#dracula parallels

[vickyvicarious]

Mina:

"We are traveling fast."

The novel beginning with a vampire in black, veiling his face, leading a man to the Castle of the undead on a carriage, praising his horses, as they enter the wild mountains. The dead travel fast.

And now at the ending, a turning vampire in black, veiling her face, leading a man to the Castle of the undead on a carriage, praising her horses, as they enter the wild mountains.

Ohohoho, I love this!

I've though about Mina echoing Jonathan's journey but really, there's a lot of parallels between her and Dracula here. Love the way you've laid this all out.

[jesterbells]

More Dracula parallels

Reading today's entry:

Dracula Sept 20: "Van Helsing, who, like me, had been startled by her voice, swooped upon him, and catching him by the neck with both hands, dragged him back with a fury of strength which I never thought he could have possessed, and actually hurled him almost across the room."

Me: waitasec... that sounds familiar...

Dracula May 16 entry: "I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires; the thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal. With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves."

[goryhorroor]

the devil in the mirror

fearless vampire killers (1967) van helsing (2004)

[moonsun2010]

4 Oct - In which Mina gets hypnotised

these are part of an animatic summarising Dracula, which you can watch here (new readers beware; it has spoilers for the entire book!)

This bit here actually parallels an earlier bit when Lucy encounters Dracula on 11 August, except of course, now Mina is the one in control:

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[drolta]

DRACULA YOU ARE THE FATHER!

[queengoose]

the halloween entry is not the most traditionally halloween thing but there IS something so haunting about mina remarking that the scenery and the landscape would be so beautiful if she and jonathan were traveling together. it’s like a glimpse into what could have been, had dracula not interfered. just a happily married couple traveling the continent together

[tart-miano]

angry that your parody has a degree and you don't, victor

[karmathenightowl]

Here's how I imagine Lady Elizabeth Godwin when she was alive compared to her reanimated self. I was inspired by MANY different visual ideas and concepts like the original Frankenstein book, late 1880s strongwomen, and 1890s fashion.

Here was my aesthetic mood board!

Since the og Frankenstein book describes the flesh of the creature to be yellow and translucent, rather than the popular green flesh seen in most film adaptations, I applied the former to Godwin's flesh of her head. Plus I wanted to really go for that corpse like appearance, particularly with the hollowness of her eyes.

The outfit she wore on the night of her passing was inspired by late 1880s bustle dresses. I saw that the og book of Bram Stoker's Dracula is set in an unspecified year of the mid 1890s, so I had an idea to make her reanimated self reflect the clothing/dresses of that era. Like having her upper part be a balloon sleeve dress with a blouse, and the lower part being a scarp of fabric from a late 1800s Balayeuse. I mentioned in my first character designs for the main pcs that when Godwin asked Igor for clothes, I imagined he made an outfit for her based on scraps he had in Frankenstein's lab. This also included chainmail above the blouse and under the dress coat based off of a Victorian Burlesque outfit. Godwin's gotta protect her new body somehow haha

This last part is just me rambling at this point but I thought this was fun to include. The two women flexing are Josephine Schauer Blatt aka Minerva, and Laverie Vallee aka Charmion (right). They were both strongwomen in the late 1880s, with Minerva having great talent in weightlifting and professional wrestling, while Charmion also performed in vaudeville trapeze. Just a fun little discovery I came across when looking up muscular build ideas for Godwin based on Justin's description :)

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

Jonathan: No piteous cry or agonised entreaty would make the men below look at me let alone hear my plea to be liberated from this monster's prison!

Seward: This guy I locked up does nothing all day but study bugs - so I'm gonna study him like a bug! How about that?!

[vickyvicarious]

"He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all."

May 16

"He is so young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it."

September 8

Thinking about this echo, and the way Lucy and the suitors + Van Helsing provide a kind of opposing force to Jonathan and the vampire ladies + Dracula.

In both cases, we have the young, appealing innocent who is soon to be married and has entered a new phase of their life (Jonathan/Lucy). Both have an older foreign man become very interested in them and very fond of them in their own way (Dracula/Van Helsing). Both have three 'admirers' who want to 'love' them (vampire ladies/suitor squad).

Of course, noting this is nothing new. Plenty of people (and I myself) have pointed out these and other parallels between all these individuals. But I want to go a little farther with it today.

A vampire's 'love' is one of corruption and consumption. Jonathan was held captive in Dracula's castle, and forced against his will to adopt a largely nocturnal schedule*; he had to adapt in this and many other ways to his captor's way of life. The vampires had him in their control from the start, and he had to behave in certain ways to please Dracula lest he suffer consequences of his displeasure. Dracula was extremely possessive of Jonathan, right up until he wasn't going to be around anymore, and then he was happy to throw him aside for the others to devour. Despite this 'sharing', he and the vampire women are at odds and dismissive of one another (he spends most of his time shooing them away from Jonathan, they scoff at and mock him), and whatever love may have been there in the past is clearly long gone.

