“Water sleeps, and the enemy is sleepless” is quite cunning advice. The count should not have given it to me.

Sweet rushes into you at the turn of the corner, carried by the lingering breeze as it works itself up again.

Then again, Jonathan should never have turned in for the night, my dear Lucy should have insisted harder on my staying in the warmth of her company, and the count should not have made me sneak a lantern from the library thirteen flights up, especially when held no qualms with replacing my husband’s, lost the night before, though his apologies for my offense—of which he only acknowledged once I startled to my senses and made a veritable show of it, mind you!—rang hollow, more out of hopes to sedate me (an impossible task for any man, let alone the count, if he even is man) than out of common courtesy, like the mumbling cove he pretends not to be!

…

I have gathered, over the subtle stretch of my time here, that the count only cares for what I do and why when it can’t find any way to truly inconvenience him. Though, believe me, it makes a commendable effort.

Treacle, or perhaps cinnamon, burnt and drizzled with blood to make light of the damage. Forgotten by the windowsill to cool.

Any kind of rule or standard, I gather, he imposes or even insists upon seems to only concern me. Though I do my best not to take any outward offense on Jonathon’s behalf, believe me (Whichever ruthless battle my host lost it in, I have no problem compensating for his sense of class until he finds it), it must be understood how little my reaction can be helped when rules change in the very mists of conversation. Not when it's “just for me”, not with such…voyeuristic intention.

One whiff in, and you’re an impromptu guest to flights of fantasy; climbing through windows for her amusement to watch her scurry off to the kitchen to nick herself and scorch something and amuse you.

The burrowing of my fury deep into bubbling, broiling guts and drowning lungs, coiled so deeply the ends push up against the ribs they are caged in, cannot distract me from his willingness to forgo order and his own benefit even, such frivolity from the most grave of men, just to see what I’ll do, what he can get me to. I need action. I need to take it—

What a gift, the chance to sharpen the mind alongside your husband, to hold one that holds onto outdated textbooks for you, well after graduation, who tinkers a keyholder beside your door frame so you won’t forget your library key on your way out. How lovely to possess such a blade, it recalls the tug of petticoat-turned-bandages against cloying fingers well enough to turn the feeling over in shivering palms, saliva pooling the same saccharine underneath your tongue as you crash back into the perfume carpet stain dampened with rain, the same heat flashing behind your jaw as you land in the next room. What a blessing it is, even now, when servants head home early.

in bare hands, swiped against walls and eyelids when need be.

Turn back and you can truly relish in it. 

The heel of her foot crunches, burns at the sudden scrape against splintering floorboards as rows of toes are sprained.

…

How…overweening of me (And what odd word choice). And to take a wrong turn, no less.

Furniture hangs from the walls and slumps onto the floor; By its lonesome, ancient, but in tonight’s collective, bathed in a curious new-wife smell, antique. The kind to fret over until their husbands fork over the cash, oblivious to the comfort an empty ornate chair will provide his waiting woman, and dread loneliness sits dead in the middle of it all. It chills the heart. I wish for curtains upon an unclothed star (one of many; what need was there for such overextending windows with such deep detest for the sun?), even with the yellow moonlight flooding in through the diamond panes. If my colour theory is right, which it often is, a trip outside down would reveal a less favoured blue. So would a walk back down the hallway, of course. So would that trip outside.

The Count would suspect nothing. He spins tales of once breathing, heaving ancestors walking into any horror for love to live vicariously through them; in all likelihood, he can’t even fathom what it would take to do so. Water sleeps, and the enemy is speechless.

“Yes, there is a way, if one dares to take it. Where his body has gone why may not another body go? I have seen him myself…Why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window?” (Harker)

By the time I had taken it all in and snapped out of it, the dust settled from the shelf to my shoulders, sliding off the silk as I shook myself awake. Aware.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula (Norton Critical Editions). Available from: VitalSource Bookshelf, (2nd Edition). W. W. Norton, 2021.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. First edition ed. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/27701.

Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794. Accessed 21 Apr. 2024.

“Dracula (1931 English-Language Film).” Wikipedia, 9 Jan. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(1931_English-language_film)#cite_note-DVD-7. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024.

Fort, G. (1931) Dracula. United States: Universal Pictures. Available at: https://archive.org/details/Dracula1931.

Dracula. Directed by John Badham, Universal Pictures, 13 July 1979.

Hart, James V. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Columbia Pictures, 1992.

There are more iterations of Dracula, of course. Plenty more.

We’ve had ones that take place in different time periods, genres, artistic mediums, cultures, languages, durations, and locations, some based on the original book itself, while others are based solely on other preexisting Dracula adaptations. There’s been iterations that align perfectly with the character interpretations at least one of these three films put forth, and ones that go against everything these films built up their portrayals of Dracula to be.

But the former’s the hardest to find. At least, it is nowadays.

From #DRCL midnight children’s seductive, alluring Dracula who has Lucy equality devoted and entranced to 2004’s Dracula, the Musical’s Dracula who learns the beauty in that which is pure and human only through falling in mutual love with Mina, this more outwardly romantic Dracula with all of its sympathies and humanization has gained widespread popularity amongst Dracula recreators of the past decade. And while this paper has discussed the legion of ways as to how artists’ romanticization is brought to life in so many adaptations, the reason why viewers so eagerly gravitate to it isn’t necessarily self-evident within their creative processes or methods. The theories they utilize to define Dracula’s opposing monstrosity, however, does imply at least one possible piece of the puzzle; If the monster is meant to represent a sort of “...metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling and a place.” (Cohen 4) through which it’s “...body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy…giving them [the monster] life” (Cohen 4) and comes to embody “pure culture”, then the monster must be defined in part by the fears and anxieties of the culture at the given moment. And what could this sharp turn from Dracula as the creature characters instinctively run from in fear, horror, and disgust to a suddenly humanized, understandable being they find themselves uncontrollably attracted to imply other than a reflection of the current culture’s fear of how nerve-wrackingly close and entangled we feel we are (or could easily become) to the forbidden and taboo Dracula embodies?

There’s a reason why Dracula’s been rewritten so many times. Boatloads of them, actually.

I need not make an argument as to why because the entirety of this thesis makes it blatantly obvious: The character and story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula holds an absurd amount of creative and artistic potential in terms of themes, genre, characterization, motifs, setting, plot structure, etc. You name it, Dracula has an angle you can take with it. By studying and analyzing what creative choices and directions I ended up exploring (along with why I did so) during the creation of my own Dracula adaptation, I aimed to gather more insight and understanding on how the creative process led to the many adaptations addressed and the various different interpretations of how Dracula and romance interact that they offer.

