Dracula The Un-Dead

by Dacre Stoker

  Writing the novel

  DACRE:

  When Ian first asked me to become involved in this project, I laughed. I thought to myself, How can I write a book, especially one of this magnitude? Ian reassured me that, even though I had never written a novel before, I could do it. We would cooperate and share writing duties completely, each being responsible for half of the workload. Our editors would help. Ian also knew of an award-winning historical researcher, Alexander Galant, who could aid in our attempts to be true to the time period of the story.

  The next hurdle was that we had to craft a good story. Ian enthusiastically and seamlessly merged his story ideas with my own. This task was much easier than either of us thought—due to the fact that both of us drew our ideas from Bram Stoker himself. At times it was as if Bram were in the room with us, guiding us through the numerous hints he left behind, like bread crumbs for us to follow.

  Ian and I both deduced from writings Bram left behind that he, or his publisher, always intended there would be a sequel to Dracula. Our primary evidence for this is Bram’s publisher’s typewritten manuscript, recently sold at auction at Christie’s, which has a different ending. In that version, the story ends with a volcanic eruption and Dracula’s castle falls into a river of lava. This sequence was cut in the final version for the current, more ambiguous ending. In addition, Dracula’s “death” at the end of Bram’s novel does not follow the “rules” that the Van Helsing character shares on how to kill a vampire. Van Helsing states that a stake must be driven through the heart, followed by decapitation. At the end of the novel, Dracula is stabbed through the heart and his throat is slit. We felt that these were telltale signs that a sequel had been part of Bram’s plan.

  As a Stoker, I felt Bram needed to be a character in this story, so we could finally give him a share of the limelight. Ian had read Bram’s preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula from 1901, where Bram claimed the events he wrote of “really took place.” We both seized on my great-granduncle’s whim and saw this as the centerpiece of our story. We would use the idea that the events of Bram’s book were “fact” as a building block in our own tale.

  The next question you may ask is, Why drag Jack the Ripper into a sequel to Dracula? Again Ian and I drew our inspiration from my great-granduncle. To quote another section of Bram’s 1901 Icelandic preface, “[Dracula’s] series of crimes has not yet passed from the memory—a series of crimes which appear to have originated from the same source, and which at the same time created as much repugnance in people everywhere as the murders of Jack the Ripper.” It seems that Bram was hinting that the Ripper’s crimes were of the same nature of Dracula’s. This we used as a launching point for one of the aspects of our story, and it was amazing how easily all the pieces fell into place.

  Once we knew that our villain was going to be Jack the Ripper, Ian and I needed to identify the elusive serial killer. Ian had read Bram’s short story Dracula’s Guest, which was published after Bram’s death. Many scholars believe this story was part of the original novel, but had been cut by Bram’s publisher. Some even think Bram intended to use this short story as a basis for a sequel. In this story, the character Johann happens upon a tomb with an iron stake on the roof. The grave marker reads COUNTESS DOLINGEN TO GRAZ IN STYRIA SEARCHED AND FOUND DEAD 1801. Also engraved, in Russian, is THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST—a clear marker that in this grave is a vampire. The theory exists among some scholars that Bram was influenced by the historic Countess Elizabeth Bathory’s bloody deeds when writing Dracula and that Bram made Dracula a count based on the name given to Countess Bathory, “Blood Countess.” It is also assumed by some that the countess in Dracula’s Guest somehow represents Bathory herself. That theory appealed to us and we decided to expand upon it.

  One of Ian’s sources suggested that Bathory was a distant relative of Dracula. We decided that this would serve our purpose well, and we have incorporated it. According to stories passed down mainly by Saxon scribes, Prince Dracula was guilty of performing many bloodthirsty acts. The same can be said of Countess Bathory, who was known to bathe in the blood of her victims. We found it interesting that the two most well-known figures in history that people today (rightly or wrongly) associate with vampire legends might have been related. As Bram did in 1897 when he introduced us to his lead villain, a fictional count based loosely on an historic figure, we in 2009 have done the same with with our Countess Bathory.

