Dracula may be my favorite story ever told. There are sections of the book that are infuriating, to be sure. Not only do we sometimes have to hear people say how greater men are than women at all things, but the female characters are usually the ones saying it. But when it comes to crafting atmosphere, dread and a terrific ensemble cast of characters, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is second to none. You’d think, then, that I would be protective of adaptations; but if anything, it’s the absolute opposite.
Dracula is nearly tied for the single most adapted fictional character in history with Sherlock Holmes. It’s been done to death, sure, but it’s also a story that’s already been told and retold a thousand different ways, so there’s really no wrong way to do it. Whatever new Dracula adaptations come out at this point—and we’ve surely not seen the last of them—it’s incredibly unlikely that they’re going to be better than the greats or worse than Dracula’s Guest. No matter the liberties that are taken, I’d like to think we’re used to it and that these characters can be deconstructed and reassembled in any number of ways.
For BBC and Netflix’s Dracula, let’s start at the beginning. We’re introduced to the protagonist of the first part of the novel, Jonathan Harker, who has arrived at a convent in Hungary looking extremely unwell after his imprisonment in Castle Dracula. The nuns press him for information about what happens to him and he tells them his story as he starts to remember it. The nuns are Sister Agatha, later revealed to be this series’ Van Helsing, and Mina, who was called in by the sisters to see her fiancée and hopefully jog his memory. This sounds off book, and a lot of people have said it is, but it really isn’t. In fact, this whole framing device was one of my favorite things about the series right out of the gate. Jonathan’s time with the nuns, in which he spends months of recovery after his initial horrors at Castle Dracula, is one of the most overlooked portions of the novel and barely ever makes it into any adaptations when it is so worth exploring. This is such a smart approach to telling the story because these are questions that the nuns must have asked him when he first arrived. Even Sister Agatha, though she actually turns out to be our Van Helsing here, is a real character in the book, and not simply invented for the series as I’ve seen many viewers suggest.
Things actually start out incredibly traditional. Jonathan Harker is sent to Castle Dracula where he is to sell property to an enigmatic old Count, slowly realizing that he is being kept prisoner and that the Count never intends him to leave. My favorite thing about this first episode, though, is that it gets less and less and less traditional as it goes on. This is absolutely an episode that starts with Harker and Old Man Dracula and makes you think it’s the story you know, until it isn’t. When it starts to take those unexpected turns, that’s when the show really starts having fun with itself. But even those moments aren’t coming from nowhere, such as the vampire begging for Jonathan’s help lifted from Horror of Dracula.
The back half of that first episode is the most imaginative and fun as Dracula makes his way to the convent, totally uncharted territory now, tossing any notions of what we know to expect from the novel out the window. The nuns are prepared for him, and seeing so many nuns trained for vampire slaying—just in case, too, as none of them have ever actually seen a vampire before—is an incredible moment. Once Dracula and Agatha come face to face, that’s when the backbone of the show is finally established, as these two characters are really the one concrete commonality between the three episodes.
With Jonathan dead and basically out of the picture after the end of that first episode, two of the most prominent key players in this story are off the board. That’s good in the sense that it’s unexpected, but also unfortunate for the fact that this was up to this point one of the adaptations to do best by Jonathan, by far. The weight of his trauma at Castle Dracula and how it informs his character is crucial to his arc, but rarely ever makes it into the movies, usually because those so often seek a romance between Mina and the Count. In that scenario, Jonathan is always the boring preppy boyfriend who can’t hold a candle to her more enigmatic, dark, powerful vampire lover. To see Mina discarded like this is way more of a surprise (and a disappointment) because she’s always the heroine of this story; except of course in some adaptations where she’s name-swapped with Lucy.
