Who Turned Dracula Into A Vampire (In Original Books & Netflix Show)
Matthew Perez Dracula is the most famous vampire of all but what caused him to turn into a bloodsucking monster? We investigate how Dracula turned into a vampire.
Who or what exactly turned Dracula into a vampire? Created by Bram Stoker as the titular villain of his 1897 Gothic horror novel, the diabolical Count Dracula is the most famous vampire in the world. Stoker's book has been a best-seller for over a century and it has been adapted countless times as films, TV series, and other forms of media, most recently by Sherlock creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss in the BBC and Netflix's Dracula.
Dracula's abilities are legendary and also unusual compared to how vampires were depicted prior to Stoker's tale: the Count is an aristocrat who resides in a decaying castle in Transylvania. He is immortal, possesses the strength of 20 or more men, and he can shapeshift as well as control bats and wolves. His weaknesses include a fear of the cross and exposure to sunlight, which is lethal to the Count. Most menacingly to the human race, Dracula feeds on the blood of the living for sustenance and he also has the power to turn mortals into vampires; as English solicitor Jonathan Harker discovered when he became Dracula's prisoner, the Count keeps three female vampires in his castle as his "brides". Dracula also turned Lucy Westenra into a vampire called the Bloofer Lady when he relocated to England and he attempted to do the same to Jonathan's wife Mina. But, if Dracula can turn people into bloodsucking monsters like himself, who began the cycle by turning Dracula into a vampire?
In his novel, Stoker never explicitly explained the process of how Dracula became a vampire. The Count is loosely based on Vlad III Dracula AKA Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century warrior and Viviode (ruler) of Wallachia and Transylvania who was infamous for impaling thousands of his enemies on long, wooden spikes. Stoker describes his vampire's past life as a "soldier, statesman, and alchemist... He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare... there was no branch of knowledge of his time that he did not essay." Count Dracula is said to have studied alchemy and black magic at the academy of Scholomance in the Carpathian Mountains; the implication is that to stave off death and achieve immortality, the Count used his arcane knowledge to turn himself into a vampire. This adds to how Dracula is atypical among vampires since most vampires in popular culture are sired by another vampire but Stoker's creation seems to have been a self-made creature of the night, and one with special powers other vampires don't possess.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation Bram Stoker's Dracula took the Count's origin to operatic heights: incensed that his wife Elisabeta's (Winona Ryder) soul was denied entry into Heaven because she committed suicide, the warrior-prince Dracula (Gary Oldman) renounced God and declared war on the Almighty with "all the powers of darkness". So, like in Stoker's novel, Dracula used black magic to turn himself into a vampire but he did it out of 'eternal love' for his bride - whom he would meet again in 1897 when she was reincarnated as Mina Murray in England.
However, the 2014 film Dracula Untold rebooted the Count's origin and explained that Dracula (Luke Evans) did indeed have a vampire sire: a Master Vampire (Charles Dance) who lived in the Carpathian Mountains and has been alive since the days of the Roman Empire. At Dracula's request, the Master Vampire turned Prince Vlad into a vampire to give him the power to fight the armies of the Ottoman Turks. Dracula Untold was originally supposed to launch Universal's Dark Universe franchise but its box office failure (and later, the demise of Dark Universe) curtailed those plans. Still, Dracula Untold broke Stoker's mold by giving its Count Dracula a more traditional vampire origin.
For its part, Netflix's Dracula explored and explained the titular vampire's mythology and the reasons behind his weaknesses but the TV series avoided any details of how the Count (Claes Bang) became a vampire. It's safe to assume Moffat and Gatiss' Dracula does stick to the more traditional Bram Stoker origin for the Count even if they diverged wildly from how the vampire's story ended in the novel.
