Dracula the Un-Dead

Abstract

In any event, as Mr. Stoker recounts, it came as a nasty surprise to Florence Stoker, Bram's widow, to discover, following Tod Browning's version of Dracula in 1931 (adapted, it will be recalled, from Hamilton Deane's stage play rather than Stoker's book), that Universal Studios could, in fact, do whatever they damn well liked with her husband's creation without paying her the proverbial red cent, never mind allowing her any 'input or approval of any of the hundreds of incarnations of Dracula over the next century' (400).

Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-Dead (or "An arse! An arse! My kingdom for an arse!") (Harper, 2009)

According to its publishers, Dracula the Un-Dead is nothing less momentous and earth-shattering than 'the official sequel' to Bram Stoker's immortal novel of 1897. This implausible claim, risible and impertinent though it may be, rests on the participation of a certain Mr. Dacre Stoker in the creation of said literary sensation. Mr. Stoker, a great-grandnephew of the afore-mentioned Bram, was, it would appear, inveigled into co-writing this mess of a book by one Ian Holt, a screenwriter of little discernable achievement who seems to have persuaded his putative colleague that it would be a jolly good wheeze to 'reestablish | v/c | creative control over Bram's novel and characters by writing a sequel that bore the Stoker name' (401).

While one can readily see why Mr. Holt might find it advantageous to attach a real live scion of the Stoker tribe to his project, it is considerably less clear how writing a bad book (or even a good one) would help re-establish 'creative control' over a character no longer in copyright. As the co-authors are presumably aware, any 'control' will extend no further than their own work, from which one may deduce that what Mr. Stoker actually hopes for is to re-assert some form of moral control over the fate of Count Dracula, Van Heising, et al. Or, to put it another way, if anyone should be allowed to write a rotten sequel to Dracula, it may as well be a genuine bona-fide member of the Stoker bloodline.

It transpires (as we are informed in the lengthy and tedious justification which comprises the Authors' Note) that the Stoker clan - or at least the North American branch of it - is not at all happy with the treatment meted out to Bram's creation by the barbarians of Beverly Hills and Bray, though it may be observed that their collective displeasure would seem, from Mr. Stoker's account, to stem more from financial, as opposed to aesthetic, concerns. Indeed, the fact that Bram Stoker failed to register Dracula for copyright in the U.S. prior to its publication there in 1899 appears to have caused an ongoing and deep-seated resentment on the part of his American descendants, a resentment which, like the Count's revenge, looks set to be 'spread over centuries,' while at the same time leading to the unworthy, though perhaps well-founded, suspicion that if Hollywood or Hammer had decided to cast Mickey Rooney as Dracula opposite Van Johnson's Van Heising, that would have been just dandy with the Stokers - as long as they were cut in for a piece of the action.

In any event, as Mr. Stoker recounts, it came as a nasty surprise to Florence Stoker, Bram's widow, to discover, following Tod Browning's version of Dracula in 1931 (adapted, it will be recalled, from Hamilton Deane's stage play rather than Stoker's book), that Universal Studios could, in fact, do whatever they damn well liked with her husband's creation without paying her the proverbial red cent, never mind allowing her any 'input or approval of any of the hundreds of incarnations of Dracula over the next century' (400).

It is, of course, not easy to decide if this was a good or a bad thing. Had Mrs. Stoker retained control, we might have been spared the sight of the Count being reduced to a comic opera bogeyman in Universal's larky and generally lamentable monster-compendium movies of the 1940s. That noted, however, it is nigh on impossible to sympathise with Mrs. Stoker's distress on learning that, despite her best efforts, at least one print of F.W. Mumau's Nosferatu had escaped the incinerator following her successful case against the German production company responsible for his unauthorised adaptation of 1922. The question of duration of copyright is a similarly tricky issue for those not directly involved. On the one hand, it is difficult to disagree with the strongly expressed view of Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, that literary copyright should last indefinitely, with the author's heirs and descendants being free to benefit in precisely the same way as those of an inventor or manufacturer of any other popular product. On the other hand, however, there is something decidedly disagreeable about the often inflexible and humourless corporate control exercised by authors' estates for the benefit of heirs who themselves, one suspects, are incapable of writing anything more creative than a line of lavatory-wall graffiti.

