Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen

The primal image of Count Dracula, the black-caped vampire, has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination, with a recognition factor rivaling, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Without prompting, most of us can recite Dracula's salient characteristics: sleeping by day in his coffin; rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shape-shift into a bat, a wolf, or mist; and a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or to a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David J. Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to modern cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what this prince of darkness says about us all.