Premise-wise, my adaptation followed a what-if scenario in which Mina, troubled by the lack of response to the letters she’s written to Jonathan during his time at Dracula’s manor, decides to travel there herself, arriving just a little while after the Count tells Jon that he can’t leave. This gave me the opportunity to explore two concepts that the original novel couldn’t due to the structuring of its plot: Mina interacting with Dracula over a lengthened period of time (during which neither is actively trying to cause imminent physical harm to the other or escaping from their presence), and Mina and Jonathan being trapped in Dracula’s manor simultaneously. Including these elements left me with a few narrative hurdles to overcome and questions to answer for, with the most pressing ones being how Mina as a character would know and understand Dracula, how she would interact with him in a less intense setting, how she would react to Jonathan’s reaction to and behavior under the Count’s captivity, and her own reaction and behavior, all of which required a decent amount of in-depth character work to better under her character both on its own and in relationship to Dracula and Jon’s characters. On a more technical level, there was the question of how to go about presenting a story like this in terms of writing style and plot structure, which forced me to narrow down what exact elements and ideas I was looking to tackle.

In doing this work and crafting my work, I found that, by and large, reciprocity was essential for Mina to develop genuine connection with Dracula based in anything other than nebulous disgust or abstract hatred, let alone romance. On Mina’s end, the biggest barrier to that reciprocation is their irreconcilable (in her eyes) principles and worldviews, rather than their lifestyles or outward personalities. By trapping Mina with Dracula in his own territory, I was able to confront Mina with an upwarped/unfiltered version of Dracula’s perspective for her to pick apart, with less outside influence to dictate how she ought to understand and feel about it and no high stakes adventure to distract her from truly examining it. Armed with a much more in depth understanding of said perspective, Mina has more opportunity to sympathize with what she deems the defining factor of the Count’s vampiric monstrosity. Sympathy eventually makes way for indulgence in and experimentation with that monstrosity, an act that offers a leveling of (or even an upper hand in) the emotional and intellectual playing field that Mina is in such dire search for.

Francis Ford Copula’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula throws all of this out the window by its very first scene.

Despite literally being subtitled “Bram Stoker’s”, the film takes loads of creative license from its creative source, much like the aforementioned Dracula (1979). Before the film can even get to the original novel’s plot, it showcases a pre-vampire Dracula—a concept made entirely of the movie’s own accord, as the book never directly states a specific cause, reason, or explanation for Dracula’s being a vampire, nor implies there ever was one—leaving his wife, Elisebeta, to go off to war in the church’s name, returning after his victory only to discover her dead, having fallen under the impression he’d died in battle. In response to the local priest's insistence that suicide irrevocably damns her, Dracula asks him, “Is this my reward for protecting God’s church?” (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 4:22-4:27) and chooses to join her in hell by loudly forsaking God and assuring Him that he will “...rise from my [his] own death to avenge her with all the powers of darkness.” (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 4:32-4:41), blood pouring from candles and the eyes of statues, marking this the act that turns Dracula vampiric.

The original plot is then kickstarted—almost identically to the actual novel—with Jonathan’s heading of to meet Dracula at his manor and all that occurs during his visit, Lucy’s choosing of a husband and transformation into a vampire, her defeat by the hands of the men, and Dracula biting Mina, before finally culminating in Dracula’s defeat by Lucy’s same fate. The deviation lies in how Dracula reacts to and interacts with Mina, from her picture becoming the catalyst for his travel to England upon realizing she’s Elisabeta’s reincarnation, to his meeting of and subsequent fully original romantic scenes with her, to the final scene in which she comforts Dracula as he passes while the film utilizes parallels and certain effects to imply forgiveness from God, his curse’s reverse, and his eventual meeting Elisabeta/Mina in heaven.

Unlike Dracula (1979), however, Bram Stoker’s Dracula allows Lucy and Mina their original narrative roles from the source material, choosing to instead expand on Mina’s by romantically connecting her to this film’s Dracula through the reincarnation subplot, in which she is awarded Dracula’s explicit love and desire as the next life of his once deceased wife. This approach works well to narratively justify the borderline rewriting of Dracula and Mina’s relationship in what he claimed to it, but Francis Ford Copula knew full well that justifying its place in the plot wasn’t enough to give this more creative reading of Mina and the Count’s dynamic genuine meaning and impact within the realm of an otherwise near identical telling of the original Dracula story. Instead, Dracula's love serves as a drain on Mina’s freedom (a stark contrast to the themes of self-liberation and romantic and sexual freedom from the previously discussed movie), binding her to him with what seems to mostly ensure his own personal benefit and further his character arc.

By framing their romance via this almost parasitic lens, Copula is able to cast Dracula specifically as “...The Monster [who] Polices the Borders of the Possible” (Cohen 12), therefore assuring that “...the monster stands as a warning…” (Cohen 12), meant for both Mina and the audience, “...against exploration of its uncertain demesnes.” (Cohen 12); straying from God's path, in the case of Dracula. By forcing the viewer to bear witness to how “The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but…is [also] something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular.” (Cohen 12) through Dracula’s diligent seduction of Mina and the unwavering, ever-passionate devotion it leaves lingering even after his defeat at the hands of the remaining cast, it becomes clear that the learned men’s combined skill and efforts are no match for, their distinctly human understanding and perception of the world around them is no match for the utter monstrosity that is Count Dracula “…From its [his] position at the limits of knowing…” (Cohen 12). Altogether, this subtextual understanding transforms any and all desire between Mina and the Count into Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s strongest thematic ammunition, the tides of Mina’s story arc turning it into the audience’s strongest concession: as the monster, Dracula is perpetually “...delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside [as Mina did] is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol [i.e. Dracula] or (worse) to become monstrous oneself [i.e. vampiric]” (Cohen 12).

In both Mina’s and the audience’s defense, Bram Stoker’s Dracula does its absolute darndest to obscure both their sight of the forest with the trees.

Dracula (1979), on an extremely othered note, did not begin its creation with this understanding of the potential of a Dracula as a deliberately cultivated and intended romantic depiction in mind. As with many explicitly visual adaptations of Stoker’s novel, the film begins with Dracula’s travel to England, trusting within the confines of a sopping wet (and likely rotting) wooden crate or coffin and the chaotic lull of storming, crashing waves to bring him safely (and secretly) to his (narratively) eventual “washing up” on land.

It ends with Dracula getting “the girl.” The girl, in this case, being Lucy.

Albeit only in the (debatably) distant future, once Dracula and his beloved “‘...have left behind those who would destroy us [them].’” (Dracula 1:36:29–1:36:33) so that she can “‘...join me [him] on a higher plane, feeding on them.’” (Dracula 1:36:36–1:36:42) in hopes the two may one day “‘...create more of our [their] kind.’” (Dracula 1:36:42–1:36:45). Passionate declarations follow the steady, gradual growth of their dynamic from two strangers that independently spark a small mutual interest in each other to a complete understanding of Dracula on Lucy’s part that inspires enough devotion (shared equally on the Count’s side) in her to forsake her lover (Johnathan) in favor of  him. By this final moment between the two, the underlying message rings unabashedly clear: Dracula (1979) was written with demonstrably dissimilar romantic intentions in its interpretation of not only Dracula’s own character, but the remaining Dracula canon as well.

