The Vision.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is my favorite novel. I love everything about it: the adventure, the dread, the characters, the epistolary structure, the suggestions it makes about Victorian ideologies concerning gender and sexuality.

I first read it over a winter vacation from university, and I’ve since read it several times in addition to writing a research paper comparing it and its romantic sensibilities to the 1841 ballet Giselle (my favorite ballet), which features the life-sucking vengeful ghosts of jilted young women. Interestingly, it is almost certain Stoker had seen Giselle before publishing Dracula.

Why now? Rereading the novel in September of 2024 (in the leadup to our presidential election), it was surprising to recognize in the novel the same xenophobic panic about immigrants (the count) taking jobs and acquiring real estate not to mention the characterization of them as monstrous pet eaters.

Culturally we are also in the midst of a horror renaissance both in film and in literature. As Stephen King points out in his brilliant book Danse Macabre, “the horror story is in many ways an optimistic, upbeat experience; that it is often the tough mind’s way of coping with terrible problems which may not be supernatural at all but perfectly real.” This production will be playful, humorous, and fun but it will also exercise our sense of fear. It will lean into the tropes of the horror genre and gothic horror in particular. It is intended for mature audiences and will be scary.