#wait hold on. there IS a trope. i want to see more metaphorical/symbolic presence of water and drowning and the sea!!!

[chadlesbianjasontodd]

Sorry, I ended up falling asleep rather than talking tropes and weird history, blame harvest time and allergy meds. I'd love to hear what tropes are present in Dracula you'd like to see more prominent in contemporary horror

[in the voice of someone who didn't also fall asleep early and then spend the next day busy and then forget i put this in drafts] oh......what a shame........but you are forgiven.

the thing about dracula that i think we’ve all been very much enjoying is that it’s not an ooooooo scary monster! novel, or even a Hey Look At This Fucked Up Thing That Happened One Time novel, which i feel (from my admittedly rather limited experience) is what’s popular in a lot of horror these days --- or at least the horror that gets movie-making money or publishing contracts. it’s a real gothic novel, and the romance and the friendship and the grief and the general emotional struggle are what makes the book.

(there's this kelli maroney quote from the documentary in search of darkness (2019): "[...]the term 'final girl' reared its head, and it makes me sound like i'm a hundred years old but i said 'you know, in my day, we called that the star of the movie.' ")

maybe this is coming across as i-don’t-like-splatter-films-level commentary, and maybe it is, but the thing i really like about dracula and other novels of the genre is the disquiet. the creeping doubt that maybe the grand project of imperialism doesn’t work, that in the attempt to make it work the empire has brought upon itself things it has no defense against. of course our good british boys and girls do their best to fight back, and maybe they’ve never done anything worse than go to work and maybe buy a second-hand kukri knife, and maybe they win, but the disquiet lingers.

---and of course the shape of that now is quite different than it was during the 1890s. it doesn’t mean nearly the same thing to say e.g. maybe the american dream is hollow etc etc, everybody knows that. you can’t do it the same way now as you could then because the world is in a different place.

long story short, tropes, hard to say: genre, that’s easy.