EOH Revisited #8: The Evolution of the Vampire with Chris Newton

The Evolution of Horror

In this final episode of the EOH Revisited mini-laries, Mike Muncer sits down with Chris Newton to trace the historical and cinematic evolut

Key takeaways

• Chris Newton is preparing to release a new book titled 'The Legacy of Dracula from page to screen' via White Owl Books.
• The vampire subgenre functions on the duality of sex and death, acting as a liminal creature between life and decay.

Main topics

• Literary origins of Dracula
• The duality of sex and death in horror

Notable quotes

Vampires are sex and death, aren't they?

Conclusion

The episode provides a scholarly yet passionate look at how one of hor

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Welcome to the EOH Network, featuring top-quality podcasts that dive deep into cult and genre film and television. I'm Mike Munter. Join me and Stacey Ponder as we watch and discuss David Lynch's twin peaks in The Detective and The Log Lady. Speaker 5 (0:15) I lost my mind. It was Speaker 3 (0:19) unbelievable, this episode. Speaker 4 (0:22) Enter the gothic world of Hammer Horror with Becky Dark and Kevin Lyons in Hammer Time. Speaker 3 (0:27) I think... This might be my favourite Hammer Dracula film so far. Sorry, I fell off my chair. Hang on a minute. Speaker 4 (0:36) Explore Britain's cheekiest and most maligned comedy franchise with me and Susan Kalman in Carry On Up the Podcast. Speaker 5 (0:42) We've got Cowboy, we've got Cleo, we've got Screaming, we've got Spying. Speaker 4 (0:46) Oh my God. Speaker 5 (0:47) It's like opening an advent calendar and every day there's something really lovely inside it. Speaker 4 (0:51) Join Matt and James as they voyage through time and space in Journey Through Sci-Fi. People Speaker 3 (0:57) just... settle on the grey alien as the look of an alien and I mean it's Speaker 4 (1:03) because it's what bloody landed in Roswell James where's Speaker 3 (1:06) the proof Matt show me the proof Speaker 4 (1:07) it's out there the truth is out there James or tune into our flagship podcast featuring me and all of these other people the award winning the evolution of horror EOH Network find us wherever you get your podcasts Speaker 1 (1:31) Before I ask you to support ACE Scholarships with a generous donation, I want to make sure you understand that your donation won't cost you a penny. Thanks to the Education Freedom Tax Credit, you can now donate up to $1,700 to the best K-12 scholarship program in the country and take every dollar off your tax bill. This is not a deduction off your gross income. This is a 100 % dollar-for-dollar reduction. of whatever you owe the federal government at the end of the year. Now, why ACE scholarships? Because ACE scholarships were designed to rescue young kids from failing school systems all over the country by empowering parents with real school choice. So far, over 121,000 scholarships have been awarded over the last 26 years. I know these guys personally. I support them directly. And I've spoken at several of their annual fundraisers. Most recently, earlier this year in Denver, it was extraordinary. The event gave me a chance to meet a few of the kids who have benefited, some of whom have gone on to apply for a scholarship from my foundation and then entered the skilled trades. ACE operates with total transparency, absolute. integrity and a fierce dedication to reinvigorate the American workforce. And now you can help them reach a lot more kids and it won't cost you a penny thanks to the Education Freedom Tax Credit. Learn more at educationfreedom.org. That's educationfreedom.org. Speaker 2 (3:18) Exchange is a phone, upgrade is a wallow, aagai sundar selfie. Fashion Speaker 5 (3:24) pe jo great deals umili, candle hopping chali nishti. Speaker 2 (3:27) Dhar decorate, India celebrate, Mumbai Lucknow Kolkata kochi. Speaker 5 (3:32) Great panani sab ka tyohar, Amazon Great Indian Festival aaya hai, 8 October se. Speaker 4 (3:54) Welcome back to the Evolution of Horror. My name is Mike Munter, and as ever, I am your host. And this is the final part in our little EOH retrospective miniseries. Across the last eight weeks, we've been revisiting the subgenres covered in the first eight seasons of the podcast to celebrate the release of the Evolution of Horror book, available in bookstores worldwide right now. The book covers eight subgenres across eight chapters, and that's exactly what we've been doing. over the course of this miniseries. And this week, for our last episode in the run, we are going to be covering the evolution of the vampire movie. So joining me to discuss vampires in depth, a very good friend of mine, a longtime friend of the pod. He is the co-host of the Page to Scream podcast. He is also a writer, an author, and a super fan. of the vampire sub-genre. Welcome back to the podcast, Chris Newton. Hello, Chris. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing? I feel a bit like a vampire at the moment because I'm desperately hiding from the sun and the heat, you know? Speaker 1 (4:57) We've gone Speaker 4 (4:57) full Orlok. I know, honestly. It is, yeah. Speaker 3 (5:00) I'm melting. But other than that, I'm really, really well. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to talk vampires. Of Speaker 4 (5:06) course. You were literally the first person I thought of for this because we didn't really know each other. Well, Your first appearance on the podcast was in the Man-Made Monsters season, I believe, was it? Frankenstein. Yeah, exactly. To talk about Frankenstein. That's right. So we haven't talked about vampires together on the podcast, but obviously... Unthinkable. I know. Can you believe it? Because you are... Tell us a little bit about your thoughts on the subgenre. You're a fan, right? It's safe to say. So I'm a bit of a fan. Yeah. I can't Speaker 3 (5:37) remember... a time before vampires in my life. Like when I, when I was a kid, my nan and granddad would take us on holiday to Whitby every year. And, you know, Whitby is the Dracula town and he's, he's everywhere. He's on fridge magnets and, and lollipops and just everything and beach towels. And of course I, you know, I grew up with things like Count Duckula. Yes. And they were brilliant kids books. There was a book I was obsessed with called The Vampire Master by Virginia Ironside. It's kind of fallen into obscurity now. It's basically Dracula for kids. But yeah, it was an obsession. And I've just finished writing a book about the legacy of Dracula that is going to come out to coincide with the 130th anniversary of the original novel. So yeah, my head is full of vampires, but then it always is, to be honest. Speaker 4 (6:21) That is incredible. And I was lucky enough to read a little bit about, read a little bit of the introduction, at least, to your book. and it's fascinating and beautifully written as well. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about what was it that kind of inspired Speaker 3 (6:35) you to want to write specifically about Dracula? It was because I also, my partner Tara and I, we co-host a literary horror podcast called From Patience to Scream, which is all about the spooky books behind our favourite horror films. And we started with Dracula, because you've got to start with Dracula. It's kind of, it's the main one. It's the original. Speaker 3 (6:55) And I was so kind of, you know, we did about six hours on the novel, but my head was still full of it. And I started just as a little passion project, annotating the original text to talk about screen adaptations. And it kind of sat on the back burner for ages. And then... a publisher approached me that were kind of interested in that kind of thing. But ultimately what they wanted was a guide to screen adaptations of Dracula. So that's what I started to write based on my original annotations of the novel. But it kind of morphed into something much more exciting and interesting than that. Because I was trying to write about Dracula in a way that kind of covered all bases, like the Dracula story. You know, Jonathan Harker goes to the castle in Transylvania. Well, actually, in some versions, it isn't Jonathan Harker. the 31 universal film it's renfield and i started to think about like all the differences in every adaptation of dracula and yet they all feel like dracula so i started to think like what are the bare bones of the dracula story what is the dracula myth and why have those elements endured and i'm sure we're Speaker 4 (7:56) going Speaker 3 (7:56) to talk a lot about this but you know Dracula specifically and vampires generally say a lot about us as a society and our our fears and dare I say our desires so I think the the core elements of that most famous vampire story was really exciting for me to explore and I was really lucky to get an incredible foreword for the book by none other than yourself I love it I Speaker 4 (8:22) love it yeah um I was very honored to be asked so thank you it's such a fascinating thing and obviously we are going to talk a lot about dracula uh in this conversation but let me just take a step back and go broader for a second and let's talk about vampires generally yeah like you said you kind of you become aware of it almost immediately i feel like when you're born vampires right like in some ways it's kind of you know i made this my eighth season of the podcast in the eighth chapter of the book In many ways, this should have been a chapter one because I feel like for so many people, vampires are chapter one of horror and Dracula is chapter one of horror in a way, right? Which we're Speaker 1 (8:58) going Speaker 4 (8:58) to talk about. But what is it about the vampire as a monster that makes it so... enduringly popular and have such mass appeal compared to other horror monsters. Yeah, I think vampires are sex and death, Speaker 3 (9:14) aren't Speaker 2 (9:14) they? Speaker 3 (9:14) That's what they are. And those two things should be sort of contradictory because one is about life and the other is death. And yet there's that duality there, isn't there? That, you know, without sex there is no life and life ultimately results in death. Like vampires are like the infinity symbol, aren't they? They're a bit of everything. You know me, I think we have quite similar tastes. We're both like the works of David Lynch, we're both like the Blair Witch Project, films that kind of leave things unanswered, where there's ambiguity and scope for imagination. Speaker 4 (9:44) And Speaker 3 (9:45) I think vampires are quite ambiguous in and of themselves, because there's a duality to them, a contradiction to them, because they're living and they're dead, and they're