The second episode of the series, though, is once again a total fan wish fulfillment. And it’s a wish fulfillment of an entirely different kind. For nearly twenty years, there have been several attempts made to get the film The Last Voyage of Demeter off the ground. Directors like Neil Marshall, David Slade and Marcus Nispel have been attached to it at various points; currently, André Øvredal is attached to direct. The film has long been set to be based on a single chapter in Dracula, completely centered on the doomed Russian freighter transporting the Count from Romania to London. Fans have been excited to see this movie for so long, but it still hasn’t yet come to pass. The decision to have this second episode of this series, keeping in mind that each episode is feature length, completely take place aboard the ship means we kind of finally get to see The Last Voyage of Demeter in some form after all this time. It’s not a big budget studio movie, but it is basically a movie about Dracula picking off the crew of that ill-fated ship en route to London.
Placing Agatha on that boat leads to many changes, as she knows the vampire and what he is capable of and is determined to stop him to save as many people as she can. The biggest change here, and the most sensible one, is the fate of the ship. Infamously, in the novel and most adaptations, the last crew member ties himself to the wheel before he dies to ensure the ship reaches port, because it is his duty. Here, that’s the last thing anyone wants to happen, so it makes every kind of sense for Agatha to offer the alternative that everyone go down with the ship to ensure that the monster is destroyed, because this ship cannot reach port under any circumstances. That then leads us into the controversial twist that seems to be almost universally despised.
Before we get there, though, there’s one last bit of fan service in episode two that absolutely has to be addressed and that’s the inclusion of Lord Ruthven. Soft-spoken, mourning the loss of his wife—as she was, after all, his best friend—and at odds with his lover, there’s a self-interest to him that wins out in this survival situation and he effectively becomes a proto-Renfield by the episode’s end, which is a clever nod to his literary history. Lord Ruthven is not actually a character from Dracula, but is incredibly important to the DNA of Dracula all the same. Ruthven originates from the John Polidori short story “The Vampyre,” originally conceived during the same famously fateful Villa Diodati ghost story contest that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. The vampire Ruthven, cruel and vain and manipulative, was based largely on Polidori’s unrequited love for Lord Byron. Which is ironic, as the rest of Polidori’s story was largely ripped off from Byron’s unnamed “Fragment of a Novel.” While we don’t see Ruthven become a vampire, his inclusion is a welcome reference to literary history and the building blocks of this whole story. Little moments like these were particular highlights of the series for me, such as also seeing the Count refer to himself as being from Wallachia, which was the province that the historical Vlad III Dracula was actually Prince of, not Transylvania. They’re totally inconsequential details, but great fun to pick up on throughout the show.
And then we come to the end of the second episode, where everyone’s good faith in this series went completely out the window. Dracula walks onto land and then he is caught in a helicopter spotlight, because it is now revealed that it’s been 123 years since the Demeter went down and he was trapped in his coffin at the bottom of the ocean. From here, the rest of the series plays out in the present day.
I’ve seen plenty of comments, tweets, Facebook posts to know that people absolutely hate this moment and, as a result, mostly seem to hate the third episode as a whole. I do not. There are certainly things I don’t love about it, but this particular decision that made everyone so mad is actually something I’ve been wanting to see for a long time. I love being transported to a different time and place whenever I read Dracula. I love seeing the Victorian costumes and locations of so many different versions on screen. But if more adaptations want to stay true to the core of the book, no matter what else they change, then more adaptations should be modern.
Dracula is fundamentally about on old world folkloric monster being unleashed on the modern world. It was published in 1897, right on the cusp of the 20th century, and Stoker was extremely aware of that. There’s almost a degree of fetishizing modernity in the text; everything from phonographs to the concept of the “New Woman” are either frequently used in the narrative or are discussed by the characters. Just as many modern techniques are used in the fight against Dracula as old world traditions. Before Lucy dies, Van Helsing tries to save her with a blood transfusion, a technique which would not be popularized until a few years later, nearly making Dracula a science fiction novel.
