View photos from Dracula The Blood is the Life on NBC.com. View photos from Dracula The Blood is the Life on NBC.com.
In this variation, a man harnesses to attempt to rejuvenate his music career. A character, typically evil or sadistic, immersed in a bathtub filled with blood. Frequently, any blood used for this purpose will be a type of that is intended to cause some fantastic effect on the bather. The derives from myths and folklore surrounding 16th Century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is said to have bathed in the blood of young women and/or in order to restore and.
While the real Countess Bathory has been accused of many unpleasant, cruel things, it's certain that her baths in blood are only the stuff of legends. However, the Blood Bath is very much a key component to be found in any story in which she is featured, and any stories that feature a Blood Bath without Bathory as a character will often allude to her motives for doing this (lifted directly from the legends) and may also mention her by name (or, at least, give a character partaking in this a similar-sounding name as a ).
The trope can often follow the to deliver a moral tract about and. Characters who bathe in blood often exhibit other qualities closely associated with, especially when alluding to blood being rejuvenating or how they come to acquire their blood in the first place; and can be commonly noticed as well. In cases not involving outright vampiric entities, characters may be dabbling in, especially. A less common,, variant of the trope takes after the story of the warrior Siegfried from the, whose body was made invulnerable after bathing in the blood of a dragon. This trope is NOT to be associated with instances where bloody corpses are found in bathtubs or, like in or (unless the blood from the victim(s) of said tropes is used for someone else to bathe in, of course).
• Based on both the legend and, one of the scariest villains of was a Japanese lord who bathed in the blood of numerous servants in the hope of extending his life and took up the moniker 'Urado' (Vlad). • In the Korean Horror Collector, the protagonist seeks to resurrect Elizabeth Bathory from a doll that she had apparently sealed her spirit inside of through one of her blood bathing rituals. Bathory herself is shown to be surprisingly compassionate, despite bathing in the blood of her victims.
• In, it's revealed in a flashback that the Black Book Club bathed in the blood of the they had slaughtered, mostly. The discovery of this (as well as several other factors). • Dubhe Siegfried of (Anime only) shares his with his namesake from the — he slays a dragon and bathes in its blood, making himself invulnerable, but at that very moment, a tiny leaf falls on his back (coincidentally over his heart), preventing that bit of skin from being touched by the blood, and therefore making that spot the only part of his body that can be dealt a mortal blow. • In, the evil witch Honerva bathes her cat in blood (although in ).
• In: Bloodlust, the spirit of the main antagonist, Carmilla, is brought back to her physical body by bathing her corpse in Charlotte's blood. Shalltear Bloodfallen normally appears as an, but when she bathes in blood, her glamor breaks and she turns into what can best be described as a humanoid. • 's invitation to a gathering of the Cadre Infernale led to him meeting the High Priestess of the order,, bathing in what Nikolai at first thought was red wine. She alludes to the rejuvenating effects of Blood Baths being discovered by Bathory but insists that, unlike Bathory, she gets her blood from young women who are willing to donate a few pints in exchange for a tax exemption. However, it turns out that jobless women who can't pay taxes are.
• Readers first meet Solomon Ravne from in the middle of one such bath, surrounded by the naked, bleeding corpses the blood had to have come from. Because Ravne is suggested to be, it may be that such a bath is needed to maintain his age and appearance or prolong his life. •: • wrote a comic ( Legends of the Dark Knight #91-93) in which the villain, Doctor Freak, was a drug lord who got people hooked on a drug so he could kill them, fill a pool with their drugged-up blood, and get high by bathing in it. • In, Deacon Blackfire bathed in blood, supposedly to make himself immortal.
•: Wake the Devil references the original legend about Elizabeth Bathory. The blood baths are only mentioned, not shown, but the iron maiden that was used to obtain the blood plays a pivotal role in the plot. • Elizabeth Bathory was a very minor adversary in '. Originally, Dracula intended to make Bathory his vampiric servant, but her baths in the blood of virgins had made her immune to Dracula's control, so they briefly agreed to form an alliance. When Bathory finally betrayed Dracula, he ended up Dracula later confronted Bathory in her cell and drained her of all her blood; she aged to death in seconds.
• In, when the King Numedides expressed a desire to become immortal, he enlisted the services of the Thulandra Thuu, and together, they sacrificed young women in order for Numedides to bathe in their blood. • foe Man-Ape gained his by eating the flesh and bathing in the blood of a rare white gorilla. • The one-shot: It's A Wonderful Life has a sequence where Carnage (wearing swim trunks, goggles, and a bathing cap) is shown high-diving into a luxury pool filled with blood, as two babes cheer him on. • One chapter of the strip 'A Love Like Blood' features the vampire king Karkossa lounging in what appears to be a blood jacuzzi while also being entertained by female vampires.
• Emily Christy of resorts to something akin to this in order to retain a human appearance in Tub Club, manipulating students into weird bloodletting pool orgies as a part of being in the titular secret society. Cassie is also depicted as partaking in one ◊ from the same. • In #17, Commandant Keisari, military commander of the Vathek (a race of vampires who dwell on Saturn), is shown bathing in a tub that is being filled from draining corpses suspended above it. • A strip published in Judge Dredd Mega Special 1995 concerns a pop singer who retained his youth and good looks through, human sacrifice, and bathing in blood—the literal blood bath being implied to be the most crucial step in the singer's rejuvenation rituals. Strangely enough, 22nd Century technology in Dredd's world has made several means of rejuvenation (including some that are legal) readily available to citizens, which makes it a bit odd to see somebody taking this route, instead.