neither good nor evil. They're liminal creatures that exist kind of outside of the boundaries of things we know. And I think that makes them intriguing. And people are constantly wondering. You know, what happened? The genre is so well established and Dracula has been adapted so many hundreds of times, you'd think we'd be sick of it by now. But they're so malleable that I think people will never stop wondering, what would happen if Dracula went here? What would happen if this person was a vampire? I don't think that fascination will Speaker 4 (10:25) ever end. So true. Do you think the vampire has become the most mainstream monster to the point where he almost doesn't belong? just to us horror fans anymore, you know? It's interesting, isn't Speaker 3 (10:37) it? And I'd not really considered that until I think you mentioned that. It was either in your book or in the chat that you and Becky did about the launch of the book about vampires being the most mainstream. And I think you're right. And vampire films will always, and this is very apt considering what we were just saying about them being fundamentally like liminal creatures who don't fit comfortably anywhere. Speaker 3 (11:03) they don't fit comfortably in the horror genre necessarily. And I know, and we'll get onto this later, I'm sure, but there are certain films that you will have covered as part of your horror podcast that people said, oh, that's not a horror film. But it's a vampire film. If Speaker 4 (11:16) it's a vampire film, it must be a horror film, surely. Right. Not Speaker 3 (11:20) necessarily. And, you know, if you go back to, not that it began with Dracula, but I would say horror cinema. kind of begins with the universal dracula at least horror cinema as we know it obviously there were earlier in inverted commas horror films and earlier vampire films but something about that universal dracula kind of set the template for basically everything that we love today didn't Speaker 4 (11:42) yeah but to Speaker 3 (11:44) go back to the novel the original story we think of dracula as living in transylvania yeah and yet It's important to note that he exists on the borders of three states. Stoker's never that... We know where the Borgo Pass is, but we don't really know where Dracula is. And I think that's kind of the point. He's off the map, where it's like, here be monsters. Even Dracula kind of exists in this weird kind of void space that we don't understand. Speaker 4 (12:12) I love that. That's so interesting. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. It's the creature that... that is eternally just on the outside of everything, of the mainstream, of cult, of all of those things. It kind of transcends all of that stuff, doesn't it? And, you know, I've been trying to get to the root of what, you know, the root of the fear, I suppose, with each sub-genre that I've covered and what fears each sub-genre or each monster kind of taps into. What do you think it is with the vampire? Because I do wonder whether it is to do with sex. I wonder if there is something inherently about... tapping into a fear of of of sex in some way that idea of kind of bod swapping kind of bodily fluids and that idea that your desire that the allure of the creature will ultimately lead to your downfall you know yeah Speaker 3 (13:00) yeah i think that's so true and i'm gonna obviously going to keep coming back to dracula yeah as kind of the the text as it were um And, you know, famously, there's the scene in Dracula where Jonathan encounters the brides. And if you read that passage in the novel, it's really fascinating to see how this, in inverted commas, respectable Victorian man talks about these harlots, these beasts of the pit. And they're not real women. You know, my fiance Mina is a real woman. And yet, so he, and this is his diary. These are his recorded thoughts. But you know that his subconscious desires, he wants them. And, you know. He finds them alluring, both sexually and in the sense of like that they bring death. Like it's the sex drive and the death drive. And what I find really interesting that apparently kind of the germination of the tale was that Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, had a nightmare about these three succubi that were basically the brides of Dracula. Right. Without wanting to go down too much of a rabbit hole, Bram Stoker was a very interesting person and he was married to Florence, but... Generally, it's thought to have been quite a loveless marriage. And the general consensus seems to be that he was gay in a time where he couldn't come out comfortably. And I think there's a lot of sexual repression in Dracula and fear of sexuality. And I think, again, we're going to keep coming back to that duality, that it's about fear and desire. It's about life and death, you know, sex and decay. So, but yeah, I think you can't really... separate Speaker 4 (14:40) the sexual element that's so interesting and sexuality itself like you say there has always been and we'll talk about this a lot as we go there has always been a queerness to the vampire too right is it the most queer of all the monsters i think it must be Speaker 3 (14:53) right absolutely and canonically the queerest monster you know and we talk about that that that sense of you know dracula living Transylvania beyond the forest in a