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Count Dracula — Description

The boggy summer air clung tight and dense to those ancient hills where crows plucked out the eyes of many a bloodthirsty prince. Fog here rolls in great tides, smothering the wailing ghosts yet to make themselves vacant from the crumbling walls atop the highest hill. Bats scatter from the belfry, tittering at the man who'd dared to stroll into the corroded graveyard. He was here for a project, jotting sweet inspired nothings into his journal, a recollection of data which will later serve him well in his confrontation with the king of demons haunting his every thought. This man is not Jonathan Harker, and this is not Dracula's Castle. This is Irish author Bram Stoker in July 1890, on vacation from his employment under the demanding actor Henry Irving, and these ruins are those of Whitby Abbey, a withering chapel, long since abandoned by God, now overlooking the roiling English coastline which will one day inevitably claim it whole.
Stoker had come here on recommendation from Irving. It was one of England's most popular resort towns, and its appropriately English atmosphere would serve as perfect inspiration for a new project Stoker was only just beginning to hash out. His previous published fictions had primarily been inspired by the Irish fairy tales he'd been surrounded with as a wee lad, but he was bored with familiarity. He'd gotten bitten by the vampire craze which had been sweeping Britannia's whispers ever since the first reports of the undead rising in Austrian Serbia had been translated for newspapers in 1732, and he wanted to craft his own version set in the mountainous woods of Styria, Austria. On August 8, however, a friend recommended he ask for a particular rare book held in the forgotten bowels of Whitby's public library, an 1820 report by William Wilkinson, the British consul in Bucharest, describing this pasty fucker's interpretation of the history and peoples of Wallachia and Moldova. It's in these pages that Stoker first discovered the story of Vlad the Impaler, a prince so bloodthirsty and cruel that his name “Dracula” has since become the Romanian word for the Devil himself. The source material, embellished as it was, was too juicy to resist rewriting his entire original premise over.
To Stoker's credit, he was determined to make his horror story as accurate to the culture of Romania as the resources of an 1890s English gent would permit. Stoker would never actually go to Romania himself for the imagery in his most famous work, instead using dreary Whitby as an acceptable substitute for inspiration. From a modern lense, the Romania (and vampires for that matter) in the form Stoker portrayed them as in his penultimate 1897 publication were… ignorant at best, and a racist caricature at worst. He left extensive notes explaining the thought process and primary sources he got these skewed perceptions of Eastern European culture from, so at least we know who to blame, but Stoker was very much a product of his time, and his primary motive was to sell copies of a good horror story. I… just wish it was a good horror story. Thing is, and I know I might get a lot of pushback saying this, Dracula fucking sucks man, and no that's not just the first of several vampire puns I'll be making unapologetically throughout this blurb.
Alright alright look, gun to my head, I'm being a little priss. Objectively speaking, Dracula is nowhere near the worst book I've ever read. I should more accurately say that I am not Stoker's… “target audience”. Bram Stoker, you see, was gay as shit. “Ava aren't you gay as shit?” Yes. Exactly. So you see the issue here? I mean okay look, I can't prove to you that Bram Stoker was gay. There's no discarded piece of parchment plucked from Stoker's underwear drawer with the express words “I like men, they're very men,” or whatever boys say about each other. Let's not forget, however, that in 1897, homosexuality was still an outright federal crime you could be convicted in court for. Hell, Stoker's best bud Oscar Wilde had been locked up for two years, sentenced to hard labor for his own “hard labor”, bowchickabowwow, so I don't think it's realistic to expect such an outright declaration of sexuality to exist. But, you may say, Stoker was married to a woman! She was Florence Balcombe, former girlfriend of Oscar Wilde, and she was a bitch. At least, according to Stoker's family. He had nothing good to say about this stuffy ball and chain, and there's no surviving photographs of them together. This is… a frustrating pattern of severe gynophobia unrelentingly reflected throughout Stoker's entire book. It was an extremely difficult read for me to slog through when every female character in Dracula is portrayed as either a vapid ditz, a burden, or a literal blood-sucking harpy, while Stoker goes pages upon pages out of his way to talk about how his men are rugged, handsome, the physical peak of mind and body alike, and other such descriptors which seem tailor-made to induce vomiting in an androphobic little lesbian like me. So before it becomes so long since I closed the last chapter that I forget the plot and have to read through this torture again for reference, let's get the summary over with.
