(I’ve spent so long thinking about this that the ideas have twisted around on each other, and it’s hard to distinguish my premises from my conclusions. Where can I start? What exactly am I trying to prove? I guess I’ll try to put things down in the manner I find most satisfying. This will turn out to be the most long-winded manner possible, because my favorite thing in the world is the sound of my own voice.)

To review,

A few years ago I wrote some “diachronic analyses” comparing four Dungeons & Dragons books: Ravenloft, the original 1983 vampire-slaying adventure; House of Strahd, its 1993 AD&D update; Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (2006), an expanded version of the same adventure for Third Edition; and Curse of Strahd (2016), a differently expanded version for Fifth Edition. In each book, the part before you enter Castle Ravenloft, the many rooms of Castle Ravenloft, and in particular the contents of the castle catacombs have the same general form, and in some places remain identical over the decades—but that just makes the details that change all the more fascinating.

To finish saying what I was saying, I needed to say something about Boris Karloff’s character in The Mummy (1932). But I never got around to writing that part.

First I had to write this post about Harley Quinn. The post is too long, and I can express its sentiment in one sentence: A lot of people find it convenient to believe that a symbol (like a comic book character, or a word) means or at least can mean exactly one thing, but they are wrong, because the process of using symbols always makes them mean many things. I might find it useful to refer to this misapprehension of singular, consistent meaning as “monosemism,” and the fact of multiple, shifting meanings as “polysemism,” but if I don’t get around to actually using those words in this post, I should go back and delete this sentence.

So far, so pretentious. Can we say something new about Ravenloft yet?

Concerning Dracula

On the most straightforward level we can see that Count Strahd von Zarovich is basically Count Dracula. It’s not just that he’s a vampire. He’s an aristocratic vampire who preys on women, who desires one woman in particular. He needs to be destroyed not just because he’s been terrorizing his local countryside for centuries, but for the sake of rescuing that one woman. Bram Stoker did not invent vampires, but to the extent that he invented Dracula, he invented the vampire, and we find ourselves in a culture where the idea of a vampire is often or usually the idea of Dracula.

Since you may not have memorized the plot of the 1897 novel Dracula, and since you love reading the words I type as much as I love typing them, let me refresh your memory:

Solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to a castle in Transylvania to arrange a real estate deal: Count Dracula wants to buy an estate called Carfax in England. Although he initially feels very welcome, Jonathan notices some odd behavior in the Count, like crawling up and down the walls of the castle, and feeding babies to his wives. When the paperwork is complete, Dracula departs with fifty crates full of his native soil, leaving Jonathan trapped in the castle with those wives.

Dracula boards the ship Demeter. During the voyage he kills more or less the entire crew. Conveniently the ship manages to arrive at Whitby, where Jonathan’s fiancée Mina Murray happens to be on holiday with her friend Lucy Westenra. Lucy starts sleepwalking and acting strangely; Dracula is getting his hooks in her. 

Jonathan escapes from Dracula’s castle and reaches a hospital in Budapest. Mina rushes over there to tend to/marry him. Lucy returns to London—conveniently for Dracula, since that’s where Carfax is.

Lucy’s own husband and two other, less successful suitors endeavor to diagnose and treat her condition. One of the non-husbands, psychologist Jack Seward, calls in his old professor Abraham Van Helsing, who recognizes the symptoms of vampiric domination. Despite their best efforts, the men are unable to prevent Dracula from completing Lucy’s transformation: As soon as she’s buried, she starts rising from the dead to prey on the children of Hampstead.

Seward’s insane asylum is conveniently located in London next door to Carfax. Dracula is able to exert a hypnotic control over one of the inmates, R.M. Renfield, who has an obsession (evinced prior to any established exposure to Dracula) with eating flies, then spiders, then whole live birds. Dracula uses Renfield to enable his continued predations, but the vampire’s influence allows the heroes to extract valuable information from Renfield (directly and indirectly) about their foe.

Mina and Jonathan return to London. Van Helsing directs Lucy’s widower to free her from undeath in rather grisly fashion. Dracula, infuriated, begins to prey on Mina in revenge. The heroes break into Carfax, to sanctify Dracula’s chests of soil, rendering them useless to him—but some of them have already been transported to hideouts around London. The hunt for these boxes of dirt is probably the most boring section of the book.

As Dracula’s influence over Mina becomes almost complete, he is forced to flee London and return by boat to Transylvania. Mina’s domination, like Renfield’s, presents some small advantage; under hypnosis she can sense Dracula’s surroundings and infer his movements. In the final climax, the heroes must race against the sunset, chasing Dracula’s carriage down on horseback destroy him once and for all and free Mina from his curse. The end.