place that Jonathan Harker, this kind of Victorian Englishman with his ordnance survey maps, he doesn't understand this place. It's beyond his understanding. So Dracula will always challenge or vampires will always arrive to challenge like societal norms, especially in terms of gender roles and sexuality. And yeah, that's it's what they're for. It's their purpose, you know. Speaker 4 (15:29) I love that. I love that. So let's, for a minute, go back pre-Dracula. Dracula was obviously, what was it, 1897 it was published, right? Relatively recent in terms of the history of kind of literature and storytelling, right? And so what about before that? Did the vampire kind of exist, at least in the form that we think of it as? I mean... And arguably, you could sort of point to Speaker 3 (15:54) the origins of that. And it's interesting. I begin my book saying who was the first vampire. And it's, you know, in order to determine that, you kind of have to define what a vampire is. Right. And I, you know, I talked about Lilith, you know, this figure from mythology who was... adam's first wife before eve who refused to be subservient to her husband and wouldn't lie beneath him and then was cast out of the garden of eden to become the mother of demons yeah and straight away and so she becomes this kind of you know uh succubus figure who who who who drinks blood and preys upon children and she's in that respect she's like a sort of proto lucy westermere from dracula because you have this this in inverted commas, perfect woman who's groomed to be somebody's, you know, obedient wife, but rejects that and finds liberation and a rejection of traditional, you know, she's a demon because she's a female who preys on children as opposed to nurturing them. She rejects the role of the mother, just like Lucy dropping the baby in the crypt in Dracula. So, you know, those ideas go right back. And I think, you know, in a sort of more modern sense. A lot of the vampire mythology, the kind of modern-ish vampire mythology, comes from... death and decomposition and times when people didn't really understand what happened to the body after death there's that misconception that the fingernails continue to grow where actually it's just the skin around them shrinks so it looks like they're growing and and the blood will pool in certain areas of the body including the lips so people would exhume cadavers and see that they had like long talons and red lips and blood around their mouth and they came to the conclusion that oh this person has returned from the grave and drunk the blood of the Speaker 4 (17:39) living, you know. And it's almost, you know, there's a crossover between vampires and zombies there, isn't there? There is, there is. Yeah, because actually, yeah, you take away the kind of suave, sophisticated, sexy elements of the vampire. Yeah. And actually, if you look at it more as a kind of, I guess more like Nosferatu, more as this really diseased, decaying, parasitic creature, there's something actually much more scary and monstrous about the vampire, isn't there? You know, like this... I think so. This leech-type figure that will come and... latch onto you in the night and drain your blood and suck your life force away this kind of rotting decaying monster there is actually something also incredibly scary about the vampire right and I think these days in a in a post-Twilight, post-Buffy world. It's easy to forget that almost, I think. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 (18:26) And again, there's that duality that sort of, you know, behind like the velvet and the cuffs, there is this grotesque and parasitical thing. Yes. And what I find really interesting is that in these sort of communities where they would, if there was some sort of, you know, plague or whatever, and they would see these bodies and think, ah, that's what's spreading. the pestilence this person has has risen from the grave and is and is spreading so it becomes like a kind of um you know like a an anthropomorphization of death and another thing that i find really fascinating is that those those communities would have had kind of like limited education but they would have been aware that something like garlic is it purifies the blood and it's a restorative. So they think actually we know that garlic and other things like can help immunize us against this death, this plague that we've personified as the vampire. So the garlic as a symbol of health becomes a kind of like totemic thing that is used to ward off death. And it's kind of like you can see where that comes from. And there's a logic behind it. And then... you know, that's kind of distilled now into our modern vampire stories where it is literally like a crucifix. It's Speaker 4 (19:42) a Speaker 3 (19:42) thing that's held up to ward them off. Speaker 4 (19:45) Yes. Speaker 3 (19:45) But yeah, so it trickles down from that kind of, like you say, that almost kind of Orlokian, grotesque, parasitical creature that brings pestilence in its wake to this kind of, this suave aristocrat. And when we talked about Frankenstein, we talked famously about, you know, that night on the shores of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron were in Villa Diodati and the weather was terrible. It was the year without summer and the skies were black and they challenged each other to