...attention grasping, and addicting. Dracula by Bram Stoker is just another novel made into the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola. Distinct changes take place from the novel on paper to the film on the screen. The characters of Dracula, Lucy, and Mina tend to share some of the same characteristics in both the film and novel, but the movie changes aspects of the characters to be more sensational and dramatic. Just as the characters are changed and reshaped, the plot has tweaks of its own. The novel and the film have similarities, but the differences are clearly visible. Count Dracula is portrayed as animal and beast-like in both Dracula and Bram Stoker’s Dracula; he also displays aspects of humanity. Within Dracula, Count Dracula survives by quenching his thirst for blood. He is driven by this yearning for blood and nothing seems to get in his way. He has the attributes of a lion in search of its prey and feeding off of it; he cannot control it, nor does he want to stop. Killing does not disturb him in the least, and he is in search of power. He displays the characteristics of a beast through his continual vicious, grueling slaughtering of his prey- humans. He feels no remorse for his process of survival and life; he is a savage beast. However, the Count appears to be human and has human qualities; he can walk, talk, and breathe just like the average human. Count Dracula also controls a ferocious animal named the wolf within Dracula. The wolf comes at his call and...
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... Count Dracula Count Dracula is practically the protagonist and antagonist of this book. The book is literally named after him. Bram Stoker, the author, describes the count as “a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white mustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere…[h]is face was strong- a very strong- aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils…[a] lofty domed forehead and hair growing scantly round temples, but profusely elsewhere…eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth […] was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp teeth; these protruded over the lips. […] His ears were pale and at the top extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong and the cheeks firm through thin.” In addition, he had sharp nails and very bad breath. What many don’t know, is that Stoker made a very distinct allusion to a real Dracula; Vlad Dracul III. The count has many similarities to Vlad Dracul but still differentiates to the extent of making Stoker’s Dracula a very popular icon. The book mentions three women living in his castle with him and even argues about how he doesn’t love in page 43 chapter 3. In response, Dracula states that they know how he has been able to love and they should know from the past. According to the book Dracula, some writers in the twentieth century...
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...societies nowadays. The look and feel of vampires has also changed due to the resources of entertainment producers and a capitalist society focused on building revenue. Nosferato vampires compared to modern vampires: In Nosferatu, the most important and popular element in the movie was the accuracy of Dracula/Count Orlok. The description in the book matches the actors portrayal, “…a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white mustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere,” (Stoker, 21). Later in his letter, Jonathan mentions the physical structure of the Count who stands before him: “His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with a high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils …The mouth, as far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years,” (Stoker, 23). Nosferatu came out in 1922, a time when movie going was at its height, yet special effects were minimal. The genuineness of the characters was the most important feature to movies in the 50’s, due to other sources of reality being slim (i.e., black and white, grainy, no dialogue). During the silent movie era, the look of everything was most...
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...As a child I was always frightened by vampires, and evil spirits. Due to books and movies like Dracula, I am still fearful of evil spirits. Dracula is the embodiment of evil and has affected the way vampires are portrayed today. This can be seen by Bram Stoker's character of Dracula, the use of a dark setting, Dracula’s unusual abilities and the fact that Dracula is a vampire. But what do I know? How sinister could Dracula actually be? A dark setting can set the mood for the entire story. As we see in Dracula, the dark setting gives off a creepy and scary mood, the perfect mood for evil and vampires. Bram Stoker does a great job of describing the dark setting. Jonathan Harker’s trip to Castle Dracula was very unusual and also creepy. Jonathan...
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...depiction of evil versus good. The descriptions of the horrific nature of hell and the terrible demons there in was meant to scare shaky religious affiliates from deserting their faith. Since then the development of the horror film genre has advanced. According to Hogan (n.d) the first ever horror film to be produced in America was Frankenstein by Thomas Edison. In the contemporary day, the production of horror movies has been exaggerated with hard headed teenagers being the most preferred characters. As a matter of fact, some horror movies such as Friday the 13th and Freddy Vs Jackson were so popular that they made 234.6 and 224.8 million US dollars respectively. There are three most popular types of horror movie genre. The first type, and also the most common, is that in which involves some scientific procedure which goes wrong leading to the creation of horrific creatures or out of this world happenings which affect mankind severely. The second genre of horror movies are those that involve characters acting as dysfunctional serial killers or...
