I may someday have to write an essay, perhaps create a video essay, about what a bad person I think Bram Stoker was and the unintentional cinematic phenomena of Dracula.

Like all Vampire stories, Dracula was about fear mongering and the zeitgeist of the time. In Dracula, Stoker tells a reverse colonialism story. Here is a person who comes from, by the estimations of Johnathan Harker, a backwards land. Harker is meant to introduce you to the character and culture of Dracula; Harker’s frequent disparaging tut-tuting of the eastern Europeans he encounters is meant to be the prevailing opinions of the time. And then, here, this cloaked and despicable figure who pretends to want to meld within British society and become a part of the western European culture –turns out he is actually an infiltration of backward eastern myth come to feed upon those most vulnerable Victorian White Ladies™ that minorities cannot get enough of. But don’t worry, white guys, we have a slightly better eastern European who’s more integrated into our society, Van Helsing, who can hopefully bridge the gap by killing the embodiment of eastern European mythos. and the
…
Does it not make sense that vampires have become so much more a sympathetic figure since 1897? Does it not make sense that so many retellings of vampire stories now within western culture focus on the suffering of the vampire? And is that not, still, pretty fucking condescending?

I like Dracula, he who has ruled so long that he would rule still. I hope he gets to eat everybody.