Bram Stoker's Dracula - the beginning of a cult

If Bram Stoker would have read Twilight saga, he would slit his veins and call it a day. The last twenty-five years have transformed the monsters into very attractive, misunderstood and charming individuals which is in total contradiction with the message of the original book.

I read Dracula when I was fourteen years old. The book today would probably be R rated and parents would forbid their children to touch it till they turn eighteen. In my youth, parents had other stuff to do than to look constantly over our shoulders and trusted us not to be complete idiots. We had one neighbor though who forbid his daughter to see horror movies, and she ended up working at the morgue. Enough said.

Bram Stoker did a very thorough work with his book. It was a time when Gothic novels were surfacing and the vampires were an interesting subject. After Sheridan Le Fanu published 'Carmilla', one of the first Gothic novels having a female vampire as the main character, Bram Stoker came with a male approach and transformed the Romanian ruler Vlad Tepes into Dracula the bloodthirsty vampire. The book is very well-written and exceptionally well documented. I believe Bram Stoker traveled to Transilvania himself to get a touch of the place in order to describe it as accurately as possible. At the end of the 18th century the railways were just beginning to spread towards eastern Europe, being financed by the Austro-Hungarian empire and the line linking Budapest to Klausenburg city (Romanian name: Cluj Napoca) was quite new.  He gained as well deep knowledge of Romanian history and geography and saw Romania as a very superstitious country.

Superstition or not, vampires are alive and well into public mind for the last century and we have to thank Bram Stoker, among others for it.  Vlad the Impaler (Tepes) was probably chosen as the subject of the book based on his extremely powerful and bloody personality. The castle described in the book is Poenari castle, situated a little more south than the actual location described in the book. It was the ruling place for Vlad the Impaler for a long time and where his first wife, Jusztina Szilagyi of Moldavia, flung herself from the towers during the siege of Vlad’s Muslim brother, Radu Bey or Radu the Beautiful, exclaiming she would rather rot and be eaten by the fish than be a prisoner of the Turks. She died smashed on the rocks and the river Arges crossing nearby got all red from the lady’s blood. From that moment on the river is called The Lady’s River. This story we can find in Francis Ford Coppola Dracula movie, although he changed her name and romanticized the story to the extreme, finding passion where in the book was just simple cruelty.

Dracula is a story of a young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker who travels to Transilvania by train to provide legal support for a real estate transaction overseen by Harker's employer, Mr Peter Hawkins of Exeter. His trip to Dracula's castle is anything but ordinary and he feels uncomfortable in the very superstitious land of Transilvania. What he believes at the beginning of being weird peasant behavior towards him and his destination, he realizes soon that are based on real worries since his client, count Dracula is anything but human and he is his prisoner with no chance of escaping alive after his work there is done.

The story is being told in epistolary format under the voice of Jonathan, his fiancee Mina and others that are caught in the story line, Van Helsing another already famous name being one of them. While Jonathan describes his adventures in Transilvania, Mina and the others are telling the story from the English shores.

The characters are all formal English gentlemen and ladies, a far cry from their picture in Francis Ford Coppola movie with the same title.

Many say Bram Stoker inspired his story from the bloody countess Bathory, but to be fair, the countess never drank blood, she bathed in it and while her castle was as well situated by Bistrita river, this was in Slovakia, not Transilvania. Vlad the Impaler might have been a very ruthless ruler with a rather unique form of punishment but I would never believe him being a vampire since his first destination out of the country would have been Istanbul not London, his hatred for Turks being legendary and he would have seen them as a more reasonable snack and a real chance for a blood bath.

The fact was that even 800 years before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, vampire stories circulated all over the world, in 1047 having the first appearance of the word "upir" (an early form of the word later to become "vampire") in a document referring to a Russian prince as "Upir Lichy", or wicked vampire. Vampire cases are reported all over Europe in the following centuries and we have legends from Africa and Asia as well which makes everything being a little more than a simple coincidence and a fair reason for its popularity in the 18th century.

But from Bram Stoker's book, which is very well-written and a classic horror, to what we have now in the vampire books and movie industry is no comparison. Is like apples and strawberries.

I am pretty sure that any of us if we would have the unfortunate chance of getting face to face with a character so popular these days as a vampire, werewolf or zombie, would run screaming our heads off. This is the best case scenario, the other one is having an instant heart attack and keeling over.

So, for who wants to read a serious vampire novel, I recommend Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. Do not read at night! My father could not do it:)

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