Dracula is without a doubt cinema’s most enduring movie monster. His aristocratic presence has been gliding uncannily across our screens since before the dawn of sound. You know him. You love him. He wears a black cape. He’s a child of the night. He never drinks…wine.
With Robert Eggers’ hotly anticipated 2024 Nosferatu remake in theaters, now is the perfect time to take a look at pop culture’s ongoing love affair with Dracula. How has our enduring fascination with the gentleman fiend evolved over the years–and has he enacted a dark transformation on us in turn?
With over 80 films and counting featuring the man himself, there’s a wealth of material to choose from. We’ll explore some of the most significant and influential Dracula movies to trace the Count’s impact on a century of culture.
Article Contents
Who Is Dracula?
You’ve probably heard of Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476), the nobleman from present-day Romania who fought the Turks and was said to impale his enemies on wooden stakes and drink their blood. Known as Dracula, or “son of Dracul [the dragon]” (dracul means “devil” in modern Romanian), his legend may have provided the basis for Irish author Bram Stoker’s supernatural villain in his famous 1897 novel. Stoker extensively researched Transylvanian folklore and history before starting the book, but there is no specific mention of Vlad the Impaler in his notes. It’s impossible to say he was a direct inspiration, but it’s likely Stoker would have at least heard of him.
Historical inspirations aside, Dracula is very much his own creature. He’s taken on a life (or unlife) of his own since he first appeared in Stoker’s novel, becoming the quintessential image of the vampire in the popular imagination. There have been fictional vampires before him–like Polidori’s Lord Ruthven–and after him, like Anne Rice’s indelible Lestat, but there’s just something elemental about Dracula. It’s like he’s always been there, lurking in the shadows of our collective consciousness.
What Does Dracula Represent?
Victorian Fears
The Dracula of Stoker’s text is a manifestation of all sorts of anxieties plaguing Victorian society at the time when it was written. He is a foreign invader threatening the chastity of Mina, an “angel of the house” figure, and her vivacious friend Lucy. In fact, Lucy’s transformation into a wild, unhinged revenant speaks to fears of women’s liberation and the “New Woman” in an era when women were beginning to demand suffrage and increased participation in public life–and you don’t need to be Dr. Freud to see a reaffirmation of masculine dominance in her grisly death by stake.
Anxieties surrounding new technologies are also prevalent in the novel, especially blood transfusions. Administered by doctors to the Count’s victim Lucy, they represent a brave new world of scientific advancement–but the deadly pathogen of vampirism is also spread by blood exchange, and it ultimately defeats this modern science.
Dracula also represents the seductive power of an ancient evil threatening the dawn of modernity–even Jonathan Harker is not immune to his charms. The three vampire brides Harker encounters in the castle emphasize the Count’s status as a serial seducer. He also enslaves the mental patient Renfield, taking over his mind and turning him into an insect-eating, animalistic madman. Everywhere he goes, the Count pulls those around him into his sphere of influence like a black hole, undermining the very foundations of polite late Victorian society and its notions of social and scientific progress.
Eat(en by) the Rich
In modern readings of the book and its adaptations, we are likely to point out that a bloodsucking aristocrat is a very literal portrayal of the rich feeding on the poor. He is part of an ancient, decaying system–an actual walking corpse–who wields godlike power over others. He also maintains his hold over people through mind control–a powerful metaphor for manufacturing consent.
Dracula represents an inversion of the natural order, a “wrongness” that is often accompanied by strange phenomena such as the mysterious blue flames that light Harker’s way to the castle. The local peasants also warn Harker away from his mysterious new client, indicating a class conflict as well as a supernatural one.
At the same time, Dracula is desirable and often charming. (Though some adaptations play up his monstrousness more than others.) His wealth is a large part of what makes him appealing to the other characters in the novel. There’s a reason the suave, unflappable version played by Bela Lugosi has become pop culture shorthand for the image of a vampire. He is the essence of Old World manners and sophistication–at least, when he’s not turning into a bat or a wolf to menace the countryside.
The Violent Patriarch
The animalistic side of Dracula is an important part of his makeup, especially if we want to analyze him as a stand-in for the evils of patriarchy. He is an exaggerated, dark mirror for the worst traits associated with manhood in a patriarchal society. He is powerful, magnetic, and self-assured, while also being brutal, savage, and monstrous. In the monster, we see the duality of “man”--or, at least, of toxic masculinity.
