Clip: Season 15 Episode 1 | 3m 19s | Video has closed captioning.
Pop culture has fixated on vampires, thrilling audiences with the horror of a deadly monster A nocturnal predator from Eastern Europe who rises from the grave to feed off the blood of its victims. But what if Dracula, and all the other vampires that have captured the public imagination, have a basis in reality?
Aired: 10/27/15
- [Narrator:] Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew, Dacre Stoker, has studied this creature who refuses to lie down and die.
- Brams not a normal author.
He knew how to put together, like a master chef, this vampire -- taking existing folklore and putting it together to create this ultimate horrifying creature.
- [Narrator:] Pop culture has fixated on vampires, thrilling audiences with the horror of a deadly monster.
A nocturnal predator from Eastern Europe, who rises from the grave to feed off the blood of its victims.
But what if Dracula, and all the other vampires that have captured the public imagination, have a basis in reality?
A tantalizing clue lies in the meticulous research Bram Stoker undertook as he shaped his character.
His great-grandnephew has a set of notes in Stoker's own hand, which reveal his fictional count wasn't simply the product of his own imagination.
- Well, through his research at the British Library, he would actually go and collect notes on specific characteristics that he wanted to place into his vampire.
And, for instance, if I may, Ill actually read from the notes themselves.
The first one is that, “The vampire goes through fog by instinct, and has white teeth.
” Well, we can see that that actually has emerged in time to anything you see about a vampire has to do with his very bright white teeth.
And he can also sort of shapeshift and blend into fog and out of fog, as he just moves at will.
“Power of creating evil thoughts or banishing good ones, in others present.
” Mesmerism and ESP and hypnotism was an emerging science back in the late 1800s.
And here, Bram inserts it into the novel as a power that the vampire can actually have over his victims.
“No looking glass in Count's house.
Never can see him reflected in one.
No shadow.
” Other ones: “Enormous strength...
He can see in the dark.
And he has the power of getting small or large, ” which is something that I believe has emerged into his shapeshifting, again, and makes him horrifying because we never know where the guy is.
We're actually starting from the back side and seeing what Bram used to put together this character that to this day has most all of these as very famous tropes.
- [Narrator:] The monster Stoker created is still stalking us more than a hundred years later, in movies and TV.
But could Dracula's popularity have blinded us to a chilling truth?
Could the vampire have its true origins not in fiction, but in fact?
- Bram's vampires, and all the others today, are for entertainment purposes.
But you've got to realize where these came from.
The myth of the vampire really terrorized villages.
People had no idea what was going on in their towns and counted it on vampirism.
And that certainly was not entertainment.
That was real fear.
