Written by: Katie W. at the Pacifica Libraries
Break out the plastic fangs and corn syrup blood! It’s time for the third installment of our spooky season blog series highlighting the gothic classics, where we’ve already explored The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein. Now, get ready to meet the head vamp himself...
Dracula (1897)
Bram Stoker ‘s Dracula opens with young lawyer Jonathan Harker’s journal, chronicling his long, strange journey to the castle of the mysterious Count Dracula.
Harker is a young, naive lawyer who has been sent from England to Transylvania to coordinate Dracula’s purchase of a British estate. Nothing scarier than real estate!
But along with Harker, the reader soon learns the Count “must be a very peculiar man!” Imprisoned in the castle and besieged by strange visions and chilling nightmares, Harker also struggles to resist three female vampires’ seduction. And soon, other characters will fall prey to Count Dracula’s hunger.
In Dracula, the figure of the ancient vampire unquestionably represents evil. To give into the vampire means sacrificing not only goodness but humanity as a whole. Here, it is possible for man to become a monster. And that transformation is total, with no good-or-evil-gray left between.
Bram Stoker offers the archetypical swirling cloaks, nails “cut to a sharp point” and “the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth—which it made one shudder to see.” But while these images—as well as the hypnotic powers of the immortal—have bled through contemporary vampire stories, the original novel’s strict moralism is long gone.
Vampires Are Having a Moment—Again
Before taking a look at some modern vampire stories we love, it’s important to spotlight Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla, which focused on lesbian vampires and preceded Dracula by roughly 25 years. Queer desire has been a cornerstone of vampire media since.
Take my current favorite: AMC’s ongoing TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. In this lush, intricate adaptation, “memory is a monster,” as human and vampire characters grapple with what they understand about their own stories.
As in the original Vampire Chronicles, these vampires question their place within and outside the world of humans. The interviewee Louis de Point du Lac does not feel at peace in life or afterlife, and in this adaptation, he is especially at odds with himself as a queer black man in 1910 New Orleans. If the gay romance between vampires Lestat and Louis is subtext in the original Interview novel, here it is made heart-wrenchingly clear.
And if you need a vampire fix before Interview’s third season airs in 2025, look no further than Robert Egger’s hotly anticipated cinematic take on Nosferatu, stalking into theaters this December.
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