Okay, first off, it’s a pet peeve of mine that people refer to him as “Vlad the Impaler.” His name was DRACULA. That’s what he would have referred to himself as, and been referred to as. Tepes, or “Impaler,” was just a nickname, and may have been intended as pejorative. Secondarily, yes, I am aware…
I’m continuing my heroic quest to read all the works of Bram Stoker that are *not* DRACULA, and I can read the thoughts of some of you on the matter. “The guy’s a complete Stoker mark,” you are saying to yourselves. “He’s not gonna say anything negative about anything Stoker wrote, so why bother with…
We all know the story about the vampire and its bond to its native soil. Right? According to the tale, a vampire can only rest in soil from the land of their origins. A vampire needs their native earth, it can’t survive without it. We all know the story, but where did it come from?…
In 1890, Bram Stoker and actor Henry Irving had dinner with Professor Arminius Vambery of Hungary. The man made enough of an impression on the author that he references the Professor in his novel. (Van Helsing relates how he has written to his friend, Professor Arminius of Budapest, for information on Count Dracula. Arminius informs…
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this one, friends. BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA was released to theaters 25 years ago. TWENTY. FIVE. YEARS. How is that even possible? How could time have flown by so fast? Twenty years I might–might–be able to buy. But a whole quarter-century? Please time, please, slow down. Like…
DRACULA HAD to be rewritten after the police fiasco over the Jack the Ripper murders showed Scotland Yard was no place for heroes, one of Bram Stoker’s descendants revealed. Sorry, folks, but this one is pure bupkis. Dacre Stoker, the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, author of DRACULA (as if you didn’t already know that) has…
We have all heard the myth before, that vampire can’t stand garlic whatsoever. To use garlic on a vampire would make them run away in disgust. It’s a classic method of protection and an item that any sane vampire hunter has on them. But where in the world did that legend come from? Out of…
The production just wrapped on my original play, DRACULA: LORD OF THE VAMPIRES, and I can safely declare it a success. Good audience turnout, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. My krewe worked hard, put in the time and the labor, and delivered a worthy effort that made little old me look good. I wrote,…
This changes everything. Let me explain to those who might not understand the implications why this is such a big deal. Those of us who love the connection between the fictional Count Dracula and the historical Vlad Dracula have had to concede, ever since the discovery of Bram Stoker’s notes for DRACULA the novel, that…
Long before Bram Stoker’s legendary novel Dracula (1897) there was The Mysterious Stranger, a short story penned by an anonymous author. This vampire tale was translated from German to English and published in Odd and Ends magazine in 1860 – over thirty years before the famed Dracula. Why is this worth noting? Because the two…
