by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

What better way to honor SpookyJawn’s Goth Week than by continuing my now annual (if you do it at least three years in a row, it’s annual, right?) run-down of the most famous Goth, Count Dracula, himself. For the past two years, I’ve examined twelve different portrayals of the dark prince in film (you can find those articles here and here), but this year I’ve decided to focus on some small screen performances. That’s right, 100 Years of Dracula is coming to TVJawn! After all, one doesn’t become the most adapted vampire over the course of a century through film alone.  

The Count Von Count—Sesame Street, “Episode 0406” (1972)

When I was a child, the Count Von Count was my favorite Sesame Street character, which just goes to show that I was a vampire fan from a young age. My parents have home videos of me with a towel draped over my shoulders like a cape, dancing and singing every line of “The Batty-Bat.”

The Count was introduced in season 4 during a Bert and Ernie sketch. Ernie creates a pyramid out of blocks and then asks Bert to guard the pyramid while he goes to get his camera to take a picture of it. Suddenly, gothic organ music plays, and a purple Muppet with a cape over his face enters the frame. He introduces himself as the Count, and, while technically the name Dracula is never mentioned, the title combined with the black opera attire, the widow’s peak, and the Transylvanian accent are all pure Bela Lugosi. The Count tells Bert that he is called the Count because he “loves to count things.” Bert tries to prevent him from dismantling Ernie’s pyramid, but the Count waves his hand, putting Bert in a trace. When he is done counting, he proclaims “6 blocks!” to the sounds of thunder, lightning, and more organ music.

The Count seems like a simple parody, but creating a children’s character as a pun on one of the less popular vampire myths—that vampires are so fastidious that they must count everything, leading to the mythical “if you throw a handful of rice/sugar/salt/sand at a vampire, they must stop and count every grain” defense strategy—is nothing short of brilliant. The Count became less “scary” over the years, losing his ability to put people in trances and gaining his now signature laugh, “ah-ah-ah.” Like other versions of the character, he does not have a reflection, but unlike other Draculas, he has a beard and a monocle, which only increases his charm. Honestly, this is the Dracula I want at my Halloween party performing the Cookie Monster Nosh.

Kurt Barlow—Salem’s Lot (dir. Tobe Hopper, 1979)

Those of you reading along from previous years, will understand why I laughed out loud when I realized that Hooper’s Salem’s Lot adaptation was released in 1979. Apparently, 1979 was THE YEAR for Dracula adaptations: from the terrible farce that is Love at First Bite (dir. Stan Dragoti) to the Frank Langella classic Dracula (dir. John Badham) to Werner Herzog’s eerie remake of Nosferatu.

Like the Count von Count, Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder), the head vampire in the 1979 TV mini-series Salem’s Lot, is not specifically referred to as Dracula… but his physical resemblance to Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is unmistakable. Barlow seems to be more of a convenient alias than a real name for the character, as for most of the film Barlow is an unseen presence, leaving most of the villainy to his amiable elderly daylight “partner” (said significantly) Richard Straker (the delightful James Mason).  

There is a reason for this: unlike the more traditional human-looking character in the book, this Barlow is monstrous in appearance. The series producer Richard Kobritz explained this adaptation choice as born of the oversaturation of Dracula in pop-culture in the ‘70s—see my article last year when I discussed three other Dracula adaptations that came out in the same year as Salem’s Lot—“you can’t do Bela Lugoi, or you’re going to get a laugh.” Instead, the series returns to the Nosferatu well. Barlow is tall, bald, with long pointed ears and protruding front teeth. The most original additions to his appearance are his glowing yellow eyes (a frankly eerie effect which he passes onto his vampire progeny) and his blue skin color, possibly to emphasize his deadness (although none of the other vampires are blue).

Nalder doesn’t really have a lot to do here other than to look scary and wear make-up, which was not a task for the faint of heart. The fake nails and dentures were constantly falling off or shifting mid-shoot, and the contact lenses for the eye effect—invented for this film by Jack Young—were only usable for 15 minutes before Nalder’s eyes needed to rest. Barlow doesn’t have any lines in the film, another deviation from the novel, but I think that that works to emphasize the partnership between Barlow and Straker, who is no Renfield stand-in. I find this premise fun, but I do think that the satire of “two old queens moved to a small town in Maine to start an antiquing business and start infecting the local boys” means something different in the context of the ‘70s than it does now, post-AIDs epidemic.

