Dracula's Father

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

15 thoughts on “Dracula's Father”

  1. Here’s an interesting article on the “real” Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.

    http://www.eskimo.com/~mwirkk/castle/vlad/vladhist.html

    “Impalement was Dracula’s preferred method of torture and execution. Impalement was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying imaginable. Dracula usually had a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs an a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the buttocks and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mother’s chests. The records indicate that victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake.”

    I saw on a History Channel documentary that Vlad refused any priest to pray for those he killed during mass, thereby hoping to assure their fate of hell.

  2. So, they were really chupacabra until that incident with Psi-Corp (your friends and ours) on the Babylon 5 station?

  3. What’s even more interesting is that most screen interpretations of Drac have more in common w/ Polidori’s Ruthven-dark-haired noble, seemingly neither young nor old, with coldly marmoreal looks and manners and a magnetic appeal for most women-than with Stoker’s rather grotesque old Count with the hairy palms. Even though seemingly nobody’s read “The Vampyre”.

    And please, allow me to grind my teeth over the whole “real Dracula” thing: Stoker borrowed the Dracula sobriquet from Vlad Tepes, yes, but bungled (or wilfully altered for the sake of fiction) enough of the historical details surrounding same to make this whole cottage industry of relating his vampiric Count back to the Romanian folk-hero (folk-anti-hero?) or the bloodier and more cunning than average medieval warlord behind the legends kinda stupid.

  4. Derringdo–The Count Dracula of screen can be traced fairly well back to the stage adaptations of the novel, I believe. Given the popularity of vampire fiction in Victorian England, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ruthven had some impact on the stage versions, as did the sensibilities of the time.

    Jimmy–Thanks for the link; I’ve been meaning to read “The Vampyre” but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ll be doing so soon.

  5. Matthew: actually, I’d heard that most stagings of the Balderston play, before the production with Bela Lugosi (and ultimately Edward Van Sloane, though I would not swear that he was in that production from the beginning), did in fact cast the Count as an old man.

  6. Derring–It’s been a long time since I read _Hollywood Gothic_ (a book that goes into detail on the development of the stage versions and the original film versions of the book–Nosferatu, the 1931 Lugosi one, and the Spanish variant), which is my prime source and worth a look. There were several different stage versions out there, and the sophisticated, romantic Count definitely arose from one of them. It may have been Lugosi who started it, or it might have been Raymond Huntley, who portrayed the role in one of the longest-running English tours and was quite young when he played the part.

    Got any other sources to recommend?

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