This, of course, is all by-the-by, and as one can only ride for so long around the grim task of delivering some semi-coherent account of the preposterous nonsense that is the plot of Dracula the Un-Dead, we had better knuckle down to it. In 1912, Quincey Harker, son of Jonathan and Mina, is reluctantly studying law at the Sorbonne. Quincey would rather be an actor than a solicitor but his parents have vetoed this, partly to protect him from some unspecified 'evil' that may or may not be hovering in the background. In Paris, Quincey witnesses the arrival of Basarab, a mysterious Romanian actor of great power, whom he contrives to meet after being bowled over by the latter's majestic rendition of Richard III. In the meantime, Dr. John Seward, now a drooling morphine addict, travels to Marseilles on the track of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, whom he believes to be Jack the Ripper. Failing to kill the Countess, Seward cadges a flight back to Paris, arriving just in time to thwart an attempt on Basarab's life by Bathory's un-dead companions (referred to as 'the Women in White,' ho, ho). He is then run over by a black, driverless carriage before expiring on the street, muttering the name of Lucy Westenra.

Back in Blighty, an Inspector Cotford, learning of Seward's demise, visits the doctor's digs in Whitechapel. Cotford, haunted by his and Scotland Yard's failure to apprehend the Ripper in 1888, finds a clue which leads him back to the original case file and towards one suspect in particular, a Dutch professor named Van Heising.

Quincey returns to London, announces to Mina that he is chucking his studies, and applies for an apprenticeship at the Lyceum Theatre, where owner and manager Bram Stoker is attempting to rescue his fortunes with a production of Dracula, starring the celebrated American thespian, John Barrymore. However, following a fistfight with the actor playing Van Heising, Barrymore loudly announces his departure, leaving Quincey to propose Basarab as his replacement, a suggestion dismissed by Stoker but which appeals to the play's producer, Hamilton Deane. Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, an ailing Professor Van Heising reads of Seward's death by driverless carriage, and concludes that none other than Count Dracula must be involved ...

Back in London, Jonathan Harker ponders the failure of his marriage to Mina, who has remained mysteriously youthful - and sexually insatiable - since drinking the Count's blood. Jonathan suspects, rightly as it happens, that blood was not the only bodily fluid exchanged between the pair, and his consequent jealousy has led him to become a pitiful drunk. Resolving to mend his ways, as well as his marriage, Harker sets off for home, only to be accosted by one of the Women in White, from whom he is saved only by the timely intervention of a mysterious shadow. No sooner does he imagine he is safely out of the woods, however, than he finds himself being chased by an equally mysterious red mist. The next morning, he is found impaled on a forty-foot stake in the middle of Piccadilly Circus ...

And so it goes, on and on and on, one improbability piled on top of another, until the reader starts to wish that someone wielding a mallet and a nice, sharp stake would put an end to the eternal, hellish torment of it all. Not only have the authors made no attempt to replicate anything of Stoker's original prose style (which at least is something to be thankful for), they have also rendered his characters virtually unrecognisable to anyone even vaguely familiar with them. This is a book written for the sort of people who enjoy modern horror fdms - in which crude shock tactics invariably trump any obligation to logic, in which characters who have seemingly been definitively dispatched spring back to life two minutes later, and in which no explanation of even the most improbable event is ever deemed necessary (needless to say, the reader is not told how, even allowing for supernatural agency, Harker's eventual demise was effected without anybody noticing). The blame for this must presumably lie with Mr. Holt and his overactive, if under-developed, screenwriter's imagination; one can readily imagine him scribbling "CGI needed here" in the margin of the page in which Countess Bathory, in the guise of a dragon, chases Mina and Basarab through the London Underground system, and it comes as no surprise to leam that we are already being threatened with a film version of Dracula the Un-Dead.

