Since its publication in 1897, Dracula has been adapted on screen hundreds of times. Bram Stoker's novel, which tells the story of the villainous blood-sucking Count's journey to Victoria Britain, has an enduring appeal that shows no sign of waning.
The latest Dracula film, Renfield, which stars Nicolas Cage as the vampire, comes more than 100 years after the first, albeit unofficial, depiction of the Count on screen.
Author’s method acting approach to writing terrified local people in Aberdeenshire as he perched on the rocks like a bat.
In August 1894, at the end of a month-long stay to research his embryonic novel, Bram Stoker wrote in the visitors’ book at the Kilmarnock Arms on the Aberdeenshire coast that he had been “delighted with everything and everybody” and hoped to return soon.
According to new research, though, the feeling was not entirely mutual. Stoker, a genial Irishman usually known for his cheeriness, was experimenting with what would become known as “method acting” to get under the skin of his new character, one Count Dracula. Local historian Mike Shepherd, who has spent seven years researching Stoker, says the author’s links with the London theatre inspired Stoker to try inhabiting his character in a different way.
Some 800 years before the publication of Dracula, and long before the term "vampire" was popularized, an English historian, William of Newburgh, recorded a tale recounted to him by a devout and reputable priest. He told of a most dishonest sinner who escaped the law by retreating to Alnwick Castle.
Due to early associations of blood-drinking with revenant spirits or demons, there has emerged a modern-day confluence of Satanism and vampirism, though the two are more often than not exclusive to one another (i.e., real vampires are not necessarily Satanists, nor are Satanists vampires).
A group of academics met at the University of Hertfordshire in England to discuss the "Americanization" of the vampire genre. WSJ's Javier Espinoza reports.
Jure Grando was a peasant who lived in the small village of Kringa, just outside of Tinjan, Croatia. He died in 1656, leaving behind a widow and a wake of terror that haunted Kringa for the next 16 years.
Every night for those 16 years, the good people of Kringa would hear knocks throughout the city in the middle of the night. The knocks were warnings, a promise that someone who lived in a house that had its door knocked had little time left on this world.
For centuries, the vampire has captured imaginations and inspired nightmares in communities around the world. And while Romania’s Transylvania region has long dominated the vampire-related conversation, for a few decades in the early 20th century the most feared blood-drainer in the world was not Dracula, but a person from Romania’s neighbor to the west: Hungary.