Bram Stoker's Dracula

The film opens in 1462, on the eastern edge of Christian Europe. A Romanian prince, Vlad Dracula, rides away to fight the armies of the Ottoman Empire and wins. But his enemies send false word back to his castle that he has been killed, and his wife Elisabeta, believing it, throws herself into the river below. When he returns in triumph, a priest tells him that because she took her own life her soul is damned. Something in him breaks. He renounces the God he has been defending, drives his sword into the stone cross of his own chapel, and drinks the blood that runs from it. He becomes what he will be for the next four hundred years.

Jump to 1897. A young London solicitor, Jonathan Harker, is sent to Transylvania to complete a property purchase for a client named Count Dracula — the job having passed to him after his colleague Renfield returned from the castle out of his mind and was shut in an asylum. Harker crosses the threshold of the castle and finds an ancient, courteous, unsettling host who keeps him talking late and is never seen in daylight.

Then the Count catches sight of a photograph of Harker's fiancée, Mina Murray — and stops. The face is Elisabeta's. Harker's usefulness ends there. He is left imprisoned in the castle, and the Count takes ship for England, carrying boxes of his own Transylvanian earth.

In London the Count takes possession of Carfax Abbey and, by night, hunts. Mina's wealthy, high-spirited friend Lucy Westenra — courted by three men at once — begins to sicken. She sleepwalks; she loses blood; no doctor can explain it. Dr Seward sends for his old teacher, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who examines her and says the unsayable word. There is a creature at work, and it obeys rules: it casts no reflection, it recoils from the sacred, it will not enter a house unless someone inside invites it. Lucy dies, rises as a vampire, and the men who loved her have to destroy her themselves.

By day, meanwhile, the Count has made himself young. He appears in London as an elegant foreign gentleman and meets Mina by apparent chance. He is charming, sad, oddly familiar. She is engaged to a man who has vanished somewhere in Eastern Europe, and she finds she cannot stay away. It is a courtship, filmed as a courtship — and this is the film's boldest decision: the audience is asked to want it, at least a little.

Then news arrives that Harker has escaped the castle and is being cared for in a convent in Romania. Mina goes to him and marries him there. The Count, left behind, does the cruellest thing available to him, and Lucy's death is the result.

Mina returns to London married. Van Helsing's group hunts down the Count's boxes of earth and destroys them, cutting off his refuges one by one. But the Count comes to Mina, confesses everything he has done, and she — furious, grieving for Lucy — tells him she loves him anyway, and remembers, or believes she remembers, a life as Elisabeta. At her own insistence he begins to turn her. He stops before it is finished; he will not damn her as she was damned before. When the hunters break in, he escapes.

The chase runs east: by sea to Varna, then overland to the Borgo Pass as winter closes in. Van Helsing takes Mina — now half-changed, and dangerous — to the castle itself and destroys the Count's three brides. The others intercept the cart carrying his coffin at sunset, in the snow below the castle walls. In the fight Quincey Morris, one of Lucy's three suitors, is stabbed and dies. The Count is mortally wounded.

Mina carries him into the chapel where, four centuries earlier, he cursed God. There, dying, he becomes a young man again and asks her for peace. She gives it to him: she drives the blade through his heart, and then, so that it is finished properly, takes his head. The mark on her forehead fades. Above them the chapel's painted ceiling shows the two of them at rest. Whether that is redemption or merely a beautiful ending is left for the audience to decide.

Here is where the legend was manufactured. Stoker's working notes for the novel survive — they are held at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia — and they show what he read. On 8 August 1890, on holiday in Whitby, he borrowed from the public library a book published in 1820 by a British consul, William Wilkinson: An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. From it he copied a few lines about a "Voivode Dracula" who crossed the Danube and attacked Turkish troops — and one footnote, which he wrote out in capitals: DRACULA in the Wallachian language means DEVIL.

That footnote is the whole of it. Wilkinson never gives the man a first name. There is no Vlad in the book, no Țepeș, no Impaler, no atrocity, no castle and certainly no vampire. Up to that moment Stoker had been calling his creature Count Wampyr; in the notes he crosses that out and writes Dracula instead. He took a name because it sounded like the devil. Vlad III is not mentioned anywhere in the notes.

Be fair to the other side, though: the novel does hand its Count a warlike ancestry. Dracula boasts of a man of his own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground — Wilkinson's sentence, almost word for word — and Van Helsing later says the Count must have been that same Voivode Dracula. So Stoker's vampire is loosely attached to a real warlord. But it is a thread, not a portrait, and no reader in 1897 could have identified the man.

Stoker never set foot in Romania. His Transylvania was built in libraries: the atmosphere and the word nosferatu came largely from Emily Gerard's essay "Transylvanian Superstitions" (1885) and her book on the region. Whitby gave him the rest of the machinery — the abbey on the cliff, and a Russian ship called the Dmitry that had been driven aground there in 1885, which he rewrote as the Demeter. Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian countess usually named as another source, appears to be a later addition too: Stoker took notes from Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves, but not one of them concerns her.

The Vlad identification arrived much later. In 1972 two Boston College historians, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, published In Search of Dracula, which fused the novel with the prince and sold enormously — written, crucially, before Stoker's notes had been properly studied. Both authors later softened the claim. But it was out. A 1974 television version already gave its Count a lost wife whose double he pursues, and closed by pointing at Vlad the Impaler. And then Coppola's 1992 film made the fusion definitive and beautiful: a prologue in 1462, a wife named Elisabeta, a reincarnated love. None of that is in Stoker's novel. Not the wife, not the reincarnation, not Vlad, not the sword in the cross. It was invented for the screen — and it is now what most of the world means by "Dracula". Even the castle is a stand-in: Bran Castle in Romania draws the tourists, though its connection to both Vlad and the novel is essentially an invention of the tourist trade.