• This is the main gimmick of villain Brother Blood, a supervillain cult leader who bathes in the blood of his followers to prolong his life (although not indefinitely). • One group of people infected by the in take to soaking themselves in blood, doing it so often that their skin begins turning a faint shade of red. The character who informs the others about this tribe then goes on to recount having stumbled onto a 'party' in which the infected filled an empty pool by shredding people with woodchippers and lawnmowers they had aimed at it. •: • The first movie opens at a vampire rave called 'Blood Bath' where all the vampires get showered in blood through the sprinkler system. • In, Vampire Lord Damaskinos wades into a small but literal pool of blood.
Then, later on, Blade is rejuvenated when he takes a nosedive into one such pool. • Immoral Tales is an which includes a section on Bathory and sequences of her bathing in blood.
• is a film about Bathory bathing in blood. • In, Dracula is revived when his corpse is put in a bathtub full of blood. • In, one of the clients of the Elite Hunting group is a woman who slices up a suspended female captive with scythes and sickles, and bathes in the blood that spills out of her wounds. The client happened to be named. • The German film, which follows the everyday lives of a pair of, has two scenes in which the main characters bathe in blood-laden water. • In Mark's nightmare in, Freddy first appears lounging in a bathtub full of blood, disguised as Mark's dead brother, who. • ends with a police officer finding the killer hanging out in a bathtub filled with the blood and body parts of a group of people he had just massacred.
• The Countess, a drama about Elizabeth Bathory, depicts Bathory as having first applied the blood of virgin girls as a cosmetic but gradually demanded more and more blood until, eventually, she was bathing in it. • The sequel has one of these.
• The psycho in 1987's Rampage, loosely based on the serial killings of, has recurring hallucinations in which he is showering himself with blood. • Speed Demon has several scenes where men clad only in boxers perform a 'purification ritual' that involves sensually washing each other with blood.
• The indie horror flick features a character who disappears in a bathtub full of blood when some paranormal force pulls him into it. • The Japanese fantasy film has the villainess bathing nude in blood to rejuvenate herself. • In Ronan bathes in the blood of Xandarians he's executed. This isn't immediately apparent due to the Xandarians', but then we see him start to refill his tub. • In, the vengeful spirit of Elizabeth Bathory suspends Abigail over an empty bathtub caked in dried blood and threatens to have her bled into the tub, heavily suggesting this trope, but Hutch saves a Abigail before any bloodletting could occur. • In the 1979 Australian horror movie Thirst, one of the attempts taken by a vampiric cult to recruit and condition the story's unwilling protagonist, believed by the cult to be a descendant of Elizabeth Bathory, involves rigging her plumbing to release blood, instead of water, while she takes a shower.
• In Ruby, Sarah, and Gigi murder Jesse, a beautiful and virginal young woman, and not only bathe in her blood but cannibalize her as well. The director and co-writer said he was directly inspired by the tales of Elizabeth Bathory.
• In, the vampiress regularly lures in victims to drain them of their blood and bathe in it to restore her youthful appearance. She even has a giant Roman bath filled with blood hidden in a catacomb. She's all but clearly stated to be Elizabeth Bathory. • The character Elizabeth Bartholdi appears in,, and 's series. She bathes in a special tub carved from a single slab of marble, and the blood keeps her eternally young in an attempt to avoid the price of her deal with the Devil.
• One of the Magpyr ancestors in is a parody of Bathory (although her name's ). The modern Magpyrs believe the story of her bathing in the blood of two hundred virgins is highly exaggerated. The bath would overflow if you used more than eighty. They've checked.
• James Follett's book and radio play Ice has a bizarre variation on this one. When the heroine is dying from hypothermia at sea, one of the heroes cuts a human-sized hole in a Blue Whale's skin,. • A demonic shower room which features shower heads that shoot blood shows up in a dream sequence in: Dreamspawn. Freddy (who's ) finds it refreshing, while his intended victim is completely horrified, especially when the drains fail to work and the room starts filling up.
• by Charles Stross references the original legend with Bathory PaleGrace (TM), a makeup that carries a youth-projecting glamour in every jar. As the company's founder says, in every jar.but.
• In, John Seward, who suspects Elizabeth Bathory of being a vampire, witnesses her bathe in a young woman's blood. • sees the and priestess of a, Zandramas, show a fondness for cutting out people's hearts and bathing in their blood. • In, a group of fairies decide to sacrifice a young girl who they have captive, believing that bathing in virgin's blood will help them. The sacrifice is called off, however, when the girl breaks into hysterical laughter after being told this.
It seems she was held captive by pirates for quite a while and is no longer a fitting sacrifice. • In the stories, Maladar's backstory contains a few details about slaughtering thousands of nobles' sons, just so he can bathe in their blood. • Erzebet Bizecka of Alisa Libby's Blood Confession has a habit of killing her servants in her dungeon and bathing in their blood in order to preserve her youth and beauty.
• The eponymous demonic from 's bathes in a tub full of blood from dead babies. He complains how difficult it is to keep them alive long enough for the bath to be warm when he empties their blood into it. • In the, Mijak's godspeakers bathe in animal blood to commune with their god. • The German epic poem (c. 1200 AD) has the hero Siegfried becoming invulnerable (except for ) by bathing in the blood of a dragon that he killed.
(This does not apply to Siegfried's Norse counterpart Sigurd.) • According to events in, Elizabeth Bathory's blood baths began as a means to cure her epilepsy. It didn't work. • In, bathing in the blood of a dragon will cause the bather to become immune to fire and fear, although this also comes at the price of the bather's humanity burning away so that even if a good character does this, it's bound to eventually turn him/her evil.
