In Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tapes (which is told from Drac’s point of view) it is asserted that it was the transfusions, not the Count’s ministrations, that done her in.
Well, they keep getting out of the cask they were kept in…
That would be the cask of Armadillo.
I was going to compliment you on your choice of username and your Saberhagen reference, but instead I shall merely mention that you have to sleep* sometime.*
I recently reread this book, fearful it wouldn’t be as good as I remembered, but it was really awesome. Part of the fun this time was watching Stoker write (or document) a lot of what passes for current vampire ‘lore’ like the stake through the heart. Though I also note that Stoker’s Dracula suffered daylight quite well, so I’m not sure how that entered the canon.
The last time I re-read Dracula (several years ago, now) it struck me that Mina was, for the time, a fairly progressive heroine. She was intelligent, competent, and had a career of her own. Towards the end of the book she’s even armed with a gun, although she winds up not needing to use it. What was especially interesting to me was that Mina winds up being bitten by the Count partially because the men wouldn’t let her come along on their big manly vampire-hunting raid and insist on leaving her at the asylum, where it was “safe”.
I remember noticing that too. I think I meant to start a thread about it, but never did!
I don’t think there was anything more to it than that Renfield’s peculiar mania made it easy for the Count to manipulate him. He wasn’t really into killing humans though, and I believe he sincerely did not want Mina to get hurt.
IIRC there’s some suggestion in the book that he has plans for world domination, or at least that the heroes are afraid that he does. But even without any grand schemes, his situation in Romania wasn’t that great. He was in an isolated area, and the locals had a fairly good understanding of how to ward him off. So just in terms of being able to have a nice snack whenever he felt hungry, he would be better off in a big city. He also had some awareness that the modern world was passing him by, and was interested in catching up on things.
Dracula’s brides probably would have finished him off pretty quickly once they had the chance. That’s the only reason I can see for leaving Jonathan alive; the Count had promised the ladies they could have him. I infer that Dracula felt drinking a man’s blood would seem kind of gay, as he apparently refrained from doing so even when it would have been easy and instead only went after women.
We’ve discussed this in other threads in the past, and the whole sunlight-kills-vampires thing was created for the movies. It first appears in Nosferatu (1922), but seems not to have really caught on until the 1940s. Another poster (I can’t remember who at the moment) suggested it may have become popular since it was a dramatic way to kill a vampire without actually being violent or gory.
I know. Upon re-reading this is the only thing that grates, though Stoker does express it very well. But I want to reach into the book and throttle the men. YOU NEED HER! 
I read Dracula years ago and I was just as enthusiastic as you guys are now! 
I have a very nice hard-cover copy and I’m going to dig it out, read a chapter a night. I particularly like the ending, people are always surprised how Dracula was dispatched, and by who.
But wasn’t there an “I’m reading Dracula” thread just within the last couple of months?
My thought as I read Dracula was, if I were the protagonists, I’d be going after the Count in Matthew Lesko style suits, with crosses in lieu of question marks. 
Every movie adaptation has cut things and combined characters, but there are three that come close to the original novel:
1.) David J. Skal, author of *Hollywood Gothic (THE book on the 1931 version), The Monster Show, V is for Vampire, and other vampire works (and editor of one of the many annotated versions, although it’s not called that) hates the 1992 version for the liberties it takes (the whole “Drac’s wife is reincarnated as Mina” business and his “romantic” character), and his favorite version is the 1977 BBC/PBS version starring Louis Jordan. This version eliminates one of Lucy’s suitors, but follows the book very closely, and Dracula’s character is a non-romantic selfish creature, as Skal prefers. Tomy mind, it’s a bit too long, with too many “dreamy” sequences. I think this version has the best overall interpretation of Professor Van Helsing, capturing his accent (which is either overdone or absent in other version), his eccentricity (without going overboard into absurdity) and his sincerity. It’s available on DVD.
2.) Leonard Wolf, author of The Annotated Dracula (the original version, from 1976), The Essential Dracula (his 1990s updating of it), and other works on Dracula, was technical advisor for the 1992 Coppola film (his name is in the credits), and he, obviously, likes thatversion. For my money, I like it, too, despite the “reincarnation” subplot. I like it mainly because it isn’t boring, and is beautifully shot, with many innovative camera tricks that are actually low-tech (I believe there’s no CGI at all). It also is the only version to have ALL THREE SUITORS of Lucy Westenra as suitors (I know – I’ve just watched each version, and took notes). I’m even willing to forgive Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder’s lack of convincing British accents, and Anthony Hopkins’ weird psycho turn as Van Helsing. This version definitely won’t put you to sleep.