All good to know. But Strahd is not exclusively Dracula, and the Ravenloft narrative is not exclusively the Dracula narrative. I want to address five Ravenloftian details, all more or less consistent from book to book. I’ll quote from the 1983 original:

• K13. (Turret Post Access Hall) “This long, narrow corridor runs east and west. Cobwebs fill the hall and obstruct sight beyond a few feet.”
• G1. (Madam Eva’s Tent) “Glints of light seem to flash from a crystal ball on the table as a hunched figure peers into its depths. She speaks. Her voice crackles like dry weeds. Her tone soars and falls like the wind outside. ‘At last you have arrived!’ Her sudden cackling laughter bursts like mad lightning from her withered lips.”
• K9. (Guests’ Hall) “To the west, large double doors hang slightly open, a steady bright light escaping through the opening. Swells of organ music come from behind the doors, spilling their melody of power and defeat into the hall.”
• K62. (Servants’ Hall) “Poor old Cyrus is obviously crazy. He has served the master for uncounted years and is totally devoted to him. […] Cyrus tends to giggle to himself from time to time for no apparent reason. He also likes to tell poor jokes at the most inopportune moments.”
• K37. (Study) “A huge painting hangs over the mantlepiece in a heavy, gilded frame. The rolling light of the fire illuminates the carefully rendered painting. It is an exact likeness of the Burgomaster’s daughter, Ireena Kolyana. Though the painting is obviously centuries old, the likeness is unmistakable.”

The Cobwebs

Cobwebs are mentioned only once in Bram Stoker’s novel, as the heroes enter Carfax, a house which has only recently become Dracula’s base of operations:

The whole place was thick with dust. The floor was seemingly inches deep, except where there were recent footsteps, in which on holding down my lamp I could see marks of hobnails where the dust was cracked. The walls were fluffy and heavy with dust, and in the corners were masses of spider’s webs, whereon the dust had gathered till they looked like old tattered rags as the weight had torn them partly down.

In the beginning of the novel, Dracula’s Transylvanian castle is described in what some would call excessive detail. (You get a lot of information about the relative positions of different rooms, which helps you visualize things when Jonathan describes climbing out onto the walls to higher and lower levels.) Critically, the castle is not a uniformly old and creepy haunted house. The rooms into which Dracula welcomes Jonathan are well-furnished and well-lit. The Count offers him wine and cigars. John writes:

The table service is of gold, and so beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value. The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of my bed are of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and must have been of fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old, though in excellent order.

Dracula warns Jonathan not to wander through the rest of the castle. Jonathan goes exploring anyway, and this is when we get our scenes of haunted house decrepitude, indicated mostly by thick layers of dust and moth-eaten upholstery. No spiderwebs, though.

However, we do see some very big spiderwebs in Dracula, the 1931 film directed by Tod Browning—the one with Bela Lugosi. We see them very early on, just as Renfield enters the castle. The webs hang in huge curtains throughout the entry hall, and Dracula somehow seems to walk through them without disturbing them. And now I get to recite to you the plot of Dracula (1931):

Solicitor Renfield travels to Transylvania to arrange a real estate deal: Count Dracula wants to lease Carfax Abbey in England. Although he initially feels very welcome, in short order Renfield is menaced by Dracula’s three brides and then attacked by Dracula himself. 

Now in Dracula’s power, Renfield boards the ship Vesta with three boxes of the Count’s native soil, one of which contains Dracula himself. When the ship arrives in Whitby, the only living person on board is Renfield, now a grinning lunatic. The rest of the crew is dead.

Dracula makes his way to London and starts preying on girls there. At a theater he meets Mina Seward, her father Doctor Seward, her fiancé John Harker, and her friend Lucy Weston. He flies into Lucy’s room as a bat, and very quickly she dies from blood loss despite multiple transfusions. 

Renfield is admitted to Seward’s sanatorium, conveniently located next to Carfax. He’s obsessed with eating flies and spiders and rats. Professor Abraham Van Helsing is brought onto the case and recognizes the symptoms of vampiric domination. Sometimes Renfield is Dracula’s eager servant; other times, he is wracked with guilt for helping Dracula prey on his next victim, Mina.

Van Helsing starts putting everything together when he notices that Mina has marks on her neck and Dracula doesn’t have a reflection. He explains all the details of vampirism and is able to convince Doctor Seward but not John Harker. While this conversation goes on, Dracula is able to lure Mina out of the house so he can suck her blood some more.

A “woman in white” is prowling the area, sucking kids’ blood. It is Lucy, risen from the grave! Mina understands Dracula’s nature now and pushes John away for his own safety. Van Helsing brings in a lot of wolfsbane that Mina is supposed to hang on her windows and wear around her neck as she sleeps.

Dracula finds Van Helsing and tells him to leave—he has already made Mina his vampire slave. Van Helsing defies him. Dracula attempts hypnotic control, but Van Helsing resists. Van Helsing pulls out a crucifix and repels Dracula.

As Mina falls into Dracula’s power, she starts to get creepy. She has a couple of good scenes where she leers hungrily at John and tries to wheedle him into getting rid of Van Helsing’s crucifix. 

