#universal dracula

[teatime-tangents-and-toys]

My review of the Monster High x Universal Monsters Dracula doll is up! Is it heresy to suggest this is a better adaptation of Dracula than the Skullector doll before her? Read the review here!

[coulsons-fullmetal-cellist]

Look at these!

[gengar-pixel-2]

The hear me out cake I did with my friends @xxgalacticambitionsxx and @kittieshauntedourfantasy. I think you can tell who I added. I'll still put it in tags, so you know!

[rallamajoop]

Hi! I was reading up your meta and I saw you mention you'll talk about "did Dracula feed on Jonathan?" but I can't find it! Has it been posted? Thank you!

Ah, yeah ‒ I did promise that back in my How Gay was Bram Stoker? post, but you can file that one under the general category of "stuff I totally meant to write, but then never got around to." But what the hell: let's do this!

Ahem.

Did Dracula ever feed on Jonathan?

The short answer, based on what Jonathan overhears Dracula saying to his wives in a short passage everyone following Dracula Daily would have read on June 29, is: yes, and perhaps even, well, obviously?

"Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have patience! To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!" There was a low, sweet ripple of laughter, and in a rage I threw open the door, and saw without the three terrible women licking their lips. As I appeared they all joined in a horrible laugh, and ran away. [emphasis mine]

In other words: the brides get to feed on Jonathan tomorrow. It’s Dracula’s turn tonight. If the dialogue doesn’t make this clear enough, the ‘three terrible women licking their lips’ is pretty unambiguous. And we know Dracula did feed that night, because the morning after, Jonathan finds him asleep in his coffin, looking suddenly much younger, with blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. Jonathan never puts together that it was himself Dracula fed on (or at least never mentions it in his diary) – but then, Lucy and Mina never had any idea they’d been fed on either. So the implications remain technically subtext, but there for anyone paying attention.

Except there’s another version of that paragraph quoted above. The Dracula Daily text is evidently drawing from the American version of Dracula, published in 1899 (and pictured above). The original UK publication came out two years previously, and there, Dracula’s speech is oh-so-significantly different.  

"Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have patience! To-morrow night, to-morrow night is yours!" [emphasis again mine]

‘To-night is mine!’ never appeared in Dracula’s original publication, and any subtext that Dracula may have fed on Jonathan is that much subtler without it. Stranger still, this seems to be the only notable difference between the two versions of Dracula: Stoker certainly hasn’t made significant rewrites, nor is there any other evidence some US editor had it sloppily transcribed. So was this change Stoker’s? Was it a deliberate change at all, or just an accident of editing?

Now, I want ‘To-night is mine!’ to be the definitive version – not just because I’m always here for slashy vampire shenanigans, but because it makes so much more sense. Why force the brides to wait for tomorrow, if not so Dracula could have first dibs? For which matter, why keep Jonathan alive and (physically) unharmed in the castle for so long at all, if not as Dracula’s convenient, pre-journey snack? It even ties right back to Jonathan’s first encounter with the brides, and Dracula’s iconic line, This man belongs to me!

It’s admittedly a little questionable that Jonathan himself never acknowledges such definitive evidence Dracula has fed on him (in either version) – but then, panic and denial can do a number on the faculties of a man far faster on the uptake than our dear Jonathan. ‘Tonight is mine, tomorrow is yours!’ doesn’t just read better, it all adds up.

Before I get too bogged down in conspiracy-theories though, I’d like to share one suspiciously similar bit of trivia from the first (authorised) Dracula film adaptation, the Universal picture from 1932. Here, it’s nominally Renfield rather than Jonathan who goes to the castle, and the ‘brides’ have only two scenes and no dialogue, but the climax of the castle section still plays some familiar notes. Drugged at dinner, our Jonathan/Renfield amalgam collapses, and we watch the brides advance on him with clear intent – only for Dracula to sweep in, turn them aside, and lean down over our hapless hero himself.

