“A Story That Is Not Known to Me:” How ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ Became One of the Deepest Loves of My Childhood
Just as Dracula famously has his great love, the Count himself has been one of mine for as long as I can remember. The Universal Monsters were the foundational building blocks of my horror education. And even before I saw those classic movies at a very young age, there were cartoon counterparts in things like Mad Monster Party and Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, which I’d been watching since I’d at least been old enough to speak. We had a hanging light-up Dracula Halloween decoration that made noise and had glowing green eyes, which absolutely scared the hell out of me. Dracula had really always been a part of my life, but it was receiving that original 1931 movie on VHS that turned my love of that vampire and that general story into a conscious, concrete thing.
Luckily, there were a lot of things to fuel a kid’s love of the classic monsters in the 1990s. When that remastered video collection came out, they came back in a surprisingly big way, with new novelizations aimed at kids, coloring books, and even Burger King Happy Meal toys. And I had them all. But there was another Dracula movie I got exposed to right around the same time as I’d first seen the Bela Lugosi film, and just like that one, I had been immediately captivated. At some point in time, my parents had taped Bram Stoker’s Dracula off of Pay-Per-View. When they sat down to watch it, my dad figured it was fine for me to watch, as he figured one Dracula was as good as another. It was obviously much sexier and gorier than the Universal classic, to the point where the two of them really couldn’t be compared, but that didn’t faze my dad at all.
My mom, however, was a different story. She walked in on us watching it one night and was horrified, naturally coming into the room right at the moment when Keanu Reeves’ Jonathan Harker is seduced by Dracula’s topless vampire brides, who are heavily suggested to bite him right on the dick. And that was when she turned off the TV and got pretty mad, noting that this was completely inappropriate for a five year-old and how on Earth could he let me watch that? For the first and only time that I can remember, my mom even went as far as to tape over it so that neither me nor my dad could revisit the movie again. Needless to say, my budding young relationship with Bram Stoker’s Dracula was over before it could really begin. This was one of my earliest movie memories in general, before I had even begun to really consider myself a horror fan or start to learn about the genre at all.
As I started getting into the genre, though, I never stopped celebrating the classics and my love for all things Dracula only grew. And all the while, I held onto my foggy memories of watching that Pay-Per-View tape with my dad. It also made the film itself that much more alluring, the one Dracula movie I was not allowed to watch. But I never got my hands on it, and I was only in second grade, so it started to slip my mind.
Before long, pretty much everything else changed as well, when my parents announced their divorce. My dad moved out and suddenly my weekends were split and it was an adjustment for each of us. I was staying with my dad one weekend in the first house he rented after moving out, one that kind of smelled perennially of dog poop, when I suddenly came down with a fever. My dad had very rarely had to take care of me when I was sick, but I have to admit that he did a pretty great job. Sure he did all the standards, kept me hydrated, brought me some soup, but also did so much more than that by going out and renting some movies.
He came home with not one, but three tapes. That was such a rarity by itself that it immediately made me giddy, even though I felt like crap. He rented me It (which, as a three-hour miniseries, was split over two tapes) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He plopped them down beside me and said, “These oughta keep you occupied,” and man was he ever right. It sparked a passion of its own and also became another childhood favorite, but sitting there watching Bram Stoker’s Dracula felt like rediscovering something great that I had only really gotten to glimpse the first time. As much as I loved Dracula before that moment, once the end credits began to roll, I had genuinely fallen in love with it. I got into everything Dracula and vampire related so much more after renting that film and finally watching it all the way through for the first time.
I kinda fell in love in more ways than one, too, as eight year old me developed his very first movie crush on Winona Ryder as Mina. Friends would even tease me about it, making me look by pointing in random directions and saying “Is that Winona Ryder?” I don’t know what she would have been doing in Maine, but I looked every time. They’d haul me along to things by saying, “I heard Winona Ryder’s gonna be there,” and it always worked, I always went.
Watching that movie and beginning to obsess over it also led me to another major decision: I wanted, nay, needed to read the book. And not just the abridged versions or novelizations aimed at kids. I wanted to actually read Bram Stoker’s novel. The very idea of it gave me chills, it felt like something that up to that point had been completely unattainable, but I was very serious about it. I wanted nothing more than to read that book and luckily Christmas was right around the corner.
It also happened to be the first Christmas since my parents had split. My mom made it clear that she was only inviting my dad because I wanted him there and she felt it was important to at least have Christmas like the old days, even though it was clear even to me that they would not look like this moving forward. That Christmas perfectly illuminated the lack of communication between the two of them. I did not just receive a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel, I received one from both of them because they both thought that they alone would be getting me the gift I wanted most. My mom had bought me a Penguin Classics paperback of Dracula with a painting of the Count’s red-eyed face staring back at me. Even unwrapping it for the first time, it both excited and unnerved me.
