Original subtitles

(CREEPY WAILING)

(HOOTING)

(THUNDER RUMBLES)

(HISSING)

(SCREAMING)

(THUNDER RUMBLES)

Count Dracula is one of the most famous figures in all of culture.

He's the archetypal vampire.

He's the debonair gentleman, the romantic hero

who has gone from the novel to cinema,

radio, television.

He's been in theatre. He's been in video games.

He's been in children's television series.

The one thing you can say about him is he's truly immortal.

He has been haunting our dreams for over a century,

and he's an incredible figure.

But more than that, he's a metaphorical figure.

We read into Dracula so many things.

He's the spirit of the devil, evil incarnate, he is disease.

He's so many things, yet, right at the heart of it,

there is this novel, and an Irish gentleman

who began as a civil servant and went on to run a theatre.

Who came up with this strange idea, imbued with all the folklore,

all the tradition of the vampire figure, and created Count Dracula.

Dracula's creator was Abraham Stoker,

who went by the shortened version of Bram.

This quiet and reserved Irish civil servant

would publish his most famous work in 1897 at the age of 50,

after an already eventful career.

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin.

He went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he excelled in many forms,

certainly in sports, as well as literature.

He went on then to become a theatre critic.

And it was there that he met Henry Irving, who had done a Hamlet,

and he rather liked the way that Stoker had written about him.

They became firm friends,

and eventually, Irving invited him to London

to take over the management of the Lyceum Theatre.

Henry Irving, of course, was this very famous actor figure,

very over the top, wore a cape,

was very impressive sweeping around town.

And in a way, you can start to see some of the ideas of this...

perhaps this count-style figure is drawing a little bit on Irving.

It's been suggested that Stoker drew on Henry Irving

in his depiction of Dracula.

I'm not 100% convinced by that,

except it is possible that in the back of his mind

he was writing a thunderingly good melodramatic villain part,

and Henry Irving could play those.

He famously played Mephistopheles.

So it's possible that Stoker was doing that thing of writing...

something in-house that would do as a play.

They put on very extravagant versions of Shakespeare,

very dramatic, full of big costumes.

And you can see that idea of theatre

and the grandiosity of Shakespeare certainly influenced him.

And he became very interested in writing a defining Gothic novel.

Now, this was the end of what might be called the Gothic tradition

we were reaching, and Bram Stoker had read a lot into

the idea of romance, the idea of the Gothic tradition,

the idea of horror, and, particularly,

where the idea of the vampire came from.

NORMAN: The Dracula myth goes back centuries,

possibly to the middle ages and even beyond.

The idea of lycanthropic creatures -

vampires - that actually sucked blood in the middle of the night

and took people as well as animals to destroy

in order to be able to make themselves live,

and possibly have immortality, is a very, very ancient folk tradition.

The idea of the vampire,

something that's closer to what we understand as a vampire

from books and movies, really comes from Eastern Europe.

We fastened on Romania, Transylvania, Hungary, that region,

as where vampires come from, mostly for literary reasons.

There are vampire stories from across Europe.

A little before the idea of vampires being Eastern European characters

really caught on, people thought of vampires as coming from Greece

or Turkey or parts of Russia.

There are actually equivalents to vampires from China and India.

Wherever else in the world you go,

you can find something that's a little like a vampire.

All myths about vampires seem to agree on a couple of things.

They're dead, but they're alive, and they drink blood.

Drinking blood can also extend to sucking breath, sapping life,

draining the vitality from victims.

The urtext of the vampire now, the vampire that we have,

coalesces in the late 18th century, mostly in Eastern Europe,

but those vampires are more like zombies.

They're sort of earthy, rotten peasant characters,

not the well-dressed aristocrats who can have a conversation with you.

They're more crawling out of their graves

and draining your blood or eating your brains.

An early literary work that would have a profound impact

on both Dracula and all vampire literature

was the 18th-century poem Lenore.

It features a character who seemingly returns from the grave

to take his beloved away on horseback,

and would even be quoted directly in Bram Stoker's work

with the line, 'For the dead travel fast.'

Lenore would also inspire the romantic poets who came before Stoker

and the beginnings of gothic horror.

One of the key figures in the origins of Bram Stoker's novel

is Byron and the Romantics.

And we return to that fateful night by the shores of Lake Geneva

when the Romantics sat and told each other's stories.

On the very same night that...

Mary Shelley told the story of Frankenstein,

Byron told his story of an aristocrat who went out into Europe

and was reckless in a Byronic manner,

but promised that he would return from the dead.

At the end of Byron's story, he dies,

but he leaves it hanging about the possibility of this figure

rising again from the dead.

And Byron would write poems which carried on this vampiric tradition.

But it was the physician of Byron who took up the story -

this unfinished piece that Byron had told

was lifted by a man called John William Polidori.

He was the doctor of Byron,

and he expanded it into a tale called The Vampyre,

which was about an aristocrat who went out into Europe

and rose from the dead,

and really establishes the footsteps that would lead us to Count Dracula.

In certain ways, you can see that book as being a satire on Byron,

and again, this idea of the Byronic poet figure,

the arrogant stylish character that Dracula is drawn from

begins as well - it's part Henry Irving, part Lord Byron.

These figures from London society are as much a part of...

who Dracula becomes as...a peasant legend or a Romanian warlord.

And the idea of the vampire

would carry on through the century, would grow.

There was a penny dreadful,

which was more or less a comic of the time, sold in the streets,

called Varney The Vampire,

which took the Polidori idea of this creature, this aristocratic monster,

and define it as a man from Southeastern Europe.

That idea of the... And comes to London.

So that concept pre-existed Bram Stoker.

Another element that came before Bram Stoker

was the figure of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu...

