A World Without Dracula

It's hard to imagine a world without Dracula and that modern popular culture could exist without them.  Between Trueblood, Twilight, the Vampire Diaries, and the countless books that have been written about them in the past decade, vampires have become so ubiquitous they no longer terrify us.  In fact, they now attract modern consumers of popular culture with their dark brooding good looks.  They have transformed from the gaunt monsters that haunted our ancestors nightmares to the heroes that inhabit our fantasies.  One of my friends even jokingly remarked, "Vampires exist, and they're using shows like Trueblood to make humans like them before they come out of the coffin."  Well, it's not a direct quote, but you get the idea.  Vampires are everywhere in modern popular culture and, thanks to Anne Rice, they no longer resemble the archetype that Brom Stoker created in Dracula.

In "Buffy vs. Dracula," Joss Whedon comments on this phenomenon and does so, as Claire observed, with self-aware humor.  While Whedon's Dracula loosely resembles Bram Stoker's - he is incredibly pale and has long fingernails - women still find him attractive.  Even Buffy, as Riley notices, is in thrall to him.  However, Dracula's attractiveness lies in his hypnotic eyes, not his strength or manly good looks.  In fact, he is almost effeminate.  Dracula must rely on his mind tricks, his mysterious mannerisms, and the promise of immortality to draw women to him.  Although I'm not as well-versed in Buffy as some of my classmates, I know this is not the case for all vampires in Buffy.  As a fan of Bones, I know that Angel (David Bozneaz) certainly fits the modern vampire stereotype.  Spike, with his muscles and British accent, would even fulfill many a fangbanger's fantasy.

In contrast to Angel and Spike, Dracula has become the parody of a vampire.  He wears a long black cape, speaks with an Eastern European accent, and is incredibly pale.  He is, as Xander initially mocks, a human version of the Count from Sesame Street.  While Buffy and the Scooby Gang are impressed and even terrified of him, Whedon's characterization makes him almost laughable.  The audience in no way finds him threatening.  Whedon even neutralizes Dracula's supernatural powers by dismissing them, through Spike, as, "Nothing but showy Gypsy stuff."  Spike clearly doesn't see Dracula as a true vampire.  By parodying Dracula, Whedon reminds the viewer, as he does almost every episode, that, like Dracula, the Gothic has become a caricature of itself.  It no longer terrifies people but merely amuses them.

This brings me to my main point.  As we've often noted in class, Dracula didn't exist in Victorian England until Bram Stoker created him.  While Victorian readers certainly had a sense, thanks to earlier Gothic novels like "Carmilla," of what a vampire acted like, they didn't have our modern homogenized conception of how a vampire should look and act.  As such, I'm sure many of them found Dracula, and everything he represented, terrifying.  We get a sense of this from the characters in Dracula, but we can never truly understand it because we are immersed in a vampiric and Gothic culture.  Buffy, especially the "Buffy vs. Dracula" episode, recognizes and plays with this idea.