We open to the page dated May 3rd in the journal of one Jonathan Harker, a solicitor from Exeter who's made the treacherous and cartoonishly spooky journey up into the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, frostbitten cliffs whose blackened, crumbling spire is Castle Dracula. Now, if I had just arrived in a town where it's Halloween every day, villagers cross themselves at the mere mention of the Count who enslaves them, will-o-wisps are verifiably real and luring people into the fog, and my carriage driver has the observable superpower to control wolves telepathically, I'd get right the fuck on the next train like Grandpa Simpson collecting his hat. Unfortunately for Jonathan Harker, he's stuck here by decree of the one demonic witchcraft which rules above all else: money. He's come on the summons of the eponymous Count Dracula, because this Dracula, the man popular culture has come to understand as the Penumbral King of the Night, the Desecration of God's Plan, He Who Owes Money to the Fist of Khonshu… desires to discuss stock options for buying land in England for no other reason than “I just think England is neat”. Idk Dracula that sounds a helluva lot like something an Englishman would say, what are you hiding, old man? 🤨
Actually he's not hiding much of anything, it kinda pisses me off ngl. Harker is welcomed into a castle which is more avalanche than architecture by a disheveled old bat of a villain who boasts wiry hair as white as fear itself, gnarled claws that look like they've been used to scratch a hole out of a coffin, incisors so long and sharp that they don't fit behind his lips, and Terminator-style glowing red eyes which leave no impression that this is in any way a good guy. The bastard looks like something you'd see in a hyperrealistic SpongeBob cutaway, but Jonathan Harker just thinks to himself “oh well this must just be how butt-ugly all foreign dignitaries are”. 1897, everyone. When it becomes clear over the next few months, however, that Dracula is in fact an undead vampire (shock and horror!) and has no intention of ever allowing his lunch to leave, Harker starts hammering out a plan to zoinks out of this mousetrap.
His dungeon crawl inevitably brings him to the one hall Dracula had warned him not to enter, because of course it does. Midway through unfogging this section of the map, Harker heavens-to-betsies himself onto the nearest piece of furniture, and when next he awakes his eyes open to HOLY SHIT. Domineering over him are THREE SMOKING HOT VAMPIRE GOTH MOMMIES who titter as they flirt with each other over who gets to eat him first. The assertive minx among them fucking steps on Harker, grabs him firmly by the ascot and starts making out allllllll up his neck. I blacked out just writing that, sweet Aphrodite, I wish that were me. We must remember, however, that Stoker is also gay, so of course he writes this scene as the most paralyzing spasm of disgust God has ever let slip through his otherwise perfect plan. It's okay though, because Dracula shows up and saves Harker from the existence of women, chucking the bitch into a wall for snacking on his solicitor. They nag and moan about being hungry tho, so Dracula chucks them a literal sack full of orphan meat, orphaned only recently when the mother attempted to get her kidnapped child back and Dracula Mr. Burns-ed the hounds on her. Alright Stoker, I'll give you that one, that's genuinely metal as hell. You are in fact a very compelling horror writer when you actually get around to describing a gruesome scene, my problem is just you can only get it up when you're trashing my half of the population. Being in the same building as these three foul temptresses for any longer is just too much for Harker to tolerate, so he decides to ditch the stealth investigation route and instead escape by yeeting himself out the window and Assassin's Creed-ing down the castle walls. He'd figure out how to get back to England from there.
