Dracula with Lester Ryan Clark

Dracula is a book where the title character shows up for roughly four chapters and then just... leaves. It's like if "Jaws" spent most of its runtime following insurance adjusters filing claims about boat damage. And yet, somehow, this 1897 novel created pop culture's most enduring monster. That's the central mystery Mandy and guest Lester Ryan Clark tackle in this Halloween extravaganza.Lester teaches Dracula to high schoolers every year (and gradually transforms into Gary Oldman's Dracula throughout Halloween week because he's clearly the best kind of teacher). He confirms what Mandy discovered reading the novel for the first time: Bram Stoker committed the bizarre act of writing a vampire book and then immediately getting bored with his vampire. After a genuinely creepy opening with Jonathan Harker trapped in a Transylvanian castle with a mustached count who climbs walls like a lizard and definitely doesn't eat dinner, the book pivots to diary entries, newspaper clippings, and an excessive amount of Victorian-era day drinking. It's an epistolary novel where characters somehow recall four pages of precise dialogue from memory for their journal entries, which—and stay with me here—doesn't really track.But here's where it gets interesting: Stoker's failure might have been his greatest success. By giving us almost nothing, he forced everyone else to fill in the blanks. We got Bella Lugosi's suave count without a mustache (sorry, Bram), Christopher Lee's menacing aristocrat, the Lost Boys' leather-jacketed vampires, and yes, even Twilight's sparkling immortals. Dracula survives by adapting to whatever each generation finds sexy, which is apparently the most vampire thing possible. The conversation explores why there are so many characters named John/Jonathan/Harker/Hawkins (looking at you, Stoker), why Mina is the book's actual hero despite Victorian men having feelings about her man-brain, what's going on with Renfield eating progressively larger animals, and why the climactic battle happens from a distance through binoculars.They also discuss how Dracula represented Victorian anxieties about foreigners, disease, and women with agency (witches used to be scary because they were "women with power and their own transportation system"), and why the novel works as proto-found-footage horror. Plus: the drinking. So much drinking. Brandy as medicine, brandy to stay awake, brandy to celebrate, brandy to mourn. It's a wonder anyone in Victorian England remained vertical.The episode ends with both agreeing that every film adaptation correctly identified the problem and added more Dracula scenes, because giving people what they want is occasionally good business. Who knew?Links & NotesLester Ryan Clark's Podcasts:

• Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at Once
• The Devil's Details

Find Lester on Social Media:

• All platforms: @LesterRyanClark

Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_Kravens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992)
• "Renfield" (2023) - starring Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Holt
• Janice Hallett - British mystery author who writes in epistolary format

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