“I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked physiognomy.
“His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so 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. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.
“Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse – broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count learned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace.”⁶⁰

The Vampire in film and other media

From the time of Dracula onwards, the path of the vampire was many-branched. F. W. Murnau produced his phenomenal film Nosferatu in 1922; Bela Lugosi popularised the Slavic cape-wearing vampire in the stage show and then film of Dracula in 1931, more and more vampire films were made (Dracula’s Daughter; Son of Dracula; The Return of the Vampire; The House of Dracula; The Brides of Dracula; Kiss of the Vampire; Dracula, Prince of Darkness; Dracula Has Risen from the Grave; Taste the Blood of Dracula; Scars of Dracula), comic books began to include vampires (particularly Count Dracula), television series starring vampires became incredibly popular, and a plethora of vampire fiction was written, with Anne Rice’s sensuous vampires doing away completely with any idea of a rotting corpse.

Vampires have (inevitably) turned up in computer games – and nowhere has their use been classier than in the Gabriel Knight games, where the concept of the Other is in classical opposition to the shadow-hunter, Gabriel himself.

So iconic has Dracula become that even those who have never read the book or seen the films based upon the book have a firm grasp of who Dracula is and what his powers are. That this grasp may not bear close resemblance to Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often not realised – for Bram Stoker never forced his Dracula into a red-lined cape or had him seduce women by his allure. The original literary Dracula was no suavely handsome, dark-haired Adonis. But the main elements of the Dracula concept (blood-drinking, somehow cursed, of aristocratic lineage, able to shape-shift into a bat, must be staked and beheaded to be killed) have persisted in today’s western cultures – and show no signs of vanishing.