  As we continued to hammer out our plot, Ian suggested that I travel to the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia to research the notes Bram used to write Dracula. In the notes I found a character that Bram had planned for, but had deleted early in the process. This was a detective named Cotford. It had always been perplexing to me that Bram, being as thorough as he was, would not have included a police investigation into the strange deaths caused by Dracula. We decided to make Bram’s character of Detective Cotford our own, and use his detective work as a way of leading our readers through the mystery at the heart of our novel.

  IAN:

  Dacre and I now focused our attention on Bram’s character of Count Dracula. Here was a major dilemma. When Bram was writing Dracula in the late 1800s, the historic Prince Dracula was a little-known figure in the West, mostly forgotten to history. Bram cobbled together a few facts regarding Prince Dracula and merged them with his own fiction. Was this done by Bram intentionally, to separate his Count Dracula from the historic Prince Dracula? Or, was it that Bram couldn’t find Prince Dracula’s complete story in his research and simply filled in the gaps using his imagination?

  For guidance, we returned to Bram’s writings. The Dracula character that Bram created in 1897 was a mysterious, refined, and complex being. He displayed conflicting attributes: At times he appears a nobleman of culture and learning, deeply in tune with his country’s past, yet at other times a wild animal displaying basic survival instincts. He was a man of the fifteenth century trying to relate to the nineteenth-century world around him, at times embracing modernization, and at others times rejecting it. He displayed a moral compass, which caused struggle as he tried to justify his need to take human life. He killed only when necessary and, to his mind, for the greater good.

  I immediately sensed that the character, if not the backstory, of Bram’s Count Dracula was very similar to the descriptions of the historical Prince Dracula. Prince Dracula was a man also fighting against changing times, seeking to drive the world back to the dark days of the crusades. Prince Dracula also had a way of always justifying his dark deeds, claiming he did what he did because he had no other choice, or that his victims had chosen their own fate by their actions.

  If Bram wanted to make his count synonymous with the historic prince, it would have been impossible at the time he was writing his novel. But we both felt that the similarities between the character of the historical Prince Dracula and Bram’s Count Dracula were not mere coincidence.

  Since the 1972 release of In Search of Dracula, the line between the historic Prince Dracula and Bram’s Count Dracula has been irreversibly blurred for the public at large. The two forever merged in pop culture in the opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Based on the similarities in Bram’s character and the historical record, and the weight of the public’s awareness of the historical prince, Dacre and I felt we had no choice but to once and for all merge the count with the prince. We are also confident that if Bram was writing Dracula today, with the wealth of historical information now available on Prince Dracula, his meticulous nature and attention to detail would result in a character that reflected the historic record.

  Some may read our novel and astutely point out that our character of Dracula is not, as in Bram’s novel, the absolute villain. In Bram’s novel, Dracula was only described through the view of his enemies, the journals, letters, etc. of the band of heroes. In our sequel we decided that we would give Dracula his say. This allowed us the chance to merge Prince Dracula with Count Dracula and present the Dracula of o
ur sequel as a complex antihero. Others still perceive him as evil, but by allowing him to speak to his own experience he presents a different side. We therefore do not change Bram’s vision, we just present another view. This also served to keep our story fresh and vital.

  We have long stated that one of the key reasons for writing this sequel was to remedy the cannibalization and bastardization of Bram’s novel by Hollywood and other authors. This is not to say we dislike the other versions. It is just that from a literary standpoint, none of the films or books fully captured the complete essence of Bram’s novel and characters. Even in the Tod Browning-Bela Lugosi classic—the only film to have input from the Stoker family—the character of Arthur Holmwood was left out, and Renfield travels to Castle Dracula in the opening of the film instead of Jonathan Harker.

