10 Weird Things We Learned About Dracula While Filming Our Wondrium Series

April 25, 2023

We’ve been shouting it from the rooftops on social media already, but here is our official announcement – the series we wrote and filmed for Wondrium last year, “The Real History of Dracula,” is now AVAILABLE TO WATCH/LISTEN TO!!

You can watch the whole 10-episode series now on Wondrium (they’ve even got a free 14-day trial!) and/or listen to the whole thing as an audiobook from Audible (and they’ve got a free trial option too!)

We’d completely forgotten that Wondrium was making an audiobook format, so, uh, SURPRISE, we have an audiobook now! It actually works fantastically as an audiobook, so check it out!

You can also watch the trailer here!

We’ve written a little bit about the process of researching, writing, and filming the series before, but today we thought we’d share 10 super weird things we learned about vampires and Dracula while doing this project. (Y’all. We read SO MANY BOOKS in the research phase. So many that we could probably build a fort out of them and sit in it while reading them.) There are some doozies!

1. Bram Stoker drew a LOT on werewolf folklore for Dracula – one of his biggest sources was Sabine Baring-Gould’s book about werewolf legends… because the line between vampire and werewolf used to be much more porous. The whole ‘vampires being able to shapeshift’ thing really became part of the whole vampire deal because Stoker’s reading skewed so wolfy!

2. Stoker never visited Transylvania – that’s why his description of the Borgo pass is… well, not at all what that area of Transylvania actually looks like (it’s sadly way less over-the-top than he would have you believe!)

3. In some early Romanian vampire stories, vampires have tails – in fact, in some stories, tail-having is one of the key ways you can tell you’re dealing with a vampire, which is NOT an aspect of the legend Stoker used (in fact, we can’t think of ANY vampire media that does use this detail?)

4. Bram Stoker’s widow totally sued the makers of the 1922 film Nosferatu – they had asked her for permission to make an adaptation of the book, she said no, and they just… did it anyway! She was understandably not pleased about this.

5. Almost all the copies of Nosferatu were destroyed – Florence Stoker actually won the case against the film company, and they were ordered to destroy all of the copies of the film (after which they went out of business.) Luckily, they didn’t actually get all the copies, and the film, which is now considered a masterpiece of early cinema, survived.

6. Another fun Nosferatu fact – the whole vampires burning up in/being destroyed by sunlight thing wasn’t a thing at all until that movie, a detail they likely added because it looked cool on film!

7. Renfield’s Syndrome isn’t real – it pops up in a LOT of sensational crime TV shows through!

8. A story called “The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo” by Uriah Derick D’Arcy featured the first Black vampire in 1819 – it’s also one of the earliest short stories to call for the emancipation of slaves.

9. An automatic staking device has been found set up on the real graves of suspected vampires – basically, a stake impales the corpse as it tries to sit or stand up, effectively staking the vampire before he even gets out of his coffin. Not a good day for him.

10. There’s a whole D&D campaign dedicated to vampires called The Curse of Strahd and it’s actually pretty darn accurate – the main vampire dude even takes damage if he’s in running water! (Sara has played it TWICE!)

So, do any of these facts pique your interest? We know it does if you love vampires as much as we do, and you can find out more about ALL of them in our series!!

To encourage you to check it out, we’re also offering a FREE BONUS! Watch or listen to the series, write a review on Wondrium or Audible, send a screenshot of your review to theprofs @ carterhaughschool.com, and we’ll send you back a FREE exclusive Dracula grimoire page!

ENJOY!! We can’t wait to hear what you think!!

Comments

  1. Yeahynot

    (in fact, we can’t think of ANY vampire media that does use this detail?)
    I can! It’s a bit of a minor spoiler but in Hemlock Grove it is acknowledged.

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