Alright, let's talk vampires!
Vampires have gone through an absurd transformation in the past few centuries.
There's no one cultural origin for them, and it really shows.
Modern interpretations will often introduce the concept
of vampire clans, or wacky vampire subspecies, or whatever,
in an attempt to reconcile the crazy menagerie of traits
that have been assigned to vampires throughout history.
Sometimes they're demons or fae,
sometimes they're hungry ghosts,
sometimes they're your garden-variety reanimated corpse.
Hell, the Mayans had a god that was basically a vampire, bat motif and all.
You can't even rely on them to necessarily drink blood.
So, what, mythically speaking, makes something a vampire?
Well, it's less of a rigid definition,
and more like a grab-bag of traits
that you can stick together into an appropriately intimidating creature of the night.
Now, the popularity of these traits has changed over time.
Back in the mid-1800s, the most popular one was "unholy."
Vampires were characterized as pure evil.
Like a walking plague, they'd spread their curse
until they were purified from the world via exorcism.
This led to representations like Nosferatu --
basically nothing more than a terrifying monster.
But in more recent years, the "unholy" trait has been shunted to the background.
The old crucifix trick still works (mostly), but it's not their defining character trait.
No, the trait that skyrocketed to the top of the popularity charts
and has been the primary defining trait of vampires for decades...
is "sexiness."
Obviously, there are exceptions, but vampires have been irrevocably associated with glamour and hypnotic beauty.
Sure, usually their true form is a little less than seductive, but the connection is still there.
Where once they were built around the concept of the horror of their existence,
today's vampires are built around how horrifically pretty they are.
They're all beautiful seductresses or hunky bad boys with nary a claw-fingered hunchback in sight.
And even if modern writers can't agree on a single other vampire trait, they can usually agree on that.
But this is obviously a huge change.
Much like Paradise Lost re-imagining Satan into a sexy bad boy,
something must have shifted the pop-culture perspective on vampires from inhuman monster to
✨ "I'm a monster, baby. There's no saving me. You should just stay away, for your own good." ✨
There was, but it wasn't that direct.
It takes a lot of evolution to get from "Glamorously Seductive, but Evil"
to "You should aspire to date one".
We didn't get some Victorian vampire romance novel,
but we did get a novel that presented vampires in a more human light.
Not necessarily a good one, but it gave them character.
And character can be developed.
Yeah, we're talking about Dracula.
Now, here's the thing about Dracula.
For all its influence on literature and Gothic horror,
not many people have actually read it.
And that's a shame, because the real impact of the story can only really be gotten by reading it.
See, the thing with Dracula is it's written as a slow burn.
It's a collection of diary entries, telegrams, letters, and newspaper clippings
that document, from several different perspectives, Dracula's gradual attempt to take over England.
For the first half of the book, nobody knows what's going on,
and even at the time, it was a fascinating subversion of existing tropes.
The first section of the book is composed entirely of the diary entries of Jonathan Harker as he stays in Dracula's castle.
It plays out almost exactly like a standard gothic horror novel with one notable exception;
The horror follows him home,
which was not standard at the time.
Now, the point is, Dracula's effectiveness is in the style, not the actual monster or the story,
and in an attempt to reconcile this,
I initially wrote a summary that attempted to preserve the style.
Rather than explaining the plot as a whole, I was explaining it as it was revealed in-story,
to maintain the slow burn quality that I found made the story so effective.
That summary was half an hour long. Needless to say, that ain't happening.
So this is going to be a shorter summary that gets across the story but not the style,
and I'm telling you right now you should really read the book.
It's got something that none of its knockoffs do; legit suspense.
Also, there's a lot of neat vampire lore that didn't get carried over into the resulting genre of vampire fiction,
you might want to check that out,
but in the meantime, here's the mini version.
The story begins with a solicitor, Jonathan Harker.
Jonathan's been sent to Transylvania to oversee the logistics of a real estate transaction
and if this is already putting you to sleep, don't worry, it gets interesting real soon.
