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\pard \ql {\fs24 \f1 This is a C.B.C. broadcast on December thirty first one nin
e hundred ninety seven at a New Year's Eve party. Cheryl Shepard was proposed t
o her on live T.V. two days later she disappeared and was never seen again. Hos
t David Ridgen heads to Hamilton Ontario to investigate the case someone knows s
omething seasoned to subscribe and i Tunes for your favorite part time staff. M
L in our walk tell him this is writers and company today something in the blood
the untold story of Bram Stoker the man who wrote Dracula all talked a cultural
historian and horror expert David J. scoll. One hundred twenty years ago a nov
el was published that resulted in countless incarnations plays movies comics tel
evision series other books and video games. Dracula is the monster that never d
ies. Even though at the end of that novel written by Bram Stoker he's a pile of
dust. Most of these other versions both give him the potential of an afterlife
and allude to his having already lived for five hundred years or more. But beh
ind the rich excesses of the vampire is a relatively unknown author Bram Stoker
he was born in Dublin in eight hundred forty seven the third of seven children i
nto an Irish Protestant aspiring middle class family his father was a civil serv
ant his mother eighteen years younger came from a military family and was well e
ducated. Bram studied at Trinity College Dublin and despite his love of theatre
. He started off working for the government at a job. His father helped him ge
t in fact his first book was a manual called the duties of clerks and Petty Sess
ions in Ireland. At the same time he was going to plays and writing reviews whi
ch is how he came to meet the grade. Actor Henry Irving. Irving was on his way
to becoming a star in fact he was the first actor to be knighted. And he invit
ed stoker to become his personal assistant and manage his new Lyceum Theatre in
London. Bram Stoker worked for Henry Irving for the next twenty seven years unt
il Irving's death in one thousand nine hundred five. But during that time stoke
r was writing his own work more than a dozen novels collections of fairy tales a
nd short stories journalism even a book about Sir Henry Irving and his star and
lover Miss Ellen Terry. I missed all those books came Dracula in one thousand n
ine hundred seven when stoker was fifty. The novel was well reviewed but sold m
odestly and stoker was poor and needy when he died in one nine hundred twelve bu
t his widow was able to reap the rich financial rewards of Dracula through world
wide royalties on the book and subsequent stage plays and especially through a
film sale to Hollywood. In one nine hundred thirty one. Todd Browning directed
by a Lugosi in the Universal Studios production of Dracula. Here's a scene. D
r Van Helsing played by Edward Van Sloane has been called to Carfax castle to tr
eat the mysterious illness of a young woman. Mina. Van Helsing has come to rea
lize that Dracula is in fact a vampire and is responsible for Mina's sudden decl
ine. Now that you have what it would be great for he would return to your own c
ountry. I prefer to be me. And protect those whom you would destroy. You are
to like my blood. Now. It will live through the centuries to come. Sure you r
isk people we know how to save me. You know if I'm not if you die. By day I se
e. But you die and I really have to accept be told told by I mean I don't you w
ant to box and write that he or you are. Edward Van Sloan as Dr Van Helsing and
go see as Count Dracula in Todd Browning's one nine hundred thirty one film Dra
cula. Of course they have been dozens of movie versions from Nosferatu to Dracu
la untold. David J. skull as an expert on Dracula and the horror genre in one n
ine hundred ninety. He published Hollywood gone thick subtitled that tangled we
b of Dracula from the novel to the stage to screen. He followed it with the mon
ster show a cultural history of horror and v is for Vampire The eight is a guide
to everything and dead. Now he's written a biography of Bram Stoker called som
ething in the blood the untold story of the man who wrote Dracula. It's just be
en named a finalist for an Edgar Award the Mystery Writers of America prize name
d after Edgar Allan Poe. David J. skull lives in Glendale California. He spoke
to me from Pasadena the most famous movie version of Dracula is the one nine hu
ndred thirty one classic directed by Todd Browning with be able to go see in the
lead role Lugosi was a hunk Gary An immigrant is that what led to the Dracula a
ccent since in the novel he's described this as speaking English quite well. Ye
s I think that there is probably no actor who is more identified with with the p
art I mean to the point that he actually took the role to his grave. He was bur
ied and Dracula scape and of course he had that there really did liberate manner
of speaking. That we forever associate with Count Dracula. And it isn't exact
ly a Garion accent. It's an actor speaking English phonetically. His son told
me. Actually that his dad never learned to think in English and that's where th
