Why Is Bram Stoker's Dracula Popular?

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the most adaptated and greatest horror books of English literature. It was first published in 1897 and became a successful book after the film adaptations. At first Bram Stoker used The Undead as a title but after his research he used Dracula. Dracula is an epistolary novel. The story is told in diary entries, letters and some newspaper extracts and this helps characters learn about the events. The setting of the novel is 19th century England.

The story begins with Jonathan Harker’s journey to Transylvania to conclude a real estate transaction for Count Dracula. He lives in a big castle and in time Jonathan Harker becomes a prisoner in Count’s castle. He is attacked by three vampire women and he is saved by Count Dracula. Then we find him in a hospital and Count is on his way to England. Count arrives in England by a ship called Demeter and the ship is wrecked on the shore. The crew of the ship is dead except only a dog, shape-shifted Count Dracula, is alive and its cargo which is boxes of soil from Transylvania.

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Then Count attacks Lucy Westenra and Dr. Seward cannot make a diagnosis and he sends for Dr. Van Helsing but they cannot cure her and she becomes a vampire attacking children at nights and she was killed by a stake through her heart and then they cut off her head and fill with garlic. Then Renfield, Dr. Seward’s patient, lets Count Dracula in and he attacks Mina Harker. He makes her suck his blood and this leads Mina to make a telepathically connection with the Count.

With the help of Mina they track Dracula and they catch him on his way back home to Transylvania, they open the box that Dracula hides in and they cut off his head with a knife. Vampirism has appeared in all cultures, in legends. There were poems and short stories telling about vampires before Stoker’s Dracula but in those Romantic Period poems the vampire were not a real character it was symbolic. Male vampires symbolized the sexual predator and the female symbolized the sexual seductress.

The vampire used as a character first in John Polidori’s The Vampyre. Ruthven, the main character of the novel is an actual vampire and he stalks and kills women. The first full-length vampire novel is Varney the Vampire, attributed to James Madison Rymer and Thomas Preston Priest. There is, in this novel, a Hungarian vampire comes to England. There are some common things between Dracula and Varney the Vampire. First Varney is the first vampire that turns his victims into other vampires, second Varney s from an aristocrat family and finally his shape shifting from a monstrous creature to an attractive aristocrat. Bram Stoker also used non-fiction books. The most influential one is Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest. He learnt about the life, history of Transylvania, a distant and exotic place he chose for the setting of the novel and William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia introduced him viovode of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler, whose notorious reputation for staking his enemies to death provided Stoker a model for Count Dracula. As a military leader, Vlad was known to favour night attacks with his most spectacular against the invading Ottoman Turks in the summer of 1462. So, Stoker’s Dracula operates only at night and shuns the sun” (Trow 2-3). Stoker uses this information and applies to vampire’s attacking technique. For instance in Count’s castle after writing letters to England Dracula warns Jonathan Harker by saying “‘…let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle…Be warned!

Should sleep now or ever overcome you, or be like to do, then haste to your own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be safe. But if you be not careful in this respect, then-…’” (Dracula 29) Jonathan Harker sleeps in another room and he is attacked by three female vampires at night, Count Dracula attacks Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker at night and Lucy attacks children at nights. “Traditionally, the only means of destroying a vampire, which Stoker employs via a vampire-hunting Dr. an Helsing in the novel, is to drive a stake through its heart and hack off its head. The driving of stakes -impalement- was Vlad’s favoured method of torture, and gave rise to his nickname, Tepes. ” (Trow 3). Stoker takes Vlad’s favourite torture method and turns it against the Count as a killing weapon. Vlad was rewarded by the king of Hungary for his fighting against Ottomans with the Order of the Dragon which was a brotherhood against Muslims. Latin word for dragon is draco and Vlad was known as Vlad Dracul but draco had another meaning which is ‘the devil’.

So, Stoker combines what he learnt from The Land Beyond the Forest about Transylvania and things he found about Vlad the Impaler and this combination created a book that adaptated for so many movies. This paper, therefore, will be analysing Bram Stoker’s Dracula in terms of its main characteristics and their contribution to Dracula’s popularity in film adaptations. Vampires represent many things to different people: immortality, forbidden desires, rebellion, power, eroticism, etc. Unlike other 'monsters', vampires attract as well as repel; and they are in many ways so much like us.