My dad, on the other hand, pulled out all the stops. He had gone to Border’s and picked up a deluxe hardcover that contained both Dracula and Frankenstein, as well. It was also illustrated. It was a much more impressive package altogether. Both of them tried to goad me into admitting whose copy of the book I liked better, even if I don’t think they really realized they were doing it. My dad’s massive hardcover should have been the easy pick, but there was something about that creepy-eyed Count on the paperback that drew me in and so that became my go-to copy. In fact, it still is. Even now, over twenty years later, that very copy is sitting on a shelf in front of me as I type this, well-read and borderline falling apart.
I started reading the book almost immediately and it quickly became my favorite novel of all time. Sure, Bram Stoker’s Dracula didn’t really turn out to be the perfect adaptation that it had claimed to be, but stacking it up against the other Dracula movies I’d seen by that time, it was pretty close. It was the first one I had seen to feature Jonathan going to the castle instead of Renfield, becoming imprisoned by the Count as he fled to London. The first I’d seen where the Count grew younger as the story went on. It was the first I’d seen to feature Arthur as Lucy’s suitor and would-be husband, or to feature Quincey at all. Of course it wasn’t the novel exactly, but as far as I was concerned it was pretty damn close. My dad, more than anything, was blown away by my reading comprehension as I powered through the unabridged novel at eight years old. When we would watch Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he’d always be delighted as I rushed to point out every similarity and difference to the book.
That also led to the first time he ever really got mad at my teachers, even though he didn’t do anything about it. A note got sent home about me reading Dracula in class. It was during our designated reading time, when every kid was free to read whatever book they wanted, and what pissed my dad off most — and me, in retrospect — is that they didn’t take issue with what I was reading at all. They just flat-out didn’t believe I was reading it. Because Dracula was too advanced for any kid, as I think I remember my teacher insinuating, there was no way I was possibly actually reading it. They legitimately thought I would sit there for forty minutes just pretending to read. After that, I was no longer allowed to read Dracula in school.
My love of the book only fueled my passion for the film even more, and it would have been one of that crop of movies I’d rent on a rotating basis every weekend, except for the fact that it broke my mom’s “‘80s rule.” She let me rent anything as long as it had been made in the 1980s or before, as she believed they would be considered tame by today’s standards. That and she remembered taping over it when I was younger, so it wasn’t the easiest flick to get my hands on. Little did she know that the book, with its baby eating and people getting torn apart by wolves, was way more violent.
Still, if I couldn’t watch the movie as often as I wanted, I could play it. Even from my early days on the Sega Genesis, I had always love games that tied into my favorite films. Toys, books, you name it, I always loved things that let me experience my love of my favorite things in any kind of new way. Because of that, Bram Stoker’s Dracula on Genesis was one of my absolute most beloved games as a kid and I played it nonstop. It was basically a Castlevania clone with Keanu’s Jonathan Harker as the main character, fighting giant versions of all the vampires and the different, monstrous versions of Dracula seen in the feature. I just could not get enough of it.
Considering most of the classic monster flicks I loved were black and white, most of my friends weren’t that interested in them. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the one way to get them on board with my passion for the Count. This was a gory, gruesome monster fest with incredible practical creature effects, and those were the qualities in every horror movie my friends and I loved when we were kids.
I even made a few friendships based on mutual love of the film, however briefly. There was a girl that sat by herself most of the time, that no one really seemed to talk to, largely because she had spent the entirety of second grade pretending to be a cat. I had always felt a little bad for her, so one day I sparked a conversation as I saw her sitting alone on the swings and hoped to find some common ground. Almost immediately, she asked if I had seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula, because that was her favorite movie. That got the ball rolling, if only for a week or two as we ran in wildly different circles.
As an adult, I don’t think Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the ultimate adaptation that I thought it was as a kid, but that doesn’t mean I don’t cherish it as a film. I still love it just as deeply as ever. From the performances, to the production design, the phenomenal and unsettling score, and of course the unbeatable effects. As much as I know it by heart, it’s one of the few Dracula movies that I think is legitimately scary at times. More than anything, though, it’s just the most. That film just wallows in excess and I adore it for that. The sexuality, the violence, the performances, the camera trickery, everything is over-the-top and just by nature of being so exaggerated and stylish, it achieves its own kind of balance. One that honestly works very well. Sure, it centers on a romance that is nowhere to be found in the actual novel, but I just love the feature so much on its own that I don’t care. It is even, on its own merits, romantic simply by being what it is, as loaded with emotion as style, a movie as horny as it is horrific.
Looking back, my mom was right. It was absolutely inappropriate for a five year old to be watching, but I’m glad I got that young taste of it all the same. And even if third grade wasn’t much better, I had proven to be able to handle the horror of it and distinguish it from reality at that age, even if my friends and I did start quietly investigating “strange events” in our neighborhood to try and turn up any evidence of vampires. It was the first incarnation that truly made me fall in love with my favorite story ever told and led me to devour every single adaptation I could get my hands on. And, above all, it’s the movie that led me to my favorite book of all time. It’s unlikely, unexpected, and maybe it shouldn’t have happened at all, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one of the biggest, deepest loves of my childhood and I will never be anything but grateful for that.
