A Virtual Museum Tour of ‘Dracula’ Crap Found in My Home

I am a huge Dracula fan. It has been my favorite novel since I got it for Christmas at the age of eight in 1997. It was the number one thing on my Christmas list that year, immediately after my parents’ divorce, and it is so emblematic at that time because they both bought me a copy of the book and did not coordinate with one another at all. I love so many of the extremely varied film adaptations we’ve seen over the years. From Murnau’s Nosferatu to Herzog’s Nosferatu, from Bela Lugosi’s Count to Christopher Lee’s, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Dracula: Dead and Loving It, I adore them all and especially love that this is a story that has been adapted more than almost any other and still has never been adapted the same way twice. As much as I love the novel, I also love Dracula as a major pop culture staple, even when those are often incredibly different things.

To highlight this love, I decided to loot around through the Dracula stuff I have on my shelves, in my collection, only counting things immediately on hand. I can’t say what compelled me to do this other than the fact that it seemed fun to do. I think part of it is because Dracula is such a massive figure in pop culture that a variety is almost guaranteed. It’s also very old. While there are certainly much more impressive, older collections out there, it was still neat to find Dracula stuff on my shelves that dated back over 50 years. You don’t get that with Jason or Freddy, though you certainly will soon enough.

Moving on. Scanning my shelves and wading through my closet, I found everything from books to old toys, comics, even candy. Here are ten random Dracula-related things I found in my home and decided to highlight for your reading pleasure.

Dracula stage play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston

From 1971, this particular edition of the classic 1927 play, which formed the basis for both the 1931 Tod Browning and 1979 John Badham films, is the oldest thing in my Dracula collection, and I think that’s neat. Crucially Deane and Balderston did not write the play together. Deane wrote a stage adaptation that was heavily rewritten by Balderston for American audiences when it came to Broadway in 1927. Many of the changed character relationships, from Lucy taking over the Mina role and becoming Dr. Seward’s daughter, to the absence of major characters like Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris, were Balderston’s contributions. I found this copy in a used bookstore somewhere around Bucksport, Maine, close to fifteen years ago.

In Search of Dracula by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu

Ironically, the second oldest thing in my Dracula collection is this paperback of In Search of Dracula from November 1973, which I picked up last month. I have a ton of nonfiction vampire books and consider this one of the seminal texts in that genre. I’ve owned the 1994 expanded edition for the past 15 years, but this copy was simply too cool to pass up. I love the look of this paperback. This book is famous for being the first to really dive into the connection between the Dracula of the novel and the historical Vlad III Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler. It examines the minimal, and largely inaccurate information that was even available at the time for Stoker to take inspiration from, as well as telling a condensed biography of Vlad himself. McNally and Florescu later wrote a full, extremely in-depth biography of Vlad called Dracula: Prince of Many Faces. But above all, the whole look of this book, the bold red text and photographic cover, it just screams ’70s Dracula.

Tomb of Dracula #14

Also from November 1973, this issue of Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula. I bought this at a convention last year along with a bunch of other horror comics, some of which were incredibly rare, for 50 cents apiece. I feel like any good Dracula collection has to have at least one vintage issue of Tomb. The issue reads like the opening of a Hammer Dracula sequel, which is a big plus, as Blade has just succeeded in killing the Count, only for some evil disciple to come in and whip up a resurrection because the body wasn’t properly disposed of. But the cover, depicting Dracula (the comic’s Count was based loosely on Jack Palance before Jack Palance actually played the Count) holding a damsel in his arms and facing down a horde of angry villagers is as classic imagery as it gets. Classic Frankenstein imagery, sure, but still.

Burger King Kids Club Dracula

This BK kids meal Dracula is something I’ve had since I first picked it up at the drive-thru in 1997. It is so perfectly emblematic of what things were like for the Universal Monsters at that time. The movies were over 60 years old, and yet those monsters were everywhere in the ’90s. There were Golden Books kids’ novelizations of the classic movies, Pepsi promotions, Pizza Hut promos, Nabisco cookies, fruit snacks, even a coloring book devoted — I can’t stress this enough — to films that were entirely in black-and-white. And yes, even fast food toys. I not only had Dracula, I had Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon as well. All but the Frankenstein toy. I didn’t care if they came out of BK’s version of a happy meal, I was stoked to finally have toys of those characters for the first time. I still love this little Dracula, though he is missing his cape and coffin, which he rose out of. Man, what a great feature that was.