Dracula succeeds in abducting Mina and carrying her to Carfax. John and Van Helsing follow Renfield there. Dracula, believing himself betrayed, kills Renfield before hiding Mina away and climbing into one of his boxes of earth. Van Helsing locates the right box and destroys the vampire once and for all, freeing Mina from his curse. The end.

Between the 1897 novel and the 1931 film are the 1924 stage play by Hamilton Deane and its 1927 revision by John L. Balderston. I am not super familiar with these plays, so if you read this Wikipedia article more carefully than I did then you will be more of an expert than I am. Both versions place all of the action in England, so there is no visit at all to Dracula’s castle. This means that Garrett Fort decided to re-add the Transylvania sequence from the novel, and that he decided to replace Jonathan Harker in that sequence with Renfield.

This is perhaps a questionable move, on script-theoretical grounds. Renfield is established as our viewpoint character from the first moments of the movie; then, rather suddenly, he transforms into a madman, worshiping an evil vampire and eating live bugs. He doesn’t get enough characterization early on to become sympathetic as a victim. The upshot of his first-act “twist” would seem to be “actually, your hero in this story is John Harker!”—but John is not much of a hero.

But in story-logical terms, this repositioning of Renfield is a big improvement. In the novel, the fact that Dracula leaves Jonathan in Transylvania and straightaway arrives near his fiancée in Whitby comes off as a total coincidence. You could infer (without any support from the text) that Dracula is thinking “having tortured this fellow a while, I’ll go after his girlfriend!” and then divines her location somehow—but he doesn’t go right after Jonathan’s girlfriend, he goes after Lucy. It really has no explanation.

Similarly, there’s no clear reason given in the novel for Renfield to be under Dracula’s power. Seward begins recording Renfield’s zoophagy in June, while Jonathan is in Transylvania and Dracula is making preparations to leave. In August, while Dracula is victimizing Lucy in Whitby and right around the time Mina leaves for Budapest, Renfield (over in London) tells Seward that “the Master is at hand.” So he’s not just a fly-eater; apparently he’s in thrall to Dracula specifically. Since when? Unclear. Why can he influence Renfield at a distance, if they’ve never met? The girls only establish this sort of connection after Dracula visits them in person.

I am not the sort of reader who tallies each loose end or convenient coincidence I notice until I get to clap the book shut, declaring its author a hack—but I do appreciate when such things can be minimized. By theatrical necessity, the 1924 Dracula eliminated the coincidence of all the action moving neatly from Whitby to London. The 1931 Dracula additionally makes Renfield’s situation completely clear. It eliminates the coincidence of Dracula moving straight from Jonathan to Mina. The only oddly convenient detail that remains is the proximity of Carfax (fused with Whitby Abbey to form Carfax Abbey) to Seward’s sanatorium.

You have to expect me to go on and on about versions of Dracula in the same manner I went on and on about versions of Ravenloft, not only to demonstrate that Dracula is subject to similar patterns of details changing in retelling, but because, duh, Ravenloft is a version of Dracula. Besides the person of the villain himself, we have the village of superstitious Eastern Europeans. We have the carriage ride, both through the woods described in the novel and the over the precipitous cliffsides seen in the film. We have the castle’s initial hospitality (the feast at which Strahd appears to play the organ) and ensuing hostility. We have the female victim, visited night after night by a monster that intends to carry her away. We have the climactic descent into the catacombs to stake the vampire in his own coffin (rather than an outdoor chase on horseback)—but this is an invention of the 1924 play, reused in the 1931 movie. And the cartoonishly huge curtains of cobwebs: Those are from the movie, too.

Madam Eva

Although the central vampire’s employment of a local marginalized ethnicity to carry out his dirty/dirt-transporting work is central to the beginning and ending segments of Dracula the novel, there is no precedent in the book or in any Dracula adaptation I know of for Madam Eva, the fortune teller who divines the locations of Strahd and certain vital artifacts within Castle Ravenloft. The closest comparison you could draw, if you’re desperate, is to the villager who pleads with Harker/Renfield to take her crucifix.

But Madam Eva didn’t come out of nowhere. She’s Maleva, the wise crone in The Wolf Man (1941) who warns Larry Talbot of his lycanthropic fate but seems as resigned to it as she is to the death of her own son. In costume and story function, Eva and Maleva are essentially identical, but their personalities are very distinct. Maleva is quiet, ominous, detached, sorrowful (absolutely the best performance in a film that doesn’t always seem to know what it’s on about). Madam Eva gets depicted as cackling convivially, cackling sinisterly, withholding ancient secrets, executing grand schemes. None of this has anything to do with Maleva, who has nothing to cackle about.

But the influence is there. Can we go any further back? The Wolf Man isn’t based on a book or any specific narrative that I know of. I can guess that the inspiration for Maleva, beyond a collection of stereotypes, is Ouspenskaya herself, who I understand to have been a towering figure in her field. Clearly this is not a text I have been banging my head against for years.