ose strange pauses and and deliberate intonations come from and it's absolutely
one of those famous voices in theatrical history kids who've never seen the movi
e or even know Lugosi his name. If you ask them talk like Dracula they know exa
ctly what to do so that that's real penetration but Lugosi was fairly unknown he
made a few films in Hollywood but Universal was unable to get a big star. It w
as a very difficult year for the studio the depression had just kicked in one ni
ne hundred thirty S. and Lugosi was literally their last choice he had done the
part on Broadway. And was quite good in it but he wasn't a bankable star. The
Lugosi fit your image of Dracula. No because I the thing that surprised me when
I was a kid is that the Dracula of the famous movie had nothing to do with the
character stoker described. There was nothing suave or sophisticated or accente
d even about Stoker's Dracula he was a horrible man who drank blood and got youn
ger as he drank blood but he never became attractive he never ingratiated himsel
f into anyone's life he certainly didn't seduce anybody and Stoker's Dracula was
really really tell and and he's an offstage character the Lugosi Dracula actual
ly developed out of the stage play because to make the thing work on stage in th
e one nine hundred twenty S. the narrative had to be transformed into something
quite unlike the novel. It had to observe the conventions of the drawing room m
ystery melodrama and Stoker's Dracula was not a key. Are you could plausibly in
vite into a drawing room he was this hideous animalistic his idea of a social ca
ll was smashing through your head room window in the form of a wolf. So his act
had to be cleaned up and that's where we got the the evening clothes and the th
e slicked back hair on the smarmy Transylvania accent and all those things we th
ink are essential to Dracula but stoker wouldn't have recognized any of them. B
ecause it is novel it's almost an epistolary novel it's people's diaries and jou
rnals and letters and when did you read Bram Stoker's book. I read it in the si
xth grade about the same time I started reading monster magazines because I coul
dn't see the Lugosi film for some reason for exactly the years I was most intere
sted in monsters of those old Universal films were being shown on Cleveland tele
vision and I devoured that book in about two days. I remember reading it in mat
h class. I wasn't supposed to be but I hit it in my lap and I kept the momentum
going with stokers wonderful story but it's always been on these kind of two tr
acks. It's been the the Dracula of popular culture and film and and the stage a
nd the novel. Dracula is really unique it's a sheep shifting kind of a kind of
a method. It had its origins in folklore and the oral tradition and stoker gave
it a literary form. You know for a while but with the age of the Moving Image
it's come back to a kind of oral visual story again to which people contribute.
Anytime somebody does an adaptation of Dracula. They seem to not be able to re
sist making some big change or making over Dracula in their image and I think th
at's the tug of folklore. That's the folkloric energy that's in it. What were
some of Dracula's literary antecedents. In literature. The idea of the romanti
c that pyre had. Been there for quite a few decades. It's usually traced to Lo
rd Byron and his circle at that same famous literary house party where Frankenst
ein was conceived Dracula had his Origin two. Byron and Percy Shelley and Mary
Shelley had a story writing contest and they wanted to see who could out scare t
he other and Byron's traveling companion. Dr John Pollard Ori wrote a story cal
led The vampire tale and his Vampire Lord Robin was very much based on Byron's n
otorious personality he was he was quite a womanizer and full of every vice you
can imagine at least in part he was a tabloid kind of a kind of a personality at
the time and people assumed that Byron actually written the story and it was ab
out a mysterious vampire nobleman who came to London and wrecked havoc of course
that's exactly the template. You know for Dracula and it was adapted for the s
tage and for opera Martian or ZZ German opera. Divine Peter was one of the most
popular things in the nineteenth century repertory and there was a penny dreadf
ul novel called Varney the vampyre or the feast of blood that was published the
same year stoker was was born and raised in thirty seven eight hundred forty sev
en and it's clear there are scenes in Dracula that seem lifted almost directly f
rom Barney. There was Joseph Sheridan knew the Irish writer who was from Dublin
as as was stoker. They don't seem to have really have known each other or even
even met but he had a very big influence on stoker he wrote sensation novels li
ke Uncle Silas. Yes And he wrote a vampire novella called Carmela that was real
ly the first lesbian vampire story in literary history and I think is the source
of why today's vampires always seem to be bisexual or pansexual. They seem to
be sexual transgressors and LAFFAN who was there first and stoker was certainly