..an Irish author who in 1872 published the vampire novel Carmilla.

He was also the owner of the Dublin Evening Mail,

which would be where Bram Stoker first worked as a theatre critic

before his move to London.

Carmilla was about a female vampire, and he had been influenced by...

the 16th-century Hungarian Countess Erzsebet Bathori.

She was notorious as a serial killer.

She actually allegedly killed up to 600 peasant girls

and bathed in their blood, with an idea that it would keep her young.

This wasn't exactly a vampire story,

but certainly it gave rise to all kinds of future works

about female vampires, succubi, and all those kind of women

who would actually do anything in order to maintain their looks,

if not maintain a kind of immortality.

All of these elements came together in Stoker's imagination.

And basically put the whole lot together to create...

his own inspired creature - and novel - which was Dracula.

With this extensive research into the vampire mythology,

Stoker would then find the inspiration to write his own version

after a visit to the English seaside town of Whitby.

And there, he talked to the locals.

And they told him a story of a Russian ship called the Dmitry

that had almost crashed into port with none of the crew onboard.

It was a slightly exaggerated story, but that struck him.

And in fact, when he started the novel, he started with the middle.

He began writing the passages that were all about the Demeter,

as he would call it, the ship that carried Count Dracula

from his homeland to England,

that arrives with no crew left alive - just rats.

And it's an incredible vision of a ship sailing into Whitby.

With his publication of Dracula in 1897,

Bram Stoker would give the world an eerie view

of the region of Transylvania -

the home of his literary creation Count Dracula.

He never went to Eastern Europe.

I mean, he did it all in his mind.

And the vision on the page that we know so well,

the most famous part of the book,

that opening that takes Jonathan Harker, the lowly legal,

all the way to Transylvania to do a property deal

with this mysterious Count, that is just imagined.

And that's almost a fictional version of Transylvania.

Many people who've gone to Transylvania

have been slightly disappointed to find it's not quite like

the way Bram Stoker describes it.

He's all, sort of, castles on mountain tops and howling wolves

in the crags, and the carriage scuttling between peaks.

All of that stuff was just imagined by Bram Stoker

as he sat in the British Museum Reading Room

trying to conjure up this idea.

ARMSTRONG: At this point, he hadn't really settled on the name

of his lead character even. He thought perhaps he'd be called...

Count Wampyr.

And the book was...he was thinking was going to be called The Undead.

At that point, copyrighting was very, very difficult for novels.

There were huge problems. All authors had great problems

in owning the rights to their work. What there was, however,

was a very rigid copyrighting process for the stage.

And that was partly due to the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain.

The Lord Chamberlain needed to see a script and say,

'Yes, that is the official licenced script.

I accept that that's the one you're going to perform.'

And the Lord Chamberlain's doing that to look out for obscenities

and treason, but it does mean that you owned that story.

So what Bram Stoker did is he held a reading of the book.

Really, that reading was in order to get the Lord Chamberlain

to stamp the script, which was basically the text of the novel.

And as soon as the Lord Chamberlain had stamped that,

that meant that he owned it. So he did one performance of the play,

which was really just 15 actors reading the book out

in different forms to an audience of two paying members of the public

at ten thirty in the morning in the Lyceum Theatre. It was a process.

It was just something that had to be done in order to state ownership.

And during this, he had to come up with a name.

He had to put the posters up outside the post...outside the theatre.

Initially, the idea was the posters were going to be called The Undead.

But eventually, at the last minute, he settled on Count Dracula.

So the posters went up Dracula, and that's how...

That was the stamp of copyright. The stamp of copyright

was on the play that was called Dracula, and therefore the novel,

which came out shortly afterwards, was also called Dracula.

The name that Stoker chose of Dracula

would eventually tie this fictional character

with a real figure of Romanian history.

One of the supposed sources for Dracula

is the 15th-century warrior Voivode of Wallachia,

Vlad the third, better known in popular culture as Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad was the son of Vlad Dracul.

Dracul is the Romanian for 'dragon'.

Vlad threw a series of battles, and also,

because of his intense cruelty and his reputation

for unbelievable sorts of atrocities,

including impaling the survivors of the battle and his victims

on big stakes, became legendary in his own time.

It's that cruelty, unfortunately, which has left the greatest legacy.

And it is the one that actually kind of links us to the possibility

that he was the model, the original model for Count Dracula.

Legend has it he would go out amongst his people at night

and find out what they were saying about him, how happy they were.

And on one of these excursions, he was killed by his own guards

who may have mistaken him for someone.

Or may just have seen that it would be convenient to mistake

this irritating warlord for someone so they didn't have to get involved

in all the horrors of this particularly brutal regime.

Anyway, his rule came to an end, but the legend...

was spread around the Ottoman Empire,

which at that point covered such huge swathes of Europe.

This idea of this terrifying warlord was told and told and told,

and exaggerated and exaggerated until the idea of Vlad the Impaler

almost passes into mythology outside Romania. Within Romania...

he's a freedom fighter. He's someone fighting for the...

local national identity against the Ottomans, against this pan-European,

pan-ethnic movement, which is trying to impose its...

its culture on Romania.

Vlad the Impaler has sort of...

retroactively been written into the story of Dracula.

When he started to write the novel,

his villain was rather dully called Count Wampyr.

And I think at some point while doing his research,

he must have turned over a page in a book of Romanian history,

and saw Dracula, and thought, 'I'll have that. That's a good name'

But the Dracula industry, as it were, in the 1970s,

two guys called McNally and Florescu wrote this book -

In Search Of Dracula, which cemented the connection

between Stoker's novel and the historical figure.

And that, almost instantly,

when people started making Dracula movies,

they drew as much on this book

as on the very vague stuff that's in Stoker.

