Why Dracula terrifies every Englishman
As a new adaptation comes to TV, Matthew Sweet says it’s the Count’s seductive powers that scare us
We have always lived at the castle. The empty dining room, with its candles, its flagstones, its dinner set for one. The aristocratic host who pours the wine for the visiting English solicitor, but does not drink it. The cellar, stacked with coffins, and the last rays of daylight falling at the window.
The nightmare of Dracula began in 1897, when Bram Stoker, Dublin-born theatre manager and friend of Oscar Wilde, published a novel in decadent yellow binding. The book offered itself as a dossier assembled by its characters – a bundle of letters, medical reports, journal entries and phonographic recordings, gathered in evidence against its title character. By the end, a coalition of heroes – among them an English schoolmistress, a Dutch metaphysician and an American cowboy – have used sunlight, science and sharp instruments to banish the vampire from his own story.
History suggests that they failed. Count Dracula has proved unstakable. He has toured English regional theatres and haunted the film studios of Berlin, Bollywood and Bray. He has been resurrected by directors as canonical as Werner Herzog, Andy Warhol and Francis Ford Coppola. Laurence Olivier, Abbott and Costello and Batman have all received his bite. This week, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, co-creators of Sherlock, have brought him to BBC One for three feature-length television episodes – in the thrillingly corporeal figure of the Danish actor Claes Bang.
Bang’s Dracula has a matey, insinuating attitude and the cheerful immorality of a Joe Orton hero. Bored of his flavourless Transylvanian neighbours, he wants to come to England, do up a derelict abbey, and integrate with the locals. (When this vampire sucks, he extracts much more than the blood of his victims.) His defining appetite is part desperate addiction, part decadent proclivity. In the second episode, set on board the SS Demeter as it travels towards the English coast, he sits among the passengers in the saloon, breathless for human claret. He can hear it pulsing in the veins of the diners.
As he drums his fingers on the tablecloth, the camera brings us close to their unprotected necks. He wants them. All of them. Irrespective of age, race or gender. And some of them want him back.
Not all screen Draculas have been demon lovers. Some have been bestial. In Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorised adaptation that incurred the displeasure of Bram Stoker’s widow, Max Schreck played the vampire as a goggling, hairless fiend with scythe-like talons. Klaus Kinski, in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, followed Schreck’s example: he exudes the sour awfulness of a creature that lives on haemoglobin, and, therefore, presumably, has breath like an abattoir scrag bin. In the Andy Warhol version of 1974, Udo Kier’s Dracula vomits unpalatable blood into the bathtub.
The first amorous cinematic Dracula was Bela Lugosi, a participant in Hungary’s socialist revolution of 1919, who went to Hollywood and played Stoker’s vampire like a romantic Mitteleuropean tenor. (“Leesten to them,” he trilled, “the cheeldren of the night.”) Lugosi’s most admired successor put a stake through all that – despite possessing a fine operatic voice of his own. Christopher Lee’s Count was direct, unmusical and as masterly as the men in his Fifties British audience would have given their souls to be.
Lee, though, remained ambivalent about his most celebrated role. He hated his red contact lenses. He was rude about scripts. He resented the Count’s power over his career. The story goes that he insisted on being paid by the line – to which Hammer responded by cutting most of his dialogue. He once told me he felt underrated as a comedian, and dismayed to be discussing Dracula and not his turns on Saturday Night Live and Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow. But thankfully, like those garlic flowers round the bedpost, the deterrents never worked.
The awkwardness of Lee’s relationship with his employers kept Dracula in the shadows. In Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), he slithers around his own castle, emitting the occasional hiss. (Lee claimed to have refused to speak the terrible dialogue in the script; the screenwriter, Jimmy Sangster, insisted he’d written Dracula as a non-speaking role.) In Dracula AD1972 he is less a protagonist, more a presence conjured by the occult rituals of a gang of Carnaby Street dabblers. But once Hammer had sucked the story dry, the emphasis changed. Draculas after Lee became more like Milton’s Satan than the Big Bad Wolf. They discussed their motivations. They developed pickup lines. In the BBC’S Count Dracula (1977) the French heart-throb Louis Jourdan played the vampire as a stylish continental sophisticate. Frank Langella’s 1979 version was another smoothie: he strides into his host’s Whitby dining room and throws aside his cloak like John Travolta hurling his jacket across the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) cast Gary Oldman as a medieval hero searching for the reincarnated soul of his wife. In John Logan’s TV series Penny Dreadful (2014-16) Dracula lives incognito as Dr Sweet, a friendly academic at the Natural History Museum.
Dracula is a novel from the dying days of the 19th century – an age of empire and self-doubt. Maps of the world showed the extent of the British imperial project in blood-bright vermilion. But at home, a strong note of anxiety and pessimism entered the culture. Darwin’s old friend TH Huxley lectured on the far-from-inevitable nature of human progress.
Degeneration (1892), a doomy treatise by the Hungarian social scientist Max Nordau, became an unexpected bestseller. Stoker’s first generation of readers consumed his novel’s queasy thrills against this background.
They were the people who read in the newly founded Daily Mail that 40-60 per cent of Army volunteers had proved medically unfit to serve in the Boer War; that the government had convened a Committee on Physical Deterioration; that it had introduced the Aliens Act to limit immigration from Eastern Europe. Those readers would have been alive to Dracula as the story of a nation attempting to diagnose its own sense of enfeeblement. Each new adaptation borrows some of its power from that turn-of-the-century crisis.
The new Gatiss and Moffat Dracula quivers with surprises. It opens up parts of the novel often ignored by adaptors. It makes some audacious revisions to the dramatis personae. But its opening scenes, in which the novel’s first narrator, the solicitor Jonathan Harker, shares his story, are alive with an impulse as relevant today as it was in 1897: the self-doubting Englishman’s fear of the charismatic foreigner (particularly the foreigner who is better in bed than he is). Harker is a husk. His eyes are hollow. Who knows what Dracula has done to him, after carrying him up the winding staircase of his castle? It’s something that shames him. Something that he quite possibly enjoyed. And no matter how many times the vampire is erased by daylight or a sharp wooden stick, we will keep revisiting and remaking this moment, and the horror that follows. This is Dracula’s secret: he is an expression of our anxieties, but also the means by which they can be satisfied.
The new ‘Dracula’ reflects our fear of the charismatic foreigner who is better in bed than us
Christopher Lee’s Count was as masterly as the men in his audience would have given their souls to be