Of Dracula, all we can say we know is what he is not.
For one thing, we already know that even "vampire" is a nebulous term pregnant with variegated meanings, so much that one could say a vampire is, as much as they don't like to admit it, just as much a "miserable pile of secrets" as a man itself. We know that one can identify as a vampire without necessarily consuming blood, shunning garlic, injuring itself by exposure to the sun, being harmed by a stake to the heart, and/or avoiding the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. So long as one exhibits both a compulsive tendency to explain precisely what makes one a vampire (forget everything you think you know, they might exhort to you. Crosses? Don't even tickle. Garlic? Love it on my pizza, and so on), and also a vehement hatred of wolfmen, one can comfortably be called a vampire. And while these varieties of vampirism can seem mercurial, or even frivolous at a first glance, it is important to note that vampire identity, like sexuality or gender, is not chosen but rather assigned to a vampire via nurture or nature and thus deserving of our respect. Of course a real vampire can sparkle, and we owe it to real sparkling vampires not to mock them for it.
Just so, we know that Dracula is no one specific person, not just a pale and gaunt Eastern European lord of a grand imposing castle, not just a black cape and a v-shaped hairline, not just a sexualized anime avatar, and certainly not just a voivoide of old Romania with a grisly rumor that clings to him and refuses to let go, try as he might to fend it off while also fending off the advancing Ottoman Empire. No, a Dracula is a wide umbrella of meaning, a general idea of the ideal Dracula, made manifest once every one hundred years. Neither is his castle a fixed spot of real estate, but transcends the Carpathian Mountains and slithers about the sensible world amoeba-like into various continents and epochs, even as far as Japan and as recent as just beyond the fin-de-twentieth-siecle.
The castle is as massive as it is peripatetic, boasting a number of rooms and wings and towers and even auxiliary keeps aside the main structure, and within them all plenty of room in the observatory, the treasury, the library, the dungeon, and other numerous haunts to house a large assortment of beasties and baddies. For every outlandish monster, a large animated skull with a serpentine tongue, perhaps, or a pair of aristocratic dancers become ghosties at the last minute of their mutual deaths, or even a bat made of stray gold coins and jewels, one will just as well find familiar mainstays in the popular imagination. One is reminded of the famous gatherings of popular monsters of old, like the "monster mash," in which the likes of Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even the Medusa, all showing up to do the graveyard smash.
It seems odd to imagine these creatures, so fiercely independent in our collective unconsciousness as much as they are fearsome, now serving under the thrall of Dracula every century, but what can we do but observe the facts with our senses? The famous living-dead creation of Dr. Frankenstein, as we all know, was last seen wandering the antarctic tundra, pondering his humanity vis-a-vis is it there at all or not, and not, as many people mistakenly believe, wandering about and pedantically correcting people that he is not "Frankenstein" but rather, in fact, the man's creation. One hopes that, now bidden by Dracula to await human intruders within his deepest dungeons to simply pelt that intruder with vials of potions (which we can never know and only wonder if they contain a secret to restoring or even amplifying its humanity), the beast has ample time to ponder its ontology.
The Medusa, the singular creation of the ancient Greeks, and so singularly slain long ago by one of those impossibly ideal Greek heroes, so very much a creature of its own time and place, we are now shocked to see hob-nobbing with modern beasties. We fail in any time or place blackened by Dracula's castle to see in its attendance, for example, the Chimera, the Minotaurus or the Nemean Lion, and we note that, while not impossible, sightings of Cerberuses and Hydras are exceedingly rare (to be fair, harpies are a common fixture, but also to be fair, it goes without saying that harpies don't count). It comes at no surprise to the would-be foe of Dracula that he encounters on its way to a medusa, not hordes of underlings, but rather hordes of statues, beasties themselves being just as susceptible to its stone-death glare as any ancient Greek man woman or child in its heyday. On a not-too-unrelated side note, it remains a point of conjecture as to how the great stone Golem that frequents these monster-mashes was first created. Could it have been an amalgamation of the Medusa's careless glances?
Now consider the Mummy, how aeons ago the lord and master of Upper and Lower ancient Egypt, Akmodan the second of his name, after a long and fruitful reign upon which the great Amun-Ra smiled as brightly as any other of those proud potentates of the sun, seemed content to have his organs scooped out and his blood drained to the last drop and his remaining husk pickled in saltpeter baths and wrapped in the finest linens woven from that land's famous cotton, that he may enjoy the afterlife for all time with the old gods across the metaphysical pond. One once again marvels to see now the bandaged man traverse to such a drastically different land and climate, and so far advanced into another timeline, so far away from his old gods, to idle away the nights upon the hands of the great keep's clock, helpfully always set to a quarter to witching hour to provide him a level plane to walk to and fro, for no other purpose than to one day entangle a would-be vampire killer with its own bandages, of which the old embalmers apparently gave him an infinite supply to spare for the task.
