‘For the Dead Travel Fast’: The Transnational Afterlives of Dracula

Since the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in 1897, the character of Count Dracula has proven to be eminently adaptable, appearing in various guises in over 300 feature films – from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) through to Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012). As with other iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Batman, Dracula has been freed from his roots in a source text and entered what Will Brooker describes as ‘the realm of the icon’. Yet, while there has been a considerable amount of scholarship on the canonical adaptations of Dracula produced in Hollywood, the UK and Germany, very little has been written on the numerous adaptations of the Count Dracula character that have appeared in other film industries. This chapter considers examples of transnational film remakes, including the 1953 Turkish film Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in Istanbul), the 1957 Mexican film El Vampiro (The Vampire), and the 1967 Pakistani film Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse). Paying close attention to the variety of ways in which the character is utilised across different cultural contexts, this chapter interrogates the complex issues that this raises in relation to the dynamic interplay of global and local within international popular cinema.