Count Dracula is the most famous vampire of film, and likely also the most aggressively departed from his literary origins. Some of this is a result of the reinvention of Dracula on stage, in the play written by Hamilton Deane and later revised by John Balderston for Broadway. The hybrid Deane/Balderston play became the template for later filmed versions of Dracula (the play on Broadway in fact starred Bela Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan as Dracula and Van Helsing) representing the count as a mannered, gentlemanly figure, a Romantic vision more in keeping with Lord Ruthven of John Polidori’s earlier story The Vampyre than with Stoker’s original text.
In Stoker’s novel, Dracula spends most of the time off-screen, as it were—a shadowy, looming presence whose existence and machinations affect all the characters, but himself perhaps the least interesting character of them all. His goals are fairly clear, his characterization most sharply wrought at the beginning of the novel in Jonathan Harker’s journal, and his appearance, while strange, only gives Harker a moment or two of discomfort. The book is focused not on Dracula but on the effect of Dracula, of how he challenges, disrupts, and destroys late Victorian sensibilities, moralities, and sexuality.
The challenge of all filmed (and stage) versions of Dracula, however much they might depart from the book, is the rendering of Dracula himself, so explicitly described by Harker at the start and yet so difficult to pin down in terms of characterization—because he really is the least complicated character. The depictions of Dracula on film tend then to fall into two categories: the mannered, elegant, sexually attractive (and ambiguous) seducer, as Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman played him; and the ugly walking corpse, the Nosferatu of Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski. Some of the most successful versions of Dracula marry these two images to create a hybrid figure that is both attractive and repugnant (despite the film’s many failings, Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula accomplishes this). More recently, though, we see Dracula become a third image: the inhuman monster, a creature only barely recognizable as once human, as in The Last Voyage of the Demeter.
The monstrous nature of Dracula tends to obscure the fact of his now monstrous humanity, and especially the way in which the novel itself uses him as a conduit to reveal the monstrosity of humanity. Dracula’s breaking of natural and religious laws leads men and women to become monsters, as defined by Victorian society—in the book, a group of men stab and decapitate the dead body of a beautiful woman, a husband abandons his wife to her rapist, men consume flies and spiders, women lure children to their doom, women penetrate men and suck their blood. Dracula, the book posits, is a monster capable of moving among humanity undetected, leaving monstrosity in his wake. But human beings are the ones seduced by him; they are often the ones who commit the truly monstrous acts.
Films like The Last Voyage of the Demeter seek to remove Dracula from humanity and, by extension, cease to examine humanity’s role in monstrosity. Dracula is effectively otherized—a hulking, half-man, half-bat creature unable to be mistaken for a human being for the majority of the film. Thus Dracula is rendered as outwardly monstrous, and is easily dismissed. He’s not humanity’s responsibility, but the responsibility of hell, or Satan, or simply a perversion of nature. It means that the humans of the film—and by extension, the viewer—can effectively refuse to take responsibility for Dracula and what he represents.
Dracula’s monstrosity in the novel takes on many different forms—from his literal ability to shapeshift, climb walls, and transform into mist, to the way in which he charms and beguiles. Often film critics and other viewers argue that the “charming seducer” element of Dracula is one superimposed by Deane’s play and later canonized by Lugosi on screen, not something contained within the original novel. But the original novel does indeed posit Dracula as an odd but not unattractive figure. He’s described initially as a “tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white mustache,” and his friendliness to Harker is courtly. Later, Harker calls attention to the oddities of his appearance—slightly pointed ears, sharp teeth—but much of the description, including an aquiline nose, long mustache, and high forehead, actually matches the paintings of Vlad Tepes (though exactly how influenced Stoker really was by Tepes’ legend is a subject of debate). Dracula may appear odd but he’s far from monstrous, and his behavior, while strange in the 19th Century, is courtly and polite.
Later, the novel remarks that Dracula is both nauseating and attractive, that there is something inherently wrong with him, yet others are drawn to him. His is the charm of death—he’s repellant but attractive, disgusting yet seductive. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula represents a seething morass beneath Victorian society—he is the dissolute aristocrat, the repressed sexuality, the attraction of death, the threat of the foreign Other, the invading force, the pestilence, the infection, the unknown and uncontrollable disease, all rolled into a single, confusing figure who becomes, above all things, the monster living in the heart of Victorian society. Like his progenitors Carmilla, Varney, and Ruthven, Dracula represented many things. Dracula calls to the darkness and repressions within humanity, however different generations and societies wish to define it.
It is somehow not surprising that contemporary mainstream films wish to remove Dracula, and by extension the vampire, from humanity entirely by rendering him so outwardly monstrous. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is one of the most recent to claim dialogue with the original novel, yet it departs so entirely from the depiction of the vampire himself. At base, this is a refusal to interact with the darkness Dracula represents. It denies the vampire within us all.
