Right on cue, scriptwriters Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, with producer Sue Vertue - the team responsible for bringing Sherlock Holmes into the twenty-first century - have collaborated to take Dracula back to the nineteenth for a new three-part BBC series on Netflix.Īs with Sherlock, Gatiss and Moffat draw characters and situations from the literary classic but then license themselves to invent, exploring tangents from the original storylines to take the dramatisation in unexpected and sometimes wayward directions. In a time of pandemic, conditions are ripe for the Prince of Darkness to reassert his dominance. Variants have proliferated since then, with The Twilight Saga (2002–12) threatening to eclipse its origins altogether. Brought into the cinematic era by Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922) and carried through the mid twentieth century by Christopher Lee, he made television history when Louis Jourdan inherited the mantle in the 1977 BBC production. Stoker’s Count Dracula may not be the source, but he is the superspreader, and the compulsion to return to him again and again has gripped successive generations. Dating back many centuries in the folklore traditions of Eastern Europe, the myth of the vampire was given to plague-like outbreaks, recorded in local accounts of desperate attempts to deal with the undead. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) may be the origin story for the ever-proliferating vampire dramas in modern popular culture, but it is saturated with its own prehistory.
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