Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins Read Free Book Online

publication, when Bram Stoker—having written the book, no doubt, with one eye on a possible stage adaptation—gave it a shot himself. Actors from the Lyceum Theatre gave a public reading of Stoker’s redacted play to secure its copyright for the future. But when stage star Henry Irving showed no interest, it was laid aside and never picked back up.
    Ironically, the man who did more than anyone else to bring Dracula to the world had grown up just a few doors away from Stoker’s childhood home. Hamilton Deane was a stagestruck youth who had joined Henry Irving’s company in 1899, when he was only 19 years old. By his early 20s, Deane was brimming with ideas for bringing Dracula to the boards. It would take him nearly two decades to achieve his goal.
    In 1922, German film director Friedrich Murnau made a film loosely based on Dracula. He called it Nosferatu (an old, folkloric name for the vampire), changed the main character to Count Orlock, shifted the location to Bremen, and brought in a chilling cast of rats to carry bubonic plague into the city.
    Bram Stoker had died in 1912, but when his widow, Florence, got wind of Murnau’s changes, she tried to shut the production down. Royalties from Dracula were her main income, and she found the German film a thinly disguised pirating of the novel. So she sued.
    After spending the better part of a decade embroiled in legal wrangles, Florence came close to having the negative and all prints of the film destroyed. Much like its protagonist, however, Nosferatu proved exceedingly difficult to kill. One print of the film escaped destruction—much to the benefit of cinematic history, for Nosferatu ranks among the finest vampire films ever made: Max Shreck’s creepy, cadaverous Orlock—all teeth and talons—sets a standard of excellence rarely matched by Dracula’s later interpreters.
    During this protracted legal battle, Hamilton Deane won permission from Florence Stoker to mount a stage adaptation of Dracula . Unable to find a competent playwright, Deane wrote it himself. He condensed the sprawling novel to fit within the limitations of a three-act play on a single set. This meant dropping the Transylvanian scenes; all the action would now take place in London.
    Crucially, Deane made the count presentable for the drawing room. For the first time in his long career, Dracula donned evening clothes, underscoring his new identity as a suave eastern European nobleman. Because Dracula was only seen in the evening, he never appeared without sporting this garb—which thus became inextricably linked with his name.
    Deane’s most distinctive refinement of Dracula’s image was the addition of an opera cloak with a high collar. This served a variety of purposes. Not least of them was providing cover for the vampire’s vanishing act: With his back turned to the audience and cast members holding his cloak, Dracula could drop through a trap door in the stage and “disappear.” That was only one of the special effects—which also included a trick coffin—that thrilled provincial audiences across England. Despite being scorned by West End critics at its 1927 London debut, Dracula would enjoy huge success for many years. It was among the last plays performed at Stoker’s old Lyceum Theatre before it closed in 1939.
    By then, Dracula had crossed the Atlantic. Rewritten once more to streamline the cast and plot even further, Dracula became a 1927 Broadway hit starring an immigrant Hungarian actor named Béla Lugosi. The tall, handsome, former Austro-Hungarian infantry officer with the mesmeric gaze had been born in 1882, near the border of Transylvania. Lugosi spoke barely a word of English upon his arrival in the United States after World War I, and he never lost his strong Hungarian accent. That seemed only to enhance his appeal as Count Dracula: The play ran for 261 performances in New York City before going out on tour. Then Universal Studios bought the movie rights.
    The 1931 film