But the essential stupidity of this misbegotten enterprise is not confined to mere absurdity of plot or distortion of character - there is also the authors' combined tin ear for the English language as spoken by people who speak English (Mr. Stoker, incidentally, is a Canadian, resident in the U.S., while Mr. Holt, one gathers, is an American). Here, for instance, is Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godaiming, giving Inspector Cotford and Sergeant Lee (named in honour of Sir Guess-who) a piece of his mind - "Tve heard quite enough. I am an English lord and you have no grounds for keeping me here. Harass me again, and I'll have both your badges."' Why on earth would a peer of the realm feel it necessary to stress his nationality to a pair of flatfoots from Scotland Yard? Why should he mention 'badges,' when British policemen carry warrant cards? Why, indeed?

The authors also display an hilarious fixation with the word 'arse,' nowhere more inappropriately or ridiculously employed than in the following musings ascribed to Mina as she contemplates her husband's sudden demise - 'Sadly, there was also little point to a funeral service. No one would be there. Quincey was missing, Jack was dead, Arthur was an arse, and Jonathan no longer had any clients who had respects to pay.' Absolutely priceless, and about as likely as Elizabeth Bennett saying, 'Well, up yours, Mr. Darcy!' But then, as Basil Fawlty once remarked to his American guests, 'Everything's bottoms with you people, isn't it?'

And the howlers just keep coming. Why, one might well wonder, would Jonathan send Quincey to study law in France, which employs the Napoleonic legal code, when he wishes his son to inherit his practise in England? Are French ticket inspectors really endowed with Gestapo-like powers of interrogation? Might not the sight of Seward and the Women in White brandishing swords in the middle of Paris have aroused the curiosity of les gendarmes? Is it at all likely that the Anglo-Irish Stoker would be given, in moments of stress, to cursing in Gaelic? Was 'Kristan' a name in popular usage in Edwardian England? Why are those responsible for killing Dracula in Stoker's original novel so ready to believe, without any evidence, that the Count is still alive? Could Mina really have wandered into her local bookshop in Exeter and found it well-stocked with useful information on Countess Bathory? Why is Quincey under the impression that Arthur Holmwood may have had some ulterior motive in adopting his title - or 'moniker,' as it is ineptly termed - when in fact, unless he was some sort of proto-Tony Benn aristocratic radical, it would never have occurred to him not to do so? And is it even remotely likely that Arthur would have killed three men in duels in the period elapsed since the events of the original novel - that is, between 1893 and 1912?

This last point leads to rather more serious concerns regarding the authors' mishandling of their material - for in order to accommodate their ill-advised inclusion of Jack the Ripper, Mr. Stoker and Mr. Holt have shifted the events of Stoker's novel from 1893 to 1888, thereby also allowing them to present Quincey as a young adult in 1912. Although they wish this to be viewed as no more than artistic license, most admirers of Stoker's novel are likely to regard it in the same way that Leslie Charteris would have done - as blatant cheating. And this, remember, from a member of a family which claims to take exception to other people's misuse of their forebear's creations! But even this bare-faced effrontery is eclipsed by the authors' unflattering and distorted portrait of Stoker himself. As his biographers all concur, Bram Stoker was loyal, hard-working, brave, and of a generally genial disposition, yet the present authors, in addition to exploiting and traducing his characters in their remarkably stupid and tasteless enterprise, have opted to portray him as a bitter, twisted and avaricious old failure. This is not only an act of staggering hypocrisy and cynicism, it is an act of betrayal - the roots of which may presumably be found in the bitter, twisted and avaricious attitude of his descendants alluded to previously.

There are many more things wrong with this wretched book, but enough is enough. Suffice it to say it makes one glad Bram Stoker neglected to register Dracula for copyright in the United States. In the unlikely event that one is a member of the Un-Dead, with all eternity at one's disposal, one might conceivably find this moronic exercise in unintentional hilarity and bad taste mildly diverting. If however, one is a mere mortal of normal lifespan, it would be better - much better - to leave Dracula the Un-Dead as Dracula the Un-Read.

JOHN EXSHAW