Hard cut to creepy ass Whitby, where the insufferable Lucy Westernra is exchanging letters with Mina Murray, Harker's fiance, about boys! Because what else would women have any interest in talking about, amirite? Lucy is just so distraught, you see, because she's had no less than three tall handsome men propose to her in one night! But woe and alas, she's already accepted the proposal of the Lord Godalming, known as Arthur Holmwood to his friends, and she had to send the other two away! But oh Mina, they were so polite and strong about it, and Lucy just feels like such a ungrateful bitch for damaging these poor emotionally vulnerable boys! Lucy, you see, is part of a caste which Stoker dubs “New Women”, those hopeless emotional volcanoes which all these silly suffragettes think should be permitted to “have rights” and “speak their minds”, egads what has society come to! Mina meanwhile is the most tolerable type of woman Stoker is capable of imagining: emotionally stunted, fully clothed, and obedient to her husband. I have one quote I had to highlight and share with my friends to express how fucking miserable it is reading Dracula as a woman. Keep in mind this is from the pen of Mina, a female character: “Some of the ‘New Women’ writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself”. Good heavens, next these women will want to show us their ankles! What is society coming to?! This is… the single bougiest horror story I've ever read and it's taken years off my life.
While Lucy is dealing with those undefinable female problems, Mina is worried sick about Jonathan, not receiving any correspondence until August 19, when a mental institution contacts her about admitting a frazzled Jonathan until his next of kin can come collect him. Mina wastes no time hoping on the next train bound for Budapest, leaving Lucy alone with the mysterious sleep-walking problem she's been having. Things all around town have been completely batshit ever since the good ship Demeter, bearing a strange cargo of crates of dirt from Varna in its hull, was smashed into the shore by a storm which seemed to follow the vessel from over the horizon, crewless but for a dead captain tied limp to the steering wheel, and a black dog claimed by witnesses to have used the inertia of the crash to hit the sand running, before ultimately disappearing into the woods, never to be found. Mr. Swales, a hardy and based old veteran of the sea (at least I… think he's pretty based, it's hard to tell because Stoker renders thick accents annoyingly phonetically), who offered friendly Odinic wisdom to Lucy and Mina as they all hung out in the Abbey's graveyard together (sitting on a suicide's grave no less, very classy), is found dead with his neck snapped the next morning.
The crash of the Demeter, interestingly enough, was inspired directly by a real life news story Stoker latched onto while staying in Whitby. On October 24, 1885, the Russian schooner Dmitry tried to dock safely in Whitby to escape a howling gale, only to run aground on the adjacent sandbar. While not as disastrous as a ship crewed only by a rotting husk, Stoker's notes recall a local ghost story surrounding the shipwreck. They say a black dog leapt from the Dmitry and ran into the church graveyard, digging up corpses to feast upon until it itself was culled. Stoker's intention had always been to give Dracula the Nosleep treatment, meticulously mixing the real world into his narrative to assert that this book was entirely nonfiction. He couldn't find a publisher who'd print it without a major scrub of any such insinuations, though. While Stoker was visiting Whitby, there was still very much an active investigation into the visceral murders ripping across Whitechapel since 1888, and Scotland Yard was having enough trouble preventing a peasant uprising without Stoker telling everybody that vampires are in fact real and they're here in England right now straight up eating people.
Among other things a proper English gentleman might describe as “a pint odd” taking place across Her Majesty's island after this incident can be found in the phonograph diary of Dr. Jack Steward, who runs an insane asylum in Carfax. His favorite patient is a right nutter named Renfield, who's been incarcerated here because his favorite passtime is feeding flies to spiders, spiders to birds, birds to cats, and he seems pretty damn determined to make his way to the top of the food chain, explicitly teasing that Man does not hold the penultimate throne atop that web. That is, indeed, “odd”, but hold that thought! Booty call! Dr. Seward, you see, was one of Arthur's mutual friends who had attempted to propose to Lucy that day, and now Arthur was calling in a favor. Lucy is ill, and she's not getting better. Dr. Seward doesn't hesitate to accept the house call, but her case is… puzzling. By all outward symptoms, she appears to have lost a lot of blood, yet she exhibits no typical signs of anemia, no wounds from which the blood can escape, save for two curious puncture marks in her neck, but even those are bizarrely sterile and dry. Jack offers his sincerest apologies to Arthur. He does not possess the expertise required to diagnose and treat Lucy's ailment. He does, however, know a man who will.
