Dracula Daily
A classic revived through the internet.
2020 was a weird year. A lot of weird things happened. But the one that’s relevant to us right now is that a man named Matt Kirkland read Bram Stoker’s Dracula with his family. While doing this, he realized that each chapter was a journal entry, letter, or newspaper clipping with a date marked. An idea began to form.
In 2021, Matt Kirkland set up a newsletter that could be received via email. What would happen was that whoever signed up would begin to be sent Dracula in real time, each chapter on the date that was written in the book.
In 2022, this newsletter took off, and Dracula Daily was born.
After a while, Dracula Daily gained a huge following on Tumblr, becoming the biggest and most loved book club on the internet. Now, I do not have a Tumblr, but Dracula Daily was made into a book in 2023, which I have checked out from the library and read. So now I can say, with great confidence and joy, that Dracula Daily is a beautiful thing.
In my last post, I detailed the differences between Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897, and Universal Studios’ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1931. To summarize, the original book was much more chaotic. With the movie, it was given a reputation for being elegant and stuffy, like most classic literature. Dracula Daily has blown that misconception straight out of the water.
In the book of Dracula Daily, as well as, I assume, in real time on the internet when it was in full swing, there is a sort of running commentary by the people reading it. There are memes, and fanart, and text posts. Reading Dracula Daily with this commentary, you get to see people realize not only how insane the original Dracula is, but also how good.
Dracula Daily and its commentary lets you watch, in real time, not just how the events of the story unfold, but how people react to them. First, the realization that this is, in many ways, a very silly book. The memes about what Dracula considers to be normal human behavior, e.g. crawling down the castle walls like a lizard (there were many memes about this one), reading a railway timetable like it’s a novel, and running around pretending to be his own servants. The love for Jonathan and his love for Mina, how he just really wants her to get that paprika hendl recipe one of these days.
And then, there is the slow realization that this book is, in fact, scary. How Jonathan’s captivity is not just scary because of the supernatural elements, but because he is alone and manipulated and cut off from communication. The saga of The Demeter, the ship Dracula sails to England on, and how they crew of the ship are pretty much in Alien, but at sea. How starkly different Lucy and Mina’s experience of these few weeks are in comparison to Jonathan’s.
Following this period, there is a lot that is said about the fact that the characters in Dracula don’t know that they’re in Dracula. This is almost immediately followed by the revelation that the characters in this book are writing Dracula, when, upon marrying Jonathan, Mina is given his journal that contains everything that happened to him in Castle Dracula and then promises never to read it for beautiful and romantic reasons.
The reactions to the rest of the book are around the same, but increasingly disbelieving. Everyone reading it in real time gets to find out for themselves just how much these characters are willing to do for each other. All of these people on the internet fall in love with these characters, are enraged and saddened as Lucy gets sicker and sicker until she finally dies, then are grieved again as she is damned to be a vampire and eventually staked and beheaded. They adore Quincey P Morris, Texan cowboy with a heart of gold, and eventually mourn him too, as he dies after killing Dracula.
Dracula Daily is real time proof of the point of this blog. A whole bunch of young people on the internet were given Dracula, this old horror story with archaic language, dubious scares, and the most spoiled plot twist in history, and fell completely in love with it. They were scared by it, and understood it. Thousands of Kids These Days were still scared of Dracula, over two hundred years later.
Not only did Dracula Daily revive a classic in a brilliant way, it brought back some love for what is simply a good story. It brought the Harkers, Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Quincey P Morris, Renfield, Lucy, and many more characters the love that was long overdue. Because of Matt Kirkland and Dracula Daily, there are now countless memes, pieces of fanart, posts, and so much more all about Dracula. The internet was given an old, dusty, classic, took it, and ran.
And I think that’s a beautiful thing.