It is officially October and that means it is time to talk about monsters! Dracula is one of the most iconic and well known monsters, but where do his stories come from? Why is he so well known? What is his history? Well, all will be answered in this article.
Dracula is a vampire most known for drinking blood, biting necks, and not being able to go in the sun. He is a fictional character that makes his first appearance in Bram Stoker’s book, appropriately named, Dracula. According to the University of Virginia, the novel was published in 1897 and didn’t see much success when it was published. What made the story more well known was when the German film Nosferatu came out in 1922. Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s wife, was involved in a copyright lawsuit due to the stories being so similar and the studio paying no royalties. This lawsuit brought significant attention to Stoker’s novel, however there is so much more.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This lawsuit brought attention to the novel, but there is rich history that comes before Bram Stoker even wrote Dracula. Growing up Stoker was bedridden with an unknown illness for 7 years and in that time his mother would tell him folklore and her own supposed accounts with mythical creatures. This filled Stoker’s head with stories from a young age and only fueled his creativity.
About 800 years prior, in Slavic Folklore, we first see the myth of blood sucking monsters. In the 11th century is the first documented mention of such creatures and the word “vampire” comes from the old Russian word “Upir”. At the time, there were rampant diseases and death was a very common thing due to untreated diseases. When the body was decomposing it would bloat and sometimes blood would run out of the mouth. This made it look like the person had just risen from the dead and fed on human blood. This created a vampire hysteria and bodies were buried with garlic or poppy seeds. They even went so far as to burn, stake, and even mutilate bodies. This continued until the 18th century when Serbia was being taken over, Austrian soldiers and government officials and they documented the way bodies were buried.
These documents made headlines across Europe and created an even bigger vampire hysteria. It became such a problem that the Austrian empress sent out her own physician to examine what was going on. He debunked what was happening and posted a scientific refutation. This decreased the hysteria, however the myth of the vampire was already widespread in Western Europe. These myths predate Christianity and persisted even when the religion taught against pagan beliefs. All this according to named Master Educator by the education technology company Course Hero, Stanley Stepanic, who did a video through Ted Ed that detailed the story of vampires and Bram Stoker.
Since the hysteria was so widespread books about the myth were published such as The Vampyre written by John William Polidori in 1819 and Carmilla, written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872. Stoker read and was inspired by the novel Carmilla and the stories his mother told, thus creating Dracula.
The story of Dracula progressed when Universal studios made the movie Dracula. Bella Legosi’s portrayal of the character made the story even more infamous and was the stake through the vampire’s heat that would guarantee the story lives on in history.
