Dracula started it all. It was the very first Universal Monsters movie. Released on February 14, 1931, it catapulted Bela Lugosi - Dracula himself - to stardom, and launched what we now know as the Universal Monsters series. But what about the book that the movie came from? And how do they compare?
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published on May 26, 1987, two years after Oscar Wilde, a good friend (and probably more) of Stoker’s was imprisoned. But more on that later. It made a splash, and birthed all of the modern vampire legends we know today. The original Dracula was what gave us the idea that vampires sleep during the day and wake at night. It told us of their lack of reflection in mirrors, and their hatred of Catholicism. It was also batshit bonkers insane.
Universal’s Dracula condensed a lot of the story. It left characters out, and cut several important - and insane - scenes. To start with, Universal’s Dracula begins with Renfield’s arrival at Castle Dracula, not Jonathan Harker’s. Renfield arrives in a nearby town, is warded off by peasants upon his mention of the castle, decides this must be fine, and continues on his way. Dracula’s kind to him immediately upon arrival, but then feeds him blood and kidnaps him so that Drac can get to England to eat more people.
Jonathan Harker’s experience in the book is similar to Renfield’s in the movie up until he gets to the castle. There, Dracula is strange and overly friendly, saying things like “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!”, which is a normal human thing to say. He doesn’t feed Jonathan blood, but instead does a number of increasingly strange things, such as:
Convinces Jonathan to stay up at night and sleep during the day.
Reads a book of railway timetables like it were a novel.
Crawls down the walls of his castle like a lizard instead of using any doors.
Acts like he has servants when he doesn’t, meaning that he has to do all of the chores and cooking and everything for the entire castle when Jonathan’s not looking.
Is notably obsessed with England.
Tells Jonathan to write letters home that should say things about being near death or attacked by wolves.
Throws a mirror out of a window when Jonathan points out his reflection wasn’t in it.
And many more.
The crawling down the walls like a lizard isn’t an isolated event, either, he does it like every day.
So not only is the Castle Dracula scene in the movie far too short, it is also way less insane than originally written.
Now, while Mr. Harker is being haunted by horrors beyond his comprehension over in Castle Dracula, his fiancee, Mina, and her friend Lucy are off having a grand old time back in England.
Mina Harker (nee, Murray), is very watered down for the movie. She is Mina Seward, daughter of John Seward, who runs the lunatic asylum Renfield is being kept in. Her and Jonathan are very in love, but in a kind of bland, Victorian way. She is bitten by Dracula, and somewhat turned, but is very frail and fainting about the whole thing. Lucy barely even lasts ten minutes.
The Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra we see in the book are, once again, wildly different than in the movie. We are first introduced to Lucy by learning that she has been proposed to by three men in one day - John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey P Morris, more on them later - and Mina is exactly as obsessed with Jonathan as he is with her. While Mr. Harker is in and on his way to Castle Dracula, he is constantly making memos about Mina in his journal with recipes he should get for her, notes about how much he loves her, etc. Mina, back in England, is studying law and memorizing timetables to help Jonathan get his lawyering business going.
Mina kicks serious ass the entire book, even once she starts being turned into a vampire. She walks barefoot over gravel to rescue Lucy from Dracula, uses her psychic link with Dracula to help everyone know where he is, is hinted at having eaten someone, and much more. Without Mina, no one in this book would be alive.
In the movie, Jonathan and Mina are still very much in love, yes - but not to anywhere near the extent they are in the book. The movie has them both as very frail characters, as Jonathan doesn’t listen to anyone’s advice and won’t understand what’s going on. Mina’s vampirism exhibits itself more as a case of Victorian woman disease than as anything as cool as it was in the book. They are in love, but in the way that Jonathan protects Mina, who is ill.
The Mina and Jonathan Harker of the book are like Morticia and Gomez Addams. After his ordeal in Transylvania, Jonathan is found raving mad with a brain fever in the woods, screaming about vampires and monsters, with his hair turned white. Mina marries him almost immediately after seeing him again. He is being cared for in a nunnery and can’t even stand, but Mina writes to Lucy about their wedding as though it were the most beautiful to ever exist. They would both fight through hell and back for each other, and do for the whole book.
That kind of love is, at its heart, what Dracula is about. Even in the movie, this very small group of people finds out that something is hurting the ones they love, and sets out to do something about it, not matter the cost. In the movie, Mina is locked in her room, which has been draped in garlic to keep the vampire out. Van Helsing and Jonathan go all the way underground to the church crypt to kill Dracula, following him and Mina the whole way. The way they go about everything in the book is, as you may have guessed, much wilder.