  The problems truly began when Hollywood wanted to make a sequel to that film based on Dracula’s Guest. The story goes that Florence Stoker would not sell the rights unless she was guaranteed more input in the creative process. It was in the midst of these negotiations that Bram’s copyright was declared void by the U.S. Copyright Office. This left Hollywood free to develop the sequel as they wished. With Florence demanding more control and Bela Lugosi demanding a large pay increase to reprise the role of Dracula, the decision was made to hire John Balderston to write Dracula’s Daughter, thereby cutting Bela and Florence out of the process completely. The film failed, but the die had been cast. Everyone was now free to write a Dracula novel or make a Dracula film any way they wanted. And oh, they did.

  Now, here’s the rub. We know there is a large segment of Dracula fans that have only seen the movies and have never read the book, and of course we wanted to inspire many of those folks to read Bram’s original. Our dearest wish is all Dracula fans—of the book and of the films, will read and enjoy our sequel. To this end there are several areas which we felt that film fans had so embraced and had become so ingrained into Dracula legend that we could not overlook them. To the literary purists we apologize, but we feel this is a necessary concession, made in the hope of once and for all harmonizing all Dracula fans.

  The concessions are as follows: the romance between Mina and Dracula; the ability of vampires to walk in daylight, fly, and transform themselves; the weapons used to destroy them; and the location and names of certain geographical sites.

  As for the Mina-Dracula romance, Dacre and I agreed that this would have to be handled with greater care than in any of the films, and deal with the fact that Bram never clearly wrote that a romance occurred. With this in mind, we went to a passage in one of Mina’s journal entries from Bram’s novel that we felt was conspicuously ambiguous. The passage comes after Mina writes that she believes Dracula has come to her in a dream and reads: “It is strange to me to be kept in the dark as I am to-day, after Jonathan’s full confidence for so many years.”

  Dacre and I found it strange that Jonathan’s and Van Helsing’s reaction to Mina’s dream is to cut her out of their plans to combat Dracula since heretofore she had been an equal member of the band of heroes. This was before Mina drinks Dracula’s blood from his chest. To our minds, this was the perfect place to insert the Dracula-Mina romance without recasting Bram’s narrative. As we envisioned it, during this “dream” Dracula comes to Mina to explain his side of the story in the hopes of encouraging the brave band of heroes to back off their pursuit. Mina, not wanting to admit to the others that she had spoken to Dracula because they had made a romantic connection (not physical yet), claimed instead that he had only visited her in a dream. Jonathan and Van Helsing naturally find this suspicious and cut Mina out of their plans. Mina’s reaction to this slight by her husband and Van Helsing then sends her back into Dracula’s arms and to an eventual physical liaison. By thus weaving the Dracula-Mina romance into the fabric of Bram’s writing, we were able to stay true to Bram and our literary fans while at not alienating our film fans.

  In Bram’s novel, Count Dracula can walk about in daylight, but is weaker during daylight hours. A vampire being destroyed by the light of the sun was an invention of F. W. Murnau in Nosferatu. Yet, vampires burning to ash in the sun is such a part of modern vampire lore that many reading Bram’s novel for the first time claim that he is “wrong.”

  This, like many other aspects of vampire lore has also evolved over the past century. Bram’s vampire lore is no longer cutting edge, and we have tried to address this in our sequel. Therefore, we decided to turn to science and fringe science to, with great care, modernize Bram’s vampires. We did nothing here that Bram had not foreseen and even expected would one day occur. Our proof for this again comes from the 1901 Icelandic preface: “And I am further convinced that [these events] must always remain to some extent incomprehensible, although continuing research in psychology and natural sciences may, in years to come, give logical explanations of such strange happenings which, at present, neither scientists nor the secret police can understand.” In other words, Bram wrote that the strange events that occurred in his novel, at the time he wrote them, are unexplainable. He goes on to write that he fully expects for science in years to come to provide a logical explanation.

