Dracula: 100 years old and still going strong

By Maharaj K. Koul

THIS year marks the 100th anniversary of Count Dracula’s appearance. His attraction is worth analysing because Dracula, alongwith Tarzan, is the best-known fictional character in the world.

Mention Dracula and the mind conjures up an aristocratic-appearing Count in a black cape, flying down a mountain-top castle to insert his teeth into the throat of a beautiful woman who is sleeping. So bewitching is the appeal of Dracula’s myth that vampire societies still flourish in the West.

Most of people have forgotten that Dracula is actually a novel that has completed a century this year. In 1897, 50-year-old Bram Stoker, theatre manager and part-time journalist, published one of the most eduring pieces of Gothic fiction.

Stoker was an invalid as a child. He could not stand or walk until the age of 7. Surprisingly, he outgrew his shortcomings to become an outstanding athlete and football player at Dublin University. After 10 years in the civil service at Dublin Castle, Stoker acted as the personal manager of his idol, the actor Henry Irving for 27 years. He turned to fiction, in life.

The book opens with the diary of Jonathan Harker, a London solicitor imprisoned by Dracula. The Count then travels to England where the story is taken up by Harker’s fiancee Mina Murray, her friend Lucy Westenra and Dr John Seward Van Helsing, a Dutch doctor and expert on vampirism.

At the end of the book, impaled on two knives, one through his throat, Count Dracula may have finally found his rest ("in that final moment of dissolution there was in the face a look of peace...") He has been born again and again as film makers and even other writers have punctured the arteries of the neck of the myth (with two whitish holes that do not fester but do not close until the victim dies) and drawn sustenance from it.

In the 1930s, Universal Cinema, which pioneered horror as a low-cost studio genre, inaugurated their classic horror cycle with Tod Brownings Dracula in 1931. Then came Dracula — Prince of Darkness (1952), Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1969), The Scars of Dracula (1970) and Dracula AD (1972). In all these movies British actor Christopher Lee played Dracula. These were followed by Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1994).

Dracula also-ran movies include Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in London, The Return of Dracula, Dracula vs Frankenstein, Billy The Kid vs Dracula andThe Dracula Saga.

Few novel plots could be more ideally suited to the spatial freedom of cinema — the ride through Transylvania, Harker’s escape from the castle, the sea-journey to Whitby, Van Helsing’s frantic pursuit of the Count across Europe — most of these elements were later seen again and again in the films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Dracula was one of the earliest novels whose adaptation was done after the introduction of sound in movies. It also launched innumerable sequels, including Dracula’s Daughters and Sons of Dracula. It was later revived in Britain by Hammer Films in the 1950s. The Hammer sequence consists of Brides of Dracula, Taste the Blood of Dracula, and The Satanic Rites of Dracula.

The myth of Dracula involves the restorative power of blood, something enshrined in myths ranging from the sacrifice of the Mithraic bull to the blood of lamb in Christianity. It invokes history in the person of Prince Vlad of Wallachia, nicknamed The Impaler for his habit of dining while surrounded by the heads of his foes on spikes. Vlad was a figure ambivalent enough to be considered a great national hero in Rumania.

To the Rumanians and his western admirers Vlad saved his country from the Turks. Vlad’s admirers, get upset when his legend is mixed up with that of an alien Hungarian, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who attempted to keep herself young by bathing in the blood of virgins. In his native Ireland, Bram Stoker’s reputation may not be at its zenith, but to this day his most famous publication Dracula outsells work of his loftier compatriots, James Joyce and William Yeats.

The name Dracula means demon. What is so compelling about Dracula described by Stoker as a tall, pale old man, with a long white moustache, rank breath and hair on his palms. Is it the promise of immortality? His superhuman (inhuman) powers? A subconscious bloodlust? Or just the fearful fascination that vampires, spirits, witches and ghosts exercise on our minds?

Sociologists the world over attribute his appeal to the morbid human preoccupation with blood and death. For instance, Dracula’s blood-sucking arouses both fascination and revulsion. The sight or thought of blood evokes complex emotions in human beings. Subconsciously, we believe that blood is the elixir of life.

The first World Dracula Congress meeting was held in Bucharest, Rumania, from May 26 to 28, 1995. The motto of the meeting was: "Everything we think exists". If Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Vikings and Adolf Hitler are now defended by revisionist historians to emphasise their heroes’ artistic sensibilities, why not the historical figure of Vlad IV, also known as Count Dracula?

The legendary castle of Count Dracula at Bran in central Rumania is threatened with collapse due to cracks in the cliff on which it is built. Large cracks, some several metres in length, are visible outside the fortress built in 1377. Its foundations and two lower floors are carved directly out of the rock. However, the 3,000 tourists who visit the castle every day are in no danger for the moment because the building is still quite solid.

The corpse of the medieval Rumanian despot is buried in a red-brick Byzantine church. The church is all that remains of a 14th century monastery on a small island in the middle of Lake Snagov, 40km north of Bucharest.