a ghost story competition. And Mary Shelley, of course, that was where Frankenstein came from. And we kind of touched on the fact that also in attendance of this gathering was John Polidori, who was Lord Byron's personal physician. And he wrote a story called The Vampire, spelled with a Y. And it's not the best vampire story. And yet, what you talked about, a vampire is this parasitical thing that leeches. He took that idea. And he created this quite unflattering caricature of Byron, who he really didn't like. And he created this kind of suave, charming, aristocratic character called Lord Ruthven, who's really just leeching off everyone around him. And he uses the vampire as a metaphor. But in doing so, he gives us a sort of proto-Dracula. So like the vampire, as we understand it, was kind of, I like to think of like Dracula and Frankenstein both being born in that same... holiday i Speaker 4 (21:09) love that that's i mean that's perfect isn't it and of course we can't forget carmilla as well right 1872 joseph sheridan lafanu um i think in some ways especially as the vampire goes on and we'll get into the sort of lesbian vampire era of course and it feels equally as important right carmilla so Speaker 3 (21:29) important and it's i feel like carmilla is kind of getting more recognition now yes um And yeah, it's more than 20 years before Dracula. And I think one of the surprising things about it when you read it, it's not just the fact, oh, it's a kind of modern vampire story pre-Dracula, but so many of the beats of Dracula are in there too, like, you know, the staking and decapitation. And it's an incredible novella. And what I don't know if Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu actually encountered each other, but they did work together because Stoker used to write newspaper articles. And for a time in Dublin, Sheridan Le Fanu was his editor. So they will have had some correspondence at least. So, you know, there's a bit of cheekiness there with Bram Stoker kind of taking... A lot of the ideas from Carmilla, I think, and initially, so Carmilla's set in Styria, so there's a lot of that kind of, you know, European folklore concerning the vampire. And in the earliest drafts of Dracula, a lot of the notes, like Dracula's going to be set in Styria too, and the main character was going to be called Count Wampierre. There were a lot of differences, and it almost feels like it began as a bit of a Carmilla. Speaker 4 (22:48) rewrite Speaker 3 (22:48) in a way excellent um and then of course bram stoker famously has his holiday in whitby in 1890 and in the whitby public library he finds the name dracula in a book and you can see his notes where he's he's crossed out count count montpierre and written dracula and then written count dracula and underlined it and you just know he's had this light bulb moment of like oh Speaker 4 (23:09) my fucking god count dracula Speaker 3 (23:13) And with that comes the kind of the Romanian element and elements of the story change. And I think Dracula, for all of its kind of, I think of Dracula, the novel as being a bit like Lord of the Rings in the sense that all the stuff in Lord of the Rings, like elves and dragons and dwarves, and they all existed in fantasy and folklore. But Tolkien kind of pulled it together in a way that kind of formed the template that fantasy would then be forever. And I think Dracula is the same. all of the elements existed but but bram stoker pulled them together and made it fun like carmilla is it's a wonderful book and i would definitely recommend it but it's not dracula is an adventure story with with chases and and and tension yes yes action and he you know he wrote something that i think people find it ploddy these days people to talk about it like in the way that people talk about Frankenstein. Oh, it's lots of letters. But Dracula, some of the films begin with Jonathan Harker being told by his employee, you've got to go and go to the mountains. The book doesn't, it starts right in there. He's like, he's on his way. Admittedly, the first paragraph is about paprika, but once you've got through that, you know, it really, it really starts right in the thick of the action and the horror. It isn't until much later that it slows down and does drag a bit in that third act. Well, Speaker 4 (24:33) absolutely. And this is the case, I mean, for me, with every version of Dracula, is that I think, for me, the thing about Dracula the story is that the first act is the best, right? It's the stuff we all love. It's that... Jonathan traveling to Transylvania. It's the castle. It's the I am Dracula. It's the brides. It's the bit when he cuts his finger and Dracula goes for him. These Speaker 3 (24:55) are Speaker 4 (24:55) all the iconic moments we think about with Dracula, right? Definitely, yeah. Once Lucy's... been staked it's kind of like oh well i was kind of rooting for her so there's nothing yeah Speaker 3 (25:04) left now but you Speaker 4 (25:07) talked about that kind of idea of you know carmilla kind of establishing some of those tropes and rules the stake the decapitation i think that's the other thing that there is something about the vampire law that people love too it's it's a it's Speaker 3 (25:22) a subgenre that has rules right Speaker 4 (25:24) and sometimes those rules are broken deliberately and subverted but