradition…a monster, but…[one] with a ‘mind not at all degraded/Even by the crimes through which it waded’...” (Fry and Craig 272) in their 2002 academic dissection of the film, “‘Unfit for Earth, Undoomed for Heaven’: The Genesis of Coppola's Byronic Dracula”. Born out of comparison to the Dracula of the original novel, Fry and Craig offer this description as leading evidence of how “...Coppola's mix of Byronism with the Gothic tradition…[of] Stoker's Dracula…offers a fascinating collision of values systems that reflects a change in the post-modern audience.” (Fry and Craig 272). That very clash—Dracula’s modern-ish priorities, thematically legitimized through the narrative of Byronic framing vs. the gothic remnants of the source material’s Victorian ideals and sensibilities—comes to a head majoritively during Mina and the Count’s boundless happenstances and interactions.

Over the course of the film, the viewer endlessly witnesses Mina’s struggle between her natural instinet (in the form of the rules and standards of her gothic background) and the more contemporary internal leanings living inside her, all while the Byronic archetype Dracula lives within forces her to confront her interest in both by enticing her to explore those leanings, through which he represents. We see it in her dining on Dracula’s blood even after he reveals his hand in Lucy’s death. We see it as Dracula slowly but surely convinces her to lend him her fair company by the end of their first meeting, while he draws her further into danger and the pouring rain, only for her to just miss him as he hides away in shame and anticipation. But before the film can even get around to the weighty thematic and narrative importance of the latter, it has to cover its most innocuous, yet succinct, yet determinedly rich example: their shared encounter with the wolf.

Notes:

So, dearest reader, you may notice that this chapter ends sort’ve abruptly, almost like there was supposed to be more! that’s because there was.

To make an Ao3 curse short, extenuating circumstances at my school allowed my thesis committee to go super easy on me, both expectation & length-wise. And as proud as I am of the final product, if I have to spend a singular extra ounce of brainpower editing this thing, I think I may finally loose what's left of my sanity :) My apologies if this minor incompleteness proves to be a distraction as you read <3

Chapter 7: Wooing The Monster: A Reflection

There’s a reason why Dracula’s been rewritten so many times. Boatloads of them, actually.

I need not make an argument as to why because the entirety of this thesis makes it blatantly obvious: The character and story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula holds an absurd amount of creative and artistic potential in terms of themes, genre, characterization, motifs, setting, plot structure, etc. You name it, Dracula has an angle you can take with it. By studying and analyzing what creative choices and directions I ended up exploring (along with why I did so) during the creation of my own Dracula adaptation, I aimed to gather more insight and understanding on how the creative process led to the many adaptations addressed and the various different interpretations of how Dracula and romance interact that they offer.

Premise-wise, my adaptation followed a what-if scenario in which Mina, troubled by the lack of response to the letters she’s written to Jonathan during his time at Dracula’s manor, decides to travel there herself, arriving just a little while after the Count tells Jon that he can’t leave. This gave me the opportunity to explore two concepts that the original novel couldn’t due to the structuring of its plot: Mina interacting with Dracula over a lengthened period of time (during which neither is actively trying to cause imminent physical harm to the other or escaping from their presence), and Mina and Jonathan being trapped in Dracula’s manor simultaneously. Including these elements left me with a few narrative hurdles to overcome and questions to answer for, with the most pressing ones being how Mina as a character would know and understand Dracula, how she would interact with him in a less intense setting, how she would react to Jonathan’s reaction to and behavior under the Count’s captivity, and her own reaction and behavior, all of which required a decent amount of in-depth character work to better under her character both on its own and in relationship to Dracula and Jon’s characters. On a more technical level, there was the question of how to go about presenting a story like this in terms of writing style and plot structure, which forced me to narrow down what exact elements and ideas I was looking to tackle.

In doing this work and crafting my work, I found that, by and large, reciprocity was essential for Mina to develop genuine connection with Dracula based in anything other than nebulous disgust or abstract hatred, let alone romance. On Mina’s end, the biggest barrier to that reciprocation is their irreconcilable (in her eyes) principles and worldviews, rather than their lifestyles or outward personalities. By trapping Mina with Dracula in his own territory, I was able to confront Mina with an upwarped/unfiltered version of Dracula’s perspective for her to pick apart, with less outside influence to dictate how she ought to understand and feel about it and no high stakes adventure to distract her from truly examining it. Armed with a much more in depth understanding of said perspective, Mina has more opportunity to sympathize with what she deems the defining factor of the Count’s vampiric monstrosity. Sympathy eventually makes way for indulgence in and experimentation with that monstrosity, an act that offers a leveling of (or even an upper hand in) the emotional and intellectual playing field that Mina is in such dire search for.

