CHAPTER 9 Dracula Lives!

The popularity of Dracula has let vampires of all sorts step out of the shadows and gain attention. Like Bram Stoker, other authors have found success creating their own vampires. In 1976, Anne Rice published the first of many books about a vampire named Lestat, a character who is part of a long line of vampires that dates back thousands of years to ancient Egypt.

In 2005, Stephenie Meyer published Twilight, a vampire story about high school–aged teens who fall in love. Their story continued for three more books. And since 1979, even younger readers have enjoyed the stories of Bunnicula, who was created by Deborah and James Howe. This rabbit has fangs that it uses to suck the juice out of vegetables!

Like Dracula, other vampires have been the subject of popular movies, and some have appeared on TV, too. During the 1960s, the vampire Barnabas Collins was a main character in the daytime show Dark Shadows. The show ran for six years, and at its peak of success, twenty million viewers tuned in each day. A new version of Dark Shadows was briefly broadcast at night in 1991, and the original show was turned into a movie in 2012, starring Johnny Depp.

More recently, vampires have been featured in movies and television shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, and the Twilight movies. Several of Anne Rice’s vampire stories have also been turned into films. The first, Interview with the Vampire, was released in 1994 and featured Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

Vampires in general, and Dracula in particular, have also appeared in comic books. Marvel Comics featured Dracula in a series of comic books published during the 1970s, and then again in four issues of a series called X-Men: Apocalypse vs Dracula, published in 2006.

Images of Dracula can be found in many different places. In 1997, a photo of Bela Lugosi playing Dracula was printed on a US postage stamp. It was one of a series of five stamps honoring the famous Universal Pictures movie monsters.

Since 1972, millions of young children have enjoyed watching the Sesame Street character Count von Count. He wears a costume similar to Bela Lugosi’s in the 1931 movie. He sounds a bit like the famous actor, too. Count von Count lives in a castle that is filled with bats. He loves to count and often counts his bats. The count has a girlfriend named Countess von Backwards who—naturally—counts backwards.

And cereal lovers have their own version of Dracula in Count Chocula, a chocolate-flavored cereal with a drawing on the box of a Dracula-like figure near his castle.

Vampire stories have been told all over the world, and it’s easy to see why these creatures of the night are as popular as ever. But it was Bram Stoker who created the most famous vampire of all. His Dracula—like the character of the count himself—lives on.