the fun of it is that we all know the rules right we all know i could ask my 10-year-old niece, and I'm sure she'd be able to list, you know, they don't go in sunlight, you know, stake through the heart, they don't cast a reflection. You know, like you say, garlic, crucifix, yeah, all of those things, they have to be invited in. There's all of those things about the vampire lore that I think add to its kind of... popularity and its kind of mythic status, I think, in a way. Absolutely, yeah. You can kind of drop somebody in that world and just know that the reader Speaker 3 (25:59) or the audience will be familiar with it instantly. And every time, like you say, when those rules are subverted, it's done with a wink at the audience saying, we know what you're expecting. Yes! Yeah, I love that. And again, like all of those elements, they come from... the folklore and the superstitions and the idea that vampires must be invited is one of my favorite bit of vampire law because you think well what a brilliant defense like they can never get you because all you have to do is not invite them in but again we talk about the appeal of the vampire that's why they're sexy that's why they're seductive because you want to let them in like if leatherface was outside your front door you just wouldn't you just wouldn't let him in but you know if ingrid pitt or Christopher Lee or Gary Oldman were there, you'd say, okay. Yeah. So what's this? Forever young, you say? Yeah. Never die? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Come on in. Speaker 4 (26:50) That's it. It's one of the only monsters as well in horror cinema, at least, that there is something almost quite appealing about being killed by that monster, right? There is something alluring. You know, you jump forward to the Lost Boys and you think of that tagline. sleep all day, party all night, never grow up, right? Like there Speaker 3 (27:09) is something incredibly appealing Speaker 4 (27:11) about, yeah, sign us up about living on the fringes of society, about embracing any kind of lifestyle, sexuality, partying, not living by society rules. It's Speaker 1 (27:23) a Speaker 4 (27:23) liberation. It's Speaker 1 (27:25) a liberation. Exactly. Yeah. Speaker 4 (27:27) But let's talk a little bit about Dracula then because I think it's, Speaker 3 (27:31) yeah, Speaker 4 (27:32) it's, Obviously, it's such an important novel. I think what's so interesting is that, and you touch upon this in your book, right, is that so many of the elements of the book have since been kind of changed and shifted and warped. You know, literally hundreds, if not thousands of adaptations we've seen since. Does the... the original novel for you still retain all of that kind of vampire-iness that we think about when we think about Dracula and vampire lore? I think it does, yeah. I think it holds up really well. And I think it's until that Speaker 3 (28:05) third act when it does slow down, I think those iconic scenes in there are all really pacey. But it's a funny one, isn't it? Because even if you've never seen a Dracula film, you would still go to that book. bringing preconceptions with you yes and it doesn't matter how many times i read the descriptions of dracula by bram stoker as this old man with the long white mustache i'm still picturing christopher lee or bella lugosi yes and if i try really hard to picture him as an old man i'm still thinking of gary oldman's yes dracula you know so i think it's impossible almost to kind of to view it um in a vacuum because it exists through this cultural lens of everything from the count on sesame street to you know what we do in the shadows to yeah 30 days of night it's just you know there's so much that you will bring to it but the original novel i think is just i think it's brilliant and what is easy to forget about it like with the sherlock holmes stories is that at the time it was a contemporary novel. It was all about technology and modernity. And in that respect, it's a bit of a weird comparison in a way, but I find Dracula quite similar to The Exorcist because they both take place in what are at the time that the modern world, and there's this thing that people say doesn't exist anymore. you know, demonic possession isn't real. That's a medieval concept for when people didn't understand epilepsy and seizures and said it was demons. Okay, then can modern science and medicine explain this? Actually, no. Maybe it's a demon. And there's something really quite scary about that, the idea that technology and science and light can't save you. Whereas... In Dracula, that is what happens. This monster from the shadows, from beyond the woods, is brought into the harsh light of modern Victorian London and defeated by it, ultimately. But that's the horror, I think, is people saying, no, this is a folkloric, archaic being that cannot possibly exist. And yet it does. I Speaker 4 (30:11) love that. And that's so interesting. And I remember Kim Newman talking to me about this on our Vampire series, saying that, you know, the... the novel that was written kind of in the midst of that kind of industrial revolution kind of era. There is so much kind of technology and that idea of the new versus the old that comes into play in that story. Right. And so many descriptions of like, I don't know, typewriters to train timetables to, you know, various kind of technology at the time. All of that is quite important to the themes of Dracula, actually. