Word: dracula
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ANNOTATED DRACULA by BRAM STOKER
Seventy-eight years have passed since Bram Stoker dredged him from the velvet underground of Victorian sexual repression. The authentic apocalypse of war, the real specter of deprivation, should have exorcised this titled vampire long ago. Instead, Count Dracula has become the Western world's most durable ghoul. There are Dracula dolls, songs, comic books and histories-proving the existence of a 15th century tyrant dubbed Dracul (dragon). Vampire movies have been made almost since the dawn of cinema and, according to Editor Leonard Wolf, there are now more than 200 Draculoid film titles, ranging from the silent Nosferatu...
...other hand," writes Editor Wolf, a professor of English who once taught a course on Dracula at San Francisco State University, "from its pages there rise images so dreamlike and yet so imperative that we experience them as ancient allegories. Everywhere one looks, there flicker the shadows of primordial struggles; the perpetual tension between the dark and the light; the wrestling match between Christ and Satan; and finally, the complex allegories of sex: sex in all its unimaginable innocence, or sex reeking with the full perfume of the swamp. And all these urgencies are seen or sensed through...
...secretary to the actor Sir Henry Irving, shrewdly swotted Transylvanian geography and vampire lore at the British Museum reading room. His gleanings provided a European psychohistory before the term was coined, covering half-remembered terrors with gothic cobwebs. Stoker wrote several other romances of no particular power, but in Dracula he managed to create a classic, forever stalking his readers when their moral and rational defenses are down...
...corrupt aristocrat moves painfully by day. At night, of course, he is able to change from man to bat to wolf to fog. The human characters who have been hunting Dracula in the light now lie abed, weak with doubt, receptive to phantoms. A winged shape flutters at the casement-ludicrous as a plot device, but classically suggestive as an embodiment of dread...