Dracula’s obsession with acquiring new brides–including Mina–underscores this aspect of his makeup. His pursuit of Mina, Lucy, and presumably his earlier brides, is not very different from his purchase of Carfax Abbey. They are an extension of his property, and as such he stakes his claim by binding them to him with his blood.
Madness
The inclusion of Dr. Seward’s insane asylum as one of the major settings in Dracula is no accident. Madness is a major theme of the book, as Harker journeys to Dracula’s castle and comes to find he can no longer trust his senses as uncanny things start happening to him, ultimately ending up in Budapest with a case of “brain fever.” Dracula enlisting the madman Renfield as his servant provides the most explicit link to the theme of insanity, showing that his rule brings chaos in its wake.
Lucy is also initially treated as if she’s experiencing nervous symptoms when she starts to show signs of the monster’s influence; Van Helsing mentions “extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.” For as much as he’s often portrayed as a kind of physical illness or plague, Dracula also destroys the minds of his victims.
The Beast Within
There is a bestial aspect to Dracula that rests hidden beneath his cultured facade. He can transform into various creatures of the night, and Harker even describes him crawling down a wall like a lizard, and says his gaze is “panther-like.”
It is this inhuman quality that shines through the most in Nosferatu and similar takes on the material. As Brian Keiper writes for Bloody Disgusting, “There is a primal quality to Nosferatu that is found only in that version of Dracula, one that lacks romance or remorse and simply preys upon our deepest, darkest, and most potent fears.”
Each era can find its own most profound fears embodied in the figure of Count Dracula. He is at once a power-hungry lord, a vicious seducer, a literal leech on society, a dark plague, and a force of nature. At the same time, his magnetic presence and supernatural power inspire awe and fascination. These many facets have kept audiences riveted for over a century as filmmakers and actors have all put a bit of themselves into film’s most immortal villain.
Dracula Adaptations
This early onscreen Dracula adaptation might have had to change the title, rename the characters, and relocate the setting to Germany to avoid thorny legal issues, but this is still Bram Stoker’s story–albeit with an artsy German Expressionist twist. The movie in all its stark, silent glory hones Stoker’s epistolary novel down to the bare essentials: light versus darkness, evil versus innocence, and the creeping sense of dread embodied in its iconic shot of a shadowy hand crawling over a map.
The film envisions Count Orlok as a plague upon the earth, and his shadow often precedes him, entering shots before the viewer sees his strange, spindly figure. A triumph of art direction, lighting, and ingenuity, this deeply unsettling film truly is “a symphony of horror.”
This Universal version directed by Tod Browning is possibly the definitive film adaptation of Dracula–which is actually kind of surprising, considering how many liberties it takes with the source novel (such as having Renfield take over Jonathan Harker’s role in the story). Really, it all comes down to Bela Lugosi, who infuses his Dracula with a subtle glee at his own evil that is downright infectious.
The staging is gorgeous, full of spooky setpieces like that climactic trip down the stone stairway, and the black and white cinematography shines–even though it's hard to find a print that isn’t at least a little grainy. But then, a bit of film degradation just adds to the gothic appeal. Check out the 1936 sequel Dracula’s Daughter for a fun, atmospheric horror romp starring Gloria Holden.
Dracula Movies of the 1940s-1960s
With the success of the Universal monster movies, Hollywood studios churned out a lot of schlock with the word “Dracula” attached, with varying degrees of campy, creepy fun to be had. Bela Lugosi reprised his role–or played characters that were basically Dracula with the serial numbers filed off–in a number of movies throughout the 1930s and 40s.
Low budget drive-in horror flourished throughout the ‘50s and early ‘60s, and Dracula was not immune to the cheesification of the genre.
John Carradine stars as Dracula in this movie that also features Universal monster movie pals Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman. It’s got a fantastically over the top premise: a scientist (horror legend Boris Karloff) escapes from prison and revives the Big Three to take revenge on his behalf, which goes about as well as you’d expect. Carradine’s take on the role would leave a big impression on future Bram Stoker’s Dracula filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.
While it’s not a direct Dracula adaptation, this film illustrates the kinds of movies that were being made with the character in the mid-twentieth century. Think of it as a Dracula fanfic.