And so the marriage of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula...

and Count Dracula, didn't really happen definitively -

certainly in the West - until the 1970s.

Ironically, it did happen somewhere else earlier.

It happened in Turkey, where they had very good cause

to remember Vlad the Impaler.

So when Dracula was translated into Turkish

in the early part of the 20th century,

it was a strange translation because a lot of details of the story,

and all the characters except Dracula, were changed.

So instead of moving from Transylvania to London,

in the Turkish translation, Dracula moves from Transylvania to Istanbul.

And instead of Dr Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker,

and all these stalwart British types fighting him,

there were various representatives of Turkish and Islamic heroism

band together to defeat Dracula,

who is explicitly identified as Vlad the Impaler -

a man who spent his entire career either imprisoned by Turks

or fighting Turks, and therefore looms large

in Turkish and Romanian folk memory.

Whatever the exact inspiration had been,

Stoker had undoubtedly laid down the foundations

for one of the most enduring characters of modern times.

What's so brilliant about Stoker's creation of this character

was he manages this balance between the possibilities.

The idea of evil being attractive had never really been done before -

monsters were repellent and hideous.

They were things to run away from, but Dracula drew you in.

He possessed you. He hypnotised you.

This was a new idea, a terrifying idea.

And Jonathan Harker would be trapped at Count Dracula's castle

with the three brides - these vampiric, alluring women,

who were based, surely, upon the witches in Macbeth

that Stoker had seen being performed at the Lyceum.

The idea of the witches become the brides of Dracula.

So you can see the handing on of traditions that come into the novel.

It's a very derived novel in a good way.

You can see clearly the sources it came from.

And we will follow Dracula as he leaves Jonathan Harker

trapped in his castle.

He will come to Europe in search of Mina Harker, the fiancee,

and he will be this bohemian figure.

He gets younger as the book goes on, Dracula.

The rejuvenating power of blood makes him younger.

Not only that, but he could hypnotise people.

And this is one of the elements of Dracula which is new,

because it is part of the new form of interest in science,

which is sort of crossed with the old school of superstition.

Mesmerism was very, very popular in Victorian times,

so was spiritualism. At the same time, of course,

there was great advances being made in scientific technology.

And it is this sort of combination of things that appears in Dracula.

And what... It's the tensions between the two -

the sort of old and the new, the historical and the superstitious,

with the rational and the advancement,

that makes the tensions in it so incredibly exciting.

I think that's what makes Dracula, apart from the central figure.

And this is... Let's not forget, this is a story...

not told as a straight narrative, it's told in a series of letters,

in articles - it's got multi-viewpoint story.

It isn't one narrator, which itself was fairly unusual.

I think that's a result of Stoker's journalistic experience.

Bram Stoker sets up some of the tropes of Dracula the vampire.

He is a Count. He lives in Eastern Europe. He has brides.

He has women who live in his castle who he has turned into vampires.

He is weak when he hasn't feasted on blood,

and it's blood that gives him strength.

He's weak in the sunlight, but he isn't killed by sunlight.

And he can enter your house without invitation.

He's not scared by garlic. A lot of these things come later.

And it also introduces the idea of Van Helsing, the vampire killer,

who knows the way to defeat Count Dracula.

It wasn't a sensation immediately.

It did quite well at first,

but there's no sense that it ever made Stoker's fortune.

He would write another seven books,

but none ever took off like Dracula did later.

But when he died in 1912,

he left behind a rather meagre sum of �4,700,

which was a healthy sum,

but it didn't say that he'd made a great fortune out of Dracula.

It would be subsequent to his death that it would make its name.

And even sadder in a sense -

poor Bram Stoker died the same week as the Titanic went down.

So even his death got very few notices in the paper,

as the bigger story was the sinking of the ship.

But Dracula wouldn't die.

Dracula would come back. Dracula would live forever.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC CONTINUES)

In 1922, the first film adaptation of Dracula would be released -

FW Murnau's Nosferatu.

The pivotal relationship between cinema and Dracula begins in 1922

with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

He was one of the great silent cinema pioneers,

a man of intense imagination,

and also a man with great disregard for the rules of copyright.

He had made a version of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde,

which has since been lost, without any, you know...

recourse to buying the rights to the book. He just made it.

And he decided that Dracula was the ideal follow-up silent film

he wanted to make. And he did not care about approaching the family

or getting the copyright. He just went ahead and made it.

And it is, of course, one of the great adaptations,

if not the foundation stone

for our entire cinematic understanding of Dracula.

He took the story of Dracula,

and indeed, the film is subtitled 'Inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula,'

and changed it to be, in a way,

truer to the original peasant legend.

Nosferatu, in this film,

is not a suave, sophisticated, debonair character.

The actor Max Schreck was a very unusual-looking character.

But also, he was lit using the techniques of German expressionism,

and with the kind of framing that was very, very specific

to that school of telling stories.

He used very, very strange, primitive imagery,

and very, very powerful lighting techniques

to create this sense of absolute darkness and dread.

And in a way, perhaps because it was silent, it's even more frightening.

This is just disease and horror and plague and fear.

It partly comes from the First World War experiences

of the Producer and the Director.

The Producer had had the story of a vampire told to him

by a Serbian villager during his time in the trenches

in the First World War. So it's a product of the war.

It's a product of the Spanish flu.

These ideas of diseases and decay

are very, very much in the heart of the film.

It's a really disturbing - possibly the most disturbing - Dracula film.

Nosferatu would be the only production of the studio behind it -

Prana Film - as it was not a financial success in Germany

at the time, although it did receive significant praise,

which has only grown over time.

NEWMAN: It's a hundred years old now.

It's still an astonishing piece of work.

It's still a film that people watch,

go back to, steal images and ideas from.