With that in mind, it makes absolutely perfect sense for the London section of the novel, where the more modern aspects of the story have always come into play, to be set in the present. It’s refreshing. It completely fits, not only in the context of the series, as it is fundamentally rooted in the entire concept of Dracula as a whole. At first, I was bummed that the final episode would have no Sister Agatha, but the show found a way to reconcile that in a way that made sense within its own internal mythology. The way “blood is lives” had been repeated over and over by Dracula, one would hope it would have some larger context, and this is it; to connect Agatha and her descendant into one body. There are still far less convoluted ways to bring her back, though. I mean, this is a vampire show. The guy could have just bitten her.
We’re also treated to modern takes on central characters to the book like Jack Seward, Lucy Westenra, and Quincey Morris. That last one is exciting because Quincey is notorious for being kept out of adaptations, despite literally being the character to deliver the killing blow to the Count in the book. Quincey’s two main characteristics (courting Lucy and being from Texas) are kept intact while other details are changed: he’s definitely more of a prick, for example, than he ever was in the book. But for the most part, he’s just sidelined. Seward is mostly the same as he’s ever been, in love with Lucy and hoping that just being in love without saying or acting on it will get him what he wants. If anything, Seward gets off too easy. There’s a semi-common theme in Gatiss and Moffat’s work of nice guys being rewarded just for being there. But honestly, I was just waiting (as I always have been with this character, really) for someone to just sit him down and give him the “You can’t make it happen just because you want it to” speech from Pretty in Pink.
Lucy, though, is where the third episode shines. This character has been reinterpreted more than perhaps any other in the book, because despite the fact that she has several letters and diary entries written from her perspective, the book rarely gives Lucy her own voice. She’s constantly building up the men around her and is a perennial plot victim. BBC’s Dracula is not the first to make Lucy an independent free spirit—Coppola’s film did that pretty famously—but it does do something new by giving her so much agency. Most explicitly, there’s the fact that she’s a willing victim of the Count this time. She wants this and it’s her decision, though it doesn’t go the way she (or Dracula) expects. I will admit that it’s not great for the first Lucy who isn’t white to also be the first to see her beauty as a curse she can’t bear to live with, but what I do love is the fact that she gets to comment on the toll of being so constantly adored, which she’s never really gotten to do, and the ways she both does and doesn’t let that objectification define her. That’s been integral to this character from the beginning and was very smartly played with here.
The series is full of these smart inversions of the mythology, of the story we think we know, taking unexpected liberties that more often than not make sense, while also being unexpectedly faithful to the source material in other areas. To be honest, the show’s internal mythology—save for the power of the blood—worked much less for me than the clever retelling and updating of the familiar tale. The Harker Institute was a nice way to keep Jonathan’s name going into the third act, but it felt very derivative of—of all things—Dracula 2000. The bits of Dracula’s imprisonment worked largely due to Claes Bang’s witty and electrifying performance, which in general lies somewhere between Frank Langella and Duncan Regehr, so you know it’s great. This section still gave off some uncomfortable echoes of the Dark Universe, in particular the Prodigium organization established in 2017’s The Mummy. That, alongside the attempts to explore the meaning behind these vampire traditions, did not work nearly as well for me as other elements. Any time a film or series sets out to do that, it almost always just comes off as pretentious and much sillier than it meant to be. It’s always funny that so many vampire stories don’t question why the central character is a walking corpse who needs to drink blood, but have to seek explanations for why he’s afraid of the sun, because, you know, that’s hokey.
Still, there’s so much to recommend and I think the series does stick its landing, particularly thanks to the mutually assured destruction between Dracula and Agatha Van Helsing. Claes Bang and Dolly Wells might have the best chemistry and rivalry since the days of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. In fact, it’s because of that that I was so excited, possibly even giddy, to see a direct callback to the legendary ending of Horror of Dracula during their final confrontation. That’s where Netflix and BBC’s Dracula shines: in the way it comments on, updates and ultimately respects both a literary and cinematic legacy that has sustained for over a hundred and twenty years.