Dracula Reflects

Cafe Society
1

Vampires don’t appear in mirrors – everybody knows that. It’s in the job description. It’s a feature in a lot of vampire movies, and has been used in countless vampire jokes. It’s a defining feature of the Undead.
Except, of course, that it really isn’t. The Undead weren’t Unseen in mirrors throughout their folkloric history, nor in pop culture from their blossoming in the early 19ith century through practically the end of it. Bram Stoker invented this “fact” about vampires for his novel Dracula, which not only codified the system of beliefs about vampires, it also made a lot of it up. This is one of the things it made up.

At first glance, you’d think it WAS a legitimate piece of folklore – it certainly looks like one. The mirror captures or reflects the Soul, after all, and vampires have no souls, so they have no reflection, right? (Oddly enough, nobodsy has any problem with vampires showing up in photographs, or on television. And vampire shadows are an entire subject to themselves in vampire movies – look at Murnau’s Nosferatu, Dreyer’s Vampyr, and Coppola’s Dracula, all of which use shadows to eerie effect.

So Stoker invented the lack of reflection, then, of course, he used it to dramatic effect. This also shows up in the Dean/Balderston stage play Dracula and in the movies derived from it, where Van Helsing uses this to demonstrate to Dracula that he knows what he is.
So you’d think that, if any vampire would lack a reflection in films, it’d definitely be Dracula, right? Only it’s not true. In at least two films, Dracula definitely reflects in a mirror. This can’t be a mistake - every element in a movie is put there deliberately. If they realize that they made a mistake, they can re-shoot a scene.

Nosferatu is so obviously an uncredited (and non-royalty paying) ripoff of Dracula that Stoker’s widow won court cases against the company that made it, and destroye every copy she could. In some prints, in fact, the Count isn’t called by his official name “Count Orlok”, but is frankly called “Dracula”. So it seems really weird that, at the very end, as he is about to die, he is ostentatiously shown reflected in a mirror (almost at the very end, about 1:22):

https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A2KLqIVjKR1V.RsAUyz7w8QF;_ylu=X3oDMTByZWc0dGJtBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMQ--?p=Youtube+Nosferatu&vid=27461e6a71f2801276bb77a98a123a7a&l=1%3A24%3A20&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DVN.608056254534059971%26pid%3D15.1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DrcyzubFvBsA&tit=Nosferatu+(1922)+-+Full+Movie&c=0&sigr=11bke0a8l&sigt=10t6770ii&sigi=11r4modms&age=1231016320&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&fr=yfp-t-252&tt=b
Another case occurs in the 1948 film Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein – the last gasp for several of the Universal monsters of the 1930s and 40s, and only the second time Bela Lugosi played Dracula on film (although he played other vampires before and after this). Bela had played the mirror scene countless times on stage, as well as in the Tod Browning film, so he was hardly unaware of this facet of Dracula. Universal made the film, so they certainly knew. But at 0:55 on this trailer, you can clearly see Drac reflected in a mirror that had to be deliberately placed there:

https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A2KLqIUjLR1VKE8AKf37w8QF;_ylu=X3oDMTByN2RnbHFoBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMw--?p=Youtube+Abbott+and+costello+Meet+Frankenstein&vid=c0925ba665635ce4ae6fb6e3a41ecbc0&l=1%3A40&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DVN.608050288822650669%26pid%3D15.1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DpzwNVy6T4fY&tit=ABBOTT+AND+COSTELLO+MEET+FRANKENSTEIN+(COLOR+TRAILER)&c=2&sigr=11bhag19e&sigt=11la1phvk&sigi=11reu3v6q&age=1389055221&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&fr=yfp-t-252&tt=b

(Added – I hadn’t even realized that a color trailer for this existed. As far as I know, this is the first time that the Frankenstein monster was officially recognized as being Green. The previous films were black and white. Some posters depicted him as green, but others showed him with normal flesh tones. Some colored lobby cards showed him green, IIRC, but this is the first and AFAIK only color footage showing the monster intended for any sort of release.

2

Okay…

3

OTOH, IIRC, Murnau’s Nosferatu introduced the vampires’ fatal vulnerability to sunlight which wasn’t in Bram Stoker’s novel. IOW, the inconsistencies in the Dracula myth are no great wonder because most of the many different versions added/subtracted to/from it since Stoker’s Dracula.