• Gloria Tesch's features a fabled 'Pool of Blood', a lake of red water which renders anyone who bathes in it invulnerable to 'the powers of darkness.' • Jarek the Wilder Icecarl, of series by, slew a Norrworm in its cave and had to swim in its blood for days until it drained out. The dip turned his skin blue and made it. • Invoked in, the short story. After seeing the nephew guillotined, the judge wishes he could have bathed in his blood. • One prank on set up the target as a new employee at a health spa 'for professional clientèle' that uses 'very expensive ingredients'.
Along with female clients who come in for rejuvenation treatments is a list of younger women and their corresponding blood types. The exact scare prank involved the target walking in as one young woman is being bled over a bathtub that an older client was bathing in. • The first episode of had hanging out in a pool of blood while. • In a later episode, when Spike thinks he's going to get his removed, he boasts about how he's going to kill Buffy and swim in her blood. ('I'm going to do the backstroke!'
) • The first episode of HBO's features Atia taking a nude shower in the blood cascading down from a slaughtered bull as part of a religious ritual in an unspecified Great Mother cult. The ritual was to provide spiritual protection for on a journey to meet in Gaul. Such a ritual actually existed but it was associated with Mithraism not Goddess cults and became popular well after Atia's time. • In episode 'Sanguinarium', Nurse Waite is discovered lying in wait for Dr. Lloyd at his house, submerged in a bathtub filled with blood. • has Santanico Pandemonium taking a bath in blood before she goes onstage. • On, Dandy Mott believes that bathing in people's blood will give him their power.
The first onscreen instance of this comes right after he, though the fact that he is covered in blood after killing Andy may suggest that he did this then, too. • In the episode 'Fresh Hell', Madame Kali takes a blood bath from a freshly murdered woman. • Metal band released the concept album Cruelty And The Beast about Countess Bathory. The album cover depicts her in a bathtub filled with blood. • The song 'Bathe In Blood' by metal band references both using blood to restore youth and the vanity that would entail. • The album cover for 's Karma depicts a woman in a nightgown waist-deep in a pool of blood.
The last three songs on the album, 'Elizabeth I, II, & III,' are about 's life. • The metal band not only shares its name with the, but has also written a number of songs about her that also hint at this practice - notably, 'Woman Of Dark Desires'. • took a Blood Bath in a photoshoot for Fool's Mate magazine and, in the past with, has written a song about Elizabeth Bathory entitled 'Rose of Pain'. • 's song 'Countess Bathory' from their album Black Metal is obviously about the and makes mention of this practice. • Poet Peter of Eboli alleged that Court of Norman member attempted to cure his gout by washing his feet in the blood of children. • According to Christian legend, when Roman Emperor Constantine I contracted leprosy, the pagan priests told him to bathe in the blood of babies as a cure. Refusing to do this, he allegedly sought counsel from Pope Sylvester I, who cured him.
This legend is the background for the Donation of Constantine, now shown to be a forgery, which purported to grant the entire Western Empire to the papacy. • In rabbinic tradition, the Pharaoh of Egypt from Exodus (the first one, not the one Moses famously confronts) is said to have contracted leprosy and treated it by bathing in the blood of Israelite babies, ordering one baby a day killed for this purpose. • The new supplement 'Immortals' has, who. Their blood bathing ritual is guaranteed to place any characters who partake in it at of the. • has a bloodline of vampires called the Galloi who bathe in blood to make themselves more beautiful.
They're not related to Bathory, though; they take their unique Discipline from the worship of Cybele, which often involved initiates being bathed in the blood of a bull to symbolize cleansing (and.). Additionally, both Macellarius and Noctoku tend to feast on blood in this manner; the Noctoku can absorb blood through their skin. • The predecessor,, had the Blood Bath as one of the sacred rites of the. It wasn't about youth, but more a ritual of baptism and consecration interpreted through the Sabbat's 'Crusades-era Catholicism on PCP' lens. • In the universe: • The Hag Queens of the Dark Elves practice this, bathing in a magical cauldron filled with blood to maintain their youth. As with so much in Warhammer, the evil blood magic of the cauldrons has been weaponised, and they are wheeled into battle atop grandiose carriages where they act as a focus for the bloodthirsty rites of the Death Hags in praise of the god Khaine - Lord of Murder. The magic of the cauldrons slowly becomes less effective over the centuries, such that the oldest and most powerful Hag Queen - Crone Hellebron - has to endure most of the year as a withered ancient for the few days of youth and vigour it now grants her.
• A shout-out to this trope occurs in a vampire context, thanks to the magical Blood Chalice of Bathori carried by the vampiress Isabella von Carstein. • Vampires in Fantasy can only heal their injuries by bathing in blood. • has the Everdawn Pool, a powerful magical artifact created by the Sorshen. The pool has many powers, but chief among them is the ability to transform the body of one who bathes in it after filling the pool with the blood of several thousand sacrificed sentient beings. The of Curse of the Crimson Throne, Queen Ileosa, intends to become an immortal being this way, slaughtering much of the population of Korvosa, including her own followers, in the process. • The female villain in is seen bathing in a pool of blood at one point and is even named 'Elizabet' as a. • An early boss who is the subject of an Act I quest in, dubbed 'The Countess', is described as having 'bathed in the rejuvenating blood of a hundred virgins' in the tome that initiates her quest.
• She can refer to this trope when you meet her, too. 'Here for a Blood Bath?' • An old magazine ad for featured some dude, presumably Caleb, in a bathtub full of blood with the tagline 'Blood? You're soaking in it.' • The user map has the Demon/Orc hybrid, who bathes in the blood of his slain victims to heal his wounds—including those that can otherwise prove fatal. • The final boss chamber in has a bath full of blood that can regenerate the main character's health and blood meters. Standing in the pool using Rayne's • sees the player travel through time to prevent Akuro from becoming perfect through bathing the vessel he wishes to possess in Orochi's blood.
