At the height of the 2020 American Election, amidst the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic, #Dracula started trending on Twitter. The reason? Trump, his lead disappearing, had tweeted “STOP THE COUNT!”. People immediately responded with images of Dracula, offering unflattering comparisons with the outgoing President. This is the latest episode in Dracula’s long career of being relevant, referenced, and reinvented. This class will explore just what it is about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). that makes it eternally relevant for adaptation within a rapidly changing culture.

Dracula demonstrates the significance of Victorian anxieties within contemporary culture more than any other novel. Theories of adaptation has moved beyond fidelity to an ‘original’, recognising instead that each new adaptation has its own audience and intention. Dracula adaptations react to the needs and expectations of the era that produced them - providing an invaluable case-study that demonstrates changing attitudes toward Victorian legacies and their synergies of reinvention. For example, the popular convention of ‘Romanticising’ Dracula (such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) adding a plot about Dracula’s reincarnated wife) is read with cultural trends of ‘attractive’ vampires, such as Anne Rice’s fiction and the Twilight phenomenon, often ignoring that it signals a rejection of the patriarchal, xenophobic values Victorian period.

This class will examine the extended ‘afterlife’ of Dracula in transformations, identifying shared themes across diverse media, and to demonstrate that reworking Dracula, even making him child-friendly, is a way of coming to terms with problematic nineteenth-century histories. Increased engagement with new media incarnations of Dracula is vital to understanding the appeal of this nineteenth-century vampire to modern audiences of all kinds. Video games, comic books, and even cartoons have all played a key role in enshrining Dracula as a pop-culture icon; as comfortable opening a hotel as fighting Batman.

A key example of such an incarnation is the long-running Castlevania series, which has run from 1986 to the present and could boast being the ‘Dracula’ series with the most iterations. Castlevania has built its own Dracula mythos, received its own trans-media adaptation and offers an international perspective on incorporating diverse influences from other adaptations. To Dracula scholarship it offers a long-running example of not only literary adaptation across media, the role of international cultures, but most significantly how new versions feed off previous ones, engaging with audience expectations, and crafting a lineage of blood across many different versions.

Instructor:
Matthew Crofts was awarded his doctorate at the University of Hull, England, UK, for his research on the importance of tyranny to the Gothic mode, utilising a range of Gothic novels and historical eras. Matthew’s previous publications include chapters on historical figures in MacDonald Fraser's Flashman in Neo-Victorian Biofictions (2020), an article in the special ‘Alternative Dickens’ issue of Victoriographies (8:1, 2018), a chapter on Dracula’s multimedia legacy in the edited collection Gothic Afterlives (Lexington Books, 2019), and a joint-authored chapter on Gothic rats in the edited collection Gothic Animals (Palgrave, 2020).

 Questions The Class Will Address:

• The class will highlight and advocate for lesser-known and under-valued Dracula texts and films.
• It will explore the tendency of Dracula adaptations to influence one another; creating a blood flow
• It will show how reworkings of Dracula demonstrate our relationship with the Victorians, both as legacy in flux and a strand of continuity between past and present concerns.
• To demonstrate the value in literary and visual re-writings and pastiches featuring Dracula, and the limitation in exploring these texts through only a ‘Gothic’ approach.
• Equally, this class asks why readers and authors share a compulsion to produce a sequel, spin-offs and assorted afterlives to Stoker’s novel?
• The class will identify the most prominent themes that develop, both within literary texts and screen and new media examples, which in turn will provide insight into the shared concerns between past and present.
• Finally, the class will aim to account for what makes Dracula so suitable for transformation amidst rapidly changing contemporary contexts, reading Dracula adaptations as a proxy for post-1992 culture.

Sample List of Films/Books to be Referenced:

Books:

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.

Marvel Comics’ Tomb of Dracula. 1972-1979. Marvel Comics.

Kikuchi, Hideyuki. Vampire Hunter D Omnibus. 2021 [1983].

Films/Games:

• Blade Trinity. 2004. David S. Goyer. USA: New Line Cinema.
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula. 1992. Francis Ford Coppola. USA: American Zoetrope
• Castlevania. 1986. Nintendo Entertainment System. Japan: Konami.
• Castlevania [Netflix TV Series]. 2017-2021. Texas: Powerhouse Animation.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. 1997. Playstation. Japan: Konami.
• Dracula: Prince of Darkness. 1966. Terence Fisher. London: Hammer Studios.
• Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned. 1980 (Japan) 1983 (United States). Akinori Nagaoka, Minoru Okazaki. Japan: Toei Animation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F0CqGOONrw.
• Hellsing Ultimate. 2006-2012. Japan: Satelight Inc (Episodes 1-4).
• Hotel Transylvania. 2012. Genndy Tartakovsky. USA: Sony Pictures Animation.
• Nosferatu. 1922. F. W. Murnau. Germany: Prana Film.