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...The Art of Deception in Dracula "Be not deceived with the first appearance of things, for show is not substance" (English Proverb). Abraham Stoker, the author of Dracula, initially presents Count Dracula as a man of nobility, moral decency, and kindness. However, as Jonathan Harker learns more about Dracula, he discovers the otherworldliness, deceptiveness, and cruel intentions of Dracula. Stoker illustrates the Count in this manner to remove the disguise of the Victorian era. From 1837 to 1901, the people of London, England cloaked themselves with wealth, peace, and confidence through their expansions of land and population. However, Londoners were corrupt with their expectations of gender and society, while their city was grimy and impoverished....
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...Dracula Essay Since the beginning of time, it has become culturally accepted that men are the stronger, preeminent gender in society. Throughout history, it can be seen that males, as a whole, have been perceived as dominant and impervious species to which nothing is inferior. Women were considered insignificant and useful only for irrelevant tasks. Evidence of this can be seen throughout the world, from prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France dated back to 17000 BCE. in which men are depicted hunting and defeating wild beasts, to the Holy Bible where women played a secondary role. It was not until much later that women prevailed and made their mark on the world. One of the periods in history in which men’s role in society was at its height was during the Victorian Era. This era was a time in English history in which the British empire flourished and prospered. There was a revival in the arts, especially, gothic literature. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mina Murray symbolizes the modern woman through her relationships with the other characters, her strong will to participate and learn, and her perseverance. Wilhelmina Murray’s closest friend in the novel was Lucy Westenra. Mina and Lucy were childhood friends, but were not of the same social standing. This was so because Mina’s mother worked for the Westenra household. Therefore, Mina was the child of a servant, which did not entitle her to the same privileges that Lucy had. As the two girls grew up, they each encountered...
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...The Myth of Dracula Jenny Martinez, Com 220 University of Phoenix Cole Chatterton January 9, 2008 THE MYTH OF DRACULA In October of 1999, a television series began that would run for approximately four and a half years. This series would again sate the American appetite for vampire stories begun by the likes of Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Tanith Lee, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. The name of the series? Angel. The Premise? A vampire, originally named Angelus, had been cursed by a gypsy victim, with a soul, and could no longer kill humans. And if he fell in love with one, his dark side would return, which he feared more than anything else. The series featured many flashbacks to many centuries past because the vampires depicted were several centuries old. Not only that, but the vampire had true eye-appeal for the female audience. He was tall, dark, and handsome, just like almost every vampire in almost every myth America has ever heard (Angel site, 2004). But could such a creature truly exist? Although the vampire myth is present in many societies around the world through the centuries, there is a basis in science and fact, for this legend. To start off with, one of the most popular modern vampire stories, written in 1897, was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. To this day, it sets the bar for the modern vampire. Authors have a tendency to pull juicy pieces of many different tales together to patchwork them into something to hold the reader’s interest. ...
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...During the Victorian era, there was a rise in tension between the Protestant church and the Catholic church. The majority of people in England practiced Protestant religion, but Dracula is about a blood-thirsty vampire that meets his demise with the use of the Catholic religion. Mina, Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris use a variety of symbols from Catholicism that kills Dracula and protects them from being harmed. Dracula is a Satanic being that in the end meets his defeat by the power of God. In the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker uses various Catholic symbols in the fight against Dracula, the antichrist, to illustrate the good of the Catholic religion and the promise of its salvation. The crucifix is...
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...focused on the representation of fear in the face of dissolution of traditional structures, gender roles and religion. The resurgence of vampire fiction in the late twentieth century presents a different image of the vampire figure, appropriate to the changing societal values and nature of our world. Bram Stokers novel “Dracula” (1897) is compared to the Catherine Hardwicke’s film “Twilight” (2008) to display the development of conventional archetypes and tropes of the vampire into a more contemporary context....
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...Today’s modern day vampire is considered one of the most notorious and iconic figures all over the world. With the steady stream of vampire novels, films, and television shows being produced, it is fair to say that the vampire has become the dark horse of literature, every enthusiasts dream. Yet this wasn’t always the case, because vampires were once considered the stuff of nightmares. Every culture has stories of these once terrifying ‘bloodsucking demons’ that, according to literary historian Brian Frost, “may go back to prehistoric times”. However, many of the myths surrounding such creatures emerged mainly during the 18th century particularly arising in Eastern Europe in areas such as Serbia, Roma, and Slovakia. The major paradigm shift from the early 19th century to the early 21st century is a complete change in attitude and definition of a vampire from a terrifying creature of the night to a romantic and beautiful almost-human, resulting from a change in religious and societal beliefs. These myths sparked a mass hysteria throughout most the 18th century, with frequent reported sightings of alleged vampires. Most famous of which was the case of Serbian peasant Arnold Paole who is believed to be the first man accused of being a vampire (Marx). It was supposed he had killed 17 people from his village during the night, later returning to his coffin. Government officials who ordered his coffin to be opened believed at the time the body (which looked perfectly fine apart from...
