Vampire aficionados know that the popularity of things vampire in books, film, theatre, and television is attributable to Irish author Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic novel Dracula.

Stoker, himself, though was influenced by two earlier vampire novels—Carmilla, an 1871 Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan La Fanu, which features a lesbian vampire and the 1819 novel The Vampyre by John Polidori, the first vampire book in English.

As an aside, Polidori, who was the personal physician of Lord Byron wrote his novel after the famous evening spent with Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairemont, where Byron suggested each of them write a ghost story. Mary Shelley, of course, started work on what would become Frankenstein. Thus it could be argued that the prototype for the suave, aristocratic Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster “met” far sooner than the 1948 film Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein!

Although Béla Lugosi is perhaps best identified as the Count, in the 1931 film, Dracula, the first adaptation of Stoker’s novel was, in fact, made by German director F.W. Murnau in 1922. The filmmakers were, however, forced to change the setting, character names, and the title because Stoker’s widow contested copyright infringement. The film is called Nosferatu and features Max Schrek as the vampire, Count Orlok.

To this day, it remains a chilling portrayal of the legend:

Tags: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bram Stoker, Carmilla, Count Orlok, Dracula, F.W. Murnau, Gothic, John Polidori, Joseph Sheridan La Fanu, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Max Schrek, Nosferatu, Robie Madison, vampires

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