It is perhaps fitting that as I sit down to write this year’s Halloween post, I do so with a crackling fire in front of me, under the cover of night at the very edge of the forest line on Tunnel Mountain. If you know me or have read the ghosts of blog story’s past (haha, sorry couldn’t resist that), you’ll know I love Halloween, and have always been interested in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which predates our modern Halloween by centuries.

As I was thinking about what to write, I came across an essay on Bram Stoker’s Dracula I’d written near the end of my undergraduate studies on how the novel from its first pages compares the past and at that time (Victorian Britain) the modern. I also wrote that Dracula as a character could be seen representing the parts of Victorian society uncomfortable with the rapid change and new technologies of the Nineteenth century, yet also as a form of the past, attempting to survive.

Dracula as a novel is also a commentary on Victorian society’s emerging dependence on new technologies like telegrams, steam trains, blood transfusions, Kodak cameras, steam powered boats, electrical lamps, the London Underground, phonographs and typewriters, and the ever-increasing mass of both print media and advertising.

Now you might have read that last line, and thought “wait a minute, that sounds familiar,” and you’d be right, but instead of print media and typewriters, 2022 has the internet, social media, and ever more powerful Apple devices. As for our dependence on technology, one only needs to think about what happens when the internet or satellite technology breaks, and we can’t access email for hours.

What’s interesting is that I wrote this essay in 2003 but could literally switch out the “technology” of just past the turn of the 21st century with our technology today, and the point of my essay would remain the same - that vampirism and technology both consume.

Just as some mythologies suggest a vampire cannot enter the home without an invitation, the mass media of both the Nineteenth century (newspapers) and 2003 (still primarily newspapers, plus TV and radio) couldn’t either. As a reference point for younger readers, I didn’t have my first school email until 2006, Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Instagram in 2010.

Now, while Vampirism is written in myth and fiction as the literal consumption of human blood, technology, and by extension, the media, consumes the mind. Today this is perhaps truer than ever before and while I could take a bite out of this particular topic (a friend told me tonight that my punning was razor sharp) that’s for another time.

Placing this post back into its Halloween milieu – and spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Dracula – while the novel introduces the many new technological advances I mention, it isn’t in modern London where the novel ends. Instead, the novel ends high atop the Carpathian mountains, with Dracula’s coffin transported by a horse drawn cart. 

As Carol Senf (1998) writes in Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, “Dracula’s modern opponents assemble a whole arsenal of technological materials to use in their battle against him” (p. 89). Yet, in the end the weapon, which in finality seals the fate of Dracula is a Bowie knife. And while Dracula crumbles to dust and is no more, vampire fiction in so many different forms of media has now lived and thrived for 125 years.