In Search of Dracula: Vampire fan Mark Gatiss sinks his teeth into Bram Stoker’s tale

As the new adaptation of Dracula concludes, Gatiss looks at the novel's legacy
Alastair McKay3 January 2020

A year ago, when Mark Gatiss first talked about his adaptation of Dracula, he mentioned that the star, Claes Bang, looked like Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi combined.

Bang was, is, 6ft 5ins, and when Gatiss and collaborator Steven Moffat saw him in Ruben Östlund’s Palme D’Or winner The Square (find it on Netflix) their first thought was “who else could it be?”

With their extraordinary reimagining of the tale of the diabolical Count concluding tonight, that thought has been vindicated. Bang’s Dracula is a bloodsucker for the ages, and although there is a passing wave at Sherlock, Gatiss and Moffat have resisted post-modern splicing, and — raising the stakes — they have rooted their Dracula in the tension between humour and horror.

“Why does death always come as such a shock to mortals?” Bang’s Dracula observes with a grim twinkle. “You do look rather… drained.”

Scheduling Gatiss’s documentary about Dracula after the conclusion of the drama feels lopsided, but at least it has allowed viewers to appreciate the story with a degree of suspense; no mean feat, given the durability of Bram Stoker’s character.

Gatiss is a fan, raised on the Hammer Horror iteration of the Count, and claims that as a child he had a red velvet curtain tucked away in his Ottoman, ready to be repurposed as a vampire’s cape. He displays admirable restraint here, restricting his gothic tendencies to bite-sized rhetorical flourishes, when the temptation must have been to go all Edgar Bloodlusten.

Dracula has been revamped many times since Stoker dreamed him up in 1897 after a meal of dressed crab. Bram was an Irish civil servant and an unpaid theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, who moved to London to become a manservant for the noted stage actor Henry Irving.

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There is a flavour of Irving in the character of the vampire — well-seasoned ham, most likely — but the suave manners come from the early stage production, not Stoker’s book. The author did establish the rules of the beast. His archived jottings observe that there are no mirrors in the Count’s castle, with lights arranged so that no shadows are cast. Dracula is granted enormous strength, and — control yourself, madam — the power of growing small or large.

“Painters cannot paint him,” Stoker decrees. “Their likenesses always look like someone else.”

Certainly Gary Oldman’s likeness of Dracula looked like the Elephant Man out on the lam, but that aside, the character has been remarkably resilient, taking on ticks from each adaptation. The upturned collar was a by-product of a theatrical disappearing trick; the fangs first appeared in 1953’s Dracula in Istanbul, which also introduced tasting notes of Vlad The Impaler.

Surprisingly, Gatiss is slightly dismissive of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula of 1931, preferring the Spanish version produced on the same set, with the same toupé. His favourite is the “sexy, unstoppable upright shark” Christopher Lee, “a terrible lover who died, yet lives”.

In Search of Dracula with Mark Gatiss​ is on BBC Two, 10.35pm

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