• A whole row of them can be found in. A corpse is found in one, with another inmate 'washing' it with its own blood. It's not pretty. • The Sumerian demon Inanna in is encountered while taking a blood shower. As a skilled sanguimancer, she can use the blood to summon the Sumerian Puppet God. Some of the pools in the Roman baths are also filled with blood. (In case you were wondering, the other pools are filled with vomit and excrement.) • Variation in: the stage at the Bottom of the Pit has blood showers.
And yes, standing under them gets your character completely drenched in crimson. • DLC character Skarlet is a who gains strength from the blood of fallen warriors (which she consists of). Her fatalities, therefore, involve her enemy's blood spraying/showering over her.
Furthermore, her fatality tutorial informs us that Elizabeth Bathory is her favorite historical figure. • Vampire Sion does this in her Actress Again ending. • In, this trope is mentioned in one of the potential descriptions for the stench vampires in Dreadsylvania.
And mocked by the narrator pointing out that a bath-tub full of blood would quickly coagulate and rot. In this case, it explains the foul odor of the vampire. • A bathtub specifically made for this is available in, specifically in the 'Makin' Magic' expansion pack. • One possible haunting in has Mattel get locked in the bathroom while blood pours out of the plumbing, filling the tub and sink as the toilet overflows with red.
“Unclean, unclean!” Mina Harker screams, gathering her bloodied nightgown around her. In Chapter 21 of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” Mina’s friend John Seward, a psychiatrist in Purfleet, near London, tells how he and a colleague, warned that Mina might be in danger, broke into her bedroom one night and found her kneeling on the edge of her bed. Bending over her was a tall figure, dressed in black. “His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” Mina’s husband, Jonathan, hypnotized by the intruder, lay on the bed, unconscious, a few inches from the scene of his wife’s violation.
Later, between sobs, Mina relates what happened. She was in bed with Jonathan when a strange mist crept into the room. Soon, it congealed into the figure of a man—Count Dracula. “With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: ‘First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions...’ And oh, my God, my God, pity me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!” The Count took a long drink.
Then he drew back, and spoke sweet words to Mina. “Flesh of my flesh,” he called her, “my bountiful wine-press.” But now he wanted something else.
He wanted her in his power from then on. A person who has had his—or, more often, her—blood repeatedly sucked by a vampire turns into a vampire, too, but the conversion can be accomplished more quickly if the victim also sucks the vampire’s blood. And so, Mina says, “he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he...
Seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh, my God!” The unspeakable happened—she sucked his blood, at his breast—at which point her friends stormed into the room. Dracula vanished, and, Seward relates, Mina uttered “a scream so wild, so ear-piercing, so despairing... That it will ring in my ears to my dying day.” That scene, and Stoker’s whole novel, is still ringing in our ears. Stoker did not invent vampires.
If we define them, broadly, as the undead—spirits who rise, embodied, from their graves to torment the living—they have been part of human imagining since ancient times. Eventually, vampire superstition became concentrated in Eastern Europe. (It survives there today. In 2007, a Serbian named Miroslav Milosevic—no relation—drove a stake into the grave of Slobodan Milosevic.) It was presumably in Eastern Europe that people worked out what became the standard methods for eliminating a vampire: you drive a wooden stake through his heart, or cut off his head, or burn him—or, to be on the safe side, all three.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were outbreaks of vampire hysteria in Western Europe; numerous stakings were reported in Germany. By 1734, the word “vampire” had entered the English language. In those days, vampires were grotesque creatures. Often, they were pictured as bloated and purple-faced (from drinking blood); they had long talons and smelled terrible—a description probably based on the appearance of corpses whose tombs had been opened by worried villagers.
These early undead did not necessarily draw blood. Often, they just did regular mischief—stole firewood, scared horses.
(Sometimes, they helped with the housework.) Their origins, too, were often quaint. Matthew Beresford, in his recent book “From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth” (University of Chicago; $24.95), records a Serbian Gypsy belief that pumpkins, if kept for more than ten days, may cross over: “The gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like ‘brrl, brrl, brrl!’ and begin to shake themselves.” Then they become vampires.
This was not yet the suave, opera-cloaked fellow of our modern mythology. That figure emerged in the early nineteenth century, a child of the Romantic movement. In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, fleeing marital difficulties, was holed up in a villa on Lake Geneva. With him was his personal physician, John Polidori, and nearby, in another house, his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley; Shelley’s mistress, Mary Godwin; and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who was angling for Byron’s attention (with reason: she was pregnant by him).
The weather that summer was cold and rainy. The friends spent hours in Byron’s drawing room, talking. One night, they read one another ghost stories, which were very popular at the time, and Byron suggested that they all write ghost stories of their own.
Shelley and Clairmont produced nothing. Byron began a story and then laid it aside. But the remaining members of the summer party went to their desks and created the two most enduring figures of the modern horror genre. Mary Godwin, eighteen years old, began her novel “Frankenstein” (1818), and John Polidori, apparently following a sketch that Byron had written for his abandoned story, wrote “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819).
In Polidori’s narrative, the undead villain is a proud, handsome aristocrat, fatal to women. (Some say that Polidori based the character on Byron.) He’s interested only in virgins; he sucks their necks; they die; he lives.
The modern vampire was born. The public adored him.
In England and France, Polidori’s tale spawned popular plays, operas, and operettas. Vampire novels appeared, the most widely read being James Malcolm Rymer’s “Varney the Vampire,” serialized between 1845 and 1847. “Varney” was a penny dreadful, and faithful to the genre. (“Shriek followed shriek....