aware of that novel and I think no Many of the aspects of sexual ambiguity in Dr
acula derived from coming. While directly remains the best known vampire his cr
eator Bram Stoker's deal lingers in the shadows that is big. He's been describe
d as the least known author of the best known book in the world. Why do we know
so little about him. Well he really was one of the literary histories one hit
wonders. He was what the Victorians like to call a very private person. He did
n't leave us any account of writing Dracula he didn't leave us any real personal
reminiscences he worked for the great Victorian actor Henry Irving who he just
idolized and adored and documented his life in excruciating detail but he didn't
write about himself and there apparently in his house was a room that was just
filled with journals that were described by his son that have not survived appar
ently his widow thought they just weren't worth keeping. She auctioned off a lo
t of lot of his papers the year after he died he died in one thousand twelve and
either she was trying to manage his his legacy and his reputation. Victorians
were very fond of burning correspondence and journals and that sort of thing dri
ves biographers crazy. Yeah absolutely. But it's quite possible she tossed out
this a roomful of journals because. They were almost indecipherable to anybody
but stoker he he has one of the most difficult handwriting styles that I've eve
r encountered. What made you want to take on Bram Stoker's a subject. Well I f
elt that stoker himself had not been done just as there had been four previous f
ull length biographies and each one of them just raised more questions than it a
nswered and I discovered rather quickly. Why those other biographies disappoint
ed me stoker was an enigma he deliberately covered his tracks and I got around.
The difficulty of Stoker not leaving his own account of himself by focusing on
the people who were closest to him and who swirled around him he was in the midd
le of the Victorian artistic and theatrical world in London at the Lyceum Theatr
e. Let's talk about what we do know about Bram Stoker starting with his early l
ife he was as you say born in Dublin Irish Protestant in one thousand forty seve
n at the height of the great famine. What were his family circumstances how did
they manage at that time. Stoker was born into a struggling middle class famil
y in Dublin at the height of the famine eight hundred forty seven was traditiona
lly called Black forty seven and it was the worst year of the potato crop failur
e that had enormous repercussions in Irish history it's just one of the the most
traumatic events that one could be born into and he was mysteriously ill for th
e first seven years of his life. We don't know exactly what the cause of this w
as but he said he couldn't stand upright until he was seven years old and yet he
overcame this he grew up to become a powerful. ATHLETE with no sign of wasting
disease. So this is always puzzled people. I suspect that he was drugged. Hi
s mother had survived a cholera plague. When she was a child and she believed t
hat the only reason her family survived is that they they dosed themselves every
day with sweetened whiskey and by the time stoker was born there were these opi
um based preparations Louden essentially they were called soothing syrup. And i
t was extraordinary how frequently these things were given to the children and I
think stoker was probably drugged by an overprotective mother until he was seve
n years old or some and lightened doctor read his mother the riot act and he was
taken off the stuff. One can see why in a way his mother was so traumatized by
that cholera epidemic because there's a surprising anecdote in your book sugges
ting that when she was young that stoker may have murdered someone. What do we
know. She grew up in the in the west of of Ireland and her family was trying to
escape the cholera plague and were really under siege by hordes of disease desp
erate people and it really does her account of it and to us today. Reads like a
zombie apocalypse kind of scene and not nothing funny really does read that way
with the family struggling to keep out all of these sick people these cholera v
ictims who are desperate for food or helper or anything and a story that was pas
sed down in the stoker household was that to protect her family young Charlotte
stoker at the age of twelve took an axe and actually hacked off the arm of a. A
ll of these people who's trying to get into the house. There's so many nightmar
ish stories about both the cholera plagues and the the famine actually stokers b
irth coincided not only with the famine but another cholera epidemic that was sw
eeping into Dublin and which would have been even more reason for his mother to
take. What she thought like action with drugs you know. During his illness Gra
eme stoker was introduced by his father to what may have been Dracula's key insp
irations the Christmas pantomime. Can you describe how these productions made i
ncludes the young Graham. Sure. I mean they were I popping productions most th