See, Jonathan is there as a guest of the eccentric Count Dracula,
*THUNDER*
and, paying no attention to the weeping peasantry who keep pressing crucifixes into his hands,
Jonathan confidently rides up to Castle Dracula and finds the count to be an
ugly, pale, mustachioed old man with hairy palms and alarmingly sharp teeth.
Long story short, after remaining staggeringly oblivious for quite some time,
Jonathan finally sees Dracula doing some spooky stuff and puts together that he's in a gothic horror novel.
This is also when he notices that all the doors are dead-bolted.
After a run-in with three sexy vampire ladies that Dracula apparently keeps in his house,
Jonathan decides that he needs to get the heck out of there.
And fails.
Also the vampire ladies eat a kid.
Man, every day is a party in Chateau Dracula.
So Jonathan does some snooping during the day when Dracula's sleeping
and finds that he's making preparations to leave for England with 50 boxes of earth.
Jonathan, having failed to find a way out of the castle or anything substantial on the plot,
opts to let out some aggression by whacking Dracula on the head with a shovel and then runs off to sulk.
When Dracula ships out with his boxes of earth, he leaves Jonathan to the mercy of the vampire ladies.
Jonathan's final diary entry is that he's gonna make a last desperate escape attempt
by scaling the castle wall.
In-story, we don't know what happens to him for quite some time,
but given that we have his diary, we can probably make some assumptions.
Anyway, the book abruptly shifts from Jonathan Harker's wacky fun times in vampire land to a
series of letters between Jonathan Harker's fiancee Mina Harker and her friend, Lucy Westenra.
Mina is an intelligent and self-assured young woman,
while Lucy is a textbook ingenue who is pure and good and has too many boyfriends.
Lucy tells Mina about the spot of drama she had with her afternoon tea,
when three strapping young future protagonists proposed to her over the course of a single day.
Dude #1 is Dr. John Seward, a kind and soft-spoken young man
who's got stable employment at the local insane asylum.
Dude #2 is a walking personification of the state of Texas by the name of Quincey P. Morris,
which, coincidentally, is also when we readers learn that
Mr. Bram Stoker has never spoken to an American in his life.
But luckily for Lucy, Dude #3 is the very dude she's had her heart set on all along:
a bland-as-bread Englishman by the name of Arthur Holmwood,
and he's the one whose proposal she accepted.
Thankfully, despite all the drama, Lucy stayed good friends with both of the other suitors
and is quite delighted with how the situation turned out
Wasn't this book supposed to be about vampires?
Don't worry. The spooky is back when the ghost ship Demeter washes ashore one night in a terrible storm,
with 50 boxes of earth in the hold and a dead captain tied to the wheel with his last log entry in his pocket,
describing the tall, thin man that drove his crew to madness and death.
Say what you will about Dracula, but at least he always makes an entrance in style.
So anyway, no sooner has Dracula made landfall in England than
Lucy falls quite ill.
Now, here's a little bit of cultural context:
In Victorian romance novels, female characters had a tendency to get sick all the time.
Tuberculosis was the main culprit because it made your character
~pale and weak with a tendency towards fainting luxuriously onto nearby furniture.~
So Lucy catching Victorian fainting lady disease wouldn't have raised too many eyebrows at the time.
This is unfortunate, because by the time her fiance Arthur thinks to call in Dr. Seward to take a look at her,
it's nearly too late, and Lucy is like three nights away from catching a severe case of vampire-itis.
Seward calls in a colleague who actually is a medical doctor so he can take a look at her,
an eccentric by the name of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
Now that is a name that commands respect.
But the character himself seems more than a little... well, goofy.
First off, he's Dutch, which in Stoker land, means he's written with some very awkward verbal mannerisms
as he fails to comprehend the intricacies of the English language.
Second, he's not exactly visually intimidating.
