Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The First Vampire Films
- Chapter 2 Vamps
- Chapter 3 Criminals
- Chapter 4 Supernatural Vampires
- Chapter 5 Drakula halála
- Chapter 6 Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
- Chapter 7 London after Midnight
- Chapter 8 Vampires at Home
- Chapter 9 Transformations
- Index
Chapter 5 - Drakula halála
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The First Vampire Films
- Chapter 2 Vamps
- Chapter 3 Criminals
- Chapter 4 Supernatural Vampires
- Chapter 5 Drakula halála
- Chapter 6 Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
- Chapter 7 London after Midnight
- Chapter 8 Vampires at Home
- Chapter 9 Transformations
- Index
Summary
“Those standing nearby fell under the spell of Drakula's powerful words. An awkward silence followed.”
– Drakula halála novella, 1924Dracula was not Hungarian. Bela Lugosi, who famously portrayed the title role in Tod Browning's Dracula (Universal, 1931), was born in Hungary, but Dracula was not.
Vlad III, also known as Vlad Drăculea (Vlad Dracula) and Vlad Ţepeş (Vlad the Impaler), remains a hero in Romania. As Voivode of Wallachia for three separate reigns during the fifteenth century, he was at times at war with Hungarians, at times allied with them. But no one mistook Vlad III's heritage, not even the Germans, his greatest detractors in the years after his death.
Bram Stoker's Dracula recounts his own complicated history with Hungarians in the 1897 novel:
Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier; that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkey-land … When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? … Again, when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free.
Histories fiction and histories nonfiction reside in a similarly complex place: Dracula was not Magyar; he was not Hungarian. And yet he was never far from the country and its people, including in the cinema.
In the late twentieth century, a few historians discovered that F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (Prana-Film, 1922) was not, as long believed, the first time that a filmmaker adapted Stoker's Dracula for the screen.
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- Vampires in Silent Cinema , pp. 102 - 137Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2024