Dracula

A surprisingly engaging read, considering how completely over-done vampires are. Bram may have set in motion an unfortunately tenacious legacy of sexy-vampire morality plays about the evils of temptation (and foreigners), but that's not his fault. And Dracula's actually pretty fresh (irony)! It also makes you admire? hate even more? the Twilight stuff, since I hadn't realized Victorian notions about gender roles and sex were part of the vampire package from day one!

Anyway, Count Draaaacula is a creepy, undead (or, as Stoker prefers it, UnDead) ForeigNer who has gone all camp in his decay, what with his “voluptuous red lips”, strange manicure, and nasty, big, pointy teeth. After terrorizing Diarist #1 (Jonathan Harker) in his ill-kept and empty castle, the action flies to London, where various English people are having various problems.

Told in a series of diary entries, letters, memos, telegrams, newspaper articles and... more diary entries by various characters, this tale is basically a sexist, classist, slightly porny tale about how evil (and yet tempting) sex is. And how women are frail, delicate flowers we must protect, lest they get infected by the sex disease. Read this before you read.

Anyway, this tale has awakened in me an UnDead interest for other vampirey things, and I'm suddenly revisiting trailers for movies that I very intentionally ignored long ago: Gary Oldman's pompadour from hell, or that one movie that I think is actually about the French Revolution, or even the fact that stodgy, silly old Van Helsing is worthy of Hollywood's imagination.