eatre companies in those days produced them they were the big money makers the c
ash cows. Of the season they would start. Usually the day after Christmas and
run through January. Very often and they were typically based on fairy tales or
or famous legends and were done on a elaborate scale with costumes and special
effects and and acrobatics and all kinds of things that would obviously impress
adults as well as mulch children but to be exposed to this as your first. Taste
of the theater for stoker coming out of his bed ridden seven years. He describ
ed the pantomime as a child's coming to life the beginning of life itself. And
when he started writing theatre reviews for the Dublin newspaper he didn't just
do reviews of these pantomimes he launched into these long didactic essays about
the importance of pantomime and why they were so wonderful and one of the the f
amous characters the most prominent characters in the pantomimes was the demon k
ing sometimes depicted. As always wearing black sometimes with bat wings and es
sentially he was very much like Dracula and Dracula I think is most profitably r
ead today as a fairy tale for adults. Brahms' interest in theatre led to his be
coming a drama critic and in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven when he was
just nineteen he caught a performance by the British actor Henry Irving and beca
me somewhat infatuated with him. Why what was the attraction there. Well no ac
tor impressed stoker as much as Henry Irving who was a self-taught self-made act
or who came up through the provinces and was very ambitious. He seems have been
spurred on by the fact that he was his. In some of his earliest appearances an
d an actor Stoker wrote never forgets his and this just seemed to have spurred h
im on to prove everybody wrong and his ambitions were nothing less than the the
transformation of the British stage and he largely accomplished that stoker was
just under struck when he saw him performing in Dublin in the late eight hundred
sixty S. Irving from then on was stokers ideal actor. Probably his ideal idea
of a man and he agreed she hated himself into Irving his life by writing a few s
evere reviews of his performances Hamlet several years later. Irving was very i
mpressed invited him to dinner and then as an after dinner treat. Regaled the a
ssembled with a recitation of a melodramatic ballad The dream of Eugene Aram. W
hich is about a murderer whose guilt catches up with him and it. It's quite a w
onderful thing. His performance was so affecting that stoker burst into a stair
case at the end of it and we can only think what the other dinner party members.
You know thought and Irving took notice and went back to his dressing room and
got a photograph and gave it to him and it was. You know to Bram Stoker God bl
ess you God bless you and from that moment they they forged a bond I think he sa
w as somebody who could be very useful to him with the theater he wanted to esta
blish and in London and shortly thereafter he did obtain the lease on the Lyceum
Theatre in London he made it over to his own image and created his own company
and stoker was his business manager for about twenty seven years and back a stal
ker would devote himself to Irving for nearly three decades and till Irving's de
ath and in one thousand five even named his only child. IRVING No after him was
his devotion reciprocated What do you make of their relationship. It was a ver
y uneven relationships docker was devoted to him like a dog and I don't think he
ever dreamed or ever knew that Irving thought of him as a useful person but did
n't have any great. Admiration for his skills as a writer or even his knowledge
of the theatre. He wrote a letter to somebody that stoker never saw that said
you're wrong about stoker he knows as much about theatre as the man in the moon.
And he wanted Irving to play Dracula on stage and didn't elaborate copyright r
eading in the Lyceum with members of the the Lyceum company and Legend has it th
at Irving. I took a peek in at the proceedings and asked what he thought about
it. Just had one word dreadful. And I think that must have really stung. But
he wasn't remembered in Irving's will and his stokers professional life and and
his health began to go downhill. Shortly after Irving stuff. Henry Irving is o
ften credited as being the real life inspiration for the character of Dracula.
How do you see it. I think there is there is a little bit too that stoker was s
o. Worshipful of Irving that I don't think on any conscious level he was intend
ing Dracula to represent Irving. However it must be said that her Ving was the
boss from hell. And one of his signature parts. Mephistopheles and sed has mor
e than a passing you know resemblance to Dracula. There's a scene in Irving's p
roduction of Faust in fact where one of his would be victims holds up a crucifix
and he recoils from it and of course that's exactly what happens in Dracula. S
ome of the photographs that have survived of Irving as Mephistopheles look an aw
ful lot like what we think of as Dracula today and there were some differences.
