DRACULA FROM STAGE TO SCREEN

He already has a choice of faces, though, and I don’t just mean the powerful old white-moustached, hairy-handed gentleman of Stoker’s description (appearing later in the novel altogether younger and sporting a natty little beard – London suits him). One reason the Dracula legend keeps growing is because it gets endlessly revisualised, with images that feed back into the way we read the book. As early as 1922, FW Murnau filmed the story, pared down, relocated to Bremen and boasting a cadaverous, rat-toothed vampire who embodied the most extreme aspects of Stoker’s description, an emaciated goblin rather than an urbane nobleman. He couldn’t be called Dracula, however, for reasons of copyright, so the film is Nosferatu and the vampire Graf Orlock. And here the odd capacity of the novel to branch out into legend becomes apparent. Orlock is played by Max Shreck, whose surname means fright, which is surely too apt to be believed… (Actually, Shreck was a perfectly legitimate actor with the famous Max Reinhardt Company, but this hasn’t stopped speculation, plus a further complication of reality/fiction in the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, in which the making of Nosferatu is assisted by the fact that Shreck/Orlock, played by Willem Dafoe, really is a vampire.) 

By 1925, Dracula was also appearing live on stage in an adaptation by Hamilton Deane. (Henry Irving, alas, never did play the part. Although in 1897 Stoker arranged a professional read-through of a dramatis­ation he had hastily put together to preserve copyright, the great man showed no interest.) The Deane play reduced the action to something like a drawing-room drama, with a Count who now could turn off his sinister side and play up his role as a charming, exotic newcomer in polite social circles. The 1931 Universal film directed by Tod Browning was essentially this modern-dress version brought to the screen, complete with successful stage Dracula, the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi. Dracula had been reconceived for the cinema audience of the 1930s as an urbane stranger, rather too sleek of hair and intense of expression to be quite decent. There was a hint of Valentino about him, a slight Old World decadence that made him dangerously attractive. At the same time, he now had an accent that everyone could mimic and evening clothes of exaggerated elegance that became a virtual uniform for his appearance in a string of sequels. Universal studios added to the legend by deciding that Dracula would be constantly reborn (who cares how?) and always recognisable whoever played the role. This is still the Hallowe’en costume vers­ion of Dracula, or Grandpa in The Munsters, the vampire defined as much by his cape as by his bloodlust. 

From their own Dracula in 1958, British company Hammer Films, with Kodak’s Eastmancolor at their disposal and post-war audiences looking for stronger meat, beefed up the blood and cast Christopher Lee as a more silent, physically overwhelming Count. As X-rated films could deliver sex as well as violence, this comparatively youthful (36 when he first played the role) vampire was faced with heaving bosoms and translucent negligees, turning staid Victorian damsels into ravening vamps with his bite and revealing a sub-text that had always been there, hardly hidden even in Stoker’s novel. Vampirism was transgressive not just because it blurred life and death but because it released its victims from the restrictions of conventional morality. Dracula was now the demon lover who liberated our desires and just as the Hammer series faded away in the 1970s, the critical industry of comment­aries on novel and character got into gear. Dracula was de- and re-constructed to personify anything from Stoker’s homosexual desire to the late Victorian fear of reverse colonisation and the tainting of the Empire by alien blood. At the same time, air-travel was becoming cheaper and the Romanian connection became something that could be explored at first-hand. (The Dracula Society was founded in 1973 largely with this in mind.) 

The Count, though, still had new aspects to uncover, and the 1977 film version directed by John Badham cast Frank Langella as the most romantic Dracula to date, a vampire directly motivated by love for the heroine Mina. He was now becoming a darkly handsome outsider led by his emotions as much as by his appetite, a perfect role model for a generation of New Romantics and budding Goths. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula made a brave attempt to reincorporate all the threads in a film that wasn’t so much true to the book as true to what the book might have been if only Stoker had read all the commentaries on his novel. A prelude to the literary plot not only assumed that vampire Dracula and Vlad Tepes were one and the same, but drew on a Romanian legend that Vlad’s first wife, hearing a false account of his defeat, jumped from Poenari fortress to her death. Dracula now has what Stoker never makes clear, a reason for becoming a vampire, an excuse for all that unpleasantness and a quest: in Victorian London, he finds his lost love reborn in Mina Harker. It’s as though Stoker somehow forgot to incorporate the mystical poss­ibilities of reincarnation into his vampire lore (he does weave it into the plot of his Egyptian novel The Jewel of Seven Stars), so Coppola puts the record straight.

And that is a major part of Count Dracula’s remarkable status – he’s instantly recognisable yet constantly re-invented. In a novel which is written in the first-person voices of several main characters, Dracula doesn’t get a voice. He’s the mirror in which we see only our own reflections, an electrifying character who still manages to provide a blank slate on which the preoccupations of each reader, director or critic can be written. An immediately recognisable icon, he’s still constantly re-invented. He has become an alternative for the Devil in a secular age, a role model for angst-ridden teens, a window into Victorian repression, a metaphor for disease, a political cartoon, a plush toy. 

He long since overwhelmed his creator: it seems absurd to realise that when Stoker died in 1912, none of his obituaries mentioned Dracula; now, Stoker’s entire life tends to be viewed in relation to his most lasting creation. And Dracula really does survive with remarkable vigour; the other reason you won’t find  him buried in Whitby is because he’s not really dead. When the movies endlessly revived him they were  surely taking a hint from Stoker, who abandoned a proposed ending that had Castle Dracula destroyed forever in favour of that rather messy slash-and-stab  death. Come on – we all know it takes more than a Bowie knife to kill a  vampire. No stake, no beheading – Dracula is always waiting for the next comeback.