Anyway, I already pointed out this connection in a previous post.

The Organ

Ravenloft seems to be intended as a mostly nonlinear dungeon crawl, but like most examples of open-ended gameplay it politely requests that you follow a linear introduction. You get invited to the castle by Strahd. You meet up with his driverless carriage, which conveys you to the castle. You cross the drawbridge into the courtyard. You follow the torchlight into the entry hall; you follow the sound of organ music into the dining hall. The player of the organ is Strahd, who welcomes you to his home and invites you to partake of the feast he’s laid out. After enough pleasantries or an attempt to attack him, “Strahd” cackles and disappears—he was an illusion! The lights go out, the drawbridge rises, the doors slam shut. Okay, now you can start exploring a dungeon.

I pointed this out in a previous post, too: Dracula does not play the organ. There is a cultural association between Dracula and organ music that I am at a loss to account for; maybe it originates in the Hammer films that I know nothing about—except that, if Dracula played the organ in any of those movies, I would expect to have found out about that by now.

The antecedent fellow who does play the organ, in the tones of “greatness and despair” and “raptured ecstasy” described by Ravenloft, is the Phantom of the Opera. Strahd is not Dracula through and through; he owes to Erik his theatrical musicianship (and perhaps location K76, his half-submerged torture chamber). Like Erik, and very unlike Dracula, Strahd has the traces of a tragic villain. Erik loves Christine, albeit not in what you’d call a healthy manner. Dracula is not in love with Lucy or with Mina; he pursues and corrupts them out of pure malice. Strahd became a vampire after he was rejected by his beloved Tatyana, and centuries later he pursues Ireena Kolyana because he believes, correctly, that she is Tatyana reincarnated. All three are villains capable of basically comparable feats of cruelty (Strahd’s treatment of Gertruda is more or less Dracula’s approach to Lucy or Mina) but the Phantom and Strahd align themselves against Dracula in that their villainy arises from a desire to love and be loved.

Cyrus Belview

Apparently the source material for Ravenloft extends far beyond the Bram Stoker novel to the 1931 film, and further into the cinematic universe of 30s-40s Universal horror movies—and undoubtedly well beyond that, drawing from other films and other media outside the scope of this analysis.

Cyrus Belview is Strahd’s insane henchman. The obvious point of reference is Dracula’s insane henchman Renfield. But I think even this minor character can be shown to combine multiple influences. The crux of Renfield’s story function is that Dracula’s power over him waxes and wanes: When he’s not forced to do the vampire’s bidding, he laments his actions and tries to help the good guys. Cyrus has no such dual nature; he is “obviously crazy” all the time. And Cyrus is not shown to be “under Strahd’s control” in the sense of hypnosis or vampiric domination—there’s no indication that if you gave him a good shake or cast Remove Curse on him, he’d come to his senses and run back home to his wife.

I see two other models for Cyrus from the old Universal horror flicks: Fritz, Henry Frankenstein’s unreliable assistant in Frankenstein (1931), and Ygor, Wolf Frankenstein’s even less reliable assistant in Son of Frankenstein (1939).

Fritz was portrayed by Dwight Frye, who also played Renfield in Dracula the same year, so the characters are somewhat muddled up to begin with. Fritz doesn’t come off as “crazy” to my mind. His performance is manic, but I don’t think he laughs the way Renfield or Cyrus does. Mostly he’s just amoral and incompetent. He can’t stop tormenting Frankenstein’s freshly-created monster for some reason, so he gets killed about a third of the way through the movie.

Dwight Frye also played the unreliable assistant Karl in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), basically indistinguishable from Fritz but also barely in the movie.

Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi, is a very competent and sinister figure, the true villain of Son of Frankenstein who makes the relatively innocent Monster into his pawn. He doesn’t match Cyrus in story function or personality, but I’m able to convince myself of a certain superficial similarity in the characters’ unhingedness.

Both Fritz and Ygor influence the Igor of Young Frankenstein (1974), but of course Marty Feldman’s interpretation is just as inventive as it is derivative—and probably more memorable than any of his predecessors. All these (and many more) depictions add up to the stock character of the hunchbacked lab assistant, which I believe inspired Cyrus Belview (even if he isn’t referred to as hunchbacked, and doesn’t really appear in a lab) more than Renfield.