Her beautifully rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul.... He drags her head to the bed’s edge.”) After “Varney” came “Carmilla” (1872), by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish ghost-story writer. “Carmilla” was the mother of vampire bodice rippers. It also gave birth to the lesbian vampire story—in time, a plentiful subgenre. “Her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses,” the female narrator writes, “and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine.’ ” “Varney” and “Carmilla” were low-end hits, but vampires penetrated high literature as well. Baudelaire wrote a poem, and Théophile Gautier a prose poem, on the subject.
Then came Bram (Abraham) Stoker. Stoker was a civil servant who fell in love with theatre in his native Dublin.
In 1878, he moved to London to become the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, owned by his idol, the actor Henry Irving. On the side, Stoker wrote thrillers, one about a curse-wielding mummy, one about a giant homicidal worm, and so on. Several of these books are in print, but they probably wouldn’t be if it were not for the fame—and the afterlife—of Stoker’s fourth novel, “Dracula” (1897). The first English Dracula play, by Hamilton Deane, opened in 1924 and was a sensation. The American production (1927), with a script revised by John L. Balderston and with Bela Lugosi in the title role, was even more popular.
Ladies were carried, fainting, from the theatre. Meanwhile, the films had begun appearing: notably, F.
Murnau’s silent “Nosferatu” (1922), which many critics still consider the greatest of Dracula movies, and then Tod Browning’s “Dracula” (1931), the first vampire talkie, with Lugosi navigating among the spiderwebs and intoning the famous words “I do not drink... Wine.” (That line was not in the book.
It was written for Browning’s movie.) Lugosi stamped the image of Dracula forever, and it stamped him. Thereafter, this ambitious Hungarian actor had a hard time getting non-monstrous roles. He spent many years as a drug addict. He was buried in his Dracula cloak. From that point to the present, there have been more than a hundred and fifty Dracula movies.
Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola all made films about the Count. There are subgenres of Dracula movies: comedy, pornography, blaxploitation, anime.
There is also a “Deafula,” for the hearing-impaired: the characters conduct their business in American Sign Language while the lines are spoken in voice-over. After film, television, of course, took on vampires. “Dark Shadows,” in the nineteen-sixties, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” in the nineties, were both big hits. Meanwhile, the undead have had a long life in fiction.
Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles” and Stephen King’s “ ’Salem’s Lot” are the best-known recent examples, but one source estimates that the undead have been featured in a thousand novels. Today, enthusiasm for vampires seems to be at a new peak. Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” novels, for young adults (that is, teen-age girls), have sold forty-two million copies worldwide since 2005. The first of the film adaptations, released late last year, made a hundred and seventy-seven million dollars in its initial seven weeks. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels (“Dead Until Dark,” plus seven more), about a Louisiana barmaid’s passion for a handsome revenant named Bill, were bought by six million people, and generated the HBO series “True Blood,” which had its début last year and will be back in June. Also from last year was the haunting Swedish movie “Let the Right One In,” in which a twelve-year-old boy, Oskar, falls in love with a mysterious girl, Eli, who has moved in next door. She, too, is twelve, she tells Oskar, but she has been twelve for a long time.
A new Dracula novel, co-authored by the fragrantly named Dacre Stoker (a great-grandnephew of Bram), will be published in October by Dutton. The movie rights have already been sold. The past half century has also seen a rise in vampire scholarship. In the nineteen-fifties, Freudian critics, addressing Stoker’s novel, did what Freudians did at that time.
Today’s scholars, intent instead on politics—race, class, and gender—have feasted at the table. Representative essays, reprinted in a recent edition of “Dracula,” include Christopher Craft’s “ ‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ ” and Stephen D. The fullness of Wolf’s commentary did not discourage others. In 1979, a second annotated edition came out, and in 1998 a third. Last October, a fourth—“The New Annotated Dracula,” by Leslie Klinger, a Los Angeles tax and estate lawyer who has a sideline editing Victorian literature—was published by Norton ($39.95). What could Klinger have found to elucidate that his predecessors didn’t? What is all this about?
Why do publishers think that readers will care? One could say that “Dracula,” like certain other works—“Alice in Wonderland,” the Sherlock Holmes stories (both, like Klinger’s “Dracula,” published in Norton’s Annotated Editions series; Klinger was the editor of the Holmes)—is a cult favorite. But why does the book have a cult? Well, cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank. Fans feel that they have to root for them.
What, then, is the source of “Dracula” ’s power? A simple device, used in many notable works of art: the deployment of great and volatile forces within a very tight structure.
The narrative method of “Dracula” is to assemble a collage of purportedly authentic documents, most of them in the first person. Many of the materials are identified as excerpts from the diaries of the main characters. In addition, there are letters to and from these people—but also from lawyers, carting companies, and Hungarian nuns—plus telegrams, “newspaper” clippings, and a ship’s log. This multiplicity of voices gives the book a wonderful liveliness. A long horror story could easily become suffocating. (That is one of the reasons that Poe’s tales are tales, not novels.) “Dracula,” in a regular, unannotated edition, runs about four hundred pages, but it is seldom tedious. It opens with four chapters from the diary of Jonathan Harker describing his visit, on legal business—he is a solicitor—to the castle of a certain Count Dracula, in Transylvania, and ending with Harker howling in horror over what he found there.
Then we turn the page, and suddenly we are in England, reading a letter from Mina—at that point, Harker’s fiancée—bubbling to her friend Lucy Westenra about how she’s learning shorthand so that she can be useful to Jonathan in his work. This is a salutary jolt, and also witty. (Little does Mina know how Jonathan’s work is going at that juncture.) The alternation of voices also lends texture.