Irving's Mephistopheles was a peacock of a character. I mean that in black and
white reproductions is costume looks like a black Dracula like robe. In realit
y it was bright red Irving's Mephistopheles took the spotlight Dracula. By cont
rast is a creature of the shadows. He's off stage for most of the stoker story
and he's exactly the kind of character Irving would never want to play there was
just no profit in it for a. An actor. Who wanted attention. They would say s
ickle throughout Bram Stoker's life. It was men more than women who seem to aro
use his passion stokers sexuality is a focus of your book. Why is it of such in
terest to stoker scholars. I think so much Dracula scholarship has revolved aro
und issues of gender and feminism and patriarchy and transgressive sexuality tha
t people of course are curious about the psychology of the man who came up with
this kind of Rosetta Stone of the Victorian sexual imagination and I.E. think th
at stoker it's easy to say oh stoker just must have been a closeted gay man in t
he Victorian era. I think it's much more complicated than that there was no con
cept of sexuality or sexual orientation as a fixed aspect of the person psycholo
gy the words and the the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality weren't e
ven current in Stoker's lifetime. You get the impression that. The Victorians
almost they were a little more progressive than we are today in that they seem t
o have almost accepted a basic. Bisexual potential or pansexual potential in ev
erybody that one had to carefully navigate oneself around during life. So what
stoker certainly was more interested in in men than in women. He barely describ
es women. Physically in his stories. Everybody got married in those days. No
matter what. There are other inclinations might might be it was just something
that a class people did and you had children stokers marriage was. Those two ha
ve been sexless after the birth of their first child he had a youthful correspon
dence with Walt Whitman you know tell me about that he wrote I mean one of the o
ne of our clues to his feelings about men is an intimate fan letter that he wrot
e to the American poet. And this is long before he met him and it seems like th
e most personal writing we have of stokers what's in the letter. It absolutely
is. And one of the reasons I focus so much on it in the book is This is the one
of the few pieces of completely candid and emotional expression about stoker re
garding himself and he was swept away by Leaves of Grass when he was a student a
t Trinity College Dublin. It was a very controversial work at the time it cause
d a firestorm of controversy in America because Whitman seemed to be talking abo
ut. Passionate love between men and men although he never would. And never cam
e out of the closet himself. It was all about camaraderie and hero worship Ben
manly men admiring manly men and that was all he could do at the time even thoug
h he had many relationships with with other men throughout his life he never act
ually talked about them or admitted to them but his his poetry seemed to be code
d communication with young men all over the world who sensed that they had a spe
cial kind of destiny in terms of their own sexuality and and feelings about men.
So even though Stockard didn't revisit the subject in any of his writings. It
's certainly there in the people swirling around him. I mean his romantic rival
was another Dubliner named Oscar Wilde remain white no magic rival in terms of
his wife yet. In terms of his wife originally wild wanted to marry her and stok
er stepped in at the last moment for reasons we can't completely divine I have s
ome speculations in there but Wilde. Of course was the opposite of Stoker in te
rms of pursuing. What was then considered the transcripts of kind of the kind o
f sexuality the stoker raised questions with the you know the themes of his fict
ion and Wilde acted it out very messily in his own life. Bram Stoker and Oscar
Wilde had much in common at the same time they were both born in Dublin they stu
died at Trinity College they moved to London the same year eight hundred seventy
eight. They became part of the London theatre scene. I mean stoker as a manag
er rather than a playwright of course and then wife Florence had been engaged to
two US crew well that one point but were still going wild actually friends. Th
ey were I think wary acquaintances. It was a very small world. You know theatr
ical and artistic London in the heat hundred eighty thousand and eight hundred n
inety S. wild was a guest in Stoker's home his wife after having her dreams of b
eing an actress dashed. You know became a. Society hostess and through splashy
Sunday get togethers and and wild would attend as would his mother Lady Wilde w
ho in Dublin had been a kind of a surrogate mother to stoker there so many fasci
nating connections with with the wild family in Bram Stoker's. David J. school
in Pasadena California. He's my guest today on writers and Company on C.B.C. Ra