It alarms one to learn that the Dracula is the lord and master of them all, and he is so every one hundred years. He even holds sway over death itself, commanding the cloaked and sickle-wielding father time to start the party again and again. It is Dracula who throws the eternal centennial beastie party, and it is Dracula who will endure long when this civilization fades into memory. When the long-imagined moment finally arrives when extra-terrestrials land on the surface of our scarred and barren yet once-great planet, they will be greeted with a distant wolf's howl to the moon, a great drawbridge falling across a moat before them, and a creaky open door with a spooky invitation to enter if they dare. Dracula can be killed but he will never die, and so Dracula will provide us sequel after sequel. Dracula will never leave us alone, indeed, not even long after there is no more "us," let alone viable heroes of legitimate Belmont stock. Dracula, like mankind's capacity for evil, endures and will endure for as long, if not longer, as mankind endures alongside him. "Mankind has ill need of a savior such as he," true, but it is the only one available to us, and indeed, the only one we deserve.
(It should be noted with care, however, that in its entire history of century-parties spanning from the eve of the First Crusade all the way up to the third millennium, not once has the traditional adversary of the vampire, the wolfman, ever darkened the footsteps of Dracula's spooky abode with an invitation in hand, and thus never once has such a wolfman subsequently suffered the lash of the Belmonts' dreaded Vampire Killer. Indeed, in all the annals of the Dracula saga to date, the only mention of a wolfman involves a single Dracula appearance, circa '64, when, in lieu of the usual latest whip-brandishing scion of the Belmont clan, it was in fact only a wolfman who (appropriately enough, given the historical animosity exhibited between vampires and wolfmen) dared to oppose Dracula this time, to face alone the full brunt of this Beloved of the Night, the King of All Vampires and his entire horde of monsters at his beck and call. We do not discuss this game, however, not under any circumstances whatsoever.)
For one thing, we already know that even "vampire" is a nebulous term pregnant with variegated meanings, so much that one could say a vampire is, as much as they don't like to admit it, just as much a "miserable pile of secrets" as a man itself. We know that one can identify as a vampire without necessarily consuming blood, shunning garlic, injuring itself by exposure to the sun, being harmed by a stake to the heart, and/or avoiding the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. So long as one exhibits both a compulsive tendency to explain precisely what makes one a vampire (forget everything you think you know, they might exhort to you. Crosses? Don't even tickle. Garlic? Love it on my pizza, and so on), and also a vehement hatred of wolfmen, one can comfortably be called a vampire. And while these varieties of vampirism can seem mercurial, or even frivolous at a first glance, it is important to note that vampire identity, like sexuality or gender, is not chosen but rather assigned to a vampire via nurture or nature and thus deserving of our respect. Of course a real vampire can sparkle, and we owe it to real sparkling vampires not to mock them for it.
Just so, we know that Dracula is no one specific person, not just a pale and gaunt Eastern European lord of a grand imposing castle, not just a black cape and a v-shaped hairline, not just a sexualized anime avatar, and certainly not just a voivoide of old Romania with a grisly rumor that clings to him and refuses to let go, try as he might to fend it off while also fending off the advancing Ottoman Empire. No, a Dracula is a wide umbrella of meaning, a general idea of the ideal Dracula, made manifest once every one hundred years. Neither is his castle a fixed spot of real estate, but transcends the Carpathian Mountains and slithers about the sensible world amoeba-like into various continents and epochs, even as far as Japan and as recent as just beyond the fin-de-twentieth-siecle.
The castle is as massive as it is peripatetic, boasting a number of rooms and wings and towers and even auxiliary keeps aside the main structure, and within them all plenty of room in the observatory, the treasury, the library, the dungeon, and other numerous haunts to house a large assortment of beasties and baddies. For every outlandish monster, a large animated skull with a serpentine tongue, perhaps, or a pair of aristocratic dancers become ghosties at the last minute of their mutual deaths, or even a bat made of stray gold coins and jewels, one will just as well find familiar mainstays in the popular imagination. One is reminded of the famous gatherings of popular monsters of old, like the "monster mash," in which the likes of Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even the Medusa, all showing up to do the graveyard smash.
