Page 189 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Bram Stoker: Dracula 1897
Stoker seemed to effortlessly intuit the growing wave of interest in the occult, the spirit world, mythological creatures and the like that emerged in the later 19th century. His Dracula, reviving the Vampire stories in Penny Dreadfuls earlier in the century (such as James Malcolm Ryder: Varney the Vampire c1845), emerged just in time to be endlessly remediated in the new media of the 20th century - in film from 1913 (Robert Vignola: The Vampire 1913) - on radio (a series starring Orson Welles - from 1938), and of course on television and in over 170 other films. A kind of spin-off from Stoker’s Dracula is the idea of the female Vampire or Vamp, initially characterised by Mina Harker - the female victim of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s story - who becomes the progenitor of the female ‘vamp’, a character-type epitomised by the American actress Theda Bara (playing the vampire woman in Frank Powell’s 1915 feature ‘A Fool there Was’), and seemingly associating the morally dubious vampire legend to beautiful women. Actually, artists like Edvard Munch and Philip Burne Jones had made paintings of the female vampire from as early as 1893 (Munch: Vampire)- and Burne Jones, the painter son of the Pre- Raphaelite artist had painted his vampire the same year of Stoker’s Dracula (Philip Burne Jones: The Vampire 1897).This was in the zeitgeist.
I didn’t read this book until I was in my forties, and then we were discussing the possibility of producing an interactive CDROM on Stoker’s original story. If I’d thought about Dracula (the book) at all it was as a kind of late 19th century penny dreadful, or what 20th century critics described as pulp fiction. The really pleasant surprise is that Bram Stoker’s gothic novel is not that at all. Stoker adopts and reinvents an epistolary style that seems perfectly to represent his story - a multi-media approach in the form of letters, diary entries, news-clippings, ship’s log entries, interspersed and linked by the authorial voice of the innocent solicitor Jonathon Harker. Harker is sent to Transylvania (a fiction situated in the Carpathian Mountains in present-day Romania) to negotiate a real-estate transaction involving Count Dracula. Thus the most successful gothic thriller begins, and as Harker slowly realises the true nature of Dracula, and we see the modern day vampire myth emerge, remediated in this prosaic notated form. Just as Mary Shelley had invented a wonderful science fiction (Frankenstein) at the beginning of the century, so Bram Stoker injects the magical Dracula at the end - ready for the 20th century multiple remediations of these two brilliant ur-stories.