Dracula Society

Last updated
The Dracula Society
Named after Dracula
Formation1973
FoundersBernard Davies
Bruce Wightman
Location
Main organ
Voices from the Vaults
Website The Dracula Society

The Dracula Society is a London-based literature and travel group with an interest in supernatural and macabre works of fiction, as exemplified by Bram Stoker's Dracula .

Contents

The Society

The society was founded in October 1973 by two actors, Bernard Davies (1924–2010) [1] and Bruce Wightman (1925-2009) [2] to organize Dracula-themed tours of Transylvania and Czechoslovakia. [3] Despite the name, its field of interest encompasses all Gothic literature, as well as stage and screen adaptations, and their sources in myth and folklore. The society meets regularly five times a year, but also organises occasional one-off events, and trips to locations in the UK and Europe. [4]

Awards

The Society presents two awards at its annual dinner, which is held in early November to mark Bram Stoker's birthday.

A third award, the Bernard Davies Award, was inaugurated in 2012, and is presented only occasionally, for achievement in scholarship. The first recipient was Dr. Elizabeth Miller, Professor (Emerita) of English of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, [4] and president of the Canadian Chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. [7]

Journal

The society also publishes a quarterly journal Voices from the Vaults which contains reviews and articles of direct or related interest to members. [8]

Membership

As well as its regular membership the society also presents Honorary Life Memberships; current holders include Richard Dalby, Christopher Frayling, Jonathan Rigby, Janina Faye and Caroline Munro, and former holders include Michael Carreras, Radu Florescu, Raymond T. McNally and Vincent Price. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bram Stoker</span> Irish novelist and short story writer (1847–1912)

Abraham Stoker was an Irish author who wrote the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the West End's Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned.

<i>Dracula</i> 1897 novel by Bram Stoker

Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horror fiction</span> Genre of fiction

Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.

<i>Bram Stokers Dracula</i> (1992 film) Film directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a 1992 American vampire horror film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and written by James V. Hart, based on the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The film stars Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits. Set in 19th century England and Romania, it follows the titular vampire (Oldman), who falls in love with Mina Murray (Ryder), the fiancée of his solicitor Jonathan Harker (Reeves). When Dracula begins terrorizing Mina's friends, Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Hopkins), an expert in vampirism, is summoned to bring an end to the vampire's reign of terror. Its closing credits theme "Love Song for a Vampire", is written and performed by Annie Lennox.

Largely as a result of the success of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Transylvania has become a popular setting for gothic horror fiction, and most particularly vampire fiction. In some later books and movies Stoker's Count Dracula was conflated with the historical Vlad III Dracula, known as Vlad the Impaler (1431–1476), who though most likely born in the Transylvanian city of Sighișoara, ruled over neighboring Wallachia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mina Harker</span> Fictional character

Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker is a fictional character and the main female character in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.

<i>The Jewel of Seven Stars</i> 1903 novel by Bram Stoker

The Jewel of Seven Stars is a horror novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker, first published by Heinemann in 1903. The story is a first-person narrative of a young man pulled into an archaeologist's plot to revive Queen Tera, an ancient Egyptian mummy. It explores common fin de siècle themes such as imperialism, the rise of the New Woman and feminism, and societal progress.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florence Balcombe</span> Wife and literary executor of Bram Stoker

Florence Balcombe was the wife and literary executor of Bram Stoker. She is remembered for her legal dispute with the makers of Nosferatu, an unauthorized film based on her husband's novel Dracula.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Count Dracula</span> Title character of Bram Stokers 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula

Count Dracula is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. He is considered the prototypical and archetypal vampire in subsequent works of fiction. Aspects of the character are believed by some to have been inspired by the 15th-century Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, who was also known as Vlad Dracula, and by Sir Henry Irving, an actor for whom Stoker was a personal assistant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Count Dracula in popular culture</span>

The character of Count Dracula from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, has remained popular over the years, and many forms of media have adopted the character in various forms. In their book Dracula in Visual Media, authors John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart declared that no other horror character or vampire has been emulated more times than Count Dracula. Most variations of Dracula across film, comics, television and documentaries predominantly explore the character of Dracula as he was first portrayed in film, with only a few adapting Stoker's original narrative more closely. These including borrowing the look of Count Dracula in both the Universal's series of Dracula and Hammer's series of Dracula, including include the characters clothing, mannerisms, physical features hair style and his motivations such as wanting to be in a home away from Europe.

