Sink your teeth into Drac facts
1 The plot line went through many incarnations with Stoker almost calling his killer Count Wampyr. Rough notes from the author, which also mention a possible werewolf attack, are kept at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library.
2 Vlad the Impaler, the 14th Century Romanian ruler who would stick his enemies on stakes and leave them to die and then drink their blood, was Bram’s biggest inspiration for Dracula. The Romanian word for the devil is Dracul and was one of Vlad’s titles.
3 A nightmare where he saw a vampire king rising from a tomb, caused by eating dodgy dressed crab, has also been mooted for giving Stoker the story idea – as has Jack the Ripper’s murders, with rumours he even had dinner with the serial killer.
4 The writer never actually visited Transylvania, famed for its Bran Castle, but used 26 books from the London library, including Rev Albert Réville’s The Devil, for his research. He also spent time in Whitby, Yorks.
5 Before the book was published, Stoker pulled excerpts from it for a play. Only two people came to watch the six-hour production and his actor boss Henry Irving turned down playing Dracula, as he thought the play was “dreadful”. Bram was also his business manager, press agent and secretary.
6 Aberdeenshire’s Slains Castle is thought to be the model for Dracula’s home after Stoker spent summers in nearby Cruden Bay. The castle is said to be haunted by the 21st Earl of Errol, Victor Hay. Ghosts of a World War Two soldier have also been spotted in the clifftop grounds.
7 Despite becoming one of the most famous books of all time, when Irishman Stoker died, aged 64, on April 20, 1912, he was so skint he had applied for a compassionate grant from the Royal Literary Fund.
8 It was the film adaptations that really set Dracula apart. He has featured in more than 250 movies – more than any other horror character – and has been played by Sir Christopher Lee, right, 10 times. 9
Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, bought the original 541-page Dracula manuscript at an auction. It had been thought lost until it was found in a barn in Pennsylvania in the 80s. In 2002 it went up for auction at Christie’s in New York but failed to reach its reserve price of around £1million.
10 While he’s the automatic go-to when thinking of vampires in books, Dracula wasn’t the first in print. Poet Lord Bryon challenged pals in 1816 to pen ghost stories and Dr John Polidori came up with The Vampyre and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.