This Day in History: Dracula was published on this day in 1897. The novel did not make much money for the author, Bram Stoker, who eventually went broke just before he died. The movies are what really made Dracula a star. He has appeared in more films than any other horror character—over 200 and counting—and that number doesn't even include comedies and cartoons.
Bram Stoker started writing Dracula right after the Jack the Ripper killings, but it may also have been influenced by a Romanian prince named Vlad Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, who was known for skewering his enemies. The working title of the novel was The Dead Undead, which was later shortened to The Undead. Right before the book was published, Stoker changed the title to Dracula.
The 1922 German classic film Nosferatu was almost destroyed because of the Dracula copyright. Today, Dracula is now in the public domain.
Dracula became a vampire after making a pact with the devil according to Van Helsing: “The Draculas… were a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, among the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due…”.
Despite most vampires in popular culture only being able to be killed via a stake through the heart, Dracula must first be decapitated and then impaled with a stake.
Dracula isn't the only Vampire we've come across in fiction. Let's not forget Count Orlock, played by Max Schrek in 1922's Nosferatu. There is also Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, The Count from Sesame Street, Kurt Barlow in Salem's Lot, Jerry Dandrige in 1985's Fright Night, David (Kiefer Sutherland) in the Lost Boys (1987), Anne Rice's the Vampire Lestat, or Blade, played by Wesley Snipes.
Before Bram Stoker's Dracula, Vampires inspired the imagination of many writers. John Polidori wrote his The Vampyre in 1819. "Byron seems to have been fascinated with the vampire theme, for in addition to his unsuccessful short story, he has used the theme in his poem, The Giaour. Here he brings in the idea that the vampire curse is a judgment from God for sin, and that the most terrible part of the punishment is the being forced to prey upon those who in life were dearest to him." (Dorothy Scarborough 1917)
Robert Southey in his Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) gives us a young girl as a vampire, and we get another female vampire in Geothe's The Bride of Corinth. Sheridan Le Fanu writes of a lesbian vampire, in Carmilla (1872), and the penny dreadful, Varney the Vampire (1847), was quite influential in its day.
H. G. Wells gives us the novelty of a botanical vampire in his The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, and Algernon Blackwood, who has touched upon every terrible aspect of supernaturalism, gives us two types of vampires in his story, The Transfer.
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