Though the movie covers the majority of the plot found in Stoker’s novel, it introduces a few sharp changes to the original novels established via a few original scenes of the Count staying at Lucy’s father’s place and one scene of Lucy tucking Mina into bed before coming downstairs to tend to the baby of one of her father’s mental patients at the same time Mina sneaks out to discover Dracula transforming from wolf to human; Lucy and Mina’s swapped characterizations and the Count coming to do business in the audience’s neck of the woods (i.e. England), opportuning him a chance to strike up a romance with Lucy and a bloodthirsty interest in Mina. In tandem, Jonathan airs his jealousy over Lucy’s romantic happenings with the Count in plain sight of an eavesdropping Dracula, Mina is bitten, Dracula recruits Renfield, Mina dies, and Lucy visits Dracula’s castle, bonding with him and gleefully surrendering to his bite while the men plot Dracula’s downfall. The movie’s rising tensions culminate when Lucy, carrying with her an abundance of confidence the audience has never seen on her before, sternly confronts them on their lethal stance against her newfound lover right before she finds him, resigning herself to his promise to come back so they can finally live out their eternal undead lives together, free from persecution. All that tension subsides with the reveal of Dracula’s escape to safety, a triumphant Lucy and dejected Jon watching him fly out of reach, to return for her another day.

Retained from its source material are the motivations of Van Helsing and the original suitors and Dracula’s dynamic with Reinfield and Van Helsing, along with a few of the original plotlines (the distressed woman’s begging for her baby back, the final showdown between Dracula and the men ending with a stake through the Count’s heart, etc.) dealing with Dracula’s violence and his move towards England’s downfall.

Directed by John Badham and written by Walter Duch Richter, Dracula (1979) is one of the earlier Dracula portrayals to go the route of a concrete, explicit romance between one of the lead woman instead of the far more commonly-used (at the time) innocuous world of subtext. Despite also being produced by Universal Studios and utilizing the same source material, the film’s wild shift in priorities never limits itself to the relationship between Dracula and romance, a clear ripple effect spilling over to the film’s many character dynamics (both including and excluding Dracula), characterizations (most notably their character development over the course of the story), tone, cinematography and blocking, and story/plot, (most notably the events of the third act), all in indirect response to the oh-so (at the time) unorthodox core concert of the film that shapes the movie’s understanding of the monstrosity that makes up its monster (i.e. Dracula) through its more fleshed-out romantic angle: The idea that “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire” (Cohen 16). In layman’s terms, a desire that, instead of acting as a weapon actively held against the other character (sometimes by Dracula, and sometimes by the narrative itself), works as a representative of that which is taboo despite still holding appeal as a source of freedom that ultimately serves as a direct path to liberation from a few of the more confining elements of what’s “normal” or ”appropriate” for certain characters (particularly Lucy), displaying how “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies…” (Cohen 16-17) for the audience through what Cohen describes as “...the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constant.” (Cohen 17) for the character of Lucy.

This thematic framing of Dracula’s character can be pointed to in a number of scenes, however, the details of Lucy’s solo dinner with the Count provide the most clear cut evidence of how it takes effect within the film’s narrative. It begins with a shot of Lucy and the Count at the table, with Lucy’s face out of frame and the camera far away from the both of them. The camera stays there as they broach the subject of Mina’s death, but begins the pattern of cutting between individual shots of the two of them as each one takes their turn speaking once, the camera zooming in closer and closer as the scene continues and often facing opposite to the current speaker to show the effect their words have on the listeners, once Lucy refutes Dracula’s insistence that there are fate worse than death. Dracula explains how he has lost all he knew to the violence he and his “kind” used to wage and Lucy hesitates before cheerfully answering in an attempt to play off his words, showing how they took her off guard, forcing her to take them to heart. Dracula then playfully tricks her into smiling for him, again showcasing how much effect he has on her, before warning her that “If at any time my company does not please you, you will only have yourself to blame, for an acquaintance who seldom forces himself, but is difficult to be rid of.” (Dracula 48:31-48:45) as the camera comes closest to him and then her as she stares back at him, the bundles of candles that have been framing them now fully out of focus, removing the visual (and metaphorical) barrier between them (and thus, everything the Count speaks of).

Dracula, so confident in his entrancement of Lucy, outright admits himself as something that allures her not by being any type of threat to her or coercing/tricking her, but something that simply hints at opportunity for that which Lucy has never been granted access to, implying that her growing emotional and romantic involvement with him—and therefore the darkness he represents—is of her own choosing, framing it as an act of autonomous self-liberation rather that unwillful corruption or tainting of her person on his end.

This idea is reinforced as the movie continues. In their later discussion of the night (meant to represent the monstrosity Dracula embodies), she kisses him in response to his suggestion that, unlike the dawn, it must be embraced and reveled in, brushing off his apology for “For intruding on your [her] life.” (Dracula 51:55-51:57) by assuring him that she “...came of my [her] own accord.” (Dracula 51:57-52:01). Lucy’s vampiric turning is done through the act of making love with Dracula, divorcing her from her monogamous relationship with Jonathan and gifting her the sexual freedom Jon, the rest of the men she knew, and society at large (in the metaphorical sense) have always denied her. This metaphorical freedom is further signified through Lucy’s constant outstretching of her arms, the exploding circles of red light illuminating their silhouettes that seem to expand with the effect of the retracting camera, and the inclusion of a flying bat and gathering of candles, color-graded in the same red and symbolizing the darkness Lucy has finally chosen to succumb to as they pan across the background above the silhouette of her body. This concept of desirability stemming from what Dracula’s monstrosity allows Lucy access to finally comes to a head, however, when as she and Jon bear witness to Dracula’s escape, with Jonathan’s despair at the sight representing the failure of goodness instead of monstrous to offer the smiling Lucy what the monster could.

Following in the footsteps of even earlier adaptations of Dracula, specifically the anti-semitic Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula, and its critically praised companion, George Melford’s Spanish-language Dracula (released alongside its English counterpart and filmed on the same exact sets), are some of the first Dracula adaptations of the sound age. Written in 1931 by Garrett Fort and based mostly on the stage play of the same name, the movie follows the same general plot as the novel, turning it into one of the most widely-known pieces of “classic monster cinema” and kickstarting what was arguably one of the most influential and long-lasting pop culture film franchises of all time. Dracula arguably established—with help from Bela Lugosi’s iconic leading performance—the default “Dracula” in the minds of the general public today: a ruthless, menacing, mysterious outsider who sticks to the shadows and terrorizes others for his own personal bloodsucking benefit with little to no sympathetic or redeeming qualities. Here, Dracula is the embodiment of that which is “dark” and impossible for any of the viewers at home to genuinely know or understand his monstrous motivations—the implication being that it would be ludicrous to expect them to even try.