Professor Abraham Van Helsing is a Dutchman with so many degrees listed after his name that I'm not entirely convinced Stoker actually knows what half of those abbreviations even mean. That's the long and short of his character, disappointingly. I think we have another case of modern popular culture spoiling us of the original source material. I went into this read expecting Van Helsing to be some seasoned badass in a leather frock with the fangs of several vampires trophied around his neck, but in the book he's just sort of… an old nerd. Mind you, he's an old nerd who, much like the audience, knows damn well exactly what's afflicting Lucy the second he lays eyes on her. Van Helsing knows, however, that Dr. Seward will look at him funny if he declares outright “yep, this girl has a textbook case of Dracula”, so instead he convinces the Scooby Gang to just let him administer the cure unquestioned and watch her improve for himself. The good doc tells Arthur that his beloved needs a blood transfusion, stat, and Arthur does not hesitate to open his veins. Lucy reports feeling fresh as a daisy the next morning, and that “Somehow, Arthur feels very, very close to me.” Dammit alright, I'll stop being a bitch for just a nanosecond, because that's genuinely adorable. If only it lasted.
Arthur has gone off to attend to his father, who is also sick, though… not with vampirism… as far as I know… leaving Lucy in his friends’ care. Unfortunately, a single blood transfusion was not enough. They check up on her again after the following night, and she's even more drained than before. Jack makes the sacrifice this time, though he and Van Helsing agree it's… probably best not to tell Art that another man's gotten his blood all up in his girl. The mere fact that they had a second crisis at all tells Van Helsing he needs to step up his game, so he orders a crate of garlic flowers to anti-vamp Lucy's entire room. It's effective until they discover the next morning that Lucy's barely-alive mother thought the garlic smelt awful and removed them while her daughter slept. Van Helsing bangs his head into a wall, offers himself as the next inevitable blood donor, and wow, Lucy is so lucky that her body didn't absolutely shut down due to receiving blood from three different people. It's worth noting that the first successful human blood transfusion was only performed in 1818, and blood types were not discovered until 1900. Sometimes the nineteenth century medical practices are the scariest thing in this book. My skin is crawling thinking about the amount of risk that was just assumed in those days.
Now this next bit is my favorite part of the entire book, because it's the only thing that feels like something our modern Castlevania conception of Dracula would do. Vampires can't enter a room without being invited, right? That's why Dracula's had to hypnotize Lucy into welcoming him in, and why he's been in bat form pitifully smacking against her window while the doctors have been working. So what is Dracula to do now that Lucy has been completely guarded against him? Why, obviously he circumvents the classic vampire weaknesses by stealing a live wolf from the local zoo and chucking it through the fucking window. Ain't nothing in the rules that says his new pet can't come in uninvited! This fiercesome display is so undeniably badass that it gives Lucy's mother a fatal heart attack and in the confusion the old broad tears the garlic necklace off of Lucy's neck. Seward and Van Helsing rush to her house the second they hear that something has gone horribly wrong, and lo and behold, the poor girl is in desperate need of… another transfusion. But oh no! The two men are still recovering from tapping their own kegs, and Arthur's still out of town! They'll need to find a third person to give their blood, or it'll be too late! Boy howdy are they lucky y'all, because by sheer coincidence, in walks our boy Quincey Morris like he's Bill fucking Murray in Space Jam!