The Portrait

The original Ravenloft does not explain the whole thing with Strahd and Tatyana and Ireena and Sergei in one paragraph. It expects the Dungeon Master to piece things together while reading through the book, as the players will piece things together while playing through the adventure. The clues are these:

1. As the adventurers explore Barovia Towne, they learn that “for some reason, Strahd is after Ireena Kolyana.” He keeps attacking her house with wolves, apparently attempting to abduct her. He has bitten her twice.
2. If the adventurers find the Tome of Strahd, they can learn his pre-vampiric backstory. He was in love with the beautiful young Tatyana, but she spurned him in favor of his younger brother Sergei. Strahd made a “pact with death” and killed his brother on the couple’s wedding day. Tatyana threw herself from the walls of Ravenloft. Strahd went on un-living as a vampire. He says: “I have often hunted for Tatyana. I have even felt her within my grasp, but she escapes. She taunts me! She taunts me!”
3. In the castle’s study is a painting depicting a woman who looks just like Ireena Kolyana, even though it must be centuries old.
4. Let me quote from page 30: “After Strahd is destroyed forever, you may want to provide an ending for the players to wrap things up. The following scenario is provided as an optional ending to this module.” I should stipulate that this is not presented as an alternative option to some other ending; you have the option of using this ending, or coming up with your own ending, or continuing the campaign somehow. Anyway, in this ending, the ghost of Sergei von Zarovich appears. He reaches out to Ireena Kolyana, who recognizes him and has this realization: “I am Ireena Kolyana, but in my past I was Sergei’s beloved Tatyana. Through these many centuries we have played out the tragedy of our lives. Now, with our deepest gratitude to you, that tragedy is over. It is time for joy to begin again.” They walk into the sky as the clouds part, the mist fades, and Barovia is freed.

Perhaps earlier when I implied that Dracula, contra Strahd, is not motivated by feelings of love, you muttered, “That’s not how I remember it…” Perhaps this reincarnation angle sounds a bit familiar to you as well. Perhaps this is because you are remembering the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the one with Gary Oldman and Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder.

The title “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” implies that this one is more rigorously based on the book than those other Draculas, and it certainly includes more elements from the novel than does the 1931 version. You get to see all three of Lucy’s suitors. You get the horseback race against the clock to destroy Dracula at the end!

However, Bram Stoker’s Dracula also half-borrows a critical detail invented for the 1931 film. Although this movie, like the book, begins with Jonathan taking the Orient Express to conduct business in Transylvania, it is established that he is taking over a case for a Mister Renfield who had dealt with the Count previously. Renfield returned to England thoroughly warped by his encounter with Dracula and is now a resident of Seward’s asylum—so he can fulfill the story function from the book while we enjoy the logical cohesion of the earlier movie.

Before Jonathan’s stay in the castle takes a turn for the worse, Dracula notices a photograph of Harker’s fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder), and it’s creepily established that the ancient vampire desires this beautiful young woman. Now, rather than a coincidence or unexplained convenience, it makes perfect sense that, when Dracula reaches England, he makes a beeline for Mina Murray.

But also the movie adds something else. I lied when I said it begins like the book with Jonathan on the Orient Express. It really begins in 1462, as a pre-vampiric Vlad the Impaler returns from his conquests to discover his wife Elisabeta (also Winona Ryder) threw herself from the walls of the castle (under the mistaken impression that her husband was dead). Vlad is devastated, swears unholy oaths, and becomes a vampire.

Four hundred years later, when Dracula sees Jonathan’s photograph of Mina, he recognizes his beloved Elisabeta. He chases her down in England and is able to draw out her latent memories of their ancient tragic romance. “Love never dies” makes no sense as the tagline of a Dracula movie without this detail: Dracula really does love Elisabeta—Mina really is the reincarnation of Elisabeta—and Mina really does love Dracula, to the extent that she is Elisabeta.

So at the end, rather than the men destroying the vampire at the last moment before the sun sets, Mina must stab her beloved and cut off his head, freeing both of them from his curse and implicitly ensuring salvation for Vlad and Elisabeta. The end.

Ravenloft’s Strahd-Tatyana-Sergei narrative is more or less the same thing, except that the noble lover and the monstrous vampire are split into two von Zarovich brothers. Maybe we should add this movie to the list of Ravenloft influences?

Well, there’s one more thing I didn’t tell you: Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out in 1992, nine years after the first Ravenloft. If anything, Francis Ford Coppola and James V. Hart lifted this element of their story from Tracy and Laura Hickman. That’s an exciting notion! We’ll have to return to it later, though. First we have to ask: Where did the Hickmans get the idea?

And now I can talk about Boris Karloff in The Mummy. 

The Mummy

Back in 2008, the Wikipedia article for The Mummy (1932 film) stated that “some critics have called The Mummy an instant remake of Dracula, produced so the studio could cash in.” On the Talk page, user Missaeagle reacted to the claim:

This is FOX news type commentary. “Some critics.” Who? This is a wholly unique film, and one of the greatest films ever made. It has noting to do with Dracula. The scenes are lit differently. None of the scenes are similar. The story is completely different.

Most of these assertions are false, and yet Missaeagle is only literally wrong. The Mummy is a fantastic film with many merits that set it apart from Dracula. It is also a straight-up rehash of Dracula. Allow me to indulge in a beat-by-beat, side-by-side description of both plots—I’ll try to keep things short…

Dracula opens with Renfield encountering the townsfolk of Transylvania. They advise him to stay away from Castle Dracula, but he won’t be dissuaded by their superstition; he only consents to carry the crucifix that one lady forces upon him.

