LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ which takes place well before the time of Anno Dracula. One of the most interesting vampire characters before or after Dracula, her curiously passive- aggressive predation strikes me as creepier than the melodramatic rapine and seduction practised by nineteenth century male vampires. She also brings in her various film avatars in Vampyr, Blood and Roses, The Vampire Lovers, The Blood-Spattered Bride, Lust for a Vampire, etc. Though a major vampire character, Carmilla seldom shows up at the party with other monsters in stories like this: an exception is the cartoon feature The Batman vs Dracula, where Carmilla is Dracula’s soul-mate.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE: MR VAMPIRE II
I should have followed the Chinese style of sequel-titling, and called this chapter ‘New Mr Vampire’.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE: THE RAPTURES AND ROSES OF VICE
Henry Wilcox. The ‘colossus of finance’ is from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End; the Anthony Hopkins part from the Merchant-Ivory film. I like Wilcox as an epitome of Victorian hypocrisy, and have featured him also in the stories ‘Seven Stars: The Mummy’s Heart’ – where he has a run-in with Kate Reed – and ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ – where his invitation to an exclusive orgy is purloined by Colonel Sebastian Moran.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE: THE DARK KISS
General Iorga. Originally intended as a porn movie entitled The Loves of Count Iorga, Robert Kelljan’s Count Yorga – Vampire was one of a wave of dynamic, contemporary-set vampire movies which came out in the early 1970s, though Iorga/Yorga himself (Robert Quarry) is a straight Dracula knock-off, a cloaked aristocratic predator. The Count loosens up in The Return of Count Yorga, which is bigger-budgeted if less confrontational. For a while, Iorga/Yorga was the second most-famous movie vampire – though his series fizzled after the sequel. In the Anno Dracula world, I see him as the most blatant Dracula wannabe among the Carpathian clique. He turns up again, conflated with the hippie guru vampire Khorda Quarry played in The Deathmaster, in ‘Castle in the Desert’, a section of Johnny Alucard which takes him to his original locale and time, California in the 1970s.
Rupert of Hentzau. The dashing villain, of course, of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. Douglas Fairbanks Jr had a career-best turn as the winning scoundrel in the 1937 Ronald Colman film.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR: CONFIDENCES
The Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt had to marry Edith Waugh, sister of his late wife Fanny. Throughout the later half of the nineteenth century, marriage to the sister of a dead wife was considered incest under English law. In an era of death in childbirth and hard-to-marry-off girls, the circumstance of a widower wishing to wed his sister-in-law was not uncommon and a lengthy campaign to overturn the law was carried out (there’s a joke about it in Iolanthe), finally resulting in The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act of 1907. In the first draft of Anno Dracula, Penelope and Pamela were sisters; thanks to Eugene Byrne for pointing out the historical circumstance that this would make Charles’s engagement illegal.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN: DOWNING STREET, BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Mr Croft. Caleb Croft, aka Charles Croydon, is one of the nastiest vampires in fiction. Created by David Chase (of The Sopranos), he is played by Michael Pataki in the 1972 film Grave of the Vampire. Chase’s script is purportedly based on his own novel, The Still Life – but no one I know has ever come across a copy, and a few have tried hard.
Graf Orlok. Max Schreck in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie das Grauens (1922). In the film, he’s Dracula himself under a pseudonym, trying to evade Florence Stoker’s copyright claims. Here, he’s a distant relation.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE: FROM HELL
The chapter title comes from one of the Jack the Ripper letters. It was used by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell for the graphic novel, which was filmed by the Hughes Brothers.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO: THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
The title comes from Richard Connell’s often-reprinted and filmed short story, as does that ‘Russian with the Tartar warbow’.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE: DRINK, PRETTY CREATURE, DRINK
The chapter title comes from ‘The Pet Lamb: A Pastoral’, by William Wordsworth.
Dr Ravna. The supercilious, chilly vampire patriarch played by Noel Willman in Hammer’s The Kiss of the Vampire.
CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN: THE HOME LIFE OF OUR OWN DEAR QUEEN
The chapter title comes from a (probably apocryphal) statement usually attributed to one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting upon seeing Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. ‘How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.’
The armadillo. In one of the oddest moments in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), an armadillo is seen among the vermin inhabiting Castle Dracula in Transylvania. Yes, armadillos are native to the Americas and highly unlikely residents of Romania. Personally, I don’t think this an error on the part of the filmmakers, but a sign of wrongness – creepier somehow than the attempt at depicting a giant insect (a regular-sized bug on a miniature set) made in the same sequence. So, here’s that armadillo again.
Countess Barbara de Cilly (c. 1390-1452). Holy Roman Empress, Queen Consort of Hungary and Bohemia, known as ‘the Messalina of Germany’. She was instrumental in founding the Order of the Dragon, which is where Dracula got his title from. Her descendants include all the Royal Houses of Europe. Besides the scheming and treachery inherent in holding offices like Holy Roman Empress, she spent her last days – after an inevitable ousting from power – studying alchemy and the occult. Some sources suggest her as the real-life model for LeFanu’s Carmilla, but she’s figured surprisingly rarely in vampire fiction.
‘sword-point darting like a dragonfly’. Thanks to Helen Simpson, the original copy-editor of Anno Dracula, for knowing what I meant, even though the manuscript said ‘darting like a snapdragon’. Helen fixed many of my other brain-freeze moments.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Of course, this novel would not exist without Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. So he should get the lion’s share of the credit for establishing an entire category of vampire fiction. In taking hold of the material Stoker laid down, I must also acknowledge a debt to many scholars. Most often consulted were Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula and Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, which point out many of the byways I found myself exploring, but I should not care to underestimate Basil Copper’s The Vampire in Legend, Fact and Art, Richard Dalby’s Dracula’s Brood, Daniel Farson’s The Man Who Wrote Dracula, Donald F. Glut’s The Dracula Book, Peter Haining’s The Dracula Centenary Book, Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, Michel Parry’s The Rivals of Dracula, Barry Pattison’s The Seal of Dracula, David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema, Alan Ryan’s The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, Alain Silver and James Ursini’s The Vampire Film, David J. Skal’s Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen and Gregory Waller’s The Living and the Un- dead.
In addition, for numerous historical, literary and frivolous details, I must credit W.S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes: A Biography and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s invaluable The Jack the Ripper A to Z, Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde, Philip Jose Farmer’s Tarzan