The breakout film was an absolute commercial success for the then struggling Universal Pictures, despite the film’s countless and ever-expansive budgetary restraints, supernatural horror’s risk with audiences at the time, and retroactive censorship after the passage of The Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) which was enacted in 1934. (“Dracula”)

The film, like all adaptations, choose to make certain deviations from its source material on occasion, mostly being cut and added plot points (a few examples being the loss of the altercation between Dracula and Jonathan while the latter shaves and Dracula’s wives seduction, along with the inclusion of a newly-bitten Mina attacking Jonathon). The general core of the book’s horrific tone and its portrayal of Dracula as an unlikeable monster above all else, as well as the characterizations of the rest of the cast, are almost fully retained in the movie.

Post-Hays Code, there were several documented changes to the film’s future broadcasting, cinematic showing, and other releases including the removal of Reinfield’s screams of horror as he meets his demise, Dracula’s dying groans at the end of the film, and a significant change to the film’s final scene, which originally had Dracula decided to outright shatter the fourth wall in order to “quell the fears'' (in a sense) of any still concerned or frightened audience members with this reassuring speech: 

Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen! A word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula…won't give you bad dreams, so just a word of reassurance. When you get home tonight and the lights have been turned out and you are afraid to look behind the curtains—and you dread to see a face appear at the window—why, just pull yourself together and remember that after all, there are such things as vampires! (Dracula 1931)

Not only do these changes highlight how the film goes out of its way to establish any subtextual sexuality between Dracula and any other character as somehow “threatening” in some way or another (or even an outright, unignorable danger) to said character and their wellbeing (and therefore innately “monstrous”), but it similarly showcases how little censoring was necessary to ensure said sexuality was almost solely defined as monstrous in the eyes of the narrative alongside (perhaps most importantly in regards to the Hays Code) the audience, proving the active intent behind this creative choice and calling attention to the initial expectations of Dracula’s relationship with romance set by the original novel and the few silent adaptations of yesteryear the film feelings the need to go off of.

Fully understanding the reasoning behind this framing of Dracula as monster, especially with the foresight of how later film adaptations so often portray Dracula’s sexuality as more consensual, the film code’s curtailing of Dracula’s sexuality demonstrates how it was perceived as a threat and it requires digging deeper into the creative process behind this adaptive choice and how the film chooses to code it this way in the first place, including the specific literary and creative tools this coding is founded on. A promising starting point of investigation is Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory: Reading Culture, as its detailing of how the concept of the “Monster,” within the wider world media and literature is perceived, learned, and understood by their audiences sheds light on the crafting the perception of this Dracula. One of the seven theses he proposes, “The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis” (Cohen 6) implicates a large chunk of literary monsters as “disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration […] a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions,” (Cohen 6), positing the monster’s foreign and unfamiliar nature as definitely intrinsic to its monstrosity. So much so that it structurally undermines any surrounding human characters’ attempts to conceptualize and/or compartmentalize it by destabilizing the innately human perspectives/worldviews foundational to the methods and methodology of categorization said characters rely on.

In the case with Dracula (1931), this element of monstrosity play off of the book’s previous thesis: “The Monster Always Escapes,” whether that escape be metaphorical, physical, emotional, or even thematic in some cases, as “The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization” (Cohen 4, 6). In essence, the monster escapes understanding above all else, leaving the questioning with only the destruction of these previously unquestioned categories left in the monster’s wake to go off of while trying to make human sense of the innately inhuman creature they bore such terrifying witnesses to. This understanding of the monster as not only category-defying via pure, unbothered existence alone, but also only understandable on the monster’s terms (to a certain extent) maps beautifully onto the film’s characterization of its Dracula, especially in regards to its chosen style of cinematography and Legosi’s nonverbal acting.

The Count shocks and disorients the remaining cast by threatening the categorical, societal, and cultural distinctions they make within the realm of romance and eroticsism that have left them so woefully unprepared, and therefore entirely at his mercy. He shocks and disorients the viewers by proving these distinctions, presumed as so universally well-understood and widely-believed, they, the human audience, must depend on them too, as fallible.

A prime, almost obvious example is the first half of the scene where Jonathan and Dracula interact face-to-face for the first time, beginning with Jonathan confusedly looking around for a face to introduce himself while in complete silence before the camera finally cuts to Dracula slowly walking down the stairs as Jonathan first meets his gaze. Throughout their meeting, conversation, and Dracula’s serving of dinner, Jonathan does his best to be pleasant (or, at the very least, civil) with Dracula, who does his best to appear hospitable and behave in a fairly unassuming and unsuspicious manner.

At this point in their story dynamic, they are both clearly attempting, to a certain degree, to follow the other’s lead as best they can. This leads the two to mimic each other’s behavior a few times, some examples being how both hold an arm out during their introduction and greeting and Jonathan’s looking around to take in the view in the same vein as Dracula, but the most blatant (and the most telling) is the way they both find themselves traveling up to the dining room.

Starting with Jonathan not even on the stairs yet, the viewer is forced to watch Dracula slowly make his way down, getting closer to Jonathan before stopping. The two fall into a pattern of Dracula turning away from Jonathan, walking up a few steps with Jon taking that as his cue to follow, before Dracula stops (prompting Jonathan to do the same) to turn to check on Jonathan (presumably to make sure the man isn’t having any trouble keeping up and that he hasn’t left his guest too far behind) before exchanging an eerie line or two with his visiter. Throughout this cycle’s entirety, the camera positions itself as looking directly up toward Dracula in tandem with decidedly looking down on Jonathan, cutting between the two whenever the other speaks. The only time it doesn’t default to one of these two styles of closeup is when it cuts to a wider shot that’s perfectly level to its axis, in order to break the illusion these closer shots build and remind the audience of both how far apart the count and his host are from each other and how much higher up Dracula is positioned on the stairs.

Everything about this section of the scene’s construction outright implies some sort of unnamed difference or obstruction between Dracula and Jonathan, from the camera work, to the way Dracula’s conversational interjections—clearly intended to be friendly—only serve to bewilder Jonathan more, down to how the individual motions of walking, stopping, and turning around are each acted out (more noticeably by Legosi) as if they are separate, incidental actions, each completely independent of the movement before it.