It has invented stuff that's now...

just part of the whole idea of the vampire genre.

The idea of the vampire crumbling away at dawn is from Nosferatu,

not from folklore, not from Dracula the novel.

The look of the vampire in Nosferatu

is very different from what became the default look of Dracula

from the 1920s onwards -

the suave, handsome, sleek Rudolph Valentino-type foreigner

in evening dress and a cloak.

The vampire played by Max Schreck in Nosferatu, who's Count Orlok,

looks like a rat or a stick insect,

and is wearing decaying clothes,

and has these, spindly fingernails, with claws and rat teeth,

and is not somebody you could invite into a drawing room.

He's one of those people who cannot go out in polite society.

Still, if you just show a couple of clips of the film to people,

he creeps you out. It's...

a uniquely unsettling and strange performance.

It is very stylised, very odd,

even in the context of silent cinema.

Even in the context of expressionist performance,

there is something so convincingly inhuman about Orlok,

about Max Schreck, that you can see why

he's haunted European nightmares for a century thereafter.

In some senses, Murnau almost remade the story again,

visually, and gave us Dracula once more

in a way that maybe we think of more immediately than the novel.

He called it Nosferatu, which is a line from the book.

It's a term that means, supposedly, 'offensive' in Romanian

and has been drawn out to mean the undead or something horrific.

And there's some contention whether that's true or not,

but there certainly is a line in the book that Van Helsing talks about

Nosferatu the undead, and that attracted Murnau.

I mean, there was an argument that he had called it Nosferatu

because he wasn't allowed to call it Dracula. That's not true.

He just wanted to call it Nosferatu.

It's a wonderful film that not only introduced

the whole idea of the vampire movie,

it also established the idea of the horror movie, actually.

There is very little in this film

that has that kind of doomed romanticism.

This is pure horror. In fact, its subtitle was 'A symphony of terror'.

That's exactly what it is.

Murnau took every single idea about...

not just the vampire, not just the way that he could destroy innocence,

and also convey and carry plagues with him.

And Nosferatu, amongst many of the other definitions available to it,

can also mean plague carrier.

He'd actually invented and developed film techniques

in order to be able to convey the sheer terror

and the idea of the supernatural invading the real world.

Wonderful scenes of a carriage going through the woods

was actually shown in negative.

And that gives it an incredibly weird look.

This was several stages on from The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari,

but Murnau used all those elements

he'd seen for all the stuff of German expressionism,

all those elements, and then pushed it even further.

There's no question that Nosferatu is an absolute masterpiece

and is probably the defining horror film of its time,

and still has an influence even to this day.

All those things that have become standard, almost,

in Dracula interpretations, the way that Orlok rises up from the coffin

in 90-degree motion, that comes from Nosferatu.

The rising out of the ship's hold, the face against darkness.

That's all Nosferatu.

So Murnau very much put down the template

of how Dracula would be seen on screen to this day.

That's how important it is as a film.

A slight problem that he was faced with was that Bram Stoker's widow,

Florence, saw that Nosferatu was really fundamentally based on

her husband's novel, and sued Murnau for copyright infringement

and plagiarism, in fact.

Her only income after Bram Stoker died, really,

was the posthumous success of Dracula.

Because of his theatrical reading, it was the only thing he had

which had become both successful and copyrighted

that delivered her an income.

So the Nosferatu filmmakers,

whilst they had said this film was inspired by Dracula,

they didn't pay any royalties, they didn't pay any copyright to her.

And when the film was released, Florence Stoker,

who was a very striking woman - she was very, very beautiful

but very austere and not very personable.

In fact, some have read into the way the women in the book of Dracula

turn into these vampire-like figures

is a husband's way of interpreting his distant wife.

But Florence was irate at the fact this film had been made

without any permissions given.

And she initially approached the producers and said,

'I need a cut of the money. I must get my share of Nosferatu.'

But by this point they had gone bust. There was no money to be had.

She then set about not only trying to get Nosferatu banned

but physically destroyed. She wanted every print of the film eradicated.

Thankfully, she didn't succeed. They almost went underground.

It's almost like a Dracula-like story. These prints disappeared.

And through the years in 1960s and 1970s, early prints were discovered.

It was also discovered in probably more recent times, the '80s,

that the tints were all-important to how you watch Nosferatu.

If you watch it without the tints put on it, it looks like

Dracula walks around in daylight. So it's slightly strange.

But if you watch it with the original tints put on,

and actually the scenes of daylight have a blue look to them,

you realise that's the version of night that Murnau wanted to do.

So you could see what was going on. It signifies night.

So if you want to watch Nosferatu,

you must watch it in a tinted restoration

because that's exactly what Murnau wanted from it.

The 1920s would prove a critical time

for the emerging popularity of Dracula,

not only with the release of Nosferatu

and the legal battle that followed it,

but with the first staging of a true theatrical adaptation.

This is what happens when the original author dies

and the work becomes a possible source of income for an estate,

but also what we now think of as a franchise, a multimedia property.

And when you think about it, Dracula was published in 1897.

There's only really the theatre,

and the notion of even copyrighting books is quite new.

There were many foreign editions, some, as I said,

extraordinarily variant from the English text.

But within Stoker's lifetime -

he lived until 1912 - and Mrs Bram Stoker,

who quite understandably wanted to retain some measure of control

and income on the property,

became very tenacious about the film rights.

And for her particularly, probably because...

her husband was a man of the theatre, the stage rights,

she felt that that was the big money-spinner,

was having it adapted as a play,

which it was in the 1920s, and became enormously successful.

It became a big hit both in the West End and on Broadway.

So concurrent with the emergence of film versions of Dracula

was this presence on stage, which, if you think about it,

hearkens far more to Stoker's background

than movies would've done. He would never have thought of films.