Oh I'm- I'm sorry, do you have absolutely no fucking clue who Quincey Morris is? I sure as shit forgot he existed. He was the third mutual friend of Arthur and his crew who had attempted to ask for Lucy's hand in marriage a bit too late. He's from Texas. He's a cowboy. He hasn't been mentioned since chapter five. This is chapter twelve. He just shows up and does absolutely fucking nothing else important to the plot except give his blood to Lucy. I am- I am so livid, Stoker, but what the fuck ever. They keep Lucy going another day, but Van Helsing is pretty visibly concerned about how long her teeth have gotten, how she seems to be developing an allergy to garlic, and how the puncture wounds on her neck have completely Wolverined over. They'd informed Arthur that she may well die soon and that he should hurry back. He returns just in time for her eyes to flutter open and take in the sight of her husband. Lucy smiles, showing her teeth, and she seems a little… too excited to ask for a kiss. Arthur of course sees no problem with this, but Van Helsing pulls him back. Lucy twitches violently upon this denial. She snarls like a predator deprived of its prey, bears her fangs and gnashes like an animal, and then all at once, inexplicably, she regains her senses. There's a fear in her eyes, a fear of herself, and then quietly, politely, apologetically, she dies. This is another point to Stoker. I can't deny, it's a genuinely creepy scene. Shortly after Lucy's demise, newspapers start to report on the hauntingly beautiful “Bloofer Lady” who's been draining children of their precious pints in the dead of night, and then disappearing without a trace.
Every single one of his firewalls foiled, Van Helsing informs Jack that the only thing left to do is to decapitate Lucy's corpse and drive a stake through her heart. Seward, obviously, is like uhhhhhhhh doc what, and he's not anymore persuaded when his old professor starts dropping the v-word on him. He's not even initially persuaded when the two of them break into Lucy's tomb one night and find her coffin empty. He comes around, however, when they stake out the cemetery, witness Lucy dragging an unconscious child back to her grave before disappearing into a cloud of mist. When the doctors crack open her coffin a second time, there lay Lucy once more, lips red as blood. It's agreed then that if anyone is gonna gank Lucy Westernra, it should be the man who was going to be her husband. They invite a confused Arthur to a similar stake out, and once his wife's undead lust for his visage and her retreat from a crucifix convinces him that vampires are in fact real, Seward and Van Helsing hand him a wooden stake and a hefty mallet. They open the coffin where Lucy returned to rest, Arthur asks his comrades if slaying the corpse will save his beloved's immortal Christian soul, the experts confirm that it will, and with a calloused face of stone which ignores the monster's chiropteran screeching, Arthur rams that fucking stake home, compared by Stoker himself to Thor meeting his fate on the fields of Ragnarök. Another point on the board for Stoker, this scene is genuinely badass.
With Lucy at last at peace, there is but one thing left to do: hunt down the parasite that did this to her and give him the same treatment. By this point, Jonathan Harker and his newlywed wife Mina have returned to England and shared every scrap of strategically important information from Jonathan's time in Transylvania. From these notes, it's deduced that the crates of dirt brought over on the Demeter are full of soil from Dracula's resting place, that the fiend might distribute around his new English properties as checkpoints he can long rest in no matter where he goes on the island. The gang gets to work tracking down each of these coffins and destroying them to corner their prey. They set up their base camp at Seward's asylum, where Renfield this whole time has just been getting weirder and weirder, but hey Renfield insists, actually doc I think I'm well enough to be discharged! Seward, actively hunting Dracula and knowing Renfield is obviously some kind of vampire thrall, blinks, and just politely tells Renfield “uuhhhhh no. No I- No. Obviously no you are not allowed out of that cell. Duh”. Now, while this is 100% the correct answer you should give, assuming you've seen… any movie, Renfield waggles an ominous finger and says very directly to the good doctor, “You will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the justice to bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince you to-night.” Guys at… at this point you just fucking kill Renfield. Like I'm sorry buddy but you need a bullet in the back of your brain like right the fuck now.