dio One on Sirius X.M. radio and around the world on C.B.C. dot ca I'm Eleanor w
alk tell the group published Dracula two years after Oscar Wilde was famously ar
rested tried and convicted for gross indecency the. So earlier literary vampire
s were quite sexual Stoker's Dracula is actually quite absent I mean do you thin
k that wild conviction led him to tone down the six in his novel. Yes absolutel
y because we can see from some of his early notes that he intended Dracula to be
a licentious character a rake you know likely the villains of the the original
gothic novels like The Italian and the mysteries of you don't. But by the time
he was working on the book the climate of censorship and the backlash that the P
icture of Dorian Gray received really I think gave him pause and I think that's
where Dracula. Started receding into the shadows we don't know how many drafts
of the book there were there were I think at least two full drafts and he had a
lot of trouble with it. His other books just kind of flowed out of him he was a
lmost like automatic writing Dracula he had difficulty with not because he was b
urnishing it than polishing it and perfecting it but because he had a lot of dif
ficulty with the subject matter the story he wanted to tell could not be told in
the moral climate of the late one eight hundred ninety S. and whether he did it
consciously or not. Dracula did take on the shape of a of a fairy tale and whe
reas Dorian Gray who is another kind of kind of a vampire character I was Oscar
Wilde's novel The Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was just excoriated c
an tempt in the revulsion with which it was received had to have given stoker pa
use and it was that very summer the Dorian Gray caused a firestorm of controvers
y that he really started to. The novel he had started. So it is kind of specul
ation but I think there's enough evidence there to say yes this is the most logi
cal explanation and I think also be by pushing Dracula into the shadows and havi
ng him be a fairly unformed character. It immediately involves the reader we be
come coconspirators we finish Dracula in our own minds. You know in the horror
of Dracula is whatever the most horrible thing in our own imagination might be t
his is why stories around the campfire or radio drama is always a great vehicle
for scary stories. I think if he had written Dracula as this kind of fully form
ed vice filled licentious their essential kind of villain. The book may have we
ll been forgotten. But it involves our imaginations it perks our curiosity and
I think this is another reason why any time the book is adapted directors and sc
reenwriters in it. They cannot resist putting their own spin on it. Finding so
me new new angle. There are as many different versions of the Dracula story as
there are adaptations. It isn't that they're disrespecting stokers original vis
ion. It's that they are following the lead of folklore which of course inspired
stoker from the very beginning and that's where Dracula's longevity comes from
he wouldn't live forever if he had been perfectly delineated. It's the flaw in
the novel truculent the dramatic flaw that makes it. One of the most read books
of the last century. Ordinarily you know if a character is not well characteri
zed and described and delineated it's considered a shortcoming in the case of Dr
acula. It makes the character. Immortal. Because we have to participate in hi
s characterization. He's off stage but we think about him. We're always antici
pating him just like the characters in the book. They've at school while the ba
nd pirates have been part of European folklore for centuries RAM stoker added se
veral new elements to their mythology What are some examples of. Well I think h
e medicalized the vampire. He brought in aspects of nine hundred centuries medi
cal thought he was the first writer for instance to situate the point of the vam
pires attack at the juggler vein because this would be a very efficient way to.
To get the amount of blood that the vampire required in earlier legends. It wa
s more nebulous It was almost poetic The vampire. Somehow took its energy or bl
ood from the heart from above the breast the use of transfusions to try to save
vampire victims was something very new. Actually he's really speculating becaus
e both Lucy and Mina would be dead if it had as many you know transfusions from
as many people as he lays forth in the book there is they don't tell you don't w
rite that is that they don't check for blood type. Yes So transfusions worked s
ometimes but mostly not because they didn't know anything about that but nonethe
less he he makes the vampire up to date. He brings the vampire into a medieval
superstition into a very modern up to date London we think of Dracula as a as a
kind of a historical period book but it was very contemporary at the time it was
like he did kind of what Stephen King does in a lot of his books a lot of famil
iar references and even trademarks and brand names. It's a world. We all know.
