In a lot of modern media, classic monsters are taken and re branded to suit the altered views and circumstances of the current audience. There are many examples of this spread throughout the media that we consume, to the point that the images that separate the original monster and the contemporary takes on them become altered, and it’s difficult to tell when each part of the lore truly surfaced. But altered or revamped or tamed or taken from a different point of view to make them seem more or less innocent, more or less justified, more or less complicated or human or relatable or good, they are still understood as “monsters”.
Some media, like Penny Dreadful by Showtime, take a lot of traditional monsters and place them all in the same place and show them interacting. Hotel Transylvania by Sony also does this, but makes it very lighthearted and comedic. Book series like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer take the myths of vampires created around Dracula and romanticizing them. Some literature goes back even further to extrapolate on ancient religions like Percy Jackson and the Olympians and other series by Rick Riordan and Hercules by Disney.
One of my personal favorites is a relatively recent series, aired first in 2017 by Netflix, Castlevania is a TV show adaptation of a video game adaptation of the lore that’s arose from Dracula over the years. In this rendition of him, he had been an outcast for a long time by the time the first episode took place, to the point where his existence in his mansion was a bit cryptic and was practically a ghost story. The first episode acted as what basically functions as a backstory to the catalyst for the apocalypse that the rest of the story takes place in, spanning the course of several years, Dracula meeting the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his son, before she is suddenly and cruelly kidnapped and burned at the stake for being a witch. This event breaks Dracula, reverting him into the monster that everyone feared he was. It’s also the last time that he actually shows up until the end of the story.
Throughout the show, Dracula exists more of as an idea than a character. A seemingly impossible bar to reach in order to survive more than a man – a father – that he actually is. In this way, this Dracula fits mostly into Cohen’s first thesis: The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body. In this case, the “cultural body” is fear and helplessness. Dracula represents the heart of the apocalypse responsible for tearing apart the world as humanity knew it and throwing the survives into a constant state of fear and anticipation, often leading to hopelessness and resignation. The protagonists of the show spend the entire time fighting that. It’s not just the fight against the legions of undead that manifested at Dracula’s behest, but – for lack of a better term – the fight to fight against almost impossible odds is the main conflict in the first season of the show, when Dracula is still alive. Or, as alive as an undead creature can be, I suppose.