Stage is where he came from. So there is a Dracula stage tradition,

which is just as important as Dracula as a film tradition,

if not quite as famous.

Of course, in 1931, Universal Studios decided to take their turn

in adapting the original book,

and their version of Dracula

is probably the most famous version of all.

RENFIELD: The coach from Count Dracula?

In 1931, Director Tod Browning would release

the first of the Universal horror films, Dracula.

I am Dracula.

One of the most signal moments in the entire history

of the character is the casting of the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi,

because Bela Lugosi would bring that look,

the slicked back hair, the widow's peak, the staring eyes,

the good looks tinged with something frightening,

the eeriness, and of course, the voice.

The 'children of the night' line is now legendary.

And there are millions in the world who could never name Bela Lugosi,

but would still know that voice in an instant.

This was how Dracula talked, that strong Bela Lugosi accent.

In the 1920s, in London and New York,

different adaptations of Dracula were both huge theatrical hits.

They were...

..big, gimmicky box-office sensations.

They famously would have, like, a registered nurse

stationed in the auditorium at every performance

in case people fainted. They did fun stuff like that,

which indicates, even this early in the history of horror,

a sort of vein of camp self-awareness

is kind of creeping into it.

Then Lugosi gets cast in the film version of Dracula in 1931.

And, you know, talkies have only been around for four years.

When Universal Pictures bought the rights to Dracula,

they bought the rights to the play rather than the novel,

although the underlying rights to the novel passed to them as well.

And so the film of Dracula is an adaption of the play,

and therefore, they ended up using Bela Lugosi,

who'd played the role on Broadway.

NORMAN: He was a sensation wherever he went.

He actually sort of defined the role for the generations to come.

The great thing about having him on stage was that, of course,

he had to arrive fully dressed

as if for an evening meal.

He had the cape, he had the evening dress.

He had obviously the advantage

of that wonderfully thick Hungarian accent.

So the moment he actually appears onstage,

he sort of became the defining iconic image of Dracula.

The origin of the Dracula cloak is really strange.

In the novel, it's mentioned once, when Dracula is climbing up a wall,

that he's wearing a cloak that looked like bat wings,

which is a really cool image.

But the reason he's wearing a cape in a play

is there's a moment at the end where the vampire hunters...

have Dracula at their mercy, and they are waving crucifixes.

They seize him, and he disappears. And they're left with the cloak.

It's because he's dropped through a trap door on the stage,

which used to be called a vampire trap.

And so the reason Dracula wears a cloak in the play

is to set up this little bit of business, this one shock,

which isn't in any of the movies, because it's a theatrical conceit.

However, Dracula wearing a cloak is just too good not to have.

Despite the success of the stage version,

there was great scepticism at the time

about bringing Dracula to the big screen in Hollywood.

Hollywood hadn't had a horror film tradition at all.

There was a feeling that the audience weren't going to enjoy

a film which was frightening, didn't have any comedy,

didn't have a twist at the end. That said,

'Hey, it's not really a ghost story, it's just a dream.'

It was this idea of a real, genuine, terrifying horror film

just hadn't really been tried before.

And there was a lot of doubt about whether this could happen.

But Universal bought the rights and decided to make the film,

casting, essentially, the cast of the play.

And it turns into an enormous success for Universal,

which at that point had been struggling to find a direction.

And from there, they started to make horror movie after horror movie -

they made Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man.

This whole tradition of horror cinema that we now have began there.

So Bela Lugosi playing Dracula

in a way that ran shivers down the spine of the American audience,

that gave us the entire history of horror cinema.

I mean, it's the film I saw when I was 11 years old

that made me fall in love with Dracula and horror,

and the whole idea of monsters and storytelling or whatever.

It still has a real potency.

And it's also the film...

that invents the horror film.

Nosferatu is an art movie.

It's an adaptation of a novel.

It's trying to wrestle with the sick soul of a Europe

that survived a world war and a pandemic.

The Universal Pictures Dracula,

the Hollywood Dracula, is a thriller.

It's a thriller with romantic overtones.

It's designed to make people shriek

but not to feel too bad afterwards.

You go home having had a good time and a couple of scares,

and that became the model,

the template for the horror movie for a very long time thereafter.

The next great incarnation of Dracula after Bela Lugosi

would arrive in 1958,

when Christopher Lee took on the role in the Hammer Films production.

The next great Dracula was Christopher Lee,

who played the character for Hammer,

a British film studio who had acquired the rights in the UK.

Christopher Lee, who had come to acting very late in life.

He wasn't professionally trained. He'd fought in the war.

He'd had a very brutal Second World War.

And he had come back from the war

wanting to do something new with his life, not return to his old job.

So he decided to go into acting.

And he brought to the character of Dracula something raw

and something quite frightening, which I think comes, partly,

from his life experience, from his war experience.

He has a very powerful, attractive appeal.

He's very masculine, and that begins to develop this idea

that really allows Dracula to survive

all the way through into the 21st century,

this idea of the sensuality of the character.

That the vampire isn't just a rat or a bat in human form.

It's not a creature of the night that just claws and gnaws.

It's something that seduces.

It's with the Hammer version that Van Helsing comes to the fore.

The duel between the two men

becomes the element that is the central to the story.

Of course, Peter Cushing would play Van Helsing in the 1958 version.

So, the two great icons of British horror

are the stars of the 1958 Dracula.

This is the world of Hammer.

So it's a different approach to Murnau.

It's a different approach to Tod Browning's Dracula.

The sexuality of the story now comes very much to the fore -

the heaving bosoms, the pale necks,

the idea of Dracula invading the bedroom.

There's great scenes of windows being left open.

