Dracula as Inter-American Film Icon: Universal Pictures and Cinematográfica ABSA

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Jonathan Harker and the Transylvanian count first come together over a piece of real estate. The purchase of Carfax Abbey is hardly an impulse-buy. An aspiring immigrant, Dracula has taken the time to educate himself on subjects “all relating to England and English life and customs and manners” (44). He plans to assimilate into a new society: “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is” (45). Dracula’s emphasis on the roar of London conveys his desire to abandon the Carpathian Mountains in favor of the modern metropolis. Transylvania will have the reverse effect on Harker: having left the industrial West, he nearly goes mad from his captivity in the East. Upon discovering the vampire lying in his coffin with “a mocking smile on the bloated face,” Harker rages (prophetically, as it turns out): “This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (74). Indeed, despite the triumph of the vampire hunters in Stoker’s novel, Dracula’s enduring popularity with “the teeming millions” is proof that the monster has had the proverbial last laugh. The more he has died in literature, film, theater, and even Antonio Barrenechea University of Mary Washington Fredericksburg, VA USA