<i>Dracula</i> (1924 play) 1924 stage play

Dracula is a stage play written by the Irish actor and playwright Hamilton Deane in 1924, then revised by the American writer John L. Balderston in 1927. It was the first authorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. After touring in England, the original version of the play appeared at London's Little Theatre in July 1927, where it was seen by the American producer Horace Liveright. Liveright asked Balderston to revise the play for a Broadway production that opened at the Fulton Theatre in October 1927. This production starred Bela Lugosi in his first major English-speaking role.

William Hughes FRHistS FSA Scot is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, China: he has specialised in the study of Bram Stoker. He was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School and the University of East Anglia, and also holds a PGCE from Christ Church, Canterbury. He has presented radio programmes for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4, and has also appeared on live television through Living TV's Most Haunted Live!, most recently during the 2009 broadcast from St George's Hall, Liverpool. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in 2019, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Prior to accepting a chair at the University of Macau he was, for 26 years, a member of the English faculty at Bath Spa University, England, where he led teaching and research in the fields of Gothic Literature and the medical humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lot No. 249</span> Short story by Arthur Conan Doyle

"Lot No. 249" is a Gothic horror short story by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1892. The story tells of a University of Oxford athlete named Abercrombie Smith who notices a strange series of events surrounding Edward Bellingham, an Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy. After seeing his mummy disappear and reappear, and two instances of Bellingham's enemies getting attacked, Smith concludes that Bellingham is reanimating his mummy. Smith confronts Bellingham, who denies this is the case; the next day, Smith is attacked by the mummy and escapes. Smith then forces Bellingham to destroy his mummy and the associated artefacts at gunpoint.

Elizabeth Russell Miller was a Professor Emerita at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She resided in Toronto. In her early academic career, she focused on Newfoundland literature, primarily the life and work of her father, well-known Newfoundland author and humorist Ted Russell. Beginning in 1990, her major field of research was Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, its author, sources and influence. She published several books on the subject, including Reflections on Dracula, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense, a volume on Dracula for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and, most recently, Bram Stoker's Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition with Robert Eighteen-Bisang. She founded the Dracula Research Centre and was the founding editor of the Journal of Dracula Studies now at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urban Gothic</span> Subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television

Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland and the United States and developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the subgenres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).

Bram Stoker's Dracula may refer to:

John Edgar Browning is an American author, editor, and scholar known for his nonfiction works about the horror genre and vampires in film, literature, and culture. Previously a visiting lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is now a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia.

Robert Eighteen-Bisang was a Canadian author and scholar who was one of the world's foremost authorities on vampire literature and mythology.

Bibliography of works on Dracula is a listing of non-fiction literary works about the book Dracula or derivative works about its titular vampire Count Dracula.

Bruce Wightman was a New Zealand actor and expert on Bram Stoker who co-founded the Dracula Society.

References

  1. "Bernard Davies". IMDb. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  2. "Bruce Wightman". IMDb. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  3. "The Dracula Society". Vampires.com. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  4. 1 2 "About the Society". The Dracula Society. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  5. "The Hamilton Deane Award". The Dracula Society. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  6. "The Children of the Night Award". The Dracula Society. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  7. "Transylvanian Society of Dracula". blooferland.com. 2013. Archived from the original on 11 May 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  8. "Voices from the Vaults". The Dracula Society. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  9. "Honorary Members". The Dracula Society. 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.