The final nail in the coffin takes place after Dracula has already passionately waxed poetry to Jonathan about the high delicacy that is “the night” within the means of both types of shots: A few consecutive close-ups of Jonathan observing the Count somehow making it past a row of cobwebs (just missing the exact moment he presumably phases through them), the young traveler visibly hesitating once he gets to them, Dracula staring intensely (almost expectedly) at him, unmoving and wholly unreadable, and then Jonathan finally awkwardly and unsurely brushing away the cobwebs to continue up the stairs, followed by a lingering wide shot that completely breaks the scene’s established routine. With the camera facing them both on a downward angle, it shows the audience Dracula and Jonathan side by side for the very first time, immediate focus entirely on each other, gaze lingering as Jonathan finally takes the lead based on what he presumes is Dracula’s go-ahead. This sequence juxtaposes the elements of sexuality floating mainly around Dracula’s character (his intense, unprompted staring, stopping to make substantially one-sided conversation, refusal to break apart the close proximity and forcing Jon to do it.) with the “Othering'' of Dracula from Jonathan (the camera implying Dracula’s perspective by ''looking down” on Jonathan, the effect exaggerated via their positioning on the stairway, how quite literally everything Jonathan does is a reaction of some kind to Dracula’s actions, slowing him down to Dracula’s unnatural pace). Doing so fully solidifies the implication this juxtaposition carries: Dracula’s entrapment of those he takes interest in (fueled by pure curiosity for that which is unlike him) is made possible only through the inherent draw of his monstrosity. The yearn to better understand him is stirred up out of hopes of somehow categorizing him while simultaneously acting as the dooming, hindering element that leaves them vulnerable to his any and all whims, allotting him a narrow “escape” (whatever form that escape might take) from categorization.

After all, that final “catching up” to Dracula and closing that gap between them led straight to Jonathan visibly feeling the need to search for Dracula’s permission in order to finally surpass his place below him, holding himself from crossing that physical and metaphorical threshold because of Dracula’s individual whims, while Dracula meets his gaze only out of curiosity and/or intrigue, forcing Jonathan to stay close to him for a few seconds longer.

Such a deliberate and careful contextualization of Dracula’s sexuality through such sudden and socially-forward emotional and physical intimacy as a source of danger for characters (and by proxy, the audience) to fear that continues throughout the film with multiple other characters through multiple other instances simply could not exist without a motive, however. One could easily make an argument that the filmmakers behind it were simply taking inspiration from the erotic undertones found within the book, but that explanation doesn’t account for why the opportunity to turn that subtext into the cinematic equivalent of text with this adaptation.

For the answer to that question, one need look no further than the previously mentioned axed scene a few paragraphs ago, courtesy of the aforementioned Hays Code.

Allegedly, the scene was only done away with out of concern of the effect Dracula’s phasing could have since it was clearly intended to imply that vampires were a genuine threat to the audience watching. Despite the playful and wholly unserious intentions behind this scene, it still raised questions of potentially instilling supernatural belief in some moviegoers. This fear may seem frivolous (or, at the very least, wholly unfounded) to the average moviegoer nowadays, but this fear was genuine to those running the film industry at the time. Audiences simply hadn’t been exposed to films with supernatural elements that weren’t explained away at some point within the film in a long time, which was part of what made this iteration of Dracula such a big risk for Universal Studios. So the fact that, out of all the standards and expectations the company could have set, these were the boundaries the company was willing to push against—and with a standalone scene sans no narrative or thematic objective besides going out of its way to (either genuinely or jokingly) try and convince the audience that every logic-defying thing they were witnessing was very much real, no less!—hints at a very different purpose behind these more romantic implications than the original novel it was based on.

While most adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula take a profound amount of creative liberties, oftentimes to the point of being unrecognizable, the original story almost always finds a way to poke through. It begins with Jonathan Harker’s journey to Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania to sell him the Carfax Estate in England, wherein Dracula eagerly welcomes Jonathan, asking him to “‘Enter freely and of your own free will!’” (Stoker 25). Jonathan soon becomes Dracula’s prisoner amidst piecing together his vampiric nature by the time his wives have seduced Jonathan one night, fully intent on draining him of blood. This scene gives us the first explicit sexual encounter of the novel and the line “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (Stoker 46). Jonathan narrowly escapes for home, Dracula following him to England all the while, returning to his soon-to-be wife, Wilhelmina “Mina” Harker, and her closest friend, Lucy Westerna, who has just agreed to marry the nobleman Arthur Holmwood from a line up of three potential suitors; Quincey Morris, John Seward, and Arthur himself. Before she can marry, however, Dracula hypnotizes Lucy, breaks into her room, and drinks from her, eventually turning her into the vampiric Bloofer Lady. After the men (with help from Seward’s former professor, Abraham Van Helsing) put her out of her bloodthirsty misery, Dracula’s scheme to take over all of England is uncovered and the hunt for him begins. In defense, Dracula turns his attention to Mina, forcing her to drink his blood in order to solidify her descent into vampirism, creating a psychic link between him and Mina that Van Helsing exploits to track Dracula down once and for all. Once the five of them defeat Dracula for good by driving a wooden stake into his heart, the effects on Mina wholly reverse.

It's easy to glance at the filmic iterations covered by the upcoming chapters of this thesis and presume their romantic elements were simple deviations from the original text, or even attempts to rewrite some of the more conventionally unappealing components of Dracula’s monstrous characterization to cater to modern audiences. And while a case could be made for this, I would argue the diverse array of romanticism they introduce to their viewers is extrapolated from a foundational reading of the original. As Arata notes, Dracula provides narrative anxiety against England’s decline, as the end of the Victorian era had brought on rising concerns amongst the English that their “entire nation—as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power—was in irretrievable decline” (Arata 622), a sentiment rooted in colonial xenophobia and a fear of the Other. “Stoker thus transformed the materials of the vampire myth, making them bear the weight of the culture’s fears over its declining status.” (Arata 502) by drawing symbolic and subtextual parallels between vampirism and his readers imagined invaders so that his monster invoked not only the common fears of the supernatural, but also the added layer of cultural and societal fear.

This effect is achieved through a few means, but the implicit sexualized nature of these subtextual suggestions are not to be understated; Stoker’s exoticization of Dracula’s vampirism culturally deviant nature and overwhelming symbolic fertility, enabled by the narrative’s framing and the threat of invasion for both British bodies (such as Lucy’s) and land, emerges not in spite of Dracula’s erotic nature, but precisely because of it.

Lucy as Dracula’s first British female victim holds more significance than one would presume; she’s the subject of most of Dracula’s sexually-coded encounters, as well as the only major character to actively die by Dracula’s hand and become a vampire (an act that elevates her to the same level of monstrosity as Dracula himself, in a technical sense). Her first death scene makes this apparent, with Dr. Steward’s written descriptions of her as “voluptuous” corroborating his assertion that “Death had given back part of her beauty…” (Stoker 157) once Lucy finally passes away. This beauty, enhanced only in death, clearly draws Arthur to her as he leans in to kiss her at her demand, only for Van Helsing to hold Arthur back and warn against it before the man can even reach her lips.

