Sometimes there is such a thing worse than being bad: it’s being nothing. And in this case, taking some interesting ideas and squandering them. Yes, we totally noticed you dropped that plotline there, move. Take BBC’s adaptation of Dracula back in 2006. Raiding the BBC period costume closet may seem like a good idea, but looking at a text and … Read More
Episode 22: Franchise Bait
Everyone loves an origin story, right? Not the Bloodsucking Feminists, who in this case firmly believe that this is one origin story that should have remained untold. Be prepared for more talk about the Universal Monsters and the upcoming reboot (and how Dracula Untold failed to be a part of the latest attempt), how the film missed both opportunities in … Read More
Episode 16: Drew Blood
Remember our sixth episode, Vampire Musicals Suck, about the German-language vampire musical Tanz der Vampire? Well nearly a year later we’re back on the topic of vampire musicals – and the ones that truly, dreadfully do suck. From a flop hit about Dracula by the master of public domain flop hit musicals, to a small chamber musical which does the … Read More
Episode 15: Getting Biblical
In the film industry, adaptations of Bram Stoker’s famous novel are especially popular. To the dedicated fangs, these adaptations can be split into three separate but equally important groups: the good, the bad, and the so-bad-it’s-good. Dracula 2000 falls into the last. Grab your leather, open up IMDB (because you’ve seen that actor somewhere, you just know it), and blast … Read More
Episode 14: The Da Racula Code
In 2005, Little, Brown published a vampire book that rocketed to the top of the bestseller charts and became a record breaker. Actually, there were two, one of which was The Historian, a doorstopper of a novel (240 000 words!) that had people devouring the adventures of three generations of academics, as they try to solve the mystery of where … Read More
Episode 02: Undead, Oversexed, and Over Here
After seven years of research (and one nightmare caused by too much crab meat covered in mayonnaise), Bram Stoker wrote and published the seminal work Dracula. An epistolary novel, Dracula tells the story of the titular vampire’s attempted move to England from the point of view of his lawyer, his victims and their friends. Join us as we discuss the … Read More
Voyages with Vampires: Whitby
One of the stranger dreams I have is to write a book/do a travel vlog series documenting vampire-related cultural tourism around the world. Many of these sites relate to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (from Poenari Castle, home of Vlad the Impaler, to Whitby, where Dracula first landed on English soil), while others are tied to the folklore of the vampire and … Read More
Dracula, Riddled Vampires & Baby Eating
If you’ve been watching NBC’s interesting if inconsistent adaptation of Dracula, loosely based on the novel (and I do mean loosely in the strongest possible way), you will have once again seen an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s oft-imitated classic that turns the relationship between the Count and Mina Murray into one of romance. It’s a favoured trope amongst those who reimagine the tale, although it would be preferable for further adaptations to make the story as gloriously queer as NBC have, because, among other reasons, there’s an evident appeal to the idea of a soulless villain who is redeemed by love.
That doesn’t happen in the book, of course. The overriding metaphor of vampirism as a stand-in for rape and disease does leave the mood a little less romantic.