How Dracula continues to slake our thirst for terror
Although scholarly interpretations of Dracula see the novel as a fearful embodiment of some pressing threat in the Victorian consciousness, in some ways—be it sexual, economic, colonial, or gendered—Count Dracula represents danger for contemporary readers. Nearly 130 years since Dracula was first published, the count and his many iterations continue to sink their teeth into the popular imagination.
Nina Auerbach’s seminal work, Our Vampires, Ourselves, puts forth the idea that the vampire’s cultural longevity is owed to their malleability; new stories which address the concerns of the times and continue the feeling of freshness. As she puts it, “[vampires] matter because when properly understood, they make us see that our lives are implicated in theirs and our times are inescapable.”
Vampires morph to fit current sensibilities, and each generation’s fears are materialized in vampires to create stories that manifest those emotions. Dracula, perhaps the most analyzed vampire story, is argued to represent a myriad of topics. The count embodied fears about the people of Eastern colonies migrating to a Victorian England terrified of foreign invasion. His wives and the women of the novel represented dangerous eroticism and gender inversion, while Dracula’s mannerisms represented capitalism rising against British hegemony. He terrified Victorian readers, as his incursion represented dangers in their real lives.
Yet modern stories are scarcely separate from these Victorian contexts. Hammer Studios’ Dracula cemented a vampire’s vulnerability to sunlight, an idea that emerged in 1922’s /Nosferatu/, embracing the pulpy horror of the 1960s. The 1970s depicted the elderly as monsters and left the youth as the only people ready to fight back. Disillusionment left the 2000s thirsty for a moral mask on their monsters, spawning the Twilight franchise.
Older works do not always fall out of favour when cultural tastes shift; the most powerful continue to have a strong foothold in the popular imagination. Vampires are uniquely talented at remaining relevant because the themes and questions that their works frequently examine are alive and unanswered today. As queerness, the pursuit of immortality, othering, and monstrosity still plague our imaginations, the monsters who inherently exist within these ephemeral questions are equally as horrific and arousing as they’ve ever been (depending on who is telling the story).
Even today, vampires occupy nearly every corner of modern media. The Castlevania anime places them firmly in the action-adventure genre, while The Blood of Dawnwalker makes them the center of a Gothic video game. Sinners used vampirism to explore questions around culture, Blackness, and appropriation, while Nosferatu twisted terror with eroticism. Even Dracula can now be a silly cereal mascot or a Halloween costume for young children. With such range, the vampire’s malleability in content, theming and identity allows them both to fit the current times and remain relevant across generations, satiating the thirst of all who yearn for a brush with the undead.