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...say how far you would agree with this view.” Women are central to the narrative of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and within Christina Rossetti’s poetry. All three texts were written during significant times in history: Rossetti and Stoker’s works during the infamous reign of Queen Victoria, and Carter’s collection during the year Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister of Britain. As a genre, the gothic is often regarded as being dominated by men, with women featuring in the role of victim subject to patriarchy. Many early gothic texts feature women in the role of victim under the authority of predatory men, perhaps most notably in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. However, Stoker, Rossetti and Carter all at times break with this convention by characterising some of their females as strong, independent and liberated. As writers, they experiment with the characteristic features of the gothic genre, particularly Carter and Rossetti who challenge the traditional conceptions by presenting many of their female characters in dominant, authoritative roles which break convention. There are occasions in all three texts when the passivity traditionally associated with femininity in the gothic genre can be perceived to be a direct result of oppression from patriarchal figures. In Dracula, Stoker uses a quintessentially gothic scene to portray Lucy being preyed upon by the Count: “The window blind blew back...
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...4, 2015 The Transformation of Vampires: from Dracula to Twilight American Gothic is a subgenre of gothic fiction, with elements specific to it such as; rational versus irrational, Das Unheimliche, puritanism, and guilt just to name a few. What really distinguished American Gothic from any other form of gothic fiction is the continuous references to predestination and presence of original sin, simply because the puritans were the first to settle in the new colonies therefore having a profound influence on American gothic writers. However, American Gothic has become much more contemporary beginning in the eighteenth century. In Caroline Spooner’s “Contemporary Gothic”, she explains how gothic has been able to survive in America by “drawing self-referentially on itself, combining sincere nostalgia with a self-aware sense of theatre, even camp.” (Farkas 1). Gothic has the ability to transform depending on the the times and what social issues are prevalent at a specific time period. Many writers are taking it upon themselves to rewrite “the vampire” in a more modern setting. The face of a vampire has changed since Bram Stoker's Dracula, but his novel has influenced our society and will continue to influence our culture as time goes by. Some of Dracula’s characteristics, including his sensitivity to light and thirst for blood, are still present, but have just been tweaked to the writer’s preference. In the time of Dracula, the vampire was more of a villain but in many of...
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...After reading the original texts from which Moore and O’Neill drew their characters for their graphic novel, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, my interpretation of the characters did not change as the Victorian texts provided a backstory that helped me understand both the original characters and Moore and O’Neill’s characters to a larger context. The original texts also helped me realize why Moore and O’Neill portrayed the characters the way they did as after reading the original texts I gained a new insight on the characters and this helped me understand the contrast between the old characters and the new ones as well as some similarities and differences. Since I had never read any of the Victorian texts previously I did not understand many of the...
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...had much in common: they were both influenced by existentialism; rejected any kind of female essence; and both thought that “one is not born but rather becomes a woman”. This is precisely what Carter tries to explore in Wolf-Alice, she goes against essentialism, by showing that becoming a woman isn’t a matter of essence but in fact a physical process on its own right. In Wolf-Alice, Angela Carter uses a wide range of stylistic devices to explore the wild nature of the eponymous character and her progression to becoming a woman. Primarily, the narrator of the story implicates the complete rejection of the child brought in from the forest. She is not viewed as a human being but instead as a savage creature, in order to underline this Carter uses a wide range of atavistic imagery, “her panting tongue hangs out” and “her legs are long, lean and muscular”. The triplet in the latter quotation recreates the image of what we would expect and animal to look like, this is further reinforced by the very strong semantic contrast; “she never walks; she trots or gallops”. This sentence is clearly split into two stylistically different parts by the semi-colon in order to, on the one hand, encapsulate her animal self, but on the other hand to underline the paradox that there might also be something human about her. The duality of her nature is reinforced further on in the story; “Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf”. This quotation maintains the uncanny image of this wolf-like...
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