In telling contrast, Lucy’s second death unveils the full extent and entailment of Dracula’s infestation of her person. When the men finally catch up to her, she eagerly drinks the blood of another one of the many children she’s lured, hisses and growls at her former friends/saviors, and “...with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said:— [says] ‘Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!’” (Stoker 200). Promptly after said husband has “...shuddered with horror.” (Stoker 200) at the sight of her, concluded that her “...sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” (Stoker 199), and “...call[ing] the thing that was before us [them] Lucy because it bore her shape”, only afforded her the dignity of her proper name for sheer convenience sake. By the confrontation’s end, Lucy has unimpeachably become a vampire in every right; fully confident and secure in her transformed self, enough to brazenly invite Arthur to join her undead life in the face of his overwhelming (albeit marginally conflicted) revulsion.

Upon coming to this conclusion, her impassioned, persistent calling upon him reveals its double meaning of erotic seduction’s punctuated by lines like “Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” (Stoker 199),  “…her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile” (Stoker 200), and  “…she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile…” ; one that frames the act of becoming a vampire as a complete, unabashed embrace of sexual temptation, thusly insinuating that rejection of deviant sexuality is compulsory when resisting the charms of vampirism. This dichotomy reflects onto the book’s wider framing of vampirism as a force which “...designates a kind of colonization of the body.” (Arata 630) in which “Horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he appropriates and transforms them. Having yielded to his assault, one literally ‘goes native’ by becoming a vampire oneself.” (Arata 630). 19th century readers understand Lucy as appropriated by Dracula, rather than destroyed, by identifying her abandonment of victorian ideals of sexual purity for outward promiscuity as the transformation init of itself, establishing the “unlawful” erotization of Lucy from once chaste to wanton and sultry as Dracula’s vampiric transmutation of her from proper Victorian to degenerate foreigner. The terror stems from Stoker’s suggestion that this transmutational sexualization was irreversible, implicating any supposed pre-existing racial degradation as unsolvable and indelible, something England could only defend against or contain the spread of. Arthur’s internal struggle to decline Lucy’s offer inquiries about whether or not the reader themselves would find themselves unyielding in the face of Dracula’s temptation, haunted by the inferred follow up questions as the read on: If they give in, what’s saving them from the same fate during the forthcoming assault of reverse colonization? What’s stopping the rest of the British empire from “going native” at the hands of racial infestation as well?

Stoker’s erotic racialization of Dracula’s vampiric monstrosity is a storytelling element that many, if not most, creatives choose to hold on when adapting Dracula, each trying their hand at a new interpretation or extrapolation of what this monstrous sexuality looks like in the retelling they’ve crafted. Though in a rather curious turn of events, a few of these reinventors, including the upcoming subjects of this thesis, have forged a new path from the book’s predominant and consistent narrative of erotic desirability, diverging to explore the offshoot implications of such an eroticism left sparsely throughout the novel. The result of their efforts? Solidifying their own unique differentiation between the erotic Dracula and its implicit, oppositional form of sensuality: The romantic Dracula.

You know Dracula.

Your friends know Dracula, your family knows Dracula, even your ten-year-old niece reaching for General Mills’ Count Chocula “knows” Dracula as she sneaks the box into her parent’s unsuspecting cart. Unless you’ve spent your life under a rock, you know “Dracula.”

The question is, rather, how do you know Dracula? Whether you get to know him through his initial debut in the titular novel, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, one of his many cinematic or televised appearances, or even the vague impression snagged from a popular culture that slaps his image and likeness onto marked-down Party City costumes, puppets counting on Sesame Street, or a cartoon cereal box, only further proves one undeniable observation: we, as a culture, have come to know Dracula in one way or another as he is relentlessly adapted to comment upon our collective anxieties, desires, and fears. This knowledge has, in turn, widened the variety of literary, visual, and artistic portrayals of Dracula further still, reintroducing him as villain, monster, friend, and even pure metaphor. Missing from this ever expanding list is lover, inspired by the public recently coming to know Dracula as an increasingly sympathetic figure, anti-hero, or even hero in some cases. This idea of Dracula as an object of romantic desire has been applied to both the audience and the characters he interacts with via reciprocation for specific romantic interests, implying he would do the same for the viewer if they were in the interest’s place. In this sense, not only is Dracula becoming more romantic in contemporary adaptations, but we’re also beginning to view him as desirable for ourselves, discovering something in the monster that attracts us even as we know we should be repelled. For even as he delves deeper into the depths of our romantic fantasies, Dracula is still deeply rooted in cultural fears that have fundamentally altered the entire scope of how we come to know Dracula as a monster, both in his historical context and in our present.

This thesis will explore this romanticizing and sympathizing by thoroughly analyzing how these adaptations evolved from Stoker’s original novel and tracing this romanticization through a few key adaptational works, develop a well rounded understanding of what it means to actively and intentionally interpret Dracula as “romantic”, especially in consideration of the source material’s depiction of him as the monstrous Other. Using what I’ve gathered from this research and reflection on existing adaptations, I will then examine from a literary, fictional, and creative standpoint what is at stake in adapting Dracula to be an explicit love interest by authoring my own reworking of Stoker’s original novel.

It’s quiet

Toooooooooooo quiet

There should be

something

Something going on around here

Banging or

childproof alarms go off

or the clamor of hushed whispers

as to not be heard

Or something

Something like that

Yeah

Good weather for a hike, though!

…Or maybe even…a heist!

Heh

hehehyeah, yeah, a heist

That’s what this is!

(real proud of myself right now)

Easy job for a dastardly crook of my vast experience, I’m sure

(pays well, too)

Boot goes into handle

Rubber against alder

DIY shoe shine against fresh paint

(don’t know, don’t care)

Stomping onto white marble,

hard enough to feel silly and accomplished,

quiet enough to not disturb

(don’t care, not supposed to care, rebels are not supposed to care, I do not care about ruining some shitty paint job

that he didn’t even do himself! he got Kenny to do it

on his day

off,

not even offering to pay him for his time, just ‘cause he was too damn lazy to

…

Swiping the expensive (wine’s expensive, right?) stuff from the

Top shelf

(i’m downing enough, that man’s gonna have to peel me off his linoleum tiles)

Tried turning around, looking to hook the spikes lining the back of my boots into the handles

somehow

(miss. by a wide margin.)

Bottle goes clack

I go clack

Whole house goes clattering across the floor

Kenny chucks the shards in a walmart bag (‘m kinda pissed they don't puncture the bottom, spill back out onto the floor. Keep that to myself, like the professional I am.) 

Stan tries to do the same to me, all night

He’s no fun

This is no fun

Kitchens smell…nastier than you remember.

