Free Rage by Jerry Langton Page B

on the other hand, is easy to get to and looks very much like a storybook castle. It draws hundreds of thousands of visitors—but it’s not Dracula’s castle. Although the locals will tell you Vlad lived there, there’s no historical evidence that he did. He was held prisoner in its dungeon for two days when the Ottomans held sway in the region, so he did actually stay there. And you can actually buy “Dracula’s” castle if you really want it. The Romanian government, under pressure from the rest of the European Union to right the wrongs of its Communist predecessors, gave Bran Castle back to its rightful owner in 2006. Dominic von Habsburg—a retired furniture designer from suburban North Salem, New York, who is usually too humble to point out he’s also Archduke Dominic—has put the property up for sale. The asking price is about $82 million, but may go higher because he has told his lawyers he will only sell to those “who will treat the property and its history with appropriate respect.”
    Although a number of popular novels featuring vampires had already appeared by that time, none had the critical impact of Dracula . Originally published in 1897, Dracula tells the story of an English lawyer, John Harker, who is sent to Transylvania to handle a real estate transaction his bosses are undertaking with a count who lives there. On his arrival, Harker is immediately impressed with Count Dracula’s wealth, charm and refinement. But when Dracula pays a little too much attention to a picture of his fiancée, Mina, Harker begins to wonder about the intentions of his host. Before long, he realizes he’s a prisoner in Dracula’s castle and disobeys his orders not to go out of his room at night. When he first emerges to explore the castle, Harker is set upon by three beautiful women. At first he’s pretty happy, until he realizes they want to kill him. Dracula saves him at the last minute and sends him on his way back to London.
    After he returns, a Russian ship carrying nothing but coffin-sized boxes of sand from Transylvania runs aground in England. The crew is missing and the captain’s log recounts a harrowing tale of crew member after crew member disappearing. After the ship crashes, witnesses report seeing a large animal, perhaps a wolf, jump off and dash away into the woods.
    Immediately afterwards, Dracula appears in England and reenters Harker’s life. The Transylvanian count starts paying an undue amount of attention to Mina and her attractive friend Lucy. Before long, Lucy falls seriously ill. One of her wealthy suitors calls in a specialist, professor Abraham Van Helsing from Amsterdam, to help her out. Van Helsing quickly determines that Lucy has been bitten by a vampire, but refuses to tell anyone about it for fear he won’t be believed. Lucy dies. When Van Helsing and her trio of suitors visit her grave to prove his hypothesis, she emerges, attacks them and they kill her (again) by beheading her.
    Dracula finds out about this and bites Mina. He then flees to Transylvania, followed by Van Helsing and others who manage to kill Dracula by slashing his throat and stabbing him in the heart. His death frees Mina from his power and she and John live happily ever after.
    Despite rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, Dracula was only a middling commercial success. It was very popular with literary and academic types, but failed to catch on with a larger audience.
    Realizing that Stoker’s slow pacing and dense prose were Dracula ’s inhibiting factors, an enterprising German filmmaker, Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau, decided to adapt the story for the screen in 1921. He had no trouble finding investors once he decided on a leading man. Max Schreck was a talented veteran stage actor whom Murnau described as “strikingly ugly”—and it didn’t hurt that his family name coincidentally happened to be the German word for “terror.”
    Careful not to infringe on copyright, Murnau changed the name of the