And these sharp cuts, and then suddenly Christopher Lee is there,

filling the frame of the window,

and filling our frame, as well, of the screen. Fantastic sequences.

The first cycle of horror films, which starts with Dracula in 1931,

ends with Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948.

And 1948, you think that's after World War II, after Hiroshima,

beginning of the Cold War - those monsters from the '30s,

they'd started to seem a bit ridiculous.

And so the series ends with their meeting comedians

and becoming figures of fun.

Bela Lugosi, who actually hadn't played Dracula...

since the original film, came back and parodied himself

in Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein.

And he parodied himself again in a British film

called Mother Riley Meets The Vampire.

So we got to the point where

people couldn't take those monsters seriously.

They were your dad's horror films.

And then Hammer Films, almost on a whim,

decided to do not a remake of Frankenstein

but a version of Frankenstein - The Curse Of Frankenstein,

with Peter Cushing as Dr Frankenstein

and Christopher Lee playing the monster.

And that was a massive hit.

And, therefore, they found themselves doing what everybody

who does one of these properties does

is they made all the others as well.

So as soon as The Curse Of Frankenstein was a hit,

they put Dracula, which is also known as

the Horror of Dracula, into production.

Looking at that first film now, and they made many, many more,

it's easy to see why it was so popular.

First of all, you have two actors who take the stuff really seriously.

Secondly, it's in colour, and not only is it colour,

it's in lurid colour.

And it gave Hammer exactly the kind of hit they needed

to then carry on making...

again, almost recycling what Universal had done

but in their own particular populist way.

Christopher Lee only gets eight minutes of screen time in Dracula,

but he does an enormous amount with it.

Those eight minutes changed how Dracula would be perceived for...

until today.

I mean, the idea of Dracula as an action character,

as well as somebody who just stood there in the wings

and exuded evil and influenced people.

If you look at Bela Lugosi's Dracula,

it's all about hypnosis. It's the glowing eyes.

It's the imposing of his will on other people.

Christopher Lee's Dracula is like grabbing people by the throat,

throwing them around, you know,

having a physical punch-up with Van Helsing at the end.

And he has the physical signs of vampirism,

which hadn't been seen much.

Count Orlok has rat teeth,

and one or two earlier semi-versions of vampires have fangs,

but it's Christopher Lee who cemented the idea

of the elongated eye teeth

as being one of the main symptoms of being a vampire.

So what followed with Hammer was... very much...

It established the idea of Dracula as a franchise.

That... He suddenly was more versatile.

You could tell the Bram Stoker story,

but you could also take ...the elements of Dracula

and move in multiple different directions.

Dracula was now versatile, and it began from here,

from Hammer, that filmmakers and television makers

and all sorts of different media would pick up Dracula

and start using him in different ways.

Because he was now an icon. He was indelible.

If you said the Count, we knew exactly what we were talking about.

After Hammer had established Dracula now as a permanent movie icon...

..we come through an era of different interpretations,

different ways of playing it, different variations on the theme.

You get 1973, Bram Stoker's Dracula,

which starred Jack Palance as the central character,

and a very good one he was too.

That was written by Richard Matheson,

who had written I Am Legend,

which is itself a sort of version of Dracula,

a future-set version of it.

So there was... The story was adapting and changing.

In 1974, Andy Warhol got into the act,

producing Paul Morrissey's Blood For Dracula,

which stared Udo Kier as the Count, a very strange version.

But it showed you the different kinds of people

who were fascinated by this mythology.

By the 1970s, Dracula was so firmly established

in the cultural consciousness that everybody wanted to have a go.

Everybody wanted to do their version of Dracula,

and this was worldwide.

This wasn't just America and Britain.

This expanded into all kinds of areas.

And the myth itself was so enduring, and the character was so enduring,

that you could actually manipulate him

into almost any situation, certainly any time.

And so what do you do with a character like Dracula?

Well, if you start to give them a romantic story, a backstory,

an understanding, it's almost like a Freudian understanding

of why would a creature stay alive for all eternity?

Why would you want that? Why would you,

having been converted to a vampire,

not just choose to die in the sunlight?

Surely this must be painful.

We understand the idea of being a vampire is awful for Dracula.

Why is he doing this? He must have a reason.

And so this is where you get the idea which becomes central

to the story of Dracula, but also to the story

of all vampires from pretty much here on in -

that there is something they are living for.

There's something they're staying for, searching for.

There is the lost love.

The thing that they left behind in their humanity,

and this is where it all begins.

That's why it's a very powerful version,

it's the raw version of this story.

And the introduction of the love that will survive eternity

and will keep this monster alive,

and therefore begins to give the monster real humanity.

In 1977, Louis Jourdan starred in Philip Saville's adaptation,

Count Dracula. And this was a reclaiming of the original story.

It was told for television in multi parts.

It's as if the story's gone so far from Bram Stoker

that what it needed now was to be brought back

to its literary tradition, with a wonderful performance from Jourdan,

and Frank Finlay as Van Helsing. It's a reclaiming of the story.

It managed to use more of the plot of the book

than any other mainstream adaptation

because it had the space to include all the minor characters.

I also like the performances of the people around him -

Frank Finlay, Judi Bowker, Susan Penhaligon.

They get more to do with roles that are usually trimmed back.

Most Dracula movies want to spend so much time with Dracula,

they remove nuance from the supporting cast.

I also think Jack Shepherd is the best Renfield -

the mad, fly-eating minion of Dracula,

who is quite often the best role in adaptations of Dracula.

By the end of the 1970s,

interest in Dracula adaptations seemed to reach their peak,

with filmmakers taking the story in ever more expansive directions.

Weirdly, in 1979, there was one week where you could go to the cinema

and see three different versions of Dracula.

I did it in two days,

in two different cinemas, sort of next to each other.