3.) One version that I first caugh on TV without having seen the introduction really blew me away, at least for the first half. It was Jess Franco’s 1970 Count Dracula. It starred Christopher Lee, who had starred in Hammer Film’s version of the story Horror of Dracula twelve years earlier, along with a string of sequels that continued after this film was made. This is NOT part of the Hammer series. It’s the first attempt I’m aware of to film the story straight, as it came from the book, without the intervening filter of the Deane and Balderston play, or an attempt to make something else of it. Lee plats Drac exactly as in the book, and he resembles the old French ilustrations for the book, with his large white moustache and white hair (both of which turn darker as he feeds). All the events at the castle are pretty much as in the book, except that Harker never leaves the castle. The film condenses people in the London section of it, and, although it has an impressive cast (Herbert Lom as Van Helsing, Klaus Kinski – who would go on to the Dracula role in the 1979 remake of Nosferatu – as Renfield), the film suffers from a lack of money, and it shows. It’s at its worst when the Fearless Vampire Hunters are threatened by a roomful of stuffed animals at Carfax Abbey. But watch it for the beginning.
Ok about that, I have a question and a comment. On the surface, it became a source of speculation as to why the Count did not simply attack the men as they worked to destroy his evil. I thought it was a sexual thing at first too, for what representation does vampires hold but a highly sexualized one? But didn’t he feast on the men on the boat coming to London? Unless he simply killed the sailors without drinking their blood, since apparently they should turn into vampires too. It wouldn’t make sense to kill them if he didn’t take their blood though.
The crew of the Demeter had slipped my mind, but you’re right, Dracula presumably did drink their blood. Of course, even if he preferred women’s blood he wouldn’t have had much choice under the circumstances, there wouldn’t have been women onboard a cargo ship then. But now that I think of it, the only women we know to have been bitten by the Count are ones he intended to make into companions for himself. Perhaps he didn’t really have a strong gender preference when it came to ordinary mealtimes.
It’s a real surname; Hayley Westenra is a reasonably well-known New Zealand singer.
Maybe the crew did turn into vampires, and the reason they all died was that they didn’t know about the whole “death by sunlight” thing. Either that, or Stoker didn’t think it through. Like when Van Helsing elaborates all the appropriate steps one must take to kill a vampire, then they just end up cutting his head off with a hunting knife (iirc).
Lucy had to in turn drink some of Dracula’s blood to change.
There is no “death by sunlight” tradition in all of vampire literature up to 1920. Even in Dracula, the Count walks around London by daylight (as depicted in the 1992 Coppola version). The film Nosferatu was the first to suggest such a thing. Even afterwards, this wasn’t an accepted bit of vampire FakeLore. It wasn’t until Universal used the idea in Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein. Curt Siodmak was responsible for the screen story or screnplay in these, and I’ll bet the German immigrany remembered the Murnau film, and that Universal liked the idea of a non-bloody way of gettng rid of the vampires and bodies. When Hammer’s Horror of Dracula also used the idea in its version of the story, it cemented the trope.
Whoa, she would make a great Lucy!
I believe it was Mina who was attacked by the Count and forced to drink his blood. It was different from the others because she had no puncture marks on her throat, and was injured on her forehead by the Count whilst the others were planning. Lucy, despite her taking the form of a vampire, didn’t ever interact with the Count except by his feeding on her. Mina actually was telepathically connected to the Count, to the point where she was drawn to him, could read his thoughts under hypnosis, and in the end, almost turned on Van Helsing on approach to the castle.
You are correct, but I thought the victim drinking the vampire’s blood was required to change. That’s not to say Lucy didn’t drink from the Count “out of narrative”, as it were. Perhaps I’ve read too much Saberhagen, though.
IIRC, it’s never made totally clear in Dracula how the Count creates new vampires. Being bitten is part of it, but is it the only part? It seems unlikely that the Count would have left Jonathan at Castle Dracula as a snack for his three brides of he’d thought Jonathan was going to turn into a vampire and still be hanging around if/when the Count returned. Van Helsing doesn’t seem concerned that any of the children bitten by Vampire Lucy will become vampires, but I believe all of them survived the attacks and were in no immediate danger of death from their wounds or blood loss. Mina lost her vampiric tendencies as soon as the Count was destroyed, so the kids were presumably fine once Lucy was staked.
It could be that multiple bites are required to turn a person into a vampire, that the victim drinking the vampire’s blood is an essential component, or perhaps that vampires dispose of the corpses of their “ordinary mealtime” victims in a way that will prevent them from rising again. The Count apparently threw the bodies of the Demeter crew members he’d killed into the sea, so even if they did become vampires that whole “can’t cross running water” thing presumably would have destroyed them or at least kept them down there for a long time.
What little we’re told about the Count’s origin indicates that he did not himself become a vampire by being bitten by another vampire, but rather through dealings with Satan. “The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. In the records are such words as ‘stregoica’ witch, ‘ordog’ and ‘pokol’ Satan and hell, and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too well.”
It probably adds to the horror that the “rules” for vampires are left a little vague in Dracula.
At sea, with only a bunch of men around, all bets are off, I guess.
A journal of Stoker’s has been found.