And the world of Dracula was a world that his readers knew very very well it w
as very immediate where they were these gadgets inventions typewriters phonograp
h box cameras and all that stuff is in Dracula. Stoker himself would have I thi
nk been very interested in the possibilities of the motion picture. You know ha
d he lived long enough to see it developed. And many of the initial reviews of
Dracula commented on the the originality of updating you know ancient legends an
d superstitions. In the form of a modern detective story which is really what i
t is you know it's written. Like the novels of Wilkie Collins great mystery wri
ter of the Victorian era in the form of journals and letters it's very much an e
pistolary novel newspaper clippings. And it seems very immediate We seem to be
examining evidence ourselves we become part of the detective process. There are
many details about Draco that have been changed in its various adaptations like
the fact that Dracula has Harry Paul means though is that part of it would make
him to want to drag me what other things have been forgotten. Oh yeah it's bee
n used a couple of times. Gary Oldman Dracula had hair on his palms Dracula had
hair on his palms. But he rarely is presented as openly repellent as stoker de
scribed him in the one nine hundred twenty two German film Nosferatu. We see pr
obably the closest approximation to what stoker intended. It's ironic because h
is wife spent years trying to have the film outlawed as a plagiarism and all pri
nts of it destroyed but it's probably the version that both evokes the fairy tal
e aspects of Dracula and the discussed verminous kind of qualities of the vampir
e himself those aside recognition and. There was no no permission granted I mea
n it was clear breach of copyright. Oh yes I mean the Germans really. They dug
a hole for themselves on the credits of the film saying freely adapted from for
him Stoker's Dracula and that indeed they did it without any license or payment
 and his wife did win and the prints were all ordered destroyed but fortunately
more than one print did survive and the film has become one of the classics of G
erman expressionism but it introduced things that stoker never dreamed of his Dr
acula can walk around London in broad daylight. It was only in one thousand nin
e hundred two in the film Nosferatu that the monsters destroyed by sunlight. If
you go back and look at all of the different ways of recognizing vampires or wa
rding off vampires or destroying vampires in European folklore stoker picks and
chooses and his choices have been the ones though that have. Most guided the fu
rther developments in popular culture the crucifix. The Crucifix the idea of th
e bat transformation the juggler vein being the point of attack garlic garlic go
vernment has a long long history as a blood purifier So it does come up in legen
ds and superstitions along with other botanicals but stoker chose to make a big
deal of garlic and so a big deal that remains other ways of destroying vampires
he never touched one of them was to you know just. Bury vampires facing down so
when they tried to get out of their coffins. They would just burrow deeper int
o the earth. And would not give us any problems. The Sometimes it wasn't a sta
ke through the heart. Sometimes it was a a needle put into vampires. There are
many variations on these customs and superstitions and stoker chose the ones th
at seemed more medical you know that transfusions might help that this could be
a blood disease and other things were. Just completely supernatural. I mean li
ke being able to turn into a mist or into a wolf. People forget the Stoker's Dr
acula was a werewolf as well as a vampire. It started with the stage they origi
nally wanted to have Dracula appear as a werewolf in the original Broadway stage
version and the effect was ludicrous and they got rid of the wolf and it append
ed itself more or less the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde category of monsters. But at o
ne point all of these billion blurred together in the European folklore imaginat
ion. How influenced you think starker was by other monsters like Robert Louis S
tevenson Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or or even the frighteningly real Jack the Ripper
who terrorizing London in the late one nine hundred eighty S.. People have won
dered about Jack the Ripper because there is a preface in a Icelandic translatio
n. That's attributed to stoker in which he seems to suggest that the Jack the R
ipper murders may have had something to do with the story he is telling and I do
n't think that is really what happened. There is an interesting Jack the Ripper
connection though stokers closest friend the novelist hall Kane was almost as f
amous as Charles Dickens and his time and he's almost forgotten to us today. He
had a strange relationship with a man who may well have been Jack the Ripper.
An American quack doctor named Francis tumble T. apparently seduced and abused.
Paul Kane as a young man and he was quite a frightening charismatic hypnotic ch
arlatan Bram Stoker actually dedicates Dracula to his friend Paul Kane and would
that be another angle on influencing. Stoker you think. Yes I think there are
some interesting clues we have from the whole Cain at the time of the Jack the
Ripper murders stoker and Cain were friends the episode with the cane and tumble
tea was well in the past. It would be strange if they didn't talk about it. F
rancis tumble tea was one of the serious contenders for being Jack the Ripper Sc
otland Yard actually had him in custody and let him go. The pictures that survi
ved of Francis tumble T. look a lot like stokers depiction of Dracula he's this
tall imposing man with this drooping moustache and this overbearing dominating p
resence. So in that sense I think Jack the Ripper may have had something to do
with the composition of Dracula. They've all the first Hollywood version of Dra
cula was the classic one thousand nine hundred one film starring babe the Lugosi
which we talked about earlier that Dracula arrived in theaters during the worst