Add that to the general fascination with the darker side of our natures, with the supernatural, and with the nature of evil, and you have the fascination with Count Dracula. One major reason that Dracula has survived is his adaptability. He is, after all, a shape-shifter. Writers, artists, film-makers and others have done creative new things with the vampire in general and Dracula in particular. Every generation creates its own Count Dracula, reflecting the fears, anxieties and fantasies of its own time. (Miller “Dracula’s Homepage”)

Vampires appear in so many cultures but film adaptations based upon Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There are sixteen film adaptations including German, Turkish, Spanish, Mexican, and Korean. Dracula has become the rule book of these film adaptations because it gives the main characteristics of the vampire. The characteristics of the Count that appear in Dracula are: 1- He is immortal 2- He survives on the others’ blood 3- He turns into a bat or wolf 4- He can appear as mist and dust 5- He has no reflection on the mirror 6- He has no shadow - He has hypnotic powers over his victims 8- He can turn his victims into vampires 9- He cannot enter a house unless he is invited in 10- He loses his powers in daylight 11- He must sleep on his native land’s soil 12- He is repelled by garlic, crucifix and holy wafer 13- He can be destroyed driving a stake in his heart or cutting his head off There are so many vampire films and some of these films follow the Dracula’s plot but some do not. The first vampire film is Nosferatu in 1921 by F. W. Murnau. Max Schreck starred as the Count. It did not follow Dracula’s plot.

The location changed to Bremen and some of the characters’ names were changed for instance Count Dracula becomes Garf Orlock because of copyright but it was not a successful film. However it is one of most known adaptations of the novel and it introduced new characteristic of the vampire. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the Count only loses his powers but in Nosferatu the sun burns Count Orlock and instead of showing a wolf or bat Dracula it was a rat-like Dracula in Nosferatu and unlike Bram Stoker’s Count, Orlock was not an attractive man.

In 1931, one of the most successful vampire movies was shot. Directed by Tod Browning Dracula followed the Stoker’s original plot. Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi starred as Dracula in this film and Dracula name was attached to him. The most faithful to the original to the novel and the best Hollywood adaptation is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, having all the characters of the novel, directed by Francis Coppola with a cast of Hollywood stars such as Gary Oldman as Dracula and Anthony Hopkins although there is a love between Mina and the Count which doesn’t exist in the novel.

It was not the plot that made Dracula in film adaptations it was, actually, the concept of the vampire itself. The vampire’s immortality helps film-makers to create new ‘Draculas’ in different time periods and with its shape shifting ability film-makers can make them as Gerald Mast states “Unlike the later incarnations of Dracula -Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Klaus Kinski- Murnau’s vampire (Max Schreck) was no sexy, suave, debonair figure who stole the lady’s heart before he stole her blood.

Murnau’s vampire was hideously ugly - a shriveled, ashen little man with pointed nose, pointed ears, and pointed head. ” (144-45) whatever they want and whatever they like them to appear. Dracula is an epistolary novel that consists of journal entries, letters, telegram, phonographic recordings of Dr. Seward and excerpts from newspaper articles. This technique was originated in eighteenth century. In the first four chapters of the novel Jonathan Harker is travelling to Transylvania.

Stoker describes the landscape with a detailed narrative in Harker’s journal entries then we see others’. After their ‘brotherhood’ against the Count is established they the characters learn about the events from other characters’ diaries. This helps the reader to understand the characters’ inner worlds, what they feel about the event, and it provides different point of views of other characters as in a modern novel while they are reading other characters’ diary entries. It creates suspense.

For instance, at the and of Chapter 4 wee see Jonathan Harker trying to escape down the castle wall and precipice by writing on his diary “I shall not remain alone with them; I shall try to scale the castle wall farther than I yet attempted…And the away for home! ” (Dracula 46). Then Harker’s entries stops and we do not know whether he succeeds or fails until Chapter eight when Mina receives a letter from a hospital in Budapest saying Jonathan Harker’ been in hospital for six weeks suffering from a brain fever (Dracula 83).

We cannot see this narrative style in Murnau’s Nosferatu as James C. Holte states in Dracula in the Dark : The Dracula Film Adaptations: “…although there are references to letters and diaries in the film, the narrative structure is much simplified: major characters are deleted, other characters, most significantly that of the vampire, are made one dimensional, and entire scenes, including Stoker’s effective chase of the vampire by the fearless band of vampire hunters across Europe and the confrontation at Castle Dracula, are cut. ”(33).