Shock of shocks, Dracula appears outside of Renfield's window with an offering of thousands of rats Renfield can eat (because Renfield is also into that), and Renfield invites Dracula in so that the Count can begin visiting Mina in the night as his new target. When Dracula fails to deliver the rats, however, Renfield throws a hissy fit and tries to fight Dracula. That goes about as well as you'd imagine, and our heroes rush in when they hear that Renfield had his head smashed open. The mad bastard clings to life just long enough to confess Dracula's plans, and the men bolt down the hall to Mina's room. They bust Mina's door down just in time to find Jonathan magically unconscious and Mina getting her face forced into Dracula's gross hairy chest, exposed and bleeding from a wound he clawed out of himself that she might drink… or drown in his inescapable grip. Point to Stoker, finally a scene which is genuinely terrifying to a lesbian! Van Helsing uses the power of Jesus Christ to banish Dracula, but it's already too late. When Van Helsing touches a communion wafer to Mina's forehead in an attempt to ward her from future intrusion, the body of Christ sears a burning scar in Mina's screaming flesh. Mina breaks down, cursed and mutated, doomed to become Dracula's thrall should she meet her untimely demise before they can gank him. There's no time to waste now, so the men hurry to Piccadilly, break into the last of Dracula's properties, and sterilize the Count's final resting place in England. They could've ganked Dracula there and then when the fiend unexpectedly arrives home in the middle of their operation, but Dracula pussies out and hooks himself up on the next boat back to Transylvania. They lost him, dammit! The son of a bitch could be anywhere by the time the group reconvenes at the asylum to draft a plan!
Seemingly because Stoker just… wrote himself into a corner here and couldn't think of any other way to progress the plot, Van Helsing decides the only rational thing to do now is… hypnotize Mina? The reasoning is that Dracula's tickling her brain with his psychic powers, so maybe they can interrogate her connection in the other direction? Sure fuck it, I just want this to be over too. The gang follows her obnoxiously vague clues all the way back to Castle Dracula, where Van Helsing destroys Dracula's OG resting place before the caravan he's recharging in can make it back home. He also robs us of the three smoking hot vampire goth mommies, because Stoker and I are just never destined to get along. In what is admittedly a very tense scene, both Dracula's caravan and an enormous pack of wolves are rapidly descending on where Van Helsing and Mina have made a rudimentary camp in the mountains. Chasing close behind, however, are the rest of the crew who'd split off to track the fucker down on route. Knowing Dracula will awaken to his full power the second the sun dips below the horizon, Jonathan and Morris seize the caravan at gunpoint. Just before the sun pulls its last light under the horizon, they rip off the lid of the coffin, Jonathan whips out his big fuckoff kukri, and guillotines the fucker's head clean off while Morris stabs Dracula in the heart. Dracula's so ancient that all his centuries of undeath catch up to him at once, poofing him into a cloud of dead skin cells once and for all. Also Morris got redshirted in the altercation. Oh no, Quincey Morris. He's dead. Oh no. Gods I'm tired.
And… that's Dracula. There is a little epilogue at the end explaining how seven years later everyone is living happily ever and quote “Godalming and Seward are both happily married”, which I know was probably intended to be read as they both found a girl to replace Lucy's face in their heads, but given what we've taken away about Bram Stoker as a human person, I like to think the vagueness of how its worded was intentional. Good on you, Stoker, I'm sorry your homosexuality interfered with writing a good book you could genuinely jerk yourself off to. For what it's worth, as much as I've been making fun of you, my fear of men very much inhibits my writing in much the same way, so I can't in any way fault you for, in reality, just being confused, repressed, and persecuted. I wish I could assure you that our community has become more accepted in broader society, but haha ha ha aha ha ha we're all gonna die.