Across the pond, Hammer Studios was also getting in on the action. Released as Horror of Dracula stateside, their first adaptation of the novel stars the late, great horror king Christopher Lee as a brooding Count with charm and appeal. (Lee would go on to play Dracula in a series of Hammer Horror films throughout the 60s, usually opposite Peter Cushing.)
70s Dracula Movies
1979 saw two drastically different versions of the Dracula mythos hit theaters. On one neatly manicured hand, there’s the sumptuous adaptation starring Frank Langella. The same year, Werner Herzog released his hypnotic version of Nosferatu, highlighting the character’s monstrous side even as the Langella version reveled in his dark romance. You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the two sides of the Count’s nature.
No list of Dracula films would be complete without one of the most famous blaxploitation movies ever made: William Crain’s Blacula. An African prince (William Marshall) gets turned into a vampire by Dracula and sealed away in a coffin for decades, awakening to cause havoc in ‘70s L.A. Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) faces off against the vampire as he racks up a mounting body count. While the film is riddled with stereotypes that might make modern audiences cringe, it’s still a fun vampire flick with a lot of style.
Frank Langella reprises his long-running Broadway role in this sumptuous adaptation directed by John Badham. This is the lord of darkness at his most seductive. It’s as bombastic as its John Williams score, an erotic, smoldering take on the source novel that highlights the anxieties at its core. This is the Count as Byronic lover–in fact, he washes up on shore after a shipwreck at the beginning of the movie, echoing a scene from Byron’s Don Juan. Langella is riveting in the role, and the costumes and cinematography make this version a feast for the eyes.
Werner Herzog’s impressionistic take on Murnau’s classic doubles down on the plague imagery that suffuses the original, drowning the screen in rats and pestilence. It features the director’s frequent nemesis/collaborator Klaus Kinski as the vamp himself, and removes the copyright-skirting trappings of the original to present an unadulterated Dracula adaptation that is compelling, beautifully shot, and yes, scary.
Dracula Spoofs
The flipside of being one of cinema’s oldest villains is that you also become one of its prime targets for satire. Movies have been poking fun at the Count since he first swept down a spiral staircase with his cape drawn up to his face. Bela Lugosi even starred as a spoof of the character in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
In the late ‘70s, Dracula got disco fever in the George Hamilton-starring comedy Love at First Bite. The Count even got the Leslie Nielsen slapstick treatment in 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It (the movie is a bit of a slog, but the scene with blood shooting out of a coffin like it’s coming out of a firehose is one of the funniest things ever). Making fun of our fears is the best way to deflate them, so it’s no surprise that a figure that inspires as much dread as our boy Dracula should also be played for laughs.
Dracula Movies of the 80s and 90s
Throughout the 1980s, direct adaptations of Dracula fell off for a while in favor of vampire movies with original premises like The Hunger, The Lost Boys, Fright Night, and Near Dark (all of which are well worth a watch). The Count does pop up for a bit in Monster Squad, though.
Francis Ford Coppola’s eye-popping 1992 dracula movie extravaganza Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave vampire movies a whole new grand guignol aesthetic to revel in. First, there’s the instantly iconic costume design by Eiko Ishioka. From Dracula’s breathtaking red armor to Lucy’s white lace collar reminiscent of a Renaissance ruff crossed with a dog cone, every look will be seared on your retinas like an unholy vision. (And who could forget Gary Oldman serving Count in his tophat and tiny round sunglasses?)
It also turns the Count’s pursuit of Winona Ryder’s Mina into a star-crossed gothic romance spanning the centuries, presenting a Dracula who is more tortured Byronic hero than heartless monster.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Coppola explains that he returned to the early days of silent film for his special effects, using in-camera effects and double exposures to create spellbinding, dreamlike effects sequences. Taking inspiration from both the source text and Murnau’s Nosferatu, his version breathes new life into the undead.
2000s-2010s Dracula Movies
With the turn of the millennium, filmmakers were interested in placing Dracula in the context of decades of horror films that had come before and finding new angles in a story that was by that point over a century old. Shiny, new trappings were added to the story, such as slick action sequences and mall goth aesthetics meant to capitalize on the success of early 2000s vampire franchises like Blade and Underworld.