It seems odd to imagine these creatures, so fiercely independent in our collective unconsciousness as much as they are fearsome, now serving under the thrall of Dracula every century, but what can we do but observe the facts with our senses? The famous living-dead creation of Dr. Frankenstein, as we all know, was last seen wandering the antarctic tundra, pondering his humanity vis-a-vis is it there at all or not, and not, as many people mistakenly believe, wandering about and pedantically correcting people that he is not "Frankenstein" but rather, in fact, the man's creation. One hopes that, now bidden by Dracula to await human intruders within his deepest dungeons to simply pelt that intruder with vials of potions (which we can never know and only wonder if they contain a secret to restoring or even amplifying its humanity), the beast has ample time to ponder its ontology.
The Medusa, the singular creation of the ancient Greeks, and so singularly slain long ago by one of those impossibly ideal Greek heroes, so very much a creature of its own time and place, we are now shocked to see hob-nobbing with modern beasties. We fail in any time or place blackened by Dracula's castle to see in its attendance, for example, the Chimera, the Minotaurus or the Nemean Lion, and we note that, while not impossible, sightings of Cerberuses and Hydras are exceedingly rare (to be fair, harpies are a common fixture, but also to be fair, it goes without saying that harpies don't count). It comes at no surprise to the would-be foe of Dracula that he encounters on its way to a medusa, not hordes of underlings, but rather hordes of statues, beasties themselves being just as susceptible to its stone-death glare as any ancient Greek man woman or child in its heyday. On a not-too-unrelated side note, it remains a point of conjecture as to how the great stone Golem that frequents these monster-mashes was first created. Could it have been an amalgamation of the Medusa's careless glances?
Now consider the Mummy, how aeons ago the lord and master of Upper and Lower ancient Egypt, Akmodan the second of his name, after a long and fruitful reign upon which the great Amun-Ra smiled as brightly as any other of those proud potentates of the sun, seemed content to have his organs scooped out and his blood drained to the last drop and his remaining husk pickled in saltpeter baths and wrapped in the finest linens woven from that land's famous cotton, that he may enjoy the afterlife for all time with the old gods across the metaphysical pond. One once again marvels to see now the bandaged man traverse to such a drastically different land and climate, and so far advanced into another timeline, so far away from his old gods, to idle away the nights upon the hands of the great keep's clock, helpfully always set to a quarter to witching hour to provide him a level plane to walk to and fro, for no other purpose than to one day entangle a would-be vampire killer with its own bandages, of which the old embalmers apparently gave him an infinite supply to spare for the task.
It alarms one to learn that the Dracula is the lord and master of them all, and he is so every one hundred years. He even holds sway over death itself, commanding the cloaked and sickle-wielding father time to start the party again and again. It is Dracula who throws the eternal centennial beastie party, and it is Dracula who will endure long when this civilization fades into memory. When the long-imagined moment finally arrives when extra-terrestrials land on the surface of our scarred and barren yet once-great planet, they will be greeted with a distant wolf's howl to the moon, a great drawbridge falling across a moat before them, and a creaky open door with a spooky invitation to enter if they dare. Dracula can be killed but he will never die, and so Dracula will provide us sequel after sequel. Dracula will never leave us alone, indeed, not even long after there is no more "us," let alone viable heroes of legitimate Belmont stock. Dracula, like mankind's capacity for evil, endures and will endure for as long, if not longer, as mankind endures alongside him. "Mankind has ill need of a savior such as he," true, but it is the only one available to us, and indeed, the only one we deserve.
(It should be noted with care, however, that in its entire history of century-parties spanning from the eve of the First Crusade all the way up to the third millennium, not once has the traditional adversary of the vampire, the wolfman, ever darkened the footsteps of Dracula's spooky abode with an invitation in hand, and thus never once has such a wolfman subsequently suffered the lash of the Belmonts' dreaded Vampire Killer. Indeed, in all the annals of the Dracula saga to date, the only mention of a wolfman involves a single Dracula appearance, circa '64, when, in lieu of the usual latest whip-brandishing scion of the Belmont clan, it was in fact only a wolfman who (appropriately enough, given the historical animosity exhibited between vampires and wolfmen) dared to oppose Dracula this time, to face alone the full brunt of this Beloved of the Night, the King of All Vampires and his entire horde of monsters at his beck and call. We do not discuss this game, however, not under any circumstances whatsoever.)