The Mummy opens with three archaeologists in Egypt having just discovered a mummy! The lead archaeologist, Sir Joseph Whemple, insists on observing due archaeological process, against the impulsiveness of his assistant Ralph Norton. They learn the mummy was the high priest Imhotep, apparently not properly embalmed, but wrapped up in bandages and interred while still alive.

When Whemple translates a curse on a coffer found with the mummy, Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan) advises more than scientific caution, saying that the old gods of Egypt still have power, which ought not be trifled with. The two older men go outside to argue, giving Norton a chance to open the coffer and examine the scroll within…

Meanwhile in Dracula, Renfield falls into Dracula’s power and travels with him on the Vesta. When the ship arrives in Whitby, the only living person on board is Renfield, now a grinning lunatic, greeting his rescuers with a chilling rictus-laugh. Fade to black.

As Norton begins transcribing and pronouncing the hieroglyphic spell upon the Scroll of Thoth, the titular Mummy stirs. When Norton realizes what’s happening, he begins screaming and then laughing in terror. The mummy grabs the magic scroll before leaving. The elder Egyptologists rush back inside to ask what happened, but the only answer Norton can manage is “He went for a little walk! You should have seen his face!” Fade to black.

So both movies open with the pattern [Warning Against Supernatural Encounter > Encounter Supernatural Anyway > Gibbering Madness], delineated by a fade-out and ensuing change of scene as the story’s opening segment. In Dracula this segment lasts about twenty minutes (although it feels longer) and might be called the “first act,” but The Mummy handles the same business in twelve minutes (although it feels shorter).

Now the stories diverge. Dracula meets the other principle characters, including John Harker (David Manners). He sucks Lucy’s blood; she dies. Van Helsing deduces that Renfield’s affliction is vampiric in nature. Renfield feels guilty about helping Dracula.

The Mummy has considerably more plot to get through. We skip forward ten years to see Sir Joseph Whemple’s son Frank (also David Manners) on his own, less successful archaeological expedition. An Egyptian aristocrat (Boris Karloff) (that’s the guy this post is about) appears, introducing himself as Ardath Bey. The viewer figures out, immediately or eventually, that Bey is the mummy Imhotep, now walking and talking and wearing clothes like an alive person.

He has a clue to a great find: the unplundered tomb of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon. Frank succeeds in plundering it, and the spoils end up in the Cairo Museum.

Bey visits the museum to stare at Anck-es-en-Amon’s sarcophagus. On the other side of town, we meet the beautiful and spooky-looking Helen Grosvenor, who is attending a party with her doctor—Dr. Muller from before.

Kneeling next to the sarcophagus, Bey unrolls the Scroll of Thoth and begins incanting a spell, repeating the name “Anck-es-en-Amon.” At the party, Helen falls into a trance. In a glassy-eyed stupor, she shambles out of the party and orders a taxi to take her to the museum. She starts chanting the name “Imhotep.”

Helen arrives at the museum as the Whemples happen to be leaving. Still entranced, she starts pounding on the locked door, moaning “I must get in”—then falls in a faint. Frank grabs her and takes her to the Whemple residence. Helen goes on mumbling in her sleep, in ancient Egyptian. 

At the museum, a guard catches Bey, interrupting his ritual.

When Helen wakes up, she and Frank fall in love immediately, for reasons that make perfect sense: Helen, naturally, is attracted to whoever rescued her when she fainted, and Frank, naturally, is attracted to a woman who looks sort of like that mummified princess he exhumed.

Professor Whemple is summoned back to the museum to see about a guard who was found dead. Bey is gone, but he left the Scroll of Thoth behind. Whemple grabs it, now convinced that something supernatural is going on. When he and Dr. Muller find Frank and Helen smooching on the couch, Whemple whispers: “The curse has struck her, and now, through her, it will strike my son.” (This is the last we will hear about that curse, though.)

The three men go into another room to start putting the pieces together, leaving Helen alone. Imhotep gains entry to the Whemple residence by mind-controlling a servant referred to only as “the Nubian.” The sight of Helen lying on the couch stops Imhotep in his tracks.

We have now reached the halfway points of both movies. At 37 out of 74 minutes into Dracula, Dracula enters the sanitarium to suck Mina’s blood for the first time. At 35 out of 73 minutes into The Mummy, Imhotep discovers Helen. He came to the Whemple residence looking for the Scroll of Thoth, but he finds Helen somehow familiar—and Helen recognizes “Ardath Bey” as well. They stand very close as they speak, Imhotep almost as entranced as Helen is. She reveals that she was drawn to the museum, and Imhotep realizes that his spell didn’t resurrect Anck-es-en-Amon’s mummy because it was summoning Helen, in whom the princess’s spirit now resides.