This Van Helsing appears to be little more than a goofy foreign doctor with a penchant for mangling metaphors.
Appears to be.
We've seen this trope before.
So after an initial examination where Lucy seemed alright - not great, but not terrible -
Van Helsing is called back in a panic by Seward after Lucy takes a sudden turn for the worse.
This is when we see the first instance of what I like to call
Van Helsing Serious Face!
See, whenever something blatantly vampirish happens around him
and he's the only one who knows what's going on,
the good doctor packs up his wacky mannerisms and equips... The Serious Face!
Let's see it in action.
Seward: "Wow, she's incredibly pale."
"It's like she's lost a lot of blood."
"It almost looks like her teeth have gotten longer and pointier as well."
So Helsing Serious Face-s it up and tells Seward that Lucy's missing, like, ALL her blood
and needs a transfusion stat.
Uh, by the way, at the time, transfusion was like, the hot new science and it wasn't fully understood.
So if you're cringing at all the transfusions that end up happening with no regard for blood type,
don't worry. It's hand-waved.
Congratulations on living in the 21st century.
Conveniently, Arthur arrives at just this moment, so they usher him off to re-blood his fiancee.
After they rearrange Lucy a little, Seward notices two small puncture wounds on Lucy's neck
and Helsing tells Seward to watch over her that night while he goes off and makes...
PREPARATIONS.
Oh, also, Mina learns that Jonathan's alive. Hooray!
So Lucy seems to be doing much better for a few days until she abruptly
isn't, and needs another transfusion, this time donated by Seward.
So Lucy gets better again, and this time,
Helsing brings a bouquet of garlic flowers and arranges them around her room.
You'd think this would help, but unfortunately, Lucy's mother inadvertently ruins everything by
opening the window and clearing out all the garlic flowers
to give her daughter some "good clean fresh air."
The only way she could have made this easier for Dracula was if she put down landing lights.
Long story short, within a couple days, Lucy and her mother are both dead.
Funeral arrangements happen, and
my God, does the book like talking about how hot Lucy's corpse is.
But anyway, Van Helsing drops a bunch of garlic flowers in the casket along with a little gold crucifix,
and tells Seward he's gonna have to come back later to cut off her head.
Unfortunately, that doesn't end up working out, since someone steals the crucifix
and apparently keeping the big J in close proximity to Lucy's not-yet-not-dead body was vital to Helsing's plans.
And short story shorter, not long after that,
Lucy rises from the grave and starts drinking the blood of local children.
Van Helsing decides that it's time for the plot to advance already and gets into contact with Mina Harker,
who, in the meantime, has been reading Jonathan's diary of his experiences in Dracula's castle
and compiling all the information she has on this weird Dracula guy.
She and Van Helsing prove themselves to be the only intelligent characters in the entire novel
when, in the space of five pages,
they put together all the stuff we, the readers, have been yelling at the book since page one.
Then, since plot advancement is the order of the day,
Van Helsing rallies Lucy's boyfriend squad and tells them the long and short of what's going on.
And when they understandably demand proof, takes them to her mausoleum
and shows them vampire Lucy the act of draining the blood from a small child.
See, the good thing about Dracula-era vampires is that their operatic levels of theatrical BS
make it really easy to prove to skeptics that there's something legit spooky going on.
So after some preparations, they kill vampire Lucy for realsies.
So Van Helsing brings the Harkers in with the Dude Squad™ and they start conferring over what to do about Dracula.
Van Helsing gives the crew a crash course on the many abilities and weaknesses of vampires,
everyone except for Mina, because the Dude Squad™ is of the opinion
~that they can't possibly subject her woman's heart to such cruel knowledge.~
This turns out to be a bad decision, because Dracula unsurprisingly sneaks in and starts draining her blood.
And if they bothered to weigh her woman's heart down with stuff like what signs to look out for,
she'd probably been able to avoid that, or at the very least tell them what was actually going on.