But this wasn’t supposed to be the version that made it to screen. Supposedly, studio execs had insisted that it would be the women who fall upon their victim, not Dracula himself – and that’s what was in the shooting script. In fact, you can see this version shot as intended in the Spanish-language version of the film (shot at night with a whole second cast and crew, using the same sets and script). But the director for the English-version, Tod Browning, had the sense to ignore the official mandate and let the film's titular villain be the one to bite Renfield. He’s the real threat – he’s the one who Renfield will spend the rest of the film obsessed with. Why undercut that in your very first act?

The answer, of course, is the dreaded h-word: homoeroticism. A vampire bite is far too sexy to be allowed to happen between two men. The boundaries on that one fascinate me a little: neither the novel nor any film adaptation has ever balked at vampire!Lucy preying on children or the brides eating a literal baby because they’re seeing paedophilic overtones all of a sudden. These are horrifying acts, certainly, but here we take them at face value.

By and large though, Dracula is not the text you want to come at with the ‘rational’ notion that there’s nothing inherently sexy about a vampire bite: this is a book where even mundane, life-preserving blood-transfusions have become a very significant metaphor by the time of Lucy’s death. And who goes to a Dracula movie wanting to see Dracula biting men? (Yes, yes, I know. Please form an orderly queue to the left.)

My point in all this is that it’s not like we don’t know that nervous producers are perfectly willing to cut some corners off the integrity of their own product for fear of getting The Gay in their good, wholesome, gothic vampire film. And if producers from the 1930’s could do it… why not publishers from the 1890’s?

This is why it’s so hard not to find layers of meaning in that critical little addition of To-night is mine! Was there some earlier draft of Stoker’s manuscript (much like whichever theoretical earlier draft of the screenplay those execs had objected to) which contained that line? Was it Stoker himself who got nervous, and cut it from the British manuscript before publication? Keep in mind, this was only a couple of years after the Oscar Wilde trial, an incident which brought homosexuality under more scrutiny than it had suffered in an age. Stoker was already a known Wilde-associate, who’d take chances in that environment?

Or was it his publishers who made the change? Anything's possible. Either way, how the ‘original’ version found its way back into the US version is still in question: maybe Stoker found his nerve again, or maybe he just accidentally included a page from the wrong draft ‒ but it's easy to miss these things when the result is an ocean away. Don’t tell me it doesn't sound plausible!

Alas, I am guilty of building this one up mostly just to knock it down again: what little real evidence we have all points the other way. When Stoker re-edited a (slightly) abridged version of Dracula in 1901 (two years after the American one), the original ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow!’ line is dutifully reproduced. When he threw together a stage version (very rough, and which would be “performed” exactly once for copyright reasons alone), there was no ‘To-night is mine!’ in that one either. And the single, surviving full-but-unfinished draft of Dracula that anyone has ever found contained the 'To-morrow' version too. There are some fascinating differences between that one draft and either published version and I could talk about it all day – but if Very Rough Draft Outlines of Dracula is to be believed, then ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow’ was part of the novel long before it reached publication. There’s nothing about this scene in any of Stoker’s earlier very-rough-draft-outlines for Dracula either.

All that said, I still want ‘To-night is mine!’ to have been Stoker’s original plan for that scene. It just works so much better on so many levels!

It also adds rather fascinating little wrinkle to another favourite Dracula-debate topic of mine: does anyone bitten by a vampire become one, or do you have to drink that vampire’s blood in turn?

In these modern, rational times (filled with tales of complex, even sympathetic vampires), we’re much more comfortable with the vampire's-blood version. It just doesn’t track that everyone bitten by a vampire becomes one ‒ not without one vampire turning into a major zombie outbreak within a matter of weeks. And it's so widespread now that few realise the idea didn’t even exist before Dracula. Traditional vampire folklore has a thousand variations and as many different ways someone can join the undead (including being bitten by one), but drinking vampire blood is one I have never found a remotely credible source for. If anything, drinking a vampire’s blood often works to protect you from that vampire (smearing it on your body or eating some of the grave soil may also do the trick).