By bridging that gap between them, the romantic potential in what she initially wrote off as monstrous (and therefore inconceivable) reveals itself to a Mina much more open to it. The challenge arrives in figuring out how Dracula and the narrative can build a temptation for that indulgence and experimentation strong enough to withstand her resolute vigilance in the wake of Dracula’s anticipated trickery and wrath before that steadfastness wills her escape.

Notes:

The creative piece discussed in this section can be read here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65783791

It was originally intended to be followed by two more chapters, but I'd say it works well enough as a standalone piece :)

Chapter 8: What Chills our Blood Today: A Concluding Statement

There are more iterations of Dracula, of course. Plenty more.

We’ve had ones that take place in different time periods, genres, artistic mediums, cultures, languages, durations, and locations, some based on the original book itself, while others are based solely on other preexisting Dracula adaptations. There’s been iterations that align perfectly with the character interpretations at least one of these three films put forth, and ones that go against everything these films built up their portrayals of Dracula to be.

But the former’s the hardest to find. At least, it is nowadays.

From #DRCL midnight children ’s seductive, alluring Dracula who has Lucy equality devoted and entranced to 2004’s Dracula, the Musical ’s Dracula who learns the beauty in that which is pure and human only through falling in mutual love with Mina, this more outwardly romantic Dracula with all of its sympathies and humanization has gained widespread popularity amongst Dracula recreators of the past decade. And while this paper has discussed the legion of ways as to how artists’ romanticization is brought to life in so many adaptations, the reason why viewers so eagerly gravitate to it isn’t necessarily self-evident within their creative processes or methods. The theories they utilize to define Dracula’s opposing monstrosity, however, does imply at least one possible piece of the puzzle; If the monster is meant to represent a sort of “...metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling and a place.” (Cohen 4) through which it’s “...body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy…giving them [the monster] life” (Cohen 4) and comes to embody “pure culture”, then the monster must be defined in part by the fears and anxieties of the culture at the given moment. And what could this sharp turn from Dracula as the creature characters instinctively run from in fear, horror, and disgust to a suddenly humanized, understandable being they find themselves uncontrollably attracted to imply other than a reflection of the current culture’s fear of how nerve-wrackingly close and entangled we feel we are (or could easily become) to the forbidden and taboo Dracula embodies?

Why else would we watch characters fall for what we once saw as the embodiment of evil, corruption, the invading enemy, and that which strays from goodness and humanity only a few decades ago, if not because of how terrified we’ve become of doing the same now?

Chapter 9: Work Cited

Stoker, Bram. Dracula (Norton Critical Editions). Available from: VitalSource Bookshelf, (2nd Edition). W. W. Norton, 2021.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. First edition ed. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/27701.

Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies , vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621–45. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794. Accessed 21 Apr. 2024.

“Dracula (1931 English-Language Film).” Wikipedia , 9 Jan. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(1931_English-language_film)#cite_note-DVD-7. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024.

Fort, G. (1931) Dracula . United States: Universal Pictures. Available at: https://archive.org/details/Dracula1931 .

Dracula . Directed by John Badham, Universal Pictures, 13 July 1979.

Hart, James V. Bram Stoker’s Dracula . Columbia Pictures, 1992.

Fry, Carrol L., and John Robert Craig. “‘Unfit for Earth, Undoomed for Heaven’: The Genesis of Coppola’s Byronic Dracala.” Literature/Film Quarterly , vol. 30, no. 4, 2002, pp. 271–78. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/45116770. Accessed 22 Apr. 2024.

Notes:

And that’s all folks!
Thank you so much for reading this far, especially to those of you who shared your thoughts in the comment section. You have no idea how honored I am to know my writing sparked such complex & fascinating intellectual debate/discussion :D

Have a fang-tastic rest of your evening, dear readers <3

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of Creative Writing Exercises/Assignments