The main crew of Dracula the book is as follows:
Jonathan Harker, soliciter - kept captive by Dracula
Mina Harker, girlboss - Jonathan’s wife, possessed by Dracula, smarter than everyone
Lucy Westenra, best friend - turned by Dracula
Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, doctor - spends most of his time trying to convince everyone that vampires are real without sounding too insane
Dr. John Seward, doctor - runs lunatic asylum that Renfield is kept in, proposes to Lucy
Arthur Holmwood, lawyer - has something to do with Dracula and money, was supposed to marry Lucy before she died
Quincey P Morris, cowboy - Black, Texan, cowboy who proposes to Lucy, knows it’s vampires, and goes around shooting every bat he sees for a while after learning that on of them was a problem
The main plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula revolves around not Count Dracula himself, but these seven people, all of whom love each other so much they would do literally anything for the others. Arthur is willing to desecrate Lucy’s body if it has the slightest chance of saving her soul. Dr. Seward, with some help, puts the pieces together that Renfield is Dracula’s servant and uses that to their advantage. Dr. Van Helsing knows what to do about vampires, and by god, is he going to do it. Jonathan and Mina are powered by only their love for each other and Lucy, which ends up being why Dracula can be killed.
While there are many problematic things in the original text of Dracula - random racism, anti-semitism, and the like - Bram Stoker also touches on something essential: that, as cheesy as it is, love conquers all. Love is the force in Dracula that saves lives and sanities. Love is the reason these six people were able to kill a monster that was centuries old. And love is something that Bram Stoker had just lost when he began writing Dracula.
Best estimates have Bram Stoker beginning to write Dracula in 1895. This is the year Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for ‘indecency’ (read: homosexuality). While it is widely known that Wilde was gay, it is less well known that Bram Stoker was. And even less known that they had an affair. With these details, Dracula is put into a whole new light.
Dracula is the blueprint for the modern vampire myth in many ways - which can be read about here. But the piece of that blueprint I want to talk about now is isolation.
Vampires are very isolated creatures, a phenomenon which, to the best of my knowledge, began with Dracula. The Count lives in a huge castle on a hill, miles away from the nearest town. He is hated in that town, too, with the villagers making the evil eye whenever they hear his name, warning away everyone who wishes to go. But even with all of that, his isolation is a choice. He has chosen to live in this castle for centuries with no one but the three vampire women that try to attack Jonathan. The reason the events of Dracula are set into play is that Dracula wants to purchase real estate in England for better feeding, leaving his castle for the first time in a very long time. That kind of isolation, the kind that is both forced and chosen, is a kind Bram Stoker likely became very familiar with upon Oscar Wilde’s arrest. If Wilde, a successful playwright, poet, and novelist could be fouund out and arrested for sodomy, then anyone could. Especially someone who’d had an affair with Wilde himself. The character of Dracula was likely greatly influenced by Wilde, and probably also influenced by traits Stoker saw in himself. Dracula’s specific type of monstrosity is reminiscent of the monster Stoker believed to be in himself, as well as Wilde, something feral and improper lurking beneath an elegant, social exterior. Another character likely influenced by both men is Renfield.
Renfield is Dracula’s first victim in both the book and the movie. In the movie, he takes Jonathan Harker’s place in being sent to Castle Dracula as a solicitor, only to be driven mad by being hypnotized. He is then sent to Dr. Seward’s asylum upon being found the only survivor of a shipwreck that was caused a storm. There, he is imprisoned, eating bugs, flies first, but then spiders, raving about his master and the blood of life. He does his best to help Mina and the rest of them, but isn’t listened to on account of his insanity. His character is mostly the same in the book, one of the only things that isn’t changed much. Renfield, imprisoned in several ways, is a melancholy echo of Stoker’s own imprisonment in both society and his own mind, as well as Wilde’s, in literal prison, and societal disdain.
As well as Univeral’s Dracula did with Renfield, what it ended up doing was telling a different story than the book did. It focuses more on the elegance in the story, of a brutal yet refined monster making its way into society and preying on rich and vulnerable women. While it is a very good movie, it takes away a lot of what made the original story what it was.
Classic literature has a reputation for being boring and stuffy. Dracula is anything but. It is a story of love so fierce it kills something long undead and damned. It is a story of society, and how long one should let the bound of propriety hold them under horrible circumstances. It is about both the fear that someone you know is a monster, as well as the fear that you may be one yourself. It is about the detrimental power of isolation. It is scary, bloody, feral, chaotic, and thoughroughly unsophisticated. It is an entirely different beast from the movie, and that is how they should be compared.
If Universal’s 1931 adaptation of Dracula is one scoop of vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone, the original text is three scoops of Neapolitan and one scoop of brownie fudge swirl in a waffle cone with sprinkles. Both are still good, both are still ice cream, and they even have a good amount of the same thing in them. One of them just has a lot more going on. One isn’t better than the other, they’re just very different versions of the same base dessert.
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