To an even greater degree than his predecessor, Lord Byron, Stoker forever changed the popular understanding of the vampire. By making his titular character a foreign aristocrat and foregrounding themes of seduction, transition, penetration, liberation, temptation, and resurrection, Stoker's bodily fluid-filled novel took a common bit of transcultural folklore — one born from a lack of knowledge about the process of decomposition and illnesses — and turned it into something else entirely. "Dracula" is nothing if not one big, bloody, euphemistic, and overtly Freudian romp through Stoker's and surrounding cultures' fears, phobias, repressions, taboos, and anxieties.
The 20th and 21st centuries have brought audiences a litany of culturally relevant iterations of Stoker's monster — everything from coming-of-age romances ("Twilight," "First Kill"), to a failed civil rights allegory ("True Blood"), to a sweet yet complicated story of love and duty ("Let the Right One In"), to adaptations that successfully explore issues of identity, inequality, oppression, acceptance, liberation, interpersonal relationships, co-dependence, and transformation using everything from gothic literary tradition and American history ("Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire") to gut-busting humor and mockumentary interviews ("What We Do in the Shadows").
But while almost every Dracula movie has employed the novel's more obvious subtext — homoeroticism, tension with sexual liberation, and potential to serve as a metaphoric vehicle for transitional states of being — via all kinds of vampire narratives, few have viewed Dracula himself through quite the same lens as his Victorian-era creator. Even adaptations of the novel, such as 1992's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and Netflix's "Dracula," have stopped short of making their simultaneously alluring and deadly Dracula something to fear. In that aim, they've avoided — almost entirely — the novel's xenophobic core. Unfortunately, 2023's atmosphere warrants as much of our attention as ever on exploring our fear — and hunting — of the Other.
