A fully updated edition of David J. Skal's Hollywood Gothic , "The ultimate book on Dracula " ( Newsweek). The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David J. Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all. includes black-and-white Illustrations throughout, plus a new Introduction. “Tracks Transylvania's most popular vampire with dry wit and the skills of a fine detective.” ― The New York Times Book Review “Witty, comprehensive . . . For those who take Halloween seriously, this is something to gnaw on long after those trick-or-treaters are gone.” ― The Los Angeles Times Book Review “Meticulously researched, engagingly written and packed with rare, archival images . . . The history of Dracula reads like a novel itself.” ― The San Francisco Bay Guardian David J. Skal (1952 - 2024) was the author several critically acclaimed books on fantastic literature and genre cinema, including The Monster Show; Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen; Screams of Reason; Mad Science and Modern Culture; V Is for Vampire: The A to Z Guide to Everything Undead; and, with Elias Savada, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning . With Nina Auerbach, he co-edited the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula . His writing appeared in a variety of publications, ranging from The New York Times to Cinefantastique, and for television, on the A&E series Biography. He wrote, produced, and directed a dozen original DVD documentaries, including features on the Universal Studios' classic monster movies, and a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters . He lived in Los Angeles. Hollywood Gothic The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen By David J. Skal Faber & Faber Copyright © 2004 David J. Skal All right reserved. ISBN: 9780571211586 Hollywood Gothic CHAPTER ONE MR. STOKER'S BOOK OF BLOOD In which a theatre manager pens a tale of surpassing terror, reviving a Gothic tradition, while indirectly addressing unspoken tensions between the sexes. An ambiguous portrait, in the manner of Mr. Wilde, of a celebrated knight and actor, who is not amused. The unexpected appearance of Mr. Wilde himself, old rivalries and new revelations, an inattentive wife, and a lingering malady. IN THE RARE BOOKS ROOM OF A SMALL LIBRARY ON A TREE-LINED street in Philadelphia is a leather slipcase containing a sheaf of mounted note cards, almost a century old but not yellowing--they are an exceptionally high grade of linen stock, the property of Henry Irving's prestigious Royal Lyceum Theatre in London. The notes contained on them do not pertain to the theatre, and are addressed to no one other than the writer himself. The obsessive culmination of years of research and rumination, they are the working notes of an author of fiction, written in a tiny, often nearly indecipherable pencil scrawl, as if the writer had miniaturized his hand to fit the dimensions of his paper. A psychiatrist, the visitor is told, has spent nearly ten years transcribing, annotating, and interpreting their contents. The frequent cross-outs and marginal additions, trailing-off sentences and one-word reminders vividly depict the fictional process--the writer intuitively steering his unconscious through the refinement of language, discovering the incantatory words and patterns of words that can best describe the troubling image and give it a form in the world. The original 1897 edition of Dracula, with rare original dust wrapper (Rosenbach Museum and Library) The first page, headed Historiae Personae, lists seventeen embryonic fictional characters. Several names are unfamiliar: Kate Reed, a young Englishwoman; Cotford, a detective; a "psychical research agent" known as Alfred Singleton; a German professor, Max Windshoeffel; an "American inventor from Texas" (discarded in favor of "A Texan--Brutus M. Marix"); a deaf-mute woman and "a silent man," servants to a mysterious Eastern European count. Other names and characters ring more familiar. Dr. Seward. Lucy Westenra. Wilhelmina Murray. Jonathan Harker. A mad patient ("theory of getting life," one entry says). And very near the center of the page, the author has scrawled the name of his