The Illustrated Dracula by Bram Stoker

From 1975, The Illustrated Dracula is simply the entire text of Stoker’s classic novel, “illustrated” by photos from the 1931 Universal movie. What’s especially funny about that is that the two things are entirely different. The film only vaguely adheres to even the basic structure of the book, and most of the characters have been condensed or even outright swapped roles. The events of the novel that do take place in the film often happen off-screen. So this book has to be incredibly confusing for anyone who was familiar with only the book, only the movie, or (especially) neither. And I love it for that.

Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula by Hans Corneel De Roos

This isn’t that impressively nostalgic, it doesn’t really feel like a piece of Dracula history or the Virtual Dracula Museum as much as the other things on this list. It’s only from 2017. But don’t be fooled. This is such a piece of Dracula history. This book contains the entire text of and history behind the Icelandic translation of Dracula that actually rewrote the entire goddamn book. And somehow nobody noticed for nearly a century. It has been translated back into English for our reading pleasure, and I can only trust that the translator with authentic to the Icelandic translator’s staggeringly bold inauthenticity.

Trolli Dracula

I bought this bag of Trolli Dracula candy in the Caribbean on vacation a few months ago. I picked it up mostly for the packaging. I mean, there is nothing that could more perfectly represent what a major pop culture cornerstone this vampire has become than seeing, right beside the gummy worms (and not at Halloween) a big bag of Dracula gummy… gums. These rubber strawberry smoothies are sickly sweet and, I’m sad to say, not an overwhelmingly positive experience. It turns out that chewing on gums and teeth is at best uncomfortable. But look at that packaging!

McFarlane Movie Maniacs Deluxe Bram Stoker’s Dracula Figure Set

My wife surprised me with this for my birthday a few years ago. I had to pick something on this list that represented Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and believe me, I have a lot to pick from) because that movie was a legitimate obsession of mine as a kid. I desperately wanted figures of Dracula’s many looks throughout this movie, especially when the Movie Maniacs line first appeared in 1998. I hoped against hope that line would cover this movie but as I got older, it just never happened. Until 2005, that is. This stunning figure set came out when I was a teenager, just after I had stopped collecting. It even depicts Dracula in his wolf and bat forms, the two I’d most wanted as figures when I was young. Dracula’s red devil armor from his impaling days would have been a close third, for what it’s worth. Thankfully, after all this time it’s mine now and both figures are stunning representations of the movie’s incredible creature effects.

Treat Street Monster Pooper Wind-Up Pooping Dracula Toy

You assumed from the title there would be no literal Dracula crap on this list. Well, hold onto your butts. I found this in a supermarket a few years ago and bought it immediately. I’ve never bought anything so fast. This is exactly what the title describes. It is a wind-up toy that poops candy as it walks. I love the pale purple color, like he’s either supposed to look like the Count from Sesame Street or he’s aggressively forcing one out. The look on his face, the fact that they elected to depict Dracula mid-crap, it’s poetry. There was no character backstory on the package, regrettably, to let us know what led Dracula to this era of colorful incontinence. Like the Trolli gummies, sadly the flavor’s not nearly as fun as the visual aesthetic. Dracula’s ass candy leaves a lot to be desired.

Puffin Classics Dracula by Bram Stoker

I already wrote about this in the intro, briefly, and there are many more eccentric, noteworthy even valuable things I could have picked to take the last spot. I could have given this spot to my signed Monster Squad poster, or the Waxwork comic book adaptation, or Dracula Classic, a Dracula souvenir magazine from 1976, or The Dracula Book of Great Horror Stories from 1981 which does not feature a single Dracula or even vampire story in the entire text. But I can’t. This is the one. This is the thing that started it all. As I mentioned earlier, my parents both got me copies of Dracula on Christmas Day 1997. My dad got me a beautiful, expensive illustrated hardcover that contained both Dracula and Frankenstein. My mom got me a Puffin paperback. And I still feel bad for my dad for this, but I picked that paperback right away. I cherished it.

As you might notice, it looks like crap. That’s because it’s the single most well-read book I have ever owned. I was fascinated just by the cover. It scared me, sometimes it even upset me to look at it, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. I got this book in third grade and read it all the time. I even got in trouble for reading it, because I was reading above my age level and the teacher genuinely believed that I was sitting there pretending to read. This book cemented my love of all things Dracula, it probably truly kicked off my love of reading, and more than anything else, it became my favorite story ever told. That’s more than enough of a reason to end the list with it. That Counts.