All right, on this festive Goth Christmas Day, let’s look at a little more Dracula. Here’s yesterday’s thread: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189557… #cleovamps 
Jonathan (I love him) has arrived at Castle Dracula, Totes Legit (THUNDERCLAP) and spent the night; what he realizes later is, if there are no servants... Dracula does everything. Continental breakfast, housekeeping, mints on the pillow, everything. #cleovamps
Which I love, and kind of want some fanfic about. Jonathan then discovers: no mirrors (live the stubble life, my guy!); he’s locked in, oh noes, but... “to my great delight, a vast number of English books” on an odd variety of subjects. #cleovamps
I find it endearing that he’s happy to see the Law List, a directory of his fellow legal professionals. I also love Klinger’s accompanying footnote: “Or were these perhaps a... menu?” #cleovamps
(I’ll pause here to mention that the very next footnote says that the 1973 Dan Curtis Dracula has *Lucy* as the reincarnated wife, so that answers my question as to whether the 1992 adaptation was the first with that idea.) #cleovamps
So Jonathan’s noticing that the library is Everything You Maybe Didn’t Even Want to Know About England when Dracula shows up, eager to chat with a real live Englishman. I feel like he would stan a lot of BBC series today. Maybe some GBBO. #cleovamps
A lovely but also interesting line here about London’s “rush of humanity,” because... I think that’s exactly what made a lot of people anxious at the turn of the century. Too many people, too much change and death... but that’s what this ~foreigner loves. #cleovamps
Here’s the thing: this book is anxious about everything, and as someone with clinical anxiety, I respect that. I can’t believe that in my brain fog yesterday I wondered if the book “Dracula” is worried about reverse imperialism. OF COURSE it is. #cleovamps
The reason Dracula endures is that the book is scared of EVERYTHING, which makes it incredibly flexible as the decades go on. You can adapt it to be about ANYTHING. IN 2019 it could be about Those Immigrants Taking Over OR an older generation sucking the young dry. #cleovamps
The Coppola adaptation uses a visual focus on blood and disease in the AIDS awareness era. The 1979 version has a ~liberated Lucy deciding she’d like to CHOOSE. I’ll have to rewatch the 1931 and get back to you, but “FOREIGNERS OMG” is a safe bet + #cleovamps
although as a guess, I’d say look at how the 1931 adaptation is in a post-flapper decade with anxieties about liberated women, and has the most heavily, iconically accented Dracula of them all. What were the global anxieties before WW2? Do you need a thesis topic? #cleovamps
Back to the book. Which was published in 1897, less than a decade after the Jack the Ripper case (which involved fears about immigrants and the London Jewish community) and four years before the elderly Queen Victoria’s death. “Its change, its death”—no! bad! BAD! #cleovamps
So we might think Dracula has a really interesting, open-minded take on London. A reader in 1897 might feel their hackles rising. And then he says “I have been so long master that I would be master still.” And this guy is going to London. #cleovamps
(I think what I’ve just described is pretty much the background of Kim Newman’s alternate history Anno Dracula, which I have around here to read at some point.) #cleovamps
I’m going to bring in the show Hannibal now, which I swear to you has a good bit of Dracula in its DNA. What Dracula’s doing, with his odd library and his hours of questions, is learning to people. Or more precisely, learning to English. #cleovamps
And right up after this is the famous scene where Dracula doesn’t show up in Jonathan’s shaving mirror and nearly jumps him at the sight of blood, which can be portrayed about as homoerotic as you want it to be. #cleovamps
Because the thing is, you could easily adapt this book in an extremely homophobic way. There is some anxiety in the text—Jonathan is 0% down for this—but *in the text* it’s balanced by Dracula promptly going after two women. #cleovamps
I would have to reread David J. Skal’s bio Something in the Blood for more insight on this, but note the lines here about actor Henry Irving inspiring both Dracula himself and love, fear, and animosity in Stoker, a theater manager. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Irv… #cleovamps
Anyway, I am not joking when I say that probably the most homoerotic adaptation of the shaving scene is in... Hannibal. Look at this staging. You can’t tell me that’s not on purpose. #cleovamps
Okay, I seem to have found the time I tweeted about the Skal bio of Stoker #cleovamps
“On one hand, here is Stoker's epic fan/love (?) letter to Walt Whitman. On the other, ‘Stoker stole a girl from Oscar Wilde and basically we have no idea how this happened.’” We contain multitudes #cleovamps
Ah, here we are. “Currently Stoker has just fallen under Henry Irving's thrall and skipped his honeymoon to help manage the Lyceum Theater.” So... homoerotic shaving scene where Dracula yells at Jonathan, tantrums his mirror out the window, and locks him in. Yeah. #cleovamps
This seems like a good stopping point for the sake of my back, and also Horror of Dracula is on the tcm.com app/website if you’re a subscriber; feels like a good way to spend the evening. We’ll do a bit more tomorrow. #cleovamps