Edit: I remembered correctly. From Nosferatu’s trivia section on imdb:

4

[Nitpick] Some people do address this. For example, on the TV show Being Human vampires don’t show up on cameras. In the Saint-Germain series of novels they don’t show up in photographs, requiring vampires that travel a lot in the modern world to have busts of their heads by which to obtain passport photos. So yes, some people have addressed that [/nitpick]

5

Yes, but we can’t hold Murnau responsible for this being part of the vampire corpus. As I say, Dame Stoker tried to have all copies destroyed, and the film wasn’t widely known or circulated for years. In popular literature and in movies, vampires were destroyed by being staked, mainly, or by fire, or (as in an H.P. Lovecraft story, The Shunned House), by being dissolved in acid. But not by sunlight. In fact, in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, the titular vampire is staked (with a metal stake) in broad daylight.

As I’ve mentioned before, the vampire dissolving in sunlight was brought back to the world by Curt (Kurt) Siodmak, a German scriptwriter who’d moved the Maerica to get away from the Nazis in the 1930s, and is responsible for a lot of our “knowledge” about the werewolf, which he made up, among other things. He wrote the screen story for Son of Dracula (which starred Lon Chaney Jr. as “Count Alucard” – “Dracula” spelled backwards), and set his demise to exposure to sunlight. He did the same for Dracula himself (played by John Carradine) in House of Frankenstein. I suspect this method of death suited public sensitivity as a neat, bloodless way to get rid of the monster. These films came out during WWII, and the public didn’t need reminders of the real bloody death going on in Europe and the Pacific.

The idea was cemented when Hammer adopted it without comment in the 1957 Horror of Dracula.

Nosferatu does depart from the novel in some ways, but keeps to it, in the main. Why they made this departure I do not know, but I observe that the usual scene where the Count is shown to have no reflection – almost always the scene where Harker is shaving, but does not see Dracula reflected in the mirror (as in the novel and in many of the screen versions, although the stage play and the 1931 film substitute a scenhe with Van Helsing in the drawing room) is completely absent from Nosferatu. So not only do we see him reflected in the mirror, we are not given the scene where his lack of reflection is made mabifest. There must be some reason behind this. After all, they kept the sleeping in the coffin, the torpor by daylight, and many other features.

6

I thought in the novel, that Dracula was killed by a bowie knife and sunlight.

7

Bowie knife and having his head cut off–interestingly, NOT by wooden stake, despite what many people believe.

Dracula appears in broad daylight at least three or four times in the novel, to no apparent ill effect.

8

Dracula Reflects would be a great title for a collection of short essays by Dracula.

9

Thanks, MrAtoz. But why the great hurry to kill him at that particular time? Were his minions coming to his aid?

10

Dracula was killed by a stake in the Deane/Balderston stage play based on the novel. They came up with a Stage Effect that showed him having a stake driven through his heart. When the play was revived on Broadway in the 1970s, originally with Frank Langella in the lead, they repeated the effect.

For the 1931 Tod Browning film, which derived from that stage play, they killed Dracula with a stake through the heart, but don’t actually show it – too gory for filmgoers, I guess, although not for theater patrons. They repeated the scene at the beginning of Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter. In the film House of Frankenstein, Boris Karloff’s character displays “the actual skeleton of Dracula, with the stake still driven in” When he removes the stake, Dracula comes back to life! (Ironically, he dissolves in sunlight later in the film)
So it’s not surprising that audiences thought Drac was killed by a stake through the heart – Universal repeatedly stated that this was the case.
Interestingly, the film starring Frank Langella based on the stage revival he starred in has him NOT being staked, but being exposed to sunlight (and it’s left ambiguous about whether he actually dies).
Leonard Wolf, in his Annotated Dracula casts doubt upon whether Dracula was actually killed at the end of Stoker’s novel, since the "Bowie knife + decapitation’ formula isn’t actually a recognized method of killing a vampire. For anyone else, getting your head cut off while being stabbed would definitely be fatal, but Drac is a special case. Even the dissolution of the body doesn’t prove it – one of Dracula’s powers is to dissolve himself into mist.

