My first encounter with The Count was at the tender age of 14. That wonderful age when you are just beginning to understand, and believe in, true romance. Your dreams of the perfect, fairytale ending have not yet been shattered, along with your heart. You still feel that heart quickening at the thought of being swept away by your Prince Charming on his white stallion. Or in my case by The Count, sweeping into my room and carrying me off on the wings of a bat. I was introduced to The Count by my grandfather, who had been telling me of a book he’d read as a young man called, as you have already guessed, “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. My grandfather’s telling of the story so fascinated me that the very next week, on the weekly library trip with my grandmother, I scoured the library for the book. Needless to say, it wasn’t to be found in the children’s library. Back then the most exciting children’s books were the Famous Five and Swallows And Amazons, all of which I had read years before. In the end my grandmother relented and borrowed the book from the adult library for me. As a side note, this is one of the many little things my grandmother did which made her a very special person in my book. In those days my sister and I used to spend the weekends with our grandmother whilst our parents and grandfather were busy converting a house near the coast. So, on the Friday evening, before they left, I eagerly showed my grandfather my reading material for the weekend. His response was that it was a good choice but admonished me not to read it at night. Which, of course, I did. I was immediately swept up in the tale; the adventure, the romance, the fear; I was so enthralled that I read into the early hours, reluctantly closing the book when my grandmother came in and told me to turn the light off. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with The Count. One memorable highlight of that year was a holiday we took with some friends. And where was this wonderful holiday destination which set my nerves tingling? Whitby, with it’s gothic Abbey and the bench by the seaman’s grave where Dracula first seduced Lucy. And Whitby has been part of my life ever since. In fact, five years later I was to spend my honeymoon in an old Dormobile on the Abbey car park, but that’s another story.
By far the best version of Count Dracula is the one I have carried in my imagination for the last 49 years. He is the yardstick by which all other incarnations are measured. I have avidly followed his progress from book to screen. I became addicted to horror films early for a child in those days. I would be allowed to stay up late, after my parents had gone to bed, for the Saturday night Hammer House Of Horror double bill. So the first screen Count Dracula I saw was, inevitably, Christopher Lee, tall, aquiline and with a taste for a buxom wench. I fell in love all over again. Then I grew up, got married, had children and busied myself in the daily life of my family. The Count was put back in his box and stored away in some dark recess of my mind.
In those early days, when TVs had knobs and buttons and we only had three channels, access to any movies was limited to what those channels decided to show or a trip to the cinema. With a young family, horror films were not at the top of my list. I did however re-read the novel, several times.
Then, in 1992, my passion for The Count was rekindled. I was in the middle of my nurse training, living away from home in Grantham, when I went to the cinema with a friend, another nursing student with the same warped sense of humour I have. The film was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This film was lavish, with THE most sexually attractive Count, gloriously brought to life by Gary Oldman. That scene on Mina’s bed stirred up and made sense of all those unformed feelings of a 14 year old girl on her very first reading of the book. This is a film I never tire of watching and is a staple of my movie collection. Dracula was well and truly back out of his box.
As an addict of this particular genre, and anything gothic, I have also widened my view. On reading Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and being somewhat a fan of Lord Byron, I did a little background reading and discovered John Polidori, subsequently hunting out and reading his book “The Vampyre”. Film-wise we were now into the era of satellite and cable TV, every household now had a video player and video lending libraries were springing up in every town so more and more films were becoming available. The horror film genre was one of the most popular, allowing us to watch all those films our younger selves had missed due to their X rating. I visually gobbled them up. The advent of the DVD in the mid 1990s and the development of the technology to restore old films made it easy to make more discoveries, notably the 1931 “Dracula” starring Bela Lugosi and the almost lost F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu, another favourite in my collection. Although based on the Bram Stoker novel, which caused a few legal problems, in this version The Count is neither romantic nor sensual but far more sinister, made more so by the black and white 35mm format and that scene of Nosferatu’s shadow as he climbs the stairs in what must be one of the first uses of a staircase to build tension in a film.
Over the last couple of decades my love for The Count has never waned, however, my liking for all things vampire has. From Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which introduced us to the teen vampire genre, to Vampire Diaries, Shadow Hunters and a whole host of very similar series and films, the myth has become watered down. Vampires walk in daylight, go to school, college and university. They grow up and have jobs, mortgages, families and behave like ordinary people and hey, we can even make a few social comments about the vampires trying to fit in. Having never read the teen novels some of these series are based on I can’t comment as to whether these social lessons come from said novels. It’s as if the writers said “Hey, we’ve got a script about kids in a boarding school but to make it more interesting let’s make them vampires”. Oh, hang on, didn’t someone do that with wizards and witches a few years back? Or “let’s have a bunch of super-wealthy, corporate vampires ruling a business dynasty, only it’s not wine they’re drinking”. It’s a bit like watching Grange Hill or Dallas with a set of fangs thrown in for good measure. What I do feel is that they have lost all the gothic romance and adventure which, for me, made Dracula so popular both in print and on film.
Which brings us neatly to the latest dire adaptation of the novel, courtesy of the BBC. They did try to give it a gothic look, shooting the majority of scenes in semi darkness, I’ll give them that, but they seriously lost the plot as the series unfolded.