In both films, this event at the halfway point establishes the crucial conflict on which the back half of each story hinges. The undead man has found the woman he wishes to possess. He has begun to exercise hypnotic control over her. (In Imhotep’s case, his control over Helen now becomes deliberate rather than accidental.) From this point on, success for the heroes lies in rescuing this particular woman from that undead guy.

In Dracula, the sight of Dracula descending on the sleeping Mina is followed by a very stageplay-like sequence of continuous talking. There are cuts to events outside the house, but no skips in time. It all lasts about 13 minutes. John and Mina talk about the “dream” Mina had; Van Helsing asks to see her neck; Dracula comes in to see Mina. Van Helsing notices Dracula has no reflection. He tricks the Count into looking at a mirror, and his violent reaction reveals his true nature—so Van Helsing knows that Dracula is a vampire, but Dracula knows that Van Helsing knows: “For one who has lived not even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing.” He leaves.

In The Mummy, we’re already in the middle of a long stageplay-like sequence of continuous talking. Frank takes Helen to her hotel, despite her desire to remain standing there staring at Ardath Bey. Muller shows Norton’s partial transcription of the Scroll of Thoth to Bey and implies he’s aware that Bey is Imhotep. Imhotep abandons his pretense, demands the original scroll, and leaves.

So, when Missaeagle says “none of the scenes are similar,” we can point to scenes in both movies where the wise academic played by Edward Van Sloan taunts the villain with a piece of physical evidence until the villain sort of halfway admits that he really is an undead monster and then departs in a huff.

The stories diverge again. Dracula has its business with Lucy rising from the dead to exsanguinate children. In conversation with Van Helsing, Mina accepts that soon she may share Lucy’s fate; she tells John he must stay away from her. Van Helsing produces a crucifix, which Mina now finds abhorrent.

InThe Mummy, Imhotep uses a scrying pool to watch Professor Whemple retrieve the Scroll of Thoth from its hiding place. He places it in the fireplace and attempts to burn it—but Imhotep magically causes Whemple to have a fatal heart attack. Then Imhotep compels the Nubian to replace the scroll with some newspaper, burn that instead so it looks like Whemple did destroy the scroll, and carry the real scroll to Imhotep’s house.

But Muller can tell that these ashes are burnt newspaper, not papyrus! He sees through Imhotep’s trick and presents Frank (now more or less convinced that Ardath Bey is actually a mummy etc) with an atropaic pendant of Isis.

Imhotep hypnotically summons Helen to his home. He shows her visions in his pool, and we learn his tragic backstory:

3,700 years ago, Imhotep and Anck-es-en-Amon were in love. But she died. Risking the ire of the gods, Imhotep stole the Scroll of Thoth and attempted the ritual to revive her—but the Pharaoh’s men caught him. His punishment: the grisly live entombment that explains the the curious case of an un-embalmed mummy.

“My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods,” Imhotep tells Helen/Anck-es-en-Amon. “No man has ever suffered as I did for you.” He concludes that they’ll finally be reunited after he gets rid of Frank.

He lets her go back to her hotel, where she meets Frank. Something of her situation begins to dawn on her: “Don’t let me go again,” she insists. “No matter what I say.”

At this point, it becomes easier to describe both stories at once: Edward Van Sloan’s character attempts to protect the victim-girl; in both cases the girl is supposed to stay in bed, like an invalid; in both cases, compelled by the undead villain’s control, she connives with a nurse in an effort to escape her own protection. Then the girl comes to her senses, accepts her situation, and delivers a desperate speech to her love interest played by David Manners.

In Dracula, this is where Mina describes in distinctly pre-Code terms the manner of her vampiric conversion. In The Mummy, Helen explains to Frank that if she goes on resisting Imhotep’s pull, she’ll die. But Van Helsing has a bright idea: Since the men haven’t managed to track down the mummy’s location, Helen should give in to the summons next time, so they can follow her to Imhotep. 

In Dracula, Dracula compels the nurse to pull down all the wolfsbane so he can come into Mina’s room and grab her.

In The Mummy, Frank disapproves of the Helen-as-bait plan. He hangs his Isis pendant on Helen’s doorknob, sealing her from Imhotep’s influence. But Imhotep can see this in his pool, and attempts his spooky-cardiac-arrest-at-a-distance technique again. Frank staggers to the pendant, grabs it, and faints. Hypnotized Helen comes out of her room and heads to Imhotep. No one is around to follow her.

Next thing we know, Imhotep and Helen are at the museum together. But Helen is dressed in the skimpy costume of a priestess of Isis, and in fact her Anck-es-en-Amon personality has taken complete control. The princess is confused about her situation (she doesn’t remember dying), but she’s happy to see her lover Imhotep—at first.

In Dracula, the climax involves a lot of cutting back and forth as John (David Manners) and Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) rush to follow Renfield who is following Dracula who is carrying Mina into the depths of Carfax Abbey. 

