Bram Stoker's Dracula - Film Analysis

María Isabel Fernández Arévalo

Film Analysis (Dracula) based on Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”

1. *During Tepes’ kingdom, he insisted that his people were honest. Whoever did not pay attention to him, he would put a stake through their bodies and with it a slow and painful death.
   
   *He invited the poor and disabled from his lands to a great feast. He fed them and asked them if they liked what he had done. When they exclaimed yes, he burned them all in a bonfire, to make clear that he did not want poor people in his lands.
   
2. He fought with Oscar Wilde--over a woman. Stoker and Wilde knew each other at Trinity College in Dublin when they were both students; Stoker even proposed Wilde’s membership at the school’s Philosophical Society. But when his childhood sweetheart, Florence Balcome, decided to marry Stoker, Wilde left Ireland and moved to England.
   
   He made a living as a stage manager and personal assistant to an actor. Actually, he started off as a civil servant--and a theater critic. His review of Hamlet impressed the star, Henry Irving, who invited him to dinner. They became friends, and a few years later, he wound up managing Irving’s theater, the Lyceum Theater, as well as Irving’s career.
   
   He wrote romance novels. Stoker is beloved for his supernatural fiction. In fact, the Horror Writer’s Association annually bestows the Bram Stoker Awards for superior achievement in horror. Dracula wasn’t his only work of horror, either, as readers who have picked up The Lair of the White Worm know. But while Stoker wrote supernatural fiction such as Jewel of the Seven Stars and Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, over half of his works of fiction were romances. Extremely Victorian romances.
   
   He was inspired to write Dracula by… Dracula was inspired by an essay by Emily Gerard, "Transylvania Superstitions." Stoker never visited Eastern Europe, so he had to rely on his journalist skills for his novel’s background. He spent seven years on research. His Hungarian friend, Ármin Vámbéry, also theoretically consulted with Stoker on Transylvanian culture.

His ashes are protected. Stoker died on April 20, 1912, of either exhaustion or syphilis, depending on which biographer you ask. He was cremated, and later, his ashes were joined by the ashes of his son, Noel. You can visit them at Golders Green Crematorium, the first crematorium in London… But you need an escort. To visit his remains at Golders Green, visitors must be escorted to the room the urn is housed in, for fear of vandalism.