It’s as if we were turning an interesting object around in our hands, looking at it from this angle, then that. And since the story is reported by so many different witnesses, we are more likely to believe it. In addition, we are given the pleasure of assembling the pieces of a puzzle. No one narrator knows all that the others have told us, and this allows us to read between the lines. One evening, as Mina is returning to a house she is sharing with Lucy in Whitby, a seaside resort in Yorkshire, she sees her friend at the window, and by her side, on the sill, “something that looked like a good-sized bird.” How strange! It’s not strange to us. By then we know that the “bird” is a bat—one of the Count’s preferred incarnations.
(Dracula will destroy Lucy before turning to Mina.) Such counterpoint, of course, increases the suspense. When are these people going to figure out what is going on? Finally, most of the narration is not just first person but on-the-moment, and therefore unglazed by memory. “We are to be married in an hour,” Mina writes to Lucy as she sits by Jonathan’s bed in a Budapest hospital.
(That’s where he landed, with a brain fever, after escaping from Castle Dracula.) He’s sleeping now, Mina says. She’ll write while she can. “Jonathan is waking!” She must break off. This minute-by-minute recording, as Samuel Richardson, its pioneer (in “Pamela”), discovered a century and a half earlier, lends urgency—you are there!—and, again, it seems a warrant of truth.
But the narrative method is not the only thing that provides a tight receptacle for the story. Most of this tale of the irrational is filtered through minds wedded to rationalism. “Dracula” has what Noël Carroll, in “The Philosophy of Horror” (1990), called a “complex discovery plot”—that is, a plot that involves not just the discovery of an evil force let loose in the world but the job of convincing skeptics (which takes a lot of time, allowing the monster to compound his crimes) that such a thing is happening.
No people, we are told, were more confident than the citizens of Victorian England. The sun never set on their empire. They were also masters of science and technology. “Dracula” is full of exciting modern machinery—the telegraph, the typewriter, the “Kodak”—and the novel has an obsession with railway trains, probably the nineteenth century’s most crucial invention. The new world held no terrors for these people.
Nevertheless, they were bewildered by it, because of its challenge to religious faith, and to the emotions religion had taught: sweetness, comfort, reverence, resignation. That crisis is recorded in work after work of late-nineteenth-century fiction, but never more forcibly than in “Dracula.” In the opening pages of the novel, Harker, on his way to Castle Dracula, has arrived in Romania. He complains of the lateness of the trains. He describes a strange dish, paprika hendl, that he was given for dinner in a restaurant. But he is English; he can handle these things. He does not yet know that the man he is going to visit has little concern for timetables—the Count has lived for hundreds of years—and dines on something more peculiar than paprika hendl.
Even when the evidence is in front of Harker’s face, he cannot credit it. The coachman driving him to Castle Dracula (it is the Count, in disguise) is of a curious appearance.
He has pointed teeth and flaming red eyes. This makes Harker, in his words, feel “a little strangely.” Days pass, however, before he forms a stronger opinion.
The other characters are equally slow to get the point. When Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the venerable Dutch physician who becomes the head of the vampire-hunting posse, suggests to his colleague John Seward that there may be a vampire operating in their midst, Seward thinks Van Helsing must be going mad. “Surely,” he protests, “there must be some rational explanation of all these mysterious things.” Van Helsing counters that not every phenomenon has a rational explanation: “Do you not think that there are things in the world which you cannot understand, and yet which are?” Throughout the novel, these self-assured people have to be convinced, with enormous difficulty, that there is something beyond their ken. According to Nina Auerbach, in “Our Vampires, Ourselves” (1995), Dracula’s crimes are merely symbols of the real-life sociopolitical horrors facing the late Victorians. One was immigration. At the end of the century, Eastern European Jews, in flight from the pogroms, were pouring into Western Europe, thereby threatening to dilute the pure blood of the English, among others. Dracula, too, is an émigré from the East.
Stoker spends a lot of words on the subject of blood, and not just when Dracula extracts it. Fully four of the book’s five vampire-hunters have their blood transfused into Lucy’s veins, and this process is recorded with grisly exactitude.
(We see the incisions, the hypodermics.) So Stoker may in fact have been thinking of the racial threat. Like other novels of the period, “Dracula” contains invidious remarks about Jews. They have big noses, they like money—the usual. At that time, furthermore, people in England were forced, by the scandal of the Oscar Wilde trials (1895), to think about something they hadn’t worried about before: homosexuality. Many scholars have found suggestions of homoeroticism in “Dracula.” Auerbach, by contrast, finds the book annoyingly heterosexual. Earlier vampire tales, such as Polidori’s story and “Carmilla,” made room for the mutability of erotic experience.
In those works, sex didn’t have to be man to woman. And it didn’t have to be outright sex—it might just be fervent friendship. As Auerbach sees it, Stoker, spooked by the Wilde case, backed off from this rich ambiguity, thereby impoverishing vampire literature. After him, she says, vampire art became reactionary. This echoes Stephen King’s statement that all horror fiction, by pitting an absolute good against an absolute evil, is “as Republican as a banker in a three-piece suit.” According to some critics, another thing troubling Stoker was the New Woman, that turn-of-the-century avatar of the feminist. Again, there is support for this.
The New Woman is referred to dismissively in the book, and the God-ordained difference between the sexes—basically, that women are weak but good, and men are strong but less good—is reiterated with maddening persistence. On the other hand, Mina, the novel’s heroine, and a woman of unquestioned virtue, looks, at times, like a feminist. She works for a living, as a schoolmistress, before her marriage, and the new technology, which should have been daunting to a female, holds no mysteries for her. She’s a whiz as a typist—a standard New Woman profession.
