This book creates a horror atmosphere that has been copied constantly over the years but never quite captured again. You’ll be experiencing with Harker the castle and what he faces there. Battling the Count in England…and the terror of the ship’s crew that carried his earth boxes across the sea, all will stay with you. Again let me urge you no matter how well any movie has been done, if the movie Dracula is the only one you know, you haven’t met the proto-vampire who resides in this book. He/it still walks through literature and even more in the dark fears that lurk in the back of our minds when we’re alone on a stormy night or we have to walk alone past that old rundown graveyard (not cemetery) where the city has never gotten around to installing those street lights.

This isn’t Twilight, nor is it Buffy the vampire Slayer, there aren’t any friendly, helpful, romantic vampires here. (None sparkle either) There is quite probably a reason (or maybe more than one) why we wish so badly to laugh at this book. It does what it does very, very well…and that’s be frightening.

This book is a classic that has been around for over a hundred years…there’s a reason for that.

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I don’t know why Francis Ford Coppola felt he had to spice up a story that has stood up for generations of scrutiny as a classic story of good vs. evil and dress it as a love story. There is a reason that other horrible characters have been created in literature, but there are only a few that endure. Dracula is one of them, and it is because of the chills a reader feels when in his presence in the world Stoker created. The novel has suspense, feeling, and good, noble characters throughout. The movie has none of these qualities.

Dracula is just a bloodthirsty psychopath hungry for power like Hitler. Sadism and the desire for power can lead human beings to commit cruelty. Just read what the Nazis did in the concentration camps. They were not tragic heroes, but sadistic scoundrels.

The adaptation with Louis Jordan is better.

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