i feel like this year a lot of dracula takes have focused in an interesting way on the ways that the horror of dracula includes how he makes his victims be or at least feel complicit in their own victimization. some of this is supernatural vampire stuff like the prohibition against entering uninvited or the ways that vampiric hypnotism seems to include as part of its nightmarish quality the experience of a desire that you don’t actually have, which we see the vampire ladies exert on jonathan in the castle and can extrapolate as a drac-power as well. but a lot of it is the straight up weird psychological manipulations and power play dracula does to jonathan in the castle - the emphasis on “enter freely and of your own free will,” all the little moments of dialogue where he makes something jonathan’s fault or purports to presume jonathan’s desires in a way that leaves no room for jonathan to dissent. it’s a kind of horror that still rings as genuinely unsettling today because it remains an unfortunately familiar and very human kind of violation. and actually even the more magical vampire stuff translates pretty easily to a metaphor for familiar human experiences, right? how many people in the midst of a traumatic event have frozen, like jonathan does when the ladies set upon him, and felt the shame afterwards of their inability to fight against what was unfolding? (cw sexual assault) it’s also well attested to that human bodies sometimes react in situations of sexual assault/abuse with physical responses that overlap with those that accompany consensual sexual experiences, something survivors of sexual violence have spoken about as part of what can make it so difficult to emotionally process what happened - and that’s not even getting into situations of coerced consent or other forms of manipulation that result in experiences only recognized as nonconsensual in retrospect and often with much difficulty and doubt.

anyway. it’s a really rich vein in the novel for me on this reread and i’m grateful for all the posts pointing out the count’s language games in particular, which didn’t jump out at me but once my attention was drawn i couldn’t stop seeing them. but while i am on principle neutral about any individual adaptation doing Whatever with the material, tracking this aspect of the novel’s horror has given me a new dimension of But Why for the sheer prevalence of adaptational choices and academic analyses that have looked at a novel that so viscerally captures so many aspects of violation and gone, “but don’t you think she kinda wanted it?” or even that have looked at dracula’s choice of victims and tried to find or place in them some appeal or weakness inherent in their essences rather than their status as victims of opportunity and vulnerability and dracula’s ability to use them to demonstrate his own power and control, which is how he operates in the novel and which is also an extremely strong parallel for how serial predators operate in the actual world. like any individual movie or retelling or whatever can do whatever it wants, but it is hard to look at the ways the contours of the story as “known” through cultural osmosis have morphed across the century-plus of its popularity and not feel like the versions of it that have lingered have done so in ways that ultimately tone down the horror by placing it more in line with many common cultural misapprehensions about abuse & sexual violence.