Comprehensive details of Stoker’s compensation at the Lyceum have yet to be published. Barbara Belford writes (without documentation) that Caine’s loan represented “eight months pay” for Stoker, which would make his Lyceum salary £75 a month—a figure totally at odds with the compensation recorded in his own hand in earlier American tour ledgers. Caine biographer Vivien Allen speculates that Stoker’s prodigious output of fiction may well have represented a necessary hedge against the shifting fortunes of the Lyceum and Henry Irving.
Stoker’s life has been the subject of three full-length books, Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (1962); The Man Who Wrote Dracula by Daniel Farson (1975); and Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (1997) by Barbara Belford. The Ludlam book (now out of print and rather difficult to find) was authorized by Stoker’s son, Noel, and has some of the distracting gloss one expects from family sanctioned biographies, but otherwise is a book well deserving a reprint or revision. Ludlam’s account is especially important, and more deserving of critical consideration than it has previously received. Ludlam seems to have had no particular reason, in 1962, to “spin” anything Noel Stoker told him. Ludlam amended his work with the short but engaging My Quest for Bram Stoker (2000). Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, had a freer hand with family documents and was considerably more candid in his assessments and speculations, but the book, like Ludlam’s, is marred by the lack of any scholarly apparatus. Belford also had access to family papers, and her book is the only biography to date that includes reasonable documentation. But Belford’s book focuses narrowly on the debatable theory that Stoker’s employer Henry Irving was the essential model for Dracula. Accordingly, it was subsequently retitled in paperback as Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula.
The date, curiously, is two days before Stoker signed a memorandum of agreement for the book’s publication. It must be assumed that the contract was an after-the-fact formality, and that Constable already had a firm option on Dracula by virtue of having published Stoker’s previous two novels. Alternately, the contract could have been merely a typewritten transcript of a previously handwritten document, which would explain why the novel is still called The Un-Dead a week before publication. In any event, it was obviously impossible to typeset, proofread, print, bind, and distribute a hardcover novel in the space of six days.
The painting could pass as a near-perfect illustration of Jonathan Harker’s nearfatal encounter with a female vampire in Dracula, and it’s odd indeed that the picture was never used as cover art for Stoker’s book until very recently. I have extensively chronicled the remarkable history of the canvas in “Fatal Image: The Artist, the Actress, and ‘The Vampire’” in my anthology Vampires: Encounters with the Undead (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2001).
Curiously, Ehrlich’s “magic bullet” has also appeared in translations from the German as the “silver bullet”—an age-old connection to myths of werewolves and vampires. It should also be mentioned here that garlic, which also has genuine antimicrobial properties, earned an exaggerated folk-remedy reputation as a blood purifier that no doubt fueled superstitions about its ability to repel vampires.
In her preface to Dracula’s Guest, Stoker’s widow states that the episode was “excised due to the length of the book,” though textual and stylistic inconsistencies point to its never having been part of the novel’s final draft.
Although Wlislocki, a Hungarian/Romanian folklorist specializing in gypsy lore and writing in German, may well have relied on Emily Gerard, his description of the Nosferat is considerably more detailed than Gerard’s nosferatu, adding only more ambiguity to the already maddening etymological stew. Followin is an excerpt from Wlislocki’s article “Torturing Spirits in Romanian Popular Belief” from the German periodical Am Ur-Quell (“At the Primary Source”), vol. 6, 1896, pp. 108-109:
“Amongst Romania’s rural population they say almost commonly that the seventh, sometimes the ninth child, be it a boy or a girl, has the capacity to turn at will into a beast and, as such, to suck sleeping people’s blood. Garlic and incense, bread and salt put into the bed protect against the visit of this fateful creature, which even after his death leaves his grave at night to indulge in his bloodsucking urge. If such a person with the reputation of having this capacity in his or her lifetime dies, a thorny twig is fixed at his or her shroud which is to hold him or her back whenever he or she wants to leave his or her grave. Yea, in Romanian villages dead bodies were dug up and decapitated, because the person in question was suspected … .