A few days later, Dracula takes it up a notch by force-feeding her some of his own blood
in order to control her and eavesdrop on the Dude Squad™ through her eyes and ears.
The Dude Squad™ actually sees this part happening though, so at least they're up to speed on this.
Oh, but before we continue, let's take a moment to do a little crash course of our own.
See, modern vampires have been translated over and over again throughout all kinds of stories,
and some of the more interesting lore has been lost in translation.
So let's talk about the classic Dracula canon vampire lore!
First off, the obvious.
Immortality sustained by blood, even becoming younger when well-fed.
Then more classic vampire stuff, like
doesn't cast a shadow, doesn't have a reflection, can turn into a bat, and a degree of super-strength.
Then we get the more esoteric abilities, like
turning into a wolf, summoning mist, and riding moonbeams,
as well as slipping through narrow entrances and seeing in the dark.
And, of course, we need some weaknesses too.
Dracula cannot enter somewhere unless he's been previously invited, garlic keeps him at bay,
his powers vanish when the sun rises, and as always, holy symbols repel him.
Then there's the more weird weaknesses,
like the fact that he can only transform his body at noon, dawn, or dusk, and can't cross running water,
and a wild rose stalk laid on his coffin will keep him from leaving it when the sun sets.
Huh. That has the potential to be weirdly romantic.
I'm actually surprised that hasn't been co-opted into sexy vampire lore.
Get on that, urban fantasy writers!
So Dude Squad™ priority one is now finding all the boxes of earth Dracula brought with him and
sealing them away, because he uses them to recharge his powers and remain strong.
Then, with nowhere for him to run, they'll trap and destroy him.
In the end they account for 49 of the boxes,
but both Dracula and box #50 are nowhere to be found.
But luckily, Mina can actually sort of tell what Dracula's seeing and hearing thanks to the mental link thing he did,
and ends up putting together that he's on a boat.
So she figures out that he's probably running back to the safety of Transylvania, safely ensconced in his coffin.
So now the crew has to chase him all the way back to Transylvania and find him.
After they lose track of him along the way, Mina comes through once again
by logically deducing the river route Dracula must be taking to get up to his castle.
She and Van Helsing split off from the group to seal away the castle itself
and take care of the sexy vampire ladies,
while the Dude Squad™ chase Dracula down on horseback to kill him before he can reach his castle.
So they do,
and they do,
and Jonathan and Quincey kill him.
And then Quincey dies.
The book ends with an epilogue from Jonathan telling us that, seven years later, they're all doing well.
He and Mina have a son called Quincey, born on the anniversary of his and Dracula's death.
How cheerful.
And that Arthur and Seward are both happily married, although not to each other.
Overall, it's a story where the impact is all in the delivery,
and without the slow burn and gradual horror the original story managed to capture,
every character derived from it loses some of their effectiveness
and has to be reimagined to make them work on their own.
There's a reason why no pure film adaption of Dracula exists.
It's a story that can only really work as a book.
The abruptly shifting perspectives that each reveal a little more of the story
are what make the story so effective as a horror novel.
You may note, Dracula on his own isn't that scary, and the plot itself isn't that scary either.
Like all great horror, the fear is in the ambience, not in the monster itself.
And that's why vampires are sexy now!
Thank you and good night.
♪ That night her kiss told me it was over ♪
♪ I walked out late into the dark ♪
♪ The misty gloom seemed to soak up my sorrow ♪
♪ The further I went on ♪
♪ I felt a spreading calm ♪
♪ Then suddenly my eyes were bathed in light ♪
♪ And the lovely lady in white was by my side ♪
♪She said, "Like me, I see you're walking alone"♪
♪"Won't you please stay?"♪
♪I couldn't look away♪
♪She said, "I love the night"♪
♪"The day is okay and the sun can be fun"♪
♪"But I live to see those rays slip away."♪
♪"I love the night"♪
♪"There's so much I can show and give to you"♪
♪"if you will welcome me tonight."♪