11

The Abbott and Costello clip looks like a production error. They just plain forgot about the mirror. Note that nothing seems to indicate that anyone is aware of this; when we see scenes with the mirror, they always hammer home the point there’s no reflection. It’s possible they were going for the effect where you only saw one reflection, but I’m not sure the technology was available to remove the other in post production.

Since this was the 1940s, no one would bother with nitpicking this, so even if someone noticed, they wouldn’t bother spending time to correct it.

I think the Murnau is more of the same – the set designer put a mirror on the set just as decoration and no one thought about the issue. Once again, this sort of nitpicking just wasn’t done when the film came out. No one cared.

So ultimately, there’s nothing here.

Re Dracula and sunlight – Stoker did not say that sunlight killed a vampire. A vampire could go about in the day if he wished – he just wouldn’t have any special powers. For that reason, they prefered to go out at night.

12

In The Dracula Tape, Fred Saberhagen has Dracula fake his death by turning into mist as the Bowie knife whacks him.

13

IIRC, in Stoker, you had to cut the head off to kill the monster after you staked him. Staking made it impossible for him to change form; but he wasn’t actually dead until you decapitated him.

14

Yes, I read that too. Both books came out in 1975, so it’s not clear who took from who, or if it they were independent ideas (which seems more likely)

15

I’m not convinced of that. People actually do take care about what appears in film and how it’s set up. They obsess over it. So I’m leery of the “set director threw it in, we just didn’t think it was important” school. I think in the case of Murnau, since they didn’t include the shaving mirror scene, they weren’t considering lack of visibility in a mirror to be one feature of a vampire.

At least one critic has stated that he thinks the scene in Abbott and Costello was deliberate, and meant to show that the film didn’t consider itself bound by the rules established elsewhere in the Universal series.

But again, that mirror didn’t just happen to be there. It makes for a pretty “busy” image. The reflection isn’t something glimpsed in the corner of the screen – it’s right there, practically in your line of vision, and people not only couldn’t have been aware of it, it looks pretty deliberate.

16

Leslie Klinger makes a similar claim in The New Annotated Dracula. Indeed, Klinger spins such a complex “theory” that Dracula not only survived, but later exerted pressure on Bram Stoker to “falsify” events when he came to “report” them, that he is not so much engaging in scholarship as writing fanfiction.

I’m well aware of all the various theatrical and cinematic adaptations that include the stake, but I’ve even run into the claim that Dracula is staked in the novel, sometimes by sources that really ought to know better. When I was a kid, the edition of the World Book Encyclopedia that we had at home said that at the end of Stoker’s novel, Dracula was killed by a wooden stake through his heart. Having read the novel myself, I knew that wasn’t true. It may have been the first time in my life that I had ever encountered a supposedly authoritative source being wrong, and it was deeply troubling to me. What else might the authorities be lying to me about?! :slight_smile:

We see five vampires destroyed in Stoker’s novel–Lucy, Dracula’s three brides, and finally Dracula himself. None are killed in exactly the same way.

Lucy is staked, her head is cut off, and her mouth is stuffed with garlic.

The three brides are staked, and their heads are cut off. They crumble to dust upon having their heads removed, so no garlic stuffing is necessary or even possible.

Dracula, as stated, is stabbed through the heart with a Bowie knife, while simultaneously having his head cut off with a Kurkri knife. He also crumbles to dust instantly.

The one thing that all Stoker’s vampire deaths have in common, then, is NOT the stake, but the severed head. I find that interesting.

17

In addition to not reflecting in mirrors, the vampires in the UK show Ultraviolet don’t show up on video, can’t talk over the phone and their fingerprints don’t show up.

18

To answer this question, which kind of got lost in the shuffle–the hurry to kill him was that the sun was setting. Presumably when the sun fully set, he would be at his full power and better able to resist. Hence the haste to kill him while the sun was still out, and his powers were weaker.

19

I hope this doesn’t stray to far afield, but I don’t it rates a solo thread.

anywho, why do so many interpretations try to for some romance between Mina and Dracula? I’ve read Dracula many, many times and I simply do not see it. Am I naive and missing some subtle clues with my man brain (heh)?

20

Oh yes, thanks. I read it in Junior High, and once or twice again several years ago.