“The most dangerous torturing spirit of Romanian folklore, which not only sucks sleeping people’s blood but also plays a dangerous part as incubus and succubus is the Nosferat. According to popular belief, the Nosferat is the illegitimate child of two people who are illegitimate themselves. The Nosferat is born dead, but after burial awakens to life and never returns to his grave, but assumes different shapes. One moment he appears as a black dog, now as a beetle, now as a butterfly, yea, even now as a straw. In these shapes he visits people at night; if he is of the male sex, women; if female, she pays her visit to men. He only appears to older people as a bloodsucking creature; he sexually mingles with the younger ones, who then emaciate, waste away and very soon die. It often happens that women are made pregnant by the Nosferat and give birth to children who are very ugly, thickly covered with hair all over, and who very soon become Moroiu [a kind of vampire]. Nightly the Nosferat appears as a beautiful youth or a voluptuous maiden to the victim, who cannot resist his embrace, and in a half-awake state must abandon him- or herself to the Nosferatu’s desires. He appears often in isolated places, even in daytime, to those youths and maidens whom he has earlier visited nocturnally. Maidens made pregnant outside marriage frequently invoke the Nosferat as an excuse. Often, during bridal nights, a Nosferat appears to the bride, another to the bridegroom, and only when the embrace is consummated, when those torturing spirits disappear with loud laughter and usually in the shape of a thin pillar of smoke, do the newlyweds realize their error. In most cases, however, there is no embrace; instead the torturing spirits turn the maiden barren or the man impotent. At divorce cases in Transylvania, the Nosferat is frequently named as the reason for impotence. To protect themselves against the visit of the Nosferat on their bridal night, couples in many villages sprinkle holy water on their bed or lay lumps of coal from the church’s thurible beneath it. In some regions it is considered sufficient for the pair’s security if, during the bridal night, a dog remains next to them. According to popular belief of the Transylvanian Romanians, the Nosferat goes down to hell in the ninety-ninth year of its life; there, as a servant of the devils, he tortures faithless married couples.” (Special thanks to Lokke Heiss and Andrea Kirchhartz for research and translation.)
Lugosi seems to have largely dropped the accent on “Bela” following his departure from Hungary, though it continued to pop up occasionally, both in his signature, and, most prominently, on one of the original 1931 posters for Universal’s Dracula. Although the correct Hungarian pronunciation of his last name (meaning “from Lugos”) is Luh-GO-shee, every known audio recording of the actor speaking his name shows his own pronunciation to be Luh-GO-see.
Lugosi aficionados often bristle at the suggestion that Lugosi never really perfected his English, as if such a deficit was a slur on his intelligence or determination. However, as linguists will attest, it is exceedingly difficult to achieve true fluency in another language after childhood, when crucial neural pathways are still open. Intelligence may only compound the problem by encouraging the learner to approach the language as an analytical problem. The Hungarian language presents particular difficulties since its structure and vocabulary are largely unique, without learning-friendly affinities to the Romance languages, and certainly not to English.
Brooklyn-born, English-trained actor (1887-1955), best known for his stage portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac, a role in which he naturally emphasized his profile, and who was often regarded as a caricature of bombastic acting. In the opening of All About Eve (1950), he plays the overreaching actor skewered by critic George Sanders.
Borland told many interviewers, including this author, that she was touring in a stock production of Dracula with Lugosi that was canceled when he was called to Universal to act in the film. However, her vividly humorous and oft-repeated anecdotes about playing Lucy—Lugosi dropping an ice cube down her negligee during the bite scene, or both of them stifling laughter when an inattentive audience member loudly shared a cooking tip (“I always fry mine in butter”)—are unsupported by the records of any Dracula tour of the period, which make no mention of Borland in any capacity. In late 1932, Lugosi did invite her to try out for a vaudeville act incorporating scenes from Dracula, but once again there is no documentation that she actually participated.
This remarkable piece of equipment was specially built for Broadway in 1929 by its director Paul Fejos and cameraman Hal Mohr. It became a venerated fixture on the Universal backlot and was often put to effective use, notably for the opening shot of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
NBC-TV’s 1958 Matinee Theatre production of Dracula, starring John Carradine, presumably exploited the American copyright loophole, as had Orson Welles’s 1938 Mercury Theatre radio dramatization.
Oldman’s outré hairdo was widely snickered at, perhaps most memorably in a Saturday Night Live skit called Bram Stoker’s Blacula, wherein the black vampire’s coiffure consisted of a pair of jutting afro-topiaries.
In the interest of full disclosure, this author produced the documentary supplement for Universal’s Dracula DVD, and also provided the film’s audio commentary.