Mr. Burns—The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror IV” (dir. David Silverman, 1993)

Admittedly, I threw this one in here for sheer amusement, but after all of the Treehouse of Horror episodes over the years, The Simpsons was bound to do vampires eventually. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (trying saying that five times in a row) had come out a year earlier, in 1992, and The Simpsons was quick with the parody draw, allowing Mr. Burns to take on the role of Dracula. Or as Lisa calls him, “Nosferatu, das vampyr!” 

There are so many Dracula references in this short, barely-a-third-of-an-episode story, from Mr. Burns wearing the red and white flowing robes and puffy white hairstyle of Gary Oldman’s Dracula to vampire Bart hovering outside Lisa’s bedroom and scratching on the window like the newly turned children do in the previously mentioned Salem’s Lot. Honestly, Mr. Burns as a vampire works for me, with his shark’s grin and proclivity for anachronistic technologies and aesthetics. Even though the Treehouse of Horror episodes are out of continuity from the rest of the show, Mr. Burns has always played the role of bloodsucker, just one who usually sucks metaphorical blood from his employees and other citizens of Springfield rather than physical blood (although, with his increasingly weird anti-aging routines, one never knows). Capitalism is a parasite, my comrades.

Dracula—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy vs. Dracula” (dir. David Solomon, 2000)

The fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t have Dracula as a seasonal big bad during their seven-season run is a testament to the storytelling restraint of the writer’s room. Instead, we get him in this one-episode curiosity, positioned at the beginning of season five before any of the real season story begins. This is partially to lull the audience into a false sense of status quo before hitting them with new character Dawn (Michelle Trachtenburg), who appears suddenly as Buffy’s sister at the end of the episode.

But we aren’t here to talk about Dawn; we are here to talk about Drac (Rudolf Martin), as the quippy denizens of Sunnydale quickly nickname him. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) first encounters him during an otherwise typical graveyard patrol for vamps and is shocked to find out that he is THE Dracula, having thought he was a fiction of vampire bravado. She’s also flattered that he knows who she is and that he is interested in her, not just as the Slayer, but as Buffy Summers. She’s less pleased when she attempts to stake him and he reveals that he has powers beyond a normal vampire, making him much more difficult to kill.

The target audience for Buffy at this point were Millennial teenage girls, so the creators and writers of the show correctly identified that this Dracula shouldn’t be some stuffy old aristocrat. This is Hot Topic Dracula. Martin, who is German, is drawing on Lugosi’s Eastern European accent (which Buffy and Willow [Alyson Hannigan] swoon over), and he is introduced while wearing a cape. But he is much younger than Lugosi, Lee, or Langella, like that forbidden hot older guy who is maybe too into The Crow (1994) and exists at the edges of your friend group in school. He represents the dark desires that Buffy has, as the Lugosi Dracula did for many adult women in the ‘30s. This Dracula can hypnotize people, including Buffy, but the viewer almost feels hypnotized by Martin’s high cheekbones and slow seductive movements. 

Weirdly, Martin was already playing Dracula for a TV movie Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula that would premiere on Halloween almost a month later than “Buffy vs. Dracula.” For someone who spent so much of 2000 playing Dracula, Martin clearly has his version of the character, with all the tropes included, down to a science. Is his performance as good as Lugosi’s or Lee’s? No, but he doesn’t have to be. Like his human counterpart, this Dracula is only interesting to teenage girls, only to be shown as a bit ridiculous in the light of day.

Alexander Grayson—Dracula, “The Blood is the Life” (dir. Steve Shill, 2013)

One of the benefits of writing this Dracula on the small screen breakdown this year has been seeing just how influential Coppola’s film has been on vampire fiction overall. Although Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the short-lived 2013 NBC Dracula series doesn’t don the Nosferatu makeup the way Mr. Burns does, the idea of Mina Harker being an incarnation of his lost wife comes directly from Coppola, making Dracula a more romantic and tragic figure. This adaptation of the character also draws on Coppola’s technology-obsessed Dracula. This show takes that idea one step farther. Instead of just being obsessed with modern technology, this Dracula sees it as another weapon in his already formidable arsenal.

