Five Myths about Bram Stoker's Dracula

Bram Stoker was the first author to fictionalize the vampire legends.

Actually, vampires had been the subject of numerous stories, novellas and even theatrical plays prior to the emergence of Bram Stoker’s version in 1897. Perhaps the first significant adaptations of the stories included John Polidori’s The Vampyre, written in the summer of 1816 as part of a ghost story challenge with fellow authors Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley (who penned Frankenstein at the same time), and the penny dreadfuls Varney the Vampire, the first installment of which appeared in 1845 and ran for roughly two years.

Stoker based his Dracula on the real-life Transylvanian ruler Vlad the Impaler.

Not according to scholar and English professor Elizabeth Miller, who believes the connection between the fictional count and the 15th century warrior is elementary at best (although, to be fair, many others disagree with her). According to Miller, Stoker’s primary research was a book by William Wilkinson titled An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in which he came across the name of the ruler and also his nickname, Dracula, which Wilkinson asserted to mean “devil” in the Wallachian language. However, though ferociously cruel, Vlad the Impaler was neither a count nor necessarily associated with vampires, says Miller.

Stoker’s novel was a huge and immediate success.

Not really. Dracula sold well in England, but would not be considered a bestseller and earned Stoker neither fame nor great wealth. Although it sold better in America, Stoker himself received none of those profits. Ultimately, it was a copyright battle by Stoker’s widow, Flo, following the 1922 release of the German film Nosferatu, which largely plagiarized the book, and the support she received for her case from the London theatre community in which her husband had worked, that brought widespread public attention to the novel once again. As attention grew, so did sales of the book, and Dracula became the hit it had not been at its introduction. It also drew the attention of actor/producer Hamilton Deane, who sought and earned permission from Mrs. Stoker to write a stage adaptation. While straying significantly from Stoker’s novel, the play nevertheless immortalized the work’s characters for a mass audience.

Bela Lugosi created the role of Dracula on stage.

The stage’s first Dracula was originally intended to be writer Hamilton Deane, but once he finished the play he chose the meatier role of Abraham Van Helsing for himself. In 1927, the theatre’s first Dracula was an actor named Raymond Huntley, who would go on to play the part more than 2,000 times throughout his career. Nurses were on hand for those first performances to attend to the fainthearted. However, it was Bela Lugosi, in a revised version of the script by American playwright John L. Balderston, who created the role for the Broadway production and whose name has become virtually synonymous with the character since. Lugosi sparked a sensation and his performance was captured forever for future generations of fans when Dracula became a film in 1931.

Stoker created the vision of Dracula we know today.

Actually, that too was Hamilton Deane, and then Hollywood. Stoker’s Dracula was hardly the formal, sensual and romantic figure the character has become to contemporary audiences. In fact, original Dracula stage actor Raymond Huntley was required to provide his own evening wear — Hamilton Deane supplied the cape, as that was considered to be a “costume” versus personal clothing.

The source for much of this information was The Dracula Guide by Bob Bankard.