For all you're bitching about Dracula being misinterpreted, there's a huge piece of Dracula that you're ignoring and that is something that isn't uniquely Dracula either, but is integral to the vampire in literature.
There's a REASON Dracula (and Carmilla) are portrayed with sexual overtones, and it is disingenuous to pretend that vampires are sexless metaphors for capitalism or aristocracy. That is a very modern view that completely ignores the fact that Dracula was modelled after Oscar Wilde, and written during the infamous libel trial that destroyed his life and brought homosexuality into wider public awareness at the same time.
Bram Stoker was a closeted gay man who admired Wilde and then had to watch him go through all of that. While writing this book.
This is why you need context of when a book was written and what was going on in the author's world at the time, and who the author was.
Otherwise you get people INSISTING that Dracula was purposely written as a metaphor for something that just so HAPPENS to be relevant right this second, and INSISTING that Dracula the character is "not supposed to be sexy, why do [all you FREAKS, is the implication] think he's sexy, ew!".
You cannot divorce Dracula from its portrayal of the homosexual as a corrupting influence on Good Normal People. To ignore this is revisionist.
The film Dracula was directed by Tod Browning, who also directed Freaks (the latter of which cast many of Browning's former friends from the circus as characters). Tod Browning was a former circus performer who constantly made films about the fringes of society, because that's where he was from, and about humanising those individuals. People were very aware that Dracula was a sexual metaphor--not just for queerness as a contagion but also the immigrant as an outsider. Dracula was made pre-Code, meaning there was allowed to be much more of an ambiguous portrayal of Dracula both as corrupting and sinister monster AND as sympathetic and tragic outsider. If you bother to ever watch the 1931 film, you will notice there is a great deal of accuracy to the book.
Frankenstein was directed by James Whale, a gay man who was actually pretty openly gay during a time when that was very dangerous. It's also a pre-Code film, meaning it's allowed to portray Adam as sympathetic. This film too is fairly accurate to the book, other than making the monster non-verbal and pretty much portraying him in his very early stages. Whale, being gay, empathised with the monster, and portrayed him as tragic and misunderstood--something he knew very well, as a gay man from that era. It's a well-known analysis that the film has queer undertones, and was very controversial at the time because it portrayed the monster as sympathetic, as the hero of the tragic tale, a victim of the greater world refusing to understand him.
The 1931 film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was by no means the first film adaptation, but it is one of the earliest that still survives and (I believe) the first with sound. I have seen it. It is accurate to the book in a degree that has not been possible since the Hays Code went into effect. It preserves the fear of the effects drugs can have on a person, which is actually one of the undertones of the book as well as the commentary on Victorian social organization, particularly the way the upper classes could quite literally get away with murder so long as they were murdering the "criminal classes"--people in abject poverty, and particularly sex workers. The book Jekyll and Hyde is not about "you have to walk in balance with yourself, repression is bad"; that interpretation is based on modern psychological ideas. Repression was seen as a good thing in Victorian society, and in particular Jekyll and Hyde hammers it home that it is a good thing to repress your evil urges, and that drugs will make you spiral out of control immediately and that "indulging" your evil will make it stronger. So it's not just a modern interpretation, it's completely and totally not understanding the book at all.
The truth is that producers did not meddle much in the filmmaking of yesteryear, and they certainly were not the ones writing the script or directing the film, so the idea that Dracula was somehow an avatar they particularly projected on is absolutely just made up nonsense that has no evidence historically. It was beneath them. As long as the movie was making money, that was all that mattered. To that end, horror was incredibly lucrative. And every single adaptation of all three books since the films I mentioned above has actually been adapting that film more than it has been adapting the book. And then subsequent films are influenced by the films that came before. They are not in direct conversation with the books, they are in direct conversation with each other, with society at the time, with filmmaking at the time. You cannot take them out of that context.
To not address the queer undertones of Frankenstein and Dracula and the books they were adapted from is ignorant. To not address the social commentary and fears of drug-use in Jekyll and Hyde is equally ignorant. To not address the fears of grave-robbing and science without ethics in Frankenstein is ignorant.
The interpretations in OP are suspiciously Puritanical in their sterility and a little too relevant to present-day social fears. This speaks to the longevity of the stories, but to insist that those are the ONLY correct interpretations, that somehow someone in the 19th century was commenting on issues in the 21st, is ridiculous and bull-headed. To in particular keep hammering that to see sexuality and sensuality in these stories is Wrong and Bad is not just foolish, it erases that these stories are part of a very real body of evidence telling us what people feared in that time, in that place, and--in the case of Dracula in particular--are part of the history of a marginalised group of people that regularly has their presence in history erased. And you're being part of that erasure in so doing. Maybe don't.
TL;DR: You're wrong and you're being a little homophobic about it tbh. People have always wanted to fuck monsters and frankly it does not matter how uncomfortable that makes you, that doesn't mean those people are "interpreting the story wrong". In fact, they're interpreting it more correctly than you are.
blakekathryn
prguitarman