Human love is one of dedication and trust. The suitors (and later Van Helsing) all come to Lucy. Both initially, in visiting her to make their proposals at her house, and then later on coming to her home when she is ill; they come to her side when she is in need, and they drop what they're doing to adapt to her. When Lucy has to turn two suitors down, she feels awful about not being able to please them all, but each of them emphasizes that they don't hold it against her at all, and they will remain devoted to her friendship. None of them are possessive of her. (Admittedly, Van Helsing does somewhat frequently work to keep Lucy's loved ones apart from her, ushering Arthur away or drugging her to sleep when he's there; but he also invites them to come and help her with their transfusions.) Arthur, the one she has chosen at the exclusion of the other suitors, is notable for being especially welcoming to the others. It is on his behest that both Jack and Quincey arrive to help Lucy in the first place, and he is extremely grateful for and welcoming of their efforts in that vein (pardon the pun):

"Young miss is bad, very bad. She wants blood, and blood she must have or die. My friend John and I have consulted; and we are about to perform what we call transfusion of blood—to transfer from full veins of one to the empty veins which pine for him. John was to give his blood, as he is the more young and strong than me"—here Arthur took my hand and wrung it hard in silence—"but, now you are here, you are more good than us, old or young, who toil much in the world of thought. Our nerves are not so calm and our blood not so bright than yours!"

And this quote brings me to the next detail I find so interesting. In order to finally escape alive, Jonathan turns many of Dracula's tricks against him. Just to name a few, he does things such as: wall-climbing, sneaking around while Dracula is asleep, stealing Dracula's belongings. There are a lot of reversals between them in the last few days, both in Jonathan's explorations and his attack on Dracula. He's 'fighting fire with fire', so to speak, and it works to get him out of the castle. Later on, we see even more of this when he is hunting Dracula down near the end of the book.

He's far from the only person to do such a thing. Dracula himself is very deliberately doing this sort of thing throughout much of the book, from imitating Jonathan in the Castle to innovating ways to work around old vampiric limitations. And Mina is of course a whole example on her own of weaponizing the enemy's own tools against him. But so is this Van Helsing + suitor squad group in a really interesting way. Even Lucy herself, though due to circumstances, she's not the most intentional/active participant in doing so. Let's look back at that quote above again. Van Helsing says that Lucy "wants blood, and blood she must have" - in order to stop her from becoming a supernatural vampire, instead they willingly perform a sort of medical vampirisim. Here we once again see the contrast between modernity and the supernatural, and interestingly, how they overlap to cross purposes.

Dracula takes Lucy's blood away. Van Helsing (by proxy at first) gives it back. Dracula wants Lucy to become a vampire, and drink the blood of those around her. Van Helsing, in giving her transfusions, enables her to drink in their blood in order to prevent her from becoming a vampire. The three vampire women wanting to gang up on Jonathan and drain him of his strength. The three suitors join together to take turns sacrificing their own strength in order to supply Lucy with more when she's in need of it.

Dracula wants her to take, just as he and the vampire women do. In fact, almost everything he does to turn her involves depriving her of things: restful sleep, blood, eventually her mother. But in her friends, Lucy is surrounded by people who love her and give freely, and this saves her (at least temporarily). They all work together and love one another in a way deeply at odds with Dracula and other vampires' form of consumptive 'love'.

And so their vampiric actions of transferring blood between bodies are life-saving instead of life-taking. Jack and Van Helsing even remember a version which is all the more a mimic of vampiric body language and leans way into the vampire-as-disease metaphor, with the reference to the time Jack sucked "from [Van Helsing's] wound so swiftly the poison of the gangrene" - it's got the mouth on skin, the sucking, but it's taking away illness rather than infecting someone. It also fosters a long-standing dedication and love, which in turn lends itself to the saving of someone else. This too ties in to the way vampiric love isolates, while human love connects.

* Lucy, meanwhile, in fighting against her terrible dreams, often attempts to be awake at night and is unable to do so. A more nocturnal schedule would make her safer, since her sleeping state is where Dracula has the most influence over her.

[jupiterlandings]

“Who do you think you are?

Ha ha ha, bless your soul!

You really think you're in control?

I think you're crazy!

I think you're crazy…

Just like me”

Dracula Aesthetics:

Dr John Seward & Mr RM Renfield

[georgiacooked]

Dracula Daily sketch for November 4th.

In which there is darkness and swirling water.

[moonsun2010]

8 July - Meet Seward, Renfield, and a little bird

these are part of an animatic summarising Dracula, which you can watch here (new readers beware; it has spoilers for the entire book!)

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[jesse-cosay]

Another thing I haven't seen anyone point out yet that just occurred to me.

This little story Lake tells sort of parallels Jesse. His friends are a bad influence on him, and likely don't respect his boundaries. Part of his character arc is realizing he needs to let them go.

Lake's story, though vague, does make sense. They never say they were close with Tulip. Never say the two of them had a good relationship as they get older or that separating hurt Tulip.

But Jesse still says it's unbelievable to stop being friends with someone. To need space from them.

Because he isn't at a point where he can do that. Where he can admit that he needs space from his friends.

And this, ultimately, is what draws Jesse to be friends with Lake. They don't try to make him anyone else he isn't.

[loo-nuh-tik]

The kiss of Judas

Dracula 2000 (2000)

Interview with the Vampire (2022-)

[autumnmobile12]

Guy with red and black color scheme tries to wipe out humanity because their special blonde person was killed senselessly.