So, the book sucks, is the movie any better? Actually… yeah! I gotta be honest, I didn't expect a movie from 1931 to fuck so hard! It trims a lot of the fat from Stoker's drawn-out clusterfuck, and spotlights all the parts I actually enjoyed from the book when Stoker gets around to them. Jonathan Harker just sort of absorbs into his character the roles of Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris, John Seward is agreeably more confined as a side character to his hot daughter Mina, Renfield's delightfully bonkers and spits some surprisingly modern jokes, while Bela Lugosi as Dracula perfectly encapsulates that uncannily emotionless “Vlad the Impaler” energy which I feel often gets lost in the “Count” of Count Dracula these days. By far though the best character upgrade is Van Helsing. This is the guy I was expecting going blind into “the original Dracula”. He's not a mystic, that's what makes his charisma all the more stronger when he looks a board of scientists dead in the eye and says “I'll be damned. Vampires be real”. Obviously their first response is bullshit, but Van Helsing is like “I know, I know. However, I can experimentally prove it to you now that we have vampires on our hands. Luckily if vampires are real, we've all been prepared for this by those fairy tales so… I guess let's get crackin?”. It's a nice reluctant twist of nuance to the “vampire hunter scientist” angle. He's also just straight up badass, but in that retired veteran sort of way. He pulls up to a Dracula who thinks he's got this old geezer played like a fiddle, and is like “hey Count, you're an intelligent man, I think you'll appreciate this scientific discovery I made, it's in this box, not sure what to make of it” and motherfucker opens up a compact mirror to rub directly into Dracula's smug face that he knows exactly who he is. Dracula swats that shit directly out of his hands and explains, through his teeth, to the room that he had his first loss of control over a situation in centuries because “I dislike mirrors. Van Helsing… will explain”. And then Dracula fucks off. Yeeeeessss that's exactly how I'd write these two minds interacting with each other in some kind of Drake Hero context. Five stars honey!
The Universal Dracula is not the oldest adaptation on the silver screen, however. While I'm sure there's nerds out there who'll have a valid case to argue with me, the safest owner of that title goes to the first and only project by the studio of German indy filmmakers F. W. Murnau and Henrik Galeen, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, released in 1922. It was the only film this studio made because they had fo file for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. Stoker's widow had quickly been made aware of this unlicensed adaptation and sued the Krauts for every cent they had. And… yeah, I can't say I blame her. I watched it, it was boring and uninspired, identically to the book it's ripping off. They slap a coat of 1838 on it, reduce the whole story to just the Harker separation and change the proper nouns around, but it would not (and did not) fly in court. It spotlights all the parts I wished the book would get on with already, and it's remarkable only in how unremarkable it is. It's the first piece of media to depict vampires as killed by sunlight, that's a neat cocktail fact I guess? Its existence really is just cursed to become one of those Hollywood trivia factoids you see before they just turn on the goddamn movie already at the theater, or as a still printed in the pages of the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, tickling the funny bone of a growing boy named Jay Lender.
Jay Lender had a project coming out in 2002, you see, as he too had carved out his own little Hollywood nest egg, and he needed a joke. Previously, the episode of this show would end with the spontaneous introduction of the appeasable “Floorboard Harry”, but that bit relied on a previous joke which got cut in production. Lender's quick mind went to those old magazines and recalled how much he chuckled at Count Orlok's stupid face, the authors knowing damn well no one living before the internet would ever have access to this film to investigate the context. That's funny, he thought. It's random in all the right ways. To quote the man himself: “So my first experience with Orlok and with that image is as this disjointed non sequitur. When the moment came that I needed to come up with a replacement horror non sequitur, that image was already in that slot in my brain. What’s interesting is that because of SpongeBob, for 20 years, everyone else’s first experience with Orlok came as a weird disjointed non sequitur horror image too.”
“Ava, did you just drag us all through the whole of Vampire Month just to explain the origin of one of SpongeBob's most random classic memes?” Honey you bet your sweet cherry-lipstick pucker-puffed ass I did. I'm going to go sleep for 24 hours straight now.
Design notes, there's a very real timeline where I gave up and just redrew my Vlad the Impaler with vampire makeup. This went through so many drafts I was worried I was gonna burn through my paper. But no, I refused, because this is my canon Dracula and canon Dracula needs to look Castlevania as fuck. I'm extremely proud of the end result of my pretentious head slam, even if I lost a lot of detail in the scanner. I tried to use my colors in such a way that the finer details wouldn't matter to the overall silhouette. I'm happy with this art, and as my reward for interacting with even the slightest drop of dopamine, I'm gonna conclude Álfablót with one long hibernation. Mama got so sleep deprived the Thursday before I'm writing this that I had a full public black out panic attack in retail torment! I'm so kooky! I'm gonna turn off all… 21… 22… 23… however many alarms I have set and reboot for the first day of Heathen winter! Drink milk or something idk. Happy Halloween everyone!