Instead of pretending to be a rather strange old-world aristocrat when he gets to London, this Dracula takes on the alias of Alexander Grayson, an American entrepreneur recently arrived in London to challenge the status quo of the newly Industrialized Victorian England. Covertly, however, he is using his technological advancements to undermine the Order of the Dragon, a powerful secret order dedicated to political, religious, and economic control whose members killed Dracula’s wife—Ilona, who Mina is a reincarnation of—centuries earlier and imprisoned Dracula himself.

This is a lot of plot for this show to take on, especially in its pilot, but the idea of Dracula playing the role of Tesla—down to the wireless light bulbs—to the Order’s Edison is admittedly a new idea in the Draculaverse. Dracula traditionally represents the specter of the failing European aristocracy, come to prey on the newly hatched British middle-class, but here Dracula/Grayson is a challenge to that specter, the clever rebel seeking to destabilize the aristocracy’s entrenchment in British society.

Despite an interesting twist on the premise, this Dracula is… boring. I watched this show as it came out in 2013, and even I barely remember it beyond Katie McGrath—delightful as always—playing a queer Lucy Westenra. Meyer’s performance is wooden, and, despite his good looks, he doesn’t have the raw charisma necessary to pull off the tension between monstrous and seductive that the character requires. This show unfortunately suffers from not knowing what it wants from its main character: is this Dracula a hero? A villain? A monster? Is he Vlad the Impaler—as the show wants to remind us when bodies skewered on wrought fences start appearing all over London—or is he closer to an Arrowverse superhero? This show certainly feels like it should have aired on the CW in the 2010s, but it isn’t campy, scary, or sexy enough to even stand alongside The Vampire Diaries (2009)—with the notable exception of McGrath’s Lucy, of course, who would have been besties with Katherine (Nina Dobrev).

Vlad Dracula Tepes—Castlevania, “Witchbottle” (dir. Sam Deats, 2017)

Vlad Dracula Tepes (Graham McTavish) in the animated Netflix series Castlevania (2017-2021) is perhaps the most romantic version of the character, although his love is not for Mina but rather for a doctor, Lisa (Emily Swallow). Based on the video game franchise of the same name and set in the 15th century, this series opens with an extended meet-cute of Lisa arriving at Dracula’s castle and asking that he teach her “the true science.” He’s intrigued by the woman who has braved all the impaled corpses outside to come make demands of a famous monster—she even tells him that he should get out more when he expresses his skepticism at humanity. She’s smart and hot; he’s smart and hot. You get it. Cut to many years later when Lisa, now Dracula’s wife, is burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for being a witch because of her use of science in her medical practice. Dracula, arriving too late to save her, goes mad and swears revenge on humanity, vowing to destroy the entire country of Wallachia with his armies of the night. 

This Dracula is obsessed with his mission to the detriment of all else, including his vampire allies. While the Catholic Church has probably at times made certain people want to destroy the whole world, Dracula is someone who can actually do it, bringing all of his formidable powers—magical, alchemical, and scientific—to bear on the task. In many ways, this is the Dracula that the 2013 series was trying to achieve, but McTavish’s rich voice, the haggard heartbreak, rage, and resolve etched in every line of the animation of the character, and the commitment of the show to Dracula being the villain—even an extremely sympathetic one—allows Castlevania to succeed where the other fails. Later in the series, his son with Lisa, Alucard (yes, his son originally named Adrian took his father’s name spelled backwards as his moniker), is one of the only people who stands against him, folding in themes of grief, father-son relationships, and the meaning of legacy. Dracula has deep, emotional, and complex things to do as well as being an extremely powerful and vengeful prince of the night, and McTavish and the animators accomplish this better than any other Dracula adaptation before.

What I’ve learned from this project this year is that TV allows the adaptations of Dracula to experiment and try new ideas with much more freedom than a film production allows. We got a puppet Dracula, two animated Draculas, and at least one Nosferatu. That willingness to play, to use the established idea of this character in the cultural consciousness to create new things, makes the character exciting and new, even when it fails (looking at you, 2013). So go ahead, put on the Cookie Monster Nosh and let your inner vampire out.