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan Harker has a Kodak. Speaker 3 (30:42) Right. Exactly. Because that's another thing. And that's what makes, you know, because. I know we'll talk about Nosferatu because that's sort of an adaptation of Dracula, but it also sort of isn't because it's its own story. And I think fundamentally because it's a German film and Dracula, it's written by an Irish author, but it's kind of, it's a book about Britain and it's written at a time when the British Empire is at the absolute height of its power. And it's about Dracula coming to London, which is probably the most... sort of powerful and important city in the world at that point. And I think the idea of nation is at the very heart of Dracula as a story because it's about the fear of the outsider, the fear of the foreigner, the corrupting foreign influence who will come over here and... literally like penetrate our women and corrupt their blood it's it's about fear of invasion yeah completely completely yeah it's very much there on Speaker 4 (31:40) the surface that stuff isn't it yeah what what about the the figure of dracula himself then and the way he is portrayed in that novel you know compared to adaptations how how important is that figure of of dracula in the way he is established in the novel i Speaker 3 (31:55) think it's really interesting because you will never quite know And this, again, it's that Lynchian kind of appeal of, you know, the more mysterious it is, the more beautiful it is. I never want to know. Speaker 1 (32:05) Yeah. Speaker 3 (32:05) But we'll never know what was going on in Bram Stoker's head. Like with as much as I, you know how much I adore Frankenstein and how much I kind of idolize Mary Shelley. But you kind of know exactly who she was and what she thought about everything. And you can look at Frankenstein and say, yes, it's about this. This means this. And she's trying to say this. Yes. But with. Dracula, it's all a big question mark. Well, is he celebrating Britain and empire and Queen Victoria? Like, well, maybe because he lives in London, but he's Irish. And you think, is this satire? Is it actually poking fun? Speaker 3 (32:45) at the kind of, you know, close-mindedness, insular nature of this paranoid island that's terrified of losing its power, terrified of corrupting foreign influence, terrified of other nations doing to it what it has done to them, you know. Speaker 4 (32:59) Yeah. Speaker 3 (33:00) And you can view Dracula through both lens. It's kind of, it's something that's quite xenophobic on the one hand, but on the other, it's something that's quite progressive. And you never know, because again, it's a vampire story. It's both. It's confusing. Speaker 4 (33:15) Yes, yes. Is Dracula, even in the novel, that suave, good-looking guy that we maybe think of when we think of... Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, etc. No, no, he isn't. I mean, he's just described Speaker 3 (33:30) as an old man, you know, with hairy hands, hairy palms in the novel. It's long massage. And he does get younger throughout the book. His hair goes from white to being iron grey. And then he's even younger at the end. But there's nothing about him being handsome or even seductive or... charismatic even there is there is something romantic about him because he is quite wistful and i think he's quite sad in some ways because he's lonely and he's old and he has some beautiful dialogue at the beginning of the book about how you know um uh his heart you know through weary years of mourning the dead is no longer attuned to mirth and you can see like the seeds of interview with the vampire there yeah but ultimately he is this kind of grotesque monstrous figure. And what I find really interesting that until almost the last minute, the book's title was supposed to be The Undead. And it's almost like, because I know you talked about this when you and Adam discussed the novel, that Dracula as a character is kind of absent for most of the book. Yes. He's more of an idea. He's this, once Jonathan has encountered him in the castle at the beginning, Dracula is this sort of threat, this presence that just looms over the rest of the story. And in many ways, like, lucy and the brides are as important yeah monsters in the story as dracula is it i wonder like would people have thought of it the way we do now had it been called the undead oh it's a story about vampires but dracula becomes the star because we've we've made him the star and i think and that it was a such a slow evolution but absolutely the the the count dracula that we know and love today is not the count dracula of the novel Yeah. Speaker 4 (35:10) And that comes through the adaptations, you know. Yeah, that's so interesting, actually, that you're right. And I wonder if that is partly why we love the first act, the first section of the story so much, because it's when you get the most Dracula, isn't it, really? You know, it's when he's at his chattiest and he is kind of most interesting, I suppose. He is, yeah, yeah. I think that's really interesting. And of course, like it has kind of evolved into becoming this kind of much more kind of alluring sexual thing. But I suppose it was always there even