New take on Dracula
The story of the world's most famous vampire has been told and retold since Bram Stoker's novel came out in 1897. James Mottram sinks his teeth into a tale with a twist
Some claim it's the second bestselling book behind the Bible. So perhaps it's no wonder Bram Stoker's Dracula keeps rising from the dead.
A gothic horror story that has captured imaginations since it was first published in 1897, the shadowy Transylvanian vampire has seeped into popular culture, infiltrating everything from radio plays and video games to comics and Japanese anime. But it's on film that Count Dracula has really come alive, making him the grandfather of all celluloid monsters.
"You could do a thousand stories with him," says Matt Sazama, co-writer of Dracula Untold, the latest film to immortalise the world's most famous immortal.
Well, we're going back 400 years before that. We're dealing with the man, the human behind the literary figure
Filmmakers have toyed with the character for almost as long as cinema has been in existence. And given how popular he is, it seems ironic that when F.W. Murnau made his 1922 classic Nosferatu, starring the brilliant Max Schreck as the Dracula-like Count Orlok, Stoker's widow, Florence, sued for copyright infringement and won.
Two years later, however, she granted permission for an official adaptation, with Hamilton Deane penning a play that would form the basis for Tod Browning's 1931 film Dracula, starring a memorable Bela Lugosi, who had originated the role on Broadway.
Lugosi only played the character one more time, in the 1948 horror comedy Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein. By then Universal, the Hollywood studio behind Browning's Dracula, had followed it with cheap spin-offs such as Dracula's Daughter (1936) and Son of Dracula (1943), the latter starring another horror icon, Lon Chaney Jnr. But it wasn't until 1958, when British company Hammer Films made Dracula (renamed Horror of Dracula in the US) starring Christopher Lee as the Count, that the character again became popular.
Since then, he's been taken to extremes - to America's Old West, for example, with John Carradine starring as the bloodsucking count, in 1966's Billy the Kid versus Dracula. Six years later, his legend inspired the hit blaxploitation film Blacula, in which an 18th-century African prince is bitten by the Count and sealed in a coffin - only to be released in Los Angeles 200 years later. And then there was Blood for Dracula - made in 1974 and starring Udo Kier as the Count, on the hunt for virgin blood.
But what makes the aristocratic vampire so popular? "There's a complexity there," says Gary Shore, the Irish-born director of Dracula Untold. "There's a duality in the character. It's the story of an anti-hero. There's the attraction to the suave, debonair prince on the outside and the hideous monster on the inside. That duality is interesting to people. It's an archetypal story and these kinds of stories get passed on from generation to generation. I'm sure it will be just as popular in 200 years as it is now."