There was Werner Herzog's Nosferatu The Vampyre.

And next to that, there was Frank Langella

in a film called just Dracula, which was based on the fact

that that play that Bela Lugosi had been in

was revived in the 1970s on Broadway. And it was a big hit,

partly because they had really great art direction

by the cartoonist Edward Gorey.

And Langella had been a sort of matinee-idol Dracula.

Count Dracula.

Good evening.

Miss Seward. SEWARD: Count evening, Count.

Dr Seward. Miss Van Helsing.

My saviour.

I trust you're feeling improved.

Oh, yes. Thank you.

He'd played the role onstage for a long time on Broadway,

and he'd given a new rock and roll, rock-star sensuality

to the character. And he reclaimed, if you like,

Dracula's sensuality, his appeal.

He just became this figure who was just powerful and attractive.

And, you know, Laurence Olivier was his Van Helsing.

Olivier does his absolute best against Langella,

but he just doesn't stand a chance.

There's just something so virile about this particular Dracula.

You're almost seeing his victims hurling themselves at him,

desperate to be bitten. It's just such a sexy film.

It's a lot like seeing a Christopher Lee film with somebody else in,

because it's full of... Although it's got Lawrence Olivier

as Van Helsing, all the other actors are like Donald Pleasence,

the kind of people that you saw in British horror films in the '70s.

And it's like a very expensive Hammer film,

but it was made by John Badham,

who'd just made Saturday Night Fever.

So it's the first Dracula who does much dancing.

He sort of sweeps the heroine off her feet in a ballroom

and does a lot of smouldering.

And he has really great hair to go with the cloak,

and a big ruffled shirt -

very much in the Anne Rice tradition of vampires.

But the film that was a huge hit that year was Love At First Bite,

with George Hamilton as Dracula with a suntan,

which is a ridiculous idea.

But again, it's a sort of domesticated Dracula.

It's Dracula in a fish-out-of-water rom-com.

Love At First Bite is in the comedy tradition of Dracula.

So, George Hamilton is Dracula in his castle,

and he's kicked out by the government

because they want to use it as a gymnastics training school.

So he's got to be out by the morning cos they're gonna be using the hall

to start doing box jumps and stuff.

So off he goes. He goes to New York, and when he arrives,

no-one's that impressed. I mean, they're all as jaded as we are

at this point by the vampire legend. He's going round saying,

'But I'm a vampire!' 'Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine.'

And it's a rather sweet, rather charming film.

It's interesting that although it was the film that, at the time,

made the most money, it's probably less well-remembered now

than the other two serious versions of Dracula.

So maybe that proves that, you know, comedy Dracula is a bit of a niche,

but serious Dracula will always come back.

One of the most critically acclaimed adaptations of the 1970s

would be Werner Herzog's remake of FW Murnau's Nosferatu.

Kinski was almost born to play Nosferatu as played by Max Schreck.

With his bald head and the pointy ears,

he could be the sort of doppelganger of Schreck.

It also stars Isabelle Adjani, but it is the visuals

and that strange elusive atmosphere,

that Herzog managed to sustain right the way through the film.

And he also pursues the idea that this Dracula,

this Nosferatu, is the real plague-carrier.

So he's bringing colour and sound to the Murnau version,

and all the iconography that came from a...

a Germanic tradition of the story.

And it shows you what you can do with...

how you can shift the tone in subtle ways.

He remains Dracula, but he becomes a slightly different character.

In 1992, Director Francis Ford Coppola

would release his version of the Dracula story.

Welcome to my home.

Francis Ford Coppola decided he would have a go

at the Dracula story, which retold Dracula in a traditional way,

but very romantically.

It was all about this enduring love.

And, of course, to someone like Coppola, that's music.

'I can put my own stamp on it.'

So what we got was, in a sense,

Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

He was going back to the novel. He was gonna go back to the tradition

of the silent film of Murnau,

to the traditions of the 1931 Tod Browning version.

He was going to re-establish Dracula as a cinematic icon,

because he was Francis Ford Coppola and that's what he did.

Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stokers Dracula,

which is, I think one too many possessory credits for me.

It has a sort of flowing, romantic, obsessive air,

which expands on what the Langella film has done.

And it uses some of the Vlad the Impaler stuff

that's in the Jack Palance film.

And it uses other ideas that go back as far as Nosferatu.

It has special effects,

which are the silent cinema look.

It also is a deeply expressionist movie.

It's a film that's entirely artificial.

It's shot, I think, completely on sets,

or on real locations dressed to look like sets,

unlike Nosferatu, which is shot outdoors.

Murnau went and pointed his camera at old ruins,

and said, 'That's what horror films look like.'

And Coppola, being, obviously, an obsessive fan of movies,

leant into that.

Gary Oldman's Dracula is an extraordinary creation.

He starts off in a very weird big wig.

He looks like a sort of grand dame, almost like a panto dame, actually.

But the one thing about Oldman is that he really goes for it,

and he does have the voice. He gets the kind of...

new kind of Bela Lugosi, growling Hungarian delivery,

which is really mesmerising.

He also gives a performance that...

..it's sort of over the top, and yet it's in keeping with the film.

Coppola creates this fantastic-looking movie,

which is a series of almost operatic set pieces,

rather than a film that has any kind of straight narrative coherence.

And in a funny sort way, it doesn't matter

because you're just revelling in each successive monumental scene.

ARMSTRONG: Francis Ford Coppola had been a fan of the Dracula books

since he was a teenager. He used to read the Dracula story at night

when he was a camp counsellor. Much later on in his career,

Winona Ryder said to him, 'I have come across this script for Dracula.

I think it's great. You should have a look at it.'

And he just suddenly thought back to how he'd envisioned that story.

