Hollywood gothic : the tangled web of Dracula from novel to stage to screen

This book examines the history of the story of Dracula, and discusses the conflicts and battles encountered while developing the story into stage and screen productions The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all IN THE RARE BOOKS ROOM OF A SMALL LIBRARY ON A TREE-LINED street in Philadelphia is a leather slipcase containing a sheaf of mounted note cards, almost a century old but not yellowing-they are an exceptionally high grade of linen stock, the property of Henry Irving's prestigious Royal Lyceum Theatre in London.