Also, she is wise and reasonable—male virtues. Nevertheless, her primary characteristic is a female trait: compassion. (At one point, she even pities Dracula.) Stoker, it seems, had mixed feelings about the New Woman. Whether or not politics was operating in Stoker’s novel, it is certainly at work in our contemporary vampire literature. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series openly treats vampires as a persecuted minority.
Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream. Sookie’s Bill has sworn off human blood, or he’s trying; he subsists on a Japanese synthetic. He registers to vote (absentee, because he cannot get around in daylight).
He wears pressed chinos. This is funny but also touching. In “The Vampire Chronicles,” Anne Rice also seems to regard her undead as an oppressed group. Their suffering is probably, at some level, a story about AIDS.
All this is a little confusing morally. How can we have sympathy for the Devil and still regard him as the Devil? That question seems to have occurred to Stephenie Meyer, who is a Mormon. Edward, the featured vampire of Meyer’s “Twilight,” is a dashing fellow, and Bella, the heroine, becomes his girlfriend, but they do not go to bed together (because of the conversion risk). Neither should you, Meyer seems to be saying to her teen-age readers.
They are compensated by the romantic fever that the sexual postponement generates. The book fairly heaves with desire. But in Stoker’s time no excitement needed to be added. Sex outside marriage was still taboo, and dangerous. It could destroy a woman’s life—a man’s, too. (Syphilis was a major killer at that time. One of Stoker’s biographers claimed that the writer died of it.) In such a context, we do not need to look for political meaning in Dracula’s transactions with women.
The meaning is forbidden sex—its menace and its allure. The baring of the woman’s flesh, her leaning back, the penetration: reading of these matters, does one think about immigration? The novel is sometimes close to pornographic. Consider the scene in which Harker, lying supine in a dark room in Dracula’s castle, is approached by the Count’s “brides.” Describing the one he likes best, Harker says that he could “see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips,” and hear “the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth.” It should happen to us!
Harker is not the only one who does not object to a vampire overture. In Chapter 8, Lucy describes to Mina her memory of how, on a recent night, she met a tall, mysterious man in the shadow of the ruined abbey that looms over Whitby.
(This was her first encounter with Dracula.) She speaks of her experience frankly, without shame, because she thinks it was a dream. She ran through the streets to the appointed spot, she says: “Then I have a vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes... And something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men... Then there was a sort of agonizing feeling, as if I were in an earthquake.” This is thrilling: her rushing to the rendezvous, her sense of something both sweet and bitter, then the “earthquake.” But Lucy is a flighty girl. The crucial testimony is that of Mina, after Dracula’s attack on her. “I did not want to hinder him,” this honest woman says. Her statement is echoed by the unsettling notes of tenderness in Seward’s description of the event: the kitten at the saucer of milk; Mina’s resemblance, with her face at Dracula’s breast, to a nursing baby.
The mind reels. “Dracula” is full of faults. It is way overfull. Many scenes are superfluous. The novel is replete with sentimentality, and with oratory.
Van Helsing cannot stop making soul-stirring speeches to his fellow vampire-hunters. “Do we not see our duty?” he asks. “We must go on,” he urges them.
“From no danger shall we shrink.” His listeners grasp one another’s hands and kneel and swear oaths and weep and flush and pale. To these tiresome characteristics of Victorian fiction, Stoker adds problems all his own. The on-the-spot narration forces him, at times, into ridiculous situations. In Chapter 11, Lucy has a hard night. First, a wolf crashes through her bedroom window, splattering glass all over. This awakens her mother, who is in bed with her.
Westenra sits up, sees the wolf, and drops dead from shock. Then, to make matters worse, Dracula comes in and sucks Lucy’s neck. What does she do when that’s over with? Call the police? She pulls out her diary, and, sitting on her bed next to the rapidly cooling body of her mother, she records the episode, because Stoker needs to tell the reader about it. None of this, however, outweighs the strengths of the novel, above all, its psychological acuity.
The last quarter of the book, where the vampire-hunters, after the attack on Mina, go after Dracula in earnest, is very subtle, because at that point Mina’s dealings with the fiend have rendered her half vampire. At times, she is coöperating with her rescuers. At other times, she is colluding with Dracula. She is a double agent. Her friends know this; she knows it, too, and knows that they know; they know that she knows that they know. This is complicated, and not always tidily worked out, but we cannot help but be impressed by Stoker’s representation of the amoral contrivances of love, or of desire.
In this bold clarity, “Dracula” is like the work of other nineteenth-century writers. You can complain that their novels were loose, baggy monsters, that their poems were crazy and unfinished. Still, you gasp at what they’re saying: the truth.
Each of the annotated editions of “Dracula” has had its claim to attention. Leonard Wolf’s “The Annotated Dracula,” with six hundred notes, was the first, and it also did the job—which somebody had to do eventually—of picking through the psychoneurotic aspects of the novel. The next version, “The Essential Dracula,” edited by Raymond T.
McNally and Radu Florescu, had its own originality. These two history professors from Boston College had unearthed Stoker’s working notes for the novel. They drew no important conclusions from that source, but never mind. They had a sexy new theory: that Stoker based the character of Dracula on a historical personage, Vlad Dracula—also known as Vlad Tepes—a fifteenth-century Walachian prince who, in defending his homeland against the Turks, acquired a reputation for cruelty unusual even among warriors of that period. Tepes means “the Impaler.” Vlad’s preferred method of dealing with enemies was to skewer them, together with their women and children, on wooden stakes. A fifteenth-century woodcut shows him dining at a table set up outdoors so that he could watch his prisoners wriggle to their deaths. McNally and Florescu’s theory gave journalists a lot of exciting things to write about, and their articles were featured: if it bleeds, it leads.