year of the Great Depression and it was an unexpected success. What do you thi
nk audiences responded to. I think American audiences in one nine hundred thirt
y one needed a lightning rod for the free floating kind of fear that was everywh
ere I mean we've gone through a big economic crisis recently here but the differ
ences we have social safety nets today there was nothing like that in the Great
Depression. It really did seem like the end of the world the wolf was at every
door and I don't think Dracula or Frankenstein would have been the they both cam
e out in one thousand thirty one would have been the big successes. They were i
n had the impact on American popular culture if they had come out in happier yea
rs. I think they were a lightning rod for her. All of this free floating anxie
ty Dracula is the depression Dracula is fear Dracula is the mysterious force tha
t is draining our life blood away from any film lovers and critics go see is the
iconic Dracula but you said you favor. Frank Langella as portrayal in the one
nine hundred seventy nine movie. Let's hear a bit of that in this scene Dracula
is walking with Lucy played by Kate Nelligan a young woman he's planning to mak
e his bride come on you're listening to the children of the night but sad music
they make me want to see kids. So not like weeping. I think is a wonderful sou
nd. I mean I love the night so sick and surgery scepter so excited you take tha
t on for granted or not some might but the night was made to enjoy. Yes yes it
watched it was made to enjoy life and love looking forward. Frank Langella and
Kate Nelligan in the one nine hundred seventy nine film Dracula directed by John
badam What do you like about Len jealous performance in this version of Dracula
. Well if we're going to have a romantic conception of Dracula Langella nailed
it. I think for all time. I mean it's a definitive prefer. It's of that inter
pretation of the character and it's probably the best adaptation of the stage pl
ay that the Lugosi film was also based on he just brings the layers of melanchol
y and sexuality and humor to it. It's an extraordinary performance and it gets
better and better as time goes on that scene especially is wonderful. It has th
at blind children of the night. Bram Stoker got that line from Oscar Wilde's mo
ther Lady wild used to describe in one of her books on folklore the ancient warr
ior tribes of Ireland. So in one of Dracula's most famous moments we do have th
e presence of the family of Oscar Wilde. The that always seems to have a waitin
g audience. Why do we want or need to be scared. There are many answers to tha
t you know it's kind of a pressure valve. It's a way of letting off steam. Scr
eaming like laughing is a way of physically letting go of tension a good horror
movie does the same thing that a good roller coaster ride. Does it lets you get
it all out at a cathartic way but you notice people coming out of a horror movi
e they're very often scared out of their minds and you watch their faces coming
out of the theater there are often laughing and smiling are also lets us process
unpleasant realities in ways that we don't have to look too closely at those fr
ightening realities. You know there's much to be frightened about in the real w
orld and one of the themes ongoing in my own writing is the relationship of horr
or to great cultural you know and social traumas be they wars or epidemics or po
litical witch hunts or the sexual revolution or the AIDS epidemic. All of these
big cultural traumas. Set in motion identifiable patterns in the ways we like
to scare ourselves with horror entertainment. So horror is escapist but I think
it's important to keep in mind what we're escaping from. Is it more manageable
in a sense because I think it gets us through the night. If we're just reactin
g to a scary monster mask instead of the forces in the real world that are reall
y threatening us. We're not really dealing with the essential problem but it he
lps us cope I think. Vampires are still a regular presence in in books in film
and on television but that said the bad hires of Twilight True Blood and other p
opular series seem a bit more approachable like they've lost their bite so to sp
eak. What do they represent. Well since Ann Rice started her revolution in vam
pire literature in the one nine hundred seventy S. the vampire has become an ant
i-hero. The vampire has become the character we are most likely to identify wit
h. And this is a sea change you know from the days of Bram Stoker but certainly
the driving attraction of almost all the vampire characters of recent decades a
nd it's not surprising you know the vampire is the one monster who more or less
looks like something we might want to be ourselves. At least in its attractive
aspect. I mean Dracula is often a very sexy monster He's handsome he's attracti
ve he's got a great wardrobe in a castle in Europe. I mean what is there not to
want to identify with so that is the way Dracula is keeping himself alive. I t
hink if he had remained a. Dylan indefinitely. We would have lost our uses for
him but he changes he develops. And I think we're in an age of moral ambiguity
and I think the idea of the attractive vampire who we can identify with his is
probably very appropriate. Thank you very much. It's good to talk to you. Tha
nk you. DAVID J school in Pasadena California something in the blood the untold
story of Bram Stoker the man who wrote Dracula is published by W.W. Norton. Wr
iters and companies produced by sender Robin Offit contributing producer this we
ek was Paul Malcolm. Katie swales is associate producer. Technical operations
by Tim Lorimer. We always like to hear from you our email addresses writers and
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ee one. For news and reviews all about books check out C.B.C. Books dot ca the
executive producer is Tara Moore. I'm Eleanor a walk tell next week the winner
of this year's cost the prize for the best book of the year. Ireland's Sebastia
n Barry. He's the only novelist to win the prize twice this next week. I hope
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}