And even in Dracula, debate remains as to why Dracula forces Mina to drink his blood. Many assert that the true point is to create the psychic connection he uses to spy on her friends later (and his own dialogue in that scene could certainly be taken that way). Meanwhile, Van Helsing does say that anyone bitten can become a vampire. He doesn’t seem at all concerned this will happen to the children Lucy has fed on, but then, destroying the parent vampire before the potential vampires have turned is exactly how Mina is saved too. Whether or not you buy it, it still holds together.

The one-bite version is an interpretation you can still see in lots of post-Dracula media too. Hammer’s Dracula films of the 50s-70s, for example, certainly seem to think that being bitten is plenty (how long the transformation takes post-bite is… less consistent). Not until after Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes out in the 1970’s does the idea that you need to drink the vampire’s blood in turn really seem to start taking hold.

But it’s not as though no-one reading Stoker’s novel ever came away with the idea that he'd added a new element to the process of becoming a vampire. Universal’s 1931 film doesn’t even show the iconic blood-drinking scene, leaving Mina simply to recount those events in dialogue after the fact – but Dracula spells out his own purpose to Van Helsing very clearly: "You are too late. My blood now flows through her veins. She will live through the centuries to come...as I have lived."

In fact, there’s an even earlier script from 1927, from a failed attempt to create a new stage version commissioned by Stoker’s own widow, that takes the same angle: “Come, drink of my blood, that you may become even as I.” (Thank you to Skal's Hollywood Gothic for that interesting tidbit!) It’s unlikely that honouring her late-husband’s artistic intent was foremost in Widow Florence's concerns (far more about securing a higher cut of the profits than she was getting from the existing stage versions), but the fact Mrs. Stoker herself was down with that interpretation isn’t nothing.

Looping all the way back to the original point, though, if Jonathan really was supposed to have been bitten by Dracula way back in the early chapters of the novel, then we can pretty much throw the one-bite theory out the window. It doesn’t neaten everything up: we’ve still got the weird implication that Lucy could have been saved by enough blood-transfusions, whereas Mina slowly deteriorates over the journey back to the castle and only Dracula’s death will save her, and so on – because as much as I love this novel, Stoker’s vampire mythology is an inconsistent mess with more holes in it than a parade of slowly-turning vampire victims (and it really is such a tribute to the overall atmosphere that it still draws you in, and can even keep you from noticing the inconsistencies). But damn, could one little bite-mark on Jonathan’s neck recontextualise so much of the rest of the story.

Tl;dr: I will never know for sure whether Stoker’s original plans for Dracula involved Jonathan being bitten by the titular vampire himself, or how that one line came to differ between the UK and US publications. But I really want the US version to be the ‘true’ one. And maybe now you do too.

(Photos of Dracula & Jonathan come from Michael Pink's ballet adaptation of Dracula ‒ the slashiest ballet version I've seen and my second-favourite overall, because I am entirely the kind of Dracula-nerd with a second-favourite ballet version, what can I tell you.)

[twistedtummies2]

Count-Down: Number 2

Welcome to Count-Down! All throughout the month of October, I’ve been counting down my favorite portrayals and reimaginings of the mythical King of the Vampires, Count Dracula. We’ve reached our penultimate choice on the countdown. And when it comes to this Count, one phrase truly stands out: You’ve Gotta Love the Classics. Number 2 is…Bela Lugosi.