  Thus, Ian and I have taken the position that vampire’s burn to ash in the sun due to an allergic/chemical reaction to the viral vampire blood that transforms the vampire’s DNA. Of course in 1912, the year in which our sequel takes place, the terms “DNA,” “virus,” or “flu” had not yet been discovered. In their place we used the term “venom.” The vampire virus changes the DNA of a human into a vampire. Part of that transformation is the ability to control the approximately 70 percent of our brains, which we do not yet use or know much about and thus allows for nonhuman powers. We explained the transformation of vampires into mist and gargoyle, etc. as a telepathic illusion created through mind control. As for the ability of the vampire to “travel fast” by soaring through the air, we turned to the study of telekinesis or levitation—the ability to move objects or one’s self with the mind. With the increased brain power due to the vampire virus, it is easy to understand in our fictional realm how these things could be possible.

  We have also clarified the weapons that could be used against the vampire. Again we turned to science, and in some cases merged religion with the science. To explain why in our novel religious icons, such as the cross, work to repel some vampires and not others, we turned to psychology. Those vampires who in life believed in God but have committed evil deeds would naturally have a guilty conscience and fear religious icons as a symbol of their soul’s ultimate damnation. Vampires who did not believe in God in life would have no fear of religious icons. The burning of the skin that occurs when a “guilty conscience” vampire comes in physical contact with a religious icon or is splashed with holy water is due to a supercharged psychosomatic reaction.

  When it came to vampires and mirrors, we could not find any justification in science for this phenomenon, so we used our sequel to discredit it. As for garlic, we felt a vampire could be allergic. The same for wolfsbane. As for silver, this has long been relegated in modern pop culture to werewolves, and that is where we left it.

  The final concession is the location and names of certain geographical sites. Bram spread his story over many locations from Transylvania to London, Exeter, and Whitby. When Deane and Balderston wrote their play it became unfeasible to have so many set changes. The solution was to set the play in only two main locations: Transylvania and Whitby. This simplification was duplicated by numerous film versions of the story, thus confusing fans for a generation. In Bram’s novel, there was not a Carfax Abbey, which is shocking to the scores of film fans who’ve never read the book. Bram did write that Dracula bought a house called Carfax, placing it in Purfleet about twenty miles east of London. To add to the confusion, there are the ancient ruins of Whitby Abbey from which Bram drew inspiration while writing parts of the novel in Whitby. Again hoping to resolve conflicts by blending the stories of the films, play, and original novel, we merged Carfax a
nd Whitby Abbey into one location: Carfax Abbey in Whitby.

  This same idea of compromise was used to finally address the long-standing confusion over the locations of the Westenra summer home and Dr. Seward’s asylum. We placed them both in Whitby, as they are in the play and many of the films. In our story, we explained why the character Bram made his decision to locate the asylum at Purfleet in his novel this way: At the time Bram didn’t know that the events he was recounting were real. He thought they were the ravings of a madman who had told him a tall tale in a pub. Thus, Bram felt he was free to make whatever changes he wanted for the purposes of his fictionalized account. In our novel, Bram discovers that the story is indeed true, and the liberties that he took with the tale come back to haunt him. Literally.

  DACRE:

  When researching Bram’s notes at the Rosenbach Museum, I found a few more exciting tidbits that we decided to include. First, Bram originally scribbled many different title ideas before settling on the title for his novel to be The Un-Dead. Later, possibly based on the suggestion of his editor shortly before publication, it became just Dracula. This explains the inspiration for our title.

  In the Rosenbach notes I also found a list of potential character names that Bram compiled but never used for whatever reason. Ian and I decide to give these names to some of our lesser characters. These names are: Kate Reed, who discovers the impaled body of Jonathan Harker; Dr. Max Windshoeffel, who witnesses the gargoyle flying down the tube tunnel; and Francis Aytown, the photographer who witnesses “the flaming dragon” outside the tube station.