As a result, “The Essential Dracula” was very popular. (To add to the fun, Florescu claimed that he was an indirect descendant of Vlad.) The Vlad hypothesis has since been discredited. As scholars have figured out, Stoker, while working on “Dracula,” read, or read in, a book that discussed Vlad, whereupon he changed his villain’s name from Count Wampyr to Count Dracula, and moved him from Austria to Transylvania, which borders on Walachia. He picked up other details, too, but not many.
This has not put later writers off Vlad’s story. Matthew Beresford, in “From Demons to Dracula,” acknowledges that Stoker’s character “was not modeled, to any great extent, on Vlad Dracula.” Yet he offers a whole chapter on the Walachian prince, including a long description of impalement methods, complete with illustrations. After reading this, you could impale someone yourself. In 1998 came “Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed,” by Clive Leatherdale, a Stoker scholar. This book did not get much attention, but it holds the record for annotation: thirty-five hundred notes, totalling a hundred and ten thousand words. Leatherdale’s edition was also remarkable for its practice—common among fans, if not editors, of cult books—of treating the novel as if it were fact rather than fiction. When Harker, invading the cellar of Castle Dracula, finds the Count sleeping in his dirt-filled coffin, Leatherdale’s note asks, “Is he lying on damp earth in his everyday clothes, or in his night-clothes, with no sheeting to prevent earth-stains?” This is a creature who has lived for centuries, and can fly, and raise storms at sea, and Leatherdale is worried about whether he’s going to get his clothes dirty?
The practice of “Dracula” annotation is both quite serious (Leatherdale, like the others, did a lot of work) and also, unashamedly, an amusement. It is an exercise in showing off—a demonstration of the editor’s erudition, energy, interests—and a confession of love for the text. Leslie Klinger, in his new annotated edition, claims that he has fresh material to go on. He has examined Stoker’s typescript, which is owned by a “private collector.” This source, he says, has yielded “startling results.” In fact, like McNally and Florescu with Stoker’s working notes, Klinger draws no important conclusions from his archival discovery, and he admits that he spent only two days studying the typescript.
As with the McNally-Florescu version, however, the real sales angle of this edition is not a new source but a new theory. Klinger not only assumes, like Leatherdale, that all the events narrated in the novel are factual; he offers a hypothesis as to how Stoker came to publish them.
Harker, a real person (with a changed name), like everyone else in the book, gave his diary, together with the other documents that constitute the novel, to Bram Stoker so that Stoker might alert the English public that a vampire named Dracula, also real, was in their midst. Stoker agreed to issue the warning. But then Dracula got wind of this plan, whereupon he contacted Stoker and used on him the methods of persuasion famously at his disposal. Dracula decided that it was too late to suppress the Harker documents entirely, so instead he forced Stoker to distort them. He sat at the desk with Stoker and co-authored the novel, changing the facts in such a way as to convince the public that Dracula had been eliminated. That way, the Count could go on, unmolested, with his project of taking over the world. Many of Klinger’s fifteen hundred notes are devoted to revealing this plot.
When Stoker makes a continuity error, or fails to supply verifiable information, this is part of the coverup. The book says that Dracula’s London house is at 347 Piccadilly, but in the eighteen-nineties the only houses on that stretch of Piccadilly that would have answered Stoker’s description were at 138 and 139. Clearly, Klinger says, Stoker is protecting the Count. Then, there’s a problem about the hotel where Van Helsing is staying.
In Chapter 9 it’s the Great Eastern; in Chapter 11 it’s the Berkeley. Again, Klinger concludes, Stoker is covering his characters’ traces. He altered the name of the hotel—presumably, he had to prevent readers from running over to the place and checking the register—but then he forgot and changed the name again. At first, you think that maybe Klinger’s book is not actually an annotated edition of “Dracula” but, rather, like Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” a novel about a paranoid, in the form of an annotated edition. But no: Klinger, in his introduction, lays out his conspiracy theory without qualification. So are we to understand that he himself is a maniac, whose delusions the editors at Norton thought it might be interesting to publish?
Preceding Klinger’s introduction there is a little note, titled “Editor’s Preface”—exactly the kind of thing that readers would skip—in which he tells us that his great hypothesis is a “gentle fiction.” (He used a similar contrivance, he says, in his Sherlock Holmes edition.) Recently, in a book-tour appearance at the New York Public Library, Klinger again admitted that his theory was a game. “If you like that sort of thing, there’s a lot of that in there,” he said.
That’s too bad, first, because it means that a serious novel has been taken as a species of camp, and, second, because it discredits Klinger’s non-joke, scholarly footnotes, of which there are many, and carefully researched. Even after the other annotated editions, this volume gives us useful information. Maybe we didn’t need to be told what Dover is, or the Bosporus, but when Klinger writes about the rise of the New Woman, or about the popularity of spiritualism in the late nineteenth century, this gives us knowledge that Victorian readers would have brought to the novel, and which could help us. It won’t, though, because readers, having had their chain pulled by the conspiracy theory, will disregard those notes, if, improbably, they have bought the book. Every generation, it seems, gets the annotated “Dracula” that it deserves. This is the postmodern version: playful, “performative,” with a smiling disdain for any claim of truth.
It found the perfect author. A tax attorney would know about gentle fictions. Why is the curtain blowing so strangely? There is a man in my study, with a briefcase—he claims he is a lawyer, from Los Angeles—and, by his side, another, taller figure, in black, with pointy teeth.
They say they want to help me revise my article. I must break off!
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