Even then, back in the camp counsellor days,

he'd a visual image of what this story was.

And he thought, 'OK, let's explore this.'

He looked at the script. He didn't like it quite as much.

And he realised that the story had been told so many times,

it had become a story that had been owned by cinema.

It was no longer the novel that he'd read.

It was a story that was a story of cinema.

And he also thought, 'Well, the story was published around the time

that cinema began. So why don't I use this film

to explore early cinema?'

Which is, in a way, going back to the roots of the story,

but also going back to the roots of the filmmakers' craft.

The romance element he keeps from 1970s.

He adds the Vlad the Impaler elements to it.

He's toying with the Bram Stoker novel,

but he's also toying with the way the early films are made.

So he made it in a way that he could have made it

a hundred years earlier.

So Gary Oldman, a controversial choice,

but, I think, quite a successful choice in the end,

as the central character arrives in a prologue as Vlad the Impaler

in this extraordinary red armour,

and we get these silhouettes of him impaling.

So that idea of connecting this historical figure

with the Dracula story is directly done within Bram Stoker's Dracula.

He was going absolutely to the rudiments.

He was going to use genuinely old special-effects equipment.

He wasn't gonna fake them using modern versions, computers.

He was gonna do traditional style.

He was gonna do traditional special effects - old cameras cranking.

But they found an old camera for a certain amount

that literally came from the silent era and used it within the film.

And we very much get in Coppola's version more than any other,

I think, the idea of the shape-shifting Dracula -

that he changes guises, which comes from the novel.

So at the beginning of the film,

after we've got through the prologue,

he's an old man with this flamboyant hairstyle.

And Oldman really plays it up.

He's drinking the blood from the razor blade

and all those kind of images.

But by the time he gets to London, he's been rejuvenated,

and he's a bohemian figure in sunglasses and the top hat,

waltzing around London without a care.

And so you do get that idea of the variation

that Stoker wanted for the character.

He's no longer the traditional Count in the cape turning into a bat.

Here, he turns into a werewolf - a kind of a beast.

And I think what it did was remind modern audiences,

or even introduce modern audiences, to the idea

that all these different versions of Dracula have been going on.

All these vampire stories they may have been watching

and reading come from Bram Stoker.

It was an origin story.

It was the chance to go, 'This is where it came from.'

And this is the kind of thing that cinema has done with it.

Another film that took on the connection between cinematic history

and the Dracula story would be Shadow Of The Vampire,

released in 2000.

Shadow of the Vampire is a film about the making of Nosferatu,

with John Malkovich playing Murnau,

and Willem Defoe playing Max Shreck.

There is a twist to this. It's not just a film about a film.

The twist is that Max Shreck,

as played by Willem Defoe, is a real vampire.

And he keeps snacking on the continuity girls

and the script girls, which is, of course, enraging Murnau.

It is a wonderful conceit. It is a really, really funny film.

And at the same time,

it does justice to Murnau and the making of the movie.

It is actually framed in many of the ways in which Murnau framed it.

So it goes back to the old techniques.

It shows how films were made in the 1920s,

which is always fascinating. And it has just fantastic performances,

both from Defoe and from Malkovich.

It's comedic, but it's not.

It's dark, but it's weird and funny.

And it's toying with the filmmaker.

It's saying to Coppola, 'You think you're gonna make the film

about the filmmaking of Dracula? No. We're gonna do that about Nosferatu,

and we're gonna take it on. We'll see you, and we'll raise you.'

And this is what keeps happening.

People will not let Dracula... They will not let him die.

They will always pull him back out of his coffin.

It's a wonderful film about the concept of Dracula.

It's that sort of parody, but also an analysis

of the way that Dracula has become a cinematic thing.

Folklore has become movie.

It's a really well-done exploration of the idea of Dracula.

So there is a permanence there.

He will never go away, Dracula,

and he has seeped deep, deep into culture,

beyond Buffy and all those things.

If you think about it, Batman is a version of Dracula.

He goes out only at night.

He has this relationship with bats in a cave.

Batman is a version of Dracula - a superhero derivation of it.

Dracula is no longer just a horror icon.

He is an icon for all of culture - music, video games, everything.

All around the world, he has been... you will find Dracula.

Because the story is so open to interpretation,

that's the beauty of what Bram Stoker did,

is he pulled together so many different wisps of legend.

He pulled the Eastern European undead legend.

He pulled the idea of celebrity and fame and the glamorous male.

He pulled the idea of sexuality and virginity.

You know, there are so many strands of storytelling

in that one story and that one character

and his journey from his castle to the UK.

This idea of moving from East to West -

all of these stories are so powerful

and so potent, and they can all be unpicked in different ways.

I don't think we'll ever find

that we've exhausted the possibilities of this legend.

In terms of an icon - immortal. He is enduring.

I think the reason is because he is transcultural.

He can be used as a metaphor for so many different things,

whether they are corruption of innocence,

they are the conveyance of disease,

where they are the search for immortality.

All of these things, and many, many more,

can be actually read into the character of Dracula

very successfully.

There are Chinese versions of Dracula.

There's a Pakistani Dracula movie.

There are Korean Draculas,

a whole bunch of films from Mexico with Dracula.

There's strange Spanish comedy Draculas.

There are about seven of those made over a period of thirty years.

So that must mean something culturally specific

that I honestly don't understand.

There is no end in sight. When I started, I thought,

'Oh, well, at least I've seen all the Dracula movies.'

No, I hadn't. No. (LAUGHS)

So many more keep turning up.

But remember, there was the novel before that.

There was Bram Stoker taking all the elements of the vampire

and concentrating them in one character,

and not knowing that he would create

one of the most famous characters of all time,

a character who simply wouldn't die.

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