Wes Craven produced this slick, stylish remix of the source novel, with veteran actor Chrisopher Plummer as a very fun Van Helsing. Is it a good movie? Hell, no. However, it does feature a pre-fame Gerard Butler in the title role and a very unique premise: Van Helsing is keeping the vampire imprisoned and draining his blood to keep himself alive. Throw in some 2000s industrial rock and Geri Ryan in a catsuit, and you’ve got a trainwreck that is downright watchable.
This 2000 film is as meta as it gets, a movie about movies that features a vampire pretending to be an actor pretending to be a vampire. It provides a fictionalized account of the making of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in which Max Schreck, the actor who played Count Orlok, is a real, live bloodsucker. Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar for his truly committed performance as the vampire actor, anchoring a film that is part dark comedy and part parable of art and artists.
The film looks back on seven decades of cinema and explores how movies can make monsters “real.”
Though it focuses on the Count’s vampire-hunting foe, Van Helsing is technically a Dracula movie–he is the main antagonist, after all. It has some fun action setpieces, but the film as a whole is pretty dour, all soupy CGI and fluttering trench coats, with a Dracula who is flattened into a generic world-threatening baddie. Hugh Jackman does what he can in the title role, but even his charms don’t really elevate this one beyond a mildly entertaining popcorn flick.
The 2010s
In the 2010s, Dracula became grist for the mill as studios continued their ongoing fixation on wringing every last drop of blood from existing intellectual property. The result was a raft of prequels and in-universe stories with predictably dark, murky cinematography slathered with CGI.
The most significant of these is probably 2014’s Dracula Untold. Luke Evans plays a Dracula who is burdened with vampirism in order to be able to defeat the Turkish army. Unfortunately, woobifying him into a tortured antihero takes away a lot of the evil that makes him so fun in the first place. At least there are some cool effects shots, like the one where Dracula turns into a cloud of bats–not to mention some good old fashioned scenery chewing from Charles Dance.
2020s Dracula Films
Noted vamp aficionado Nicolas Cage plays a gooey, decomposing Dracula in this irreverent spin on the source novel that focuses on the long-suffering manservant Renfield (Nicholas Hoult, always a delight). The movie received mixed reviews, but it’s got such a fun premise you might not have any trouble turning a blind eye to its flaws–like the listless subplots featuring a drug cartel and police corruption. When it’s allowed to be a gory horror comedy, this movie has tons of laughs and geysers of blood to spare.
This recent film features Dracula at his most inhuman–no witty quips or flowing capes, just teeth, claws, and carnage. It focuses on a single episode from the novel that is sketched out in the ship’s log of the Demeter, on which the Count travels to England, which drifts into port with the crew members mysteriously dead. The film tells the spine-chilling story of how they got that way, serving up a fresh take on the source material that might just be the scariest Dracula movie ever made.
If anything, our 2020s Draculas have become less sympathetic, less human, and more bone-chillingly alien. The terrifying creature picking off sailors one by one in The Last Voyage of the Demeter has a lot more in common with the Xenomorph from Alien than with the drawing room charmer of older adaptations of the book. Batlike and unspeaking, there’s pretty much nothing human about him–certainly no tragic backstory or motivation beyond bloodlust.
It’s the same with Eggers’ Nosferatu. He isn’t so much a person as a plague, a dark force that corrupts everything it touches. It seems audiences today are hungry for the bestial, remorseless killing machine rather than the refined gentleman in black. In the ongoing wake of COVID-19, it’s no surprise that a decaying Dracula whose influence is infectious and insidious as a disease is the one that resonates most strongly with the fears of the moment.
For as long as there have been movies, Dracula has given a face to evil in all its many manifestations. If the current iterations are anything to go on, our present moment is done with the handsome fiend passing himself off as a member of polite society. Audiences agree: it’s time to bring on the monster.
Dracula makes manifest the subconscious horrors that follow us to bed every night. He watches. He seduces. He consumes. He shows different facets depending on the era and who’s doing the adaptation. As Mina writes in her journal, “I suppose one ought to pity any thing so hunted as the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not human—not even beast.”
As filmmakers and audiences continue to explore what Dracula is, we’ll keep bringing our deepest anxieties out into the blazing light–and that’s something the children of the night can always celebrate.