At the very least, this one does. You would have to check a few more to make sure it's not just this one, but the thought of having to hold more than one version of the same type of room with the same purpose inside your head at the same time? That feels like too much. You’re too used to everything belonging to one place, to knowing every activity, device, and task was sectioned off to one place. The luxury of never needing to go looking for anything.

You hear something clatter against the kitchen floor.

You hear a lot of things clatter against the kitchen floor. Mostly metal. You’re quite proud of yourself for remembering what metal sounds like.

You're not as proud of the way you shift around for comfort, your ass never actually getting off the floor.

But that’s fair, because you're not used to being proud of yourself anyway, apparently, because rust grows fervently in good, sopping conditions, apparently, after 4 fucking years, apparently. You haven’t had your skin, your oils, your grease, your snow-topped mountain ranges burning red in the hot sun in four, fuck-ing years and disrespect has set in deep, neglect callousing the bitten tips of your good playing fingers (which necessitates it, you guess.), and you’re not used to him setting the table or accusing you of pre-emptily forgetting to wash your hands (apparently you forget “well enough”) or holding on to his second favorite aunt’s notebook, so being proud of him is out of the question too.

You cover your ears as he the dustpan against the edge of the rotting trashcan, making the poor thing balance on one foot. You do that now (Probably cause of the ears). And he cleans up glass.

You’re still checking for sparkles on your plat-

“Dinner’s ready. Get off the floor.”

From this angle, he only needs to bend down by about 47.08°, give or take. Eyes blank, refuse to leave his. Arm hairs poke your pit, brush through the bushel of wild coils you didn’t have four years ago. The contact still feels missed, like a dream you’ve had for so long, you find yourself surprised, on occasion, at not having achieved it already.

There’s a stumble as you rise, limp and dripping on the floor, and you almost ask him to wipe you up, but you still get to the table, all on your own.

Once upon a time, the most beautiful maiden in all the land was digging some sort of rabid…thing out from her neighbor's molting, sweating garden.

(It is unclear if the aforementioned sweat originally bared shelter within the cracking walls of the weed’s pores, or the thing’s)

Her maidenhood was made known to the village (quite loudly, I might add) by the shimmer of her great beauty (“shimmer” as meant in the literal sense, that is. A local schoolboy was quoted in The Daily Parchment as having been blinded by “the freshly sharpened string of pearls woven into the valleys of her gums). For if it were not for the shine of her coat, none would dare find themselves looking past its complete attachment to her “person”. And though even the daftest of the townsfolk could see that such animalistic eloquence and stature could only come to be through the curse of a witch (or a second gift from god, perhaps, to keep her from the wiles and whims of the men and boys she walked home), the fruit she bore, fuzzy and already split open for a few hours at this point, blood and juices running from him, down his thigh, seeping into her mane and sticking to his steps and sewing the seems of botanical stems together, blades of grass cutting through the stream, guiding it along the lining of the stone path-

And through even that!

He was but a fond footnote in the neat folds of her memory, as her rich company always claims, and she was but the catalyst of his everything and everyone and himself, making for a fair more enchanting tale.

But since it is only fair (and because he would inevitably get his way in the matter anyway), we instead present The Life and Lies of That Thing over there, shivering in the corner, shaking the bushes.

LIGHT ON. Both characters are occupying cruddy, worn-down lawn chairs staring at the now-moved stove, a human limb or two sticking out. Having a cord that’s attached to the stove and clearly leads back to a supposed outlet is optional, but preferred.

BUTTERS

He wanted a burial.

KENNY

Who, Stevie?

BUTTERS

(Giggling)

You mean Stephen?

KENNY

(Wordlessly shrugs)

BUTTERS

(Giggling harder)

You silly goose.

Kenny bursts out laughing, causing Butters to do the same. At some point, before they calm down, Kenny deliberately and noticeably pushes Butters back into his chair after he leans too close to the fire.

BUTTERS

…He wanted to be 6 feet deep so he could “feel the lord lift his soul away from the flames of hell licking his bones”.

KENNY

Jesus. Normally, I aim 6 feet deep to make a girl screa-

BUTTERS

(Mapping out the imagery with his hands)

I wanted to bury him so we could put my mom right next to him, and then we could dig a little hole between the two dirt boxes, you know, so their skeletons could hold hands.

KENNY

…Oh, dude.

BUTTERS

Yeah, I know.

KENNY

Oh, no, fuck that, man. That’s like…the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, fuck…Leo, how the hell do you…

(Turning to Butters and lightly shaking his shoulders)

…How does…anybody talk to you and not fall head over heels?

BUTTERS

(Smiling brightly, giggling, and weakly punching Kenny’s arm)

However you dodged that bullet!

Suddenly embarrassed, Kenny awkwardly chuckles before dropping the strained smile and leaning in, pulling Butters closer.

KENNY

…Do you want a better alibi, Butters?

BUTTERS

…You said South Park crimes don’t need good alibis, Ken?

KENNY

(Speaking intensely and actively dodging Butters’s attempts to correct him)

They don’t need kids like us either, Buttercup. They don’t need us, and we don’t need them, and I snuck into your backyard with nothing but some good ol’ McCormick charm to talk you into ditching this stupid town for good, with me and the guys tonight, and don’t you dare ask me if Cartman’s coming, ‘cause I can’t stand him, and you don’t need him- No, fuck you, you do not, Leo!

(Grabbing Butters’s face by the hand and turning it towards the fire)

Look what you did without him!

(Pulling Butter’s face close to his and grinning)

Think about what we could do together if we leave now! We could stay with KEVIN and KAREN, and- and STAN could hook us up with a long-term plan, and I could pick up odd jobs while KYLE gets his degree, and then we’d be fuckin’ set, dude!

(Cupping both of Butters’s cheeks in both hands)

We can finally get you the life you deser-

Butters rips his head away and Kenny’s toothy grin slowly fades, growing defensive and rising from his seat. The fight escalates gradually.

KENNY

…No. No, don’t you pull that crap with me, you little shit!

BUTTERS

(Sinking into his chair exasperated)

Oh, Christ, here we go again.

KENNY

You can’t act like I’m bullshittin’ you every time I point out how you’re the best fuckin’ part of this town, just ‘cause you’re so uncomfortable with your own fucking existence-

BUTTERS

(Shooting up out of his seat)

Oh, please! You wanna talk “comfort”? You couldn’t look me in the eyes ‘till high school!

KENNY

(Unhinged)

Because those fucking eyes were still big and bright and full of fuckin’ wonder even when you were the school lapdog and mine were dead and nobody would look at them, but you did! You looked at me and you saw friendship and- and a future and fuckin-… potential, god knows why! And all of a sudden, I was your favorite, and I couldn’t get why that rocked my nine-year-old world, but I get it now, and I can’t lose it again, so please! Please, can you just…trust me on this one?

A beat passes. Butters scoffs. He calmly walks to a tearful Kenny bent over a chair and looks down at him, voice calm and collected. Kenny’s head is bent down.