“Dracula never ends. I don’t know if I should call it a virtue or a curse, but it never ends.” These words – delivered by Bela Lugosi near the end of his life – have forever cemented his relationship with his most famous character. While there have been many, many popular Draculas over the years, the single most iconic will always be Lugosi. True, the 1931 film starring him has its clunky and dated moments, but it also is still effectively creepy in several places, and a big part of that comes from his incarnation of the Count of Transylvania. Lugosi’s whole career was largely shaped by his association with Dracula, and so was the history of the character. Many believe that much of what we associate Dracula with today came from Lugosi; this is both true and untrue. The LOOK we so often associate the character as having came from before Lugosi’s time: it was first established by actor Raymond Huntley, among others, in a long-running West End stage production of Dracula. When the show was brought to Broadway, the decision was made – mostly for purposes of money – to cast a relative unknown in the role of the Count. Lugosi, at the time, was still scraping to make a name for himself in America (after a long and successful stage career in Europe), and ended up winning the role. History was made on the stages of NYC, and it was only cemented when Lugosi was cast in Universal’s 1931 feature film production, based on both the book and the stage show. Interestingly enough, Lugosi was not the first choice for the role…but when other actors died or simply became unavailable or unwilling to tackle the character, the decision was made to cast him after he lobbied extensively for the part. From that moment on, Lugosi would never be able to escape the clutches of his vampiric alter-ego: he only played Dracula twice in movies (the 1931 picture and “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein”), but this didn’t prevent him playing other Dracula-like characters in other films, or having guest appearances in-character as the Count on TV and in short subjects, or even from reprising the role onstage several times over the course of his life. His relationship with the role was a love-hate affair: on the one hand, he had made a name for himself, and would always be known as cinema’s premier vampire. On the other hand, this, and various…shall we say, managerial issues throughout his career? Prevented him from ever truly stepping out of the shadow of Dracula. That 1931 picture was the moment he peaked as a performer…and it was all downhill, with very few other ups, from there. Nowadays, Lugosi’s Dracula is often perceived as somewhat hokey and cartoony, and I don’t think that’s entirely fair. After so much exposure to exaggerated portrayals that are more or less parodies of his character – many of which we’ve discussed in earlier parts of this list, and our Honorable Mentions – it’s understandable people would have that feeling, but once you actually watch him AS Dracula, you can realize there really is a gravity and a power to his portrayal that makes it effective. Is it melodramatic? Yes, but that’s exactly what the story of Dracula is: a melodrama. It’s just a very GOOD melodrama. Lugosi’s thick, easily-mocked accent was actually his real one: he was actually born and raised for a good part of his life in Transylvania, which gives his voice an authenticity few other actors have. There’s a misconception that the slow, steady way he spoke as the Count was a result of him still learning English; in fact, by the time 1931 rolled around, he was quite fluent in English, and this was a deliberate choice. Lugosi saw Dracula as a living corpse; that is, after all, what a vampire IS at the end of the day. Much of what he did was therefore meant to give one a sense of something dead PRETENDING to be alive; almost like something else was living under that handsome face and those fiery eyes. He was highly methodical and meticulous in his acting, using every part of his body to his advantage to give Dracula an appropriately hypnotic sense of presence, and even mild hints of pathos that many overlook. His Dracula is both one of the most human and inhuman at the same time. One thing I must also say is that Lugosi’s Dracula not only forever established Dracula, but also his nemesis, Professor Van Helsing. In the book, Van Helsing is just a scientist who is willing to believe in the supernatural; he’s not an experienced monster hunter, just a man who knows about vampires and realizes what’s going on can’t be explained rationally. It was really this movie that established the relationship between Van Helsing and Dracula and made them interconnected. Part of this is because the actor who plays Van Helsing in the 1931 film, Edward Van Sloan, had worked with Lugosi many, many times onstage with each of them playing the same roles. They had long since developed a chemistry and connection, and with the changes the film made from the stage play and novel alike, their two characters became even more closely linked. Van Helsing becomes almost like a Sherlock Holmes figure in the 1931 picture, with Dracula as his undead Moriarty: each is the only one who can stop the other, and despite their mutual desire to destroy one another, they seem to have an odd and unusual respect for each other, at the same time. Whether you think Lugosi’s Dracula – in terms of the film or his performance – have aged well or not, one thing cannot be easily denied: when people think of Dracula, when people IMPERSONATE Dracula, it is Lugosi they try to imitate or conjure up, at least nine times out of ten. For that reason above all else, he has deserved his high marks. Lugosi has been deceased for many decades…but it’s just as he said all the way back then: “Dracula Never Ends.” Who can top the great Bela Lugosi? Find out tomorrow, when I unveil my number one favorite Dracula of all time. Hint: If you haven’t guessed who it is yet, I guess I’ll have to Hammer it in.

[millydibby]

The wheel turns, nothing is ever new ~ Sherlock S04E03 vs Dracula (1931)