Like Nosferatu, in Browning’s Dracula we see that Jonathan Harker neither travels to Transylvania nor he is attacked by three vampire women. These two directors omit the parts significant in the novel which create the suspense and resolve the conflict at the end. However, both Nosferatu and Dracula are both successful Dracula adaptations. Nosferatu and Dracula are still considered to be two of the most well-known Dracula adaptations. Dracula is a gothic novel. It includes lots of gothic elements such as the Count’s castle, violence, blood. Especially the castle is the basic element of the film versions.

Dracula’s first four chapters are the used by film-makers for the setting because the Stoker describes the landscape and the Count’s castle in detail. He describes the castle in chapter one as “the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlight sky” (Dracula 13). As Anthony Masters states “The first few chapters of Stoker’s Dracula are the most effective and it is upon these that dozens of films and plays have been based” (209) these chapters ctually give the setting of the castle and the way to the castle. Blood is another gothic element in Dracula. Vampires feed on other people’s blood and it represents the life as Renfield tells Dr Seward “…All lives! all red blood with years of life in it;…” (Dracula 232). Dracula gains life when he sucks people’s blood and as he does to Mina Harker when he makes her suck his blood he gives her immortality and he makes her telepathically connected to him as she can see whatever Dracula sees at that moment and she helps ‘the brotherhood’ to track him and destroy him.

Violence is another element and we see violent acts such as Lucy’s case of being driven a stake through her heart in her grave and cut off her head, Count’s attack to Renfield as he tells the event to Dr. Seward “…He raised me up flung me down…” (Dracula 233). These elements make film adaptations of Dracula the best films in horror movie genre. Sexual imageries are also important in Dracula. The sucking of blood is a reference to sexual intercourse. Some of them are very significant in the novel.

The first is Jonathan Harker’s case of being attacked by three vampire woman as he describes in his diary “the fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth…I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips…” (Dracula 33-34). This is not sex but eroticism. The doctor’s remedies are also sexual. When Dr.

Seward and Morris give blood to Lucy after Arthur they do not tell him as if there were a sexual intercourse. Arthur says that he is married Lucy with the blood transfusion. And then the killing of vampire Lucy has more sexual imagery, she is driven a stake through her heart which is a phallic symbol. Finally the Count’s attack to Mina resembles rape because he forces Mina to suck his blood. However, Stoker does not mention sex as James Twitchell states “sex without genitalia, sex without confusion, sex without responsibility, sex without guilt, sex without love – better yet sex without mention. (107). This ‘not mentioned sex’ appears in film adaptations as nudity or real sex. From ancient times to this day many cultures have vampire legends but Bram Stoker’s combination of these legends and a violent man from history uncovers the vampire and makes a book that inspired film-makers for not just Dracula adaptations but hundreds of other vampire movies. As Holte states “Most examples from the Vampire Cinema have Dracula as their central character.

Whether he is a villain or hero, messiah or anti-Christ… For both viewers and film-makers, Dracula is the archetypal vampire of the silver screen; but his immediate origins lie in the literature of an Irish civil servant turned theatrical agent, Abraham Stoker. ” (27). Stoker gives what film-makers need. He chooses Transylvania and he creates a gothic environment and he gives the setting to film-makers, he gives the main characteristics of the vampire especially with the shape-shifting ability and immortality of the vampire film-makers creates their own ‘Counts’ in different time and look.

All is given to them by Stoker and all they should do is apply it to their ideas. He uses sexual imageries and gothic elements such as the castle, blood, and violence and this makes Dracula, which was not that popular before discovered by the film industry, become an inspiration for horror movies.

WORKS CITED

(MLA) Holte, James C. Dracula in the Dark : The Dracula Film Adaptations. Westport, CT, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, 1997 Mast, Gerald. A Short History of the Movies.

New York: Macmillan, 1986 Masters, Anthony. The Natural History of the Vampire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972 Miller, Elizabeth. Dracula’s Homepage. http://www. ucs. mun. ca/~emiller/faq. html 15 Dec. 2007 Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2000 Trow, M. J. Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula. Gloucestershire: Sutton Pub. Ltd. , 2003 Twitchell, James. Quoted in Christopher Frayling’s Nightmare: Birth of Horror BBC Boks, 1996



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