BUTTERS

You want me to trust you? What, like I trusted my uncles?

Butters bends over, head level with Kenny’s. Kenny looks up to meet his gaze. The audience can faintly hear his teeth grit.

BUTTERS

(Gently but furiously)

You don’t get brownie points for fucking me, Kennith. You get called a faggot by all our little pals, and Eric saying you could do better.

Shouting, Kenny shoots up while slamming his hands on the top of the chair before roughly grabbing and shaking Butters, pulling him closer. He sounds frantic and desperate, his voice breaking and tears pouring down his face.

KENNY

I don’t want better, I want-

He freezes. A long pause passes.

…I wanna make a toast.

He sprints offstage before Butters can say anything. A long pause passes. He jogs back with two beer bottles in hand, one already opened. He pushes the open one into Butters’s hand before cracking the other one open with his own violently shaking hands. He looks like he’s been crying even harder offstage and sounds like he still has some waterworks left in the tank. He raises his beer, voice slightly wavering.

To our newfound freedom!

Butters stares blankly, before smiling sadly. They click glasses before settling back into their seats. Butters holds his in both hands cautiously while Kenny uses one hand. They both drink, turning away from each other. LIGHTS OUT.

He resigned himself to fixing this because he cared about his friends and wanted them to be okay, first and foremost. His primal, base need for some kind of goal to laser in on as a distraction from his own dark thoughts was barely an afterthought, honest.

It was Basil’s smile that hit Kel first, words tumbling after. Mischievous. Adoring. Laughing with him, not at him. It's the one Kel gave when the guilt of faking it weighed down on the corners of his mouth. He wondered if Basil carved the eerily perfect curve out of the good of the situation like he did.

“Hey, Kel.” Through some kind of witchcraft, Basil had managed to make his voice even softer, even smaller. Kel was grateful, he swore. He was grateful for everything they did, but the gentle almost-whisper was kind on his over-sensitive ears, even with how closely they sat together. They smiled, and it warmed him faster than the heated porcelain cupped in his hands. “How are you feeling?” Kel resisted the urge to lean into the hand now rubbing his back, aching for the raw, unabashed comfort of Sunny’s arms around his.

He could feel Basil’s eyes crawling all over him, but he’d sew his mouth shut before saying that. Unless the aforementioned witchcraft gave him the ability to read minds alongside his weird Poison Ivy thing, Basil didn’t know anything. Yet. He turned his eyes to the reflection in the cup just in case, wary of the residual guilt swimming in his eyes. He could spill over as easily as this teacup, if he wasn’t careful (and, historically speaking, he wasn’t).

“Fine.” He took a sip to avoid further suspicion before it dawned on him that oh shit, he liked tea now. Wack. “You?”

The counterattack raised an eyebrow and the tone of Basil’s voice, but what really made his blood freeze was the cross of his arms before holding a hand over his chest. It reeked of his mother and the persistent stench of her disappointment. “...I’m alright, but I’m not the one who woke up screaming and crying.”

Busted.

He gave it a good try though! Using their own signature move against the divine Masters of Deflection themselves took guts. Guts he’d spew all over the carpet if it weren’t for his rigorously trained immune system.

“I wasn’t crying.” He scrambled under Basil’s unimpressed frown for an excuse for such a blatant lie. “M-my body was just..” His fear slithers up, reaching to claw at his mouth before dragging something only believable to people who didn’t know him. Sunny and Basil knew him, for better or, in this mortifyingly dragged-out scenario, worse. ”...overworking itself in my sleep!”

Basil’s eyebrow was trying for the ceiling now. A noble goal, but Kel wasn’t giving up just yet. “N-no, seriously! It happens all the time when I play, I swear!”

“You don’t cry when you play.” Oh, now Sunny joins in? The one time he’s not encouraging him to speak up? Jesus, he was just trying to quell their worries. Is that too much to ask? Does he really need to know? “At least…” Sunny shifted his gaze down, just a tad. Enough for his eyes to follow in bereft anticipation. “...I don’t think you do.” Perhaps he should keep an eye or two out, he mused. To let the referee know.

Kel’s fingernails drummed against the cup and he wondered if this was how Basil felt like right before spiraling. He really hoped not. This felt too cruel for the universe to inflict, even for Basil, even once in a blue moon. The clinking was grounding. Harsh. Kinda rude if you ask him, with an oversensitive Sunny resting his head on his shoulder (Fuck, could Sunny feel the warmth spreading across his cheeks from there? It felt…inappropriate, considering the mood).

The makeshift metronome was relievingly reminiscent of the tea parties Aubery and Mari would drag a humoring Hero and an indifferent Sunny into (He recalled, regretfully, distracting an intrigued Basil with Spaceboy comics, rolling his basketball back and forth, whatever his tainted little mind could think of, tucked away in their cramped little corner). Kel wished he was there, that this hazy little early morning was as far away as a balloon let go of in his own overexcitement, getting smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared into the clouds.

Mari used to complain about his “wishing life away”. Probably ‘cause she knew how to spot the good in every living, breathing moment. Even moments like this.

He blinked hard. His eyes searched, scanned, adjusting to the darkness only to be met with his dead-eyed shadow dancing over boards and boards of dead trees.

Kel wondered what she’d say now. How she hid the faint shadow of distress from something as bright as her little sunshine. If she simply tucked it behind a lock of hair to circle the drain during her morning shower. Swallowed it only to puke it onto over some harrowing piano piece later. 

Well, if he couldn’t be Mari (and believe him, he tried), he could be honest. One of them had to be, and Kel was a marvel at picking up the slack where his friends struggled. It was second nature at this point. Grateful, tiresome, rewarding second nature.

Sucking in a huge wavering breath, almost as if he could heave out the fear swirling in his lungs on the exhale, Kel spat out the most avoidant truth possible, which was absolutely not a copout, shut up.

“Only when you’re not watching!”

...Ah. A tad too truthful in his humble, humble little opinion. One could even call it a worst-case scenario. How did Hero do this again?

“…What…” Oh, that silence could swallow him whole if it wanted, and he wasn't in the sport of putting up a fight. “…does that…” God, fuck. “…mean, Kel?”

With all the care and precision in the world, Kel just...didn't answer.

“Kel, why are you crying when you play basketball?” He vaguely heard a pinch of halfhearted stammering. From him, he had to presume. “Kel? Kel-“ He’s folding now, blaming his losings on a rancid deck, when surely, he was just fumbling with understanding the unending rules- “Kelsey!”

Kel’s silence floated over the room, draping over the late-night conversationalists in a makeshift pillow fort. As if one of the light gray clouds outside seeped through the ceiling, too heavy with tears to drift away to safety. 

Out of pure, dire necessity, Basil was the loudest voice in the room.