In The Mummy, the basic structure is the same, but the plot is much more detailed. At the museum, Imhotep’s plan slowly unfurls for Anck-es-en-Amon. Although they are in love, they cannot be together as long as Anck-es-en-Amon is in the body of a living woman while Imhotep is an undead mummy. Imhotep’s solution is to make her just like him with the Scroll of Thoth—but for that to work, first he has to mummify her—and before that, he has to kill her.

Anck-es-en-Amon protests: “I loved you once, but now you belong with the dead. I am Anck-es-en-Amon, but I’m somebody else too. I want to live, even in this strange, new world.” Imhotep applies his hypnotic power, and she gives in.

Meanwhile, Muller finds Frank passed out on the floor and somehow intuits that Helen has gone to meet Imhotep at the museum. Now there’s a lot of cutting back and forth as Frank (David Manners) and Muller (Edward Van Sloan) rush to the museum while Imhotep very slowly gets around to killing Helen. 

Dracula: The good guys bust into Carfax Abbey, chase Dracula into the catacombs. With some difficulty they locate Dracula in his box. Van Helsing applies a stake, releasing Mina from the vampire’s control. She reveals herself so that she and John can climb the stairs out of the abbey together. THE END.

The Mummy: The good guys bust into the museum. The sound of Frank’s voice calling Helen’s name rouses Anck-es-en-Amon to awareness. She dashes to a statue of Isis and prays desperately to her patron goddess. The statue raises its ankh and zaps the mummy. Anck-es-en-Amon falls in a faint; Frank grabs her and, at Muller’s urging, calls Helen back from across the centuries. She wakes up. Imhotep is a crumbled skeleton. THE END.

So there are levels on which the plots of the two movies could be said to be identical. There are scenes in The Mummy that are essentially quotations, in a storytelling sense, from Dracula. I can’t speak directly to Missaeagle’s claim that “the scenes are lit differently” (to my eye, most scenes in either film are lit in a normal movie way), but it’s probably relevant that Karl Freund was the cinematographer for Dracula before directing The Mummy. And John L. Balderston, who wrote the second stage version of Dracula that reduced the cast to what we see in the film, wrote the script for The Mummy.

And so it was Balderston who introduced this “tragic romance spanning centuries” angle that makes Imhotep a much more tragic villain than Dracula, and which I contend inspired similar backstories for Strahd and the 90s Dracula. Where did Balderston get this idea? Well, in 1932 he also wrote a script treatment for the H. Rider Haggard novel She. (I’m pretty sure this would have been the first sound adaptation of the book, after a few different silent versions.) In She, the immortal queen Ayesha believes that the hero is the reincarnation of a lover she killed in a jealous rage a couple thousand years prior. She tries to make him immortal with the same magic flame that had that effect on her, but when she enters the fire to demonstrate how safe it is, she ages rapidly, withers into a sort of husk, and perishes. Imhotep’s somewhat more sympathetic depiction may have been influenced by Balderston’s work on the play Berkeley Square, a time-travel romance he wrote in the 1920s.

In Doris V. Sutherland’s book The Mummy, besides looking at She in more detail, she points out two other stories that probably inspired the film: “The Ring of Thoth” by Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Jewel of Seven Stars” by Bram Stoker. The details of these stories are outside the scope of this post (a scope I delineate according to my unpredictable whim), but I want to make it clear that even though The Mummy absolutely merits being called an instant remake of Dracula, it is also its own movie with its own constellation of influences. And Ravenloft is “just Dracula (the book)” but it is also Dracula, the movie; and it is also The Mummy and The Wolf Man and The Phantom of the Opera and probably one or more Frankenstein movies.

(Now we can ask: Did Francis Ford Coppola and James V. Hart take their tragic romance/reincarnation plot for Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Ravenloft? You can’t say the details aren’t similar. One can imagine that, in the same way some people are convinced that Dracula traditionally plays a church organ, certain nerds in the 1980s might have believed that Dracula had a doomed reincarnation thing going with Mina, just because they remembered that detail from Ravenloft. I can’t follow this rabbithole right now, though. We’re so close to finishing this post.)

Are We Done Yet?

Having shown to some extent how the Ravenloft narrative changes from edition to edition to meet the needs of each decade of nerds, I wanted to show how Ravenloft is an incarnation of not only the Dracula narrative but the Mummy narrative, itself an incarnation of the Dracula narrative (itself an incarnation of the Carmilla narrative and so on), which has undergone the same sort of repetition and revision. If we undertake to judge these incarnations by their faithfulness to the “original,” we will soon discover that there’s no such thing—only an infinite regress of influence and adaptation.

Let me open the scope of this statement by one more notch. People have variously interpreted the idea of a vampire as encoding ideas of imperialism, capitalism, aristocracy, homophobia, feminism-phobia, STD anxiety, xenophobia, antisemitism, mental illness, etc., etc. Any of these ideas may influence a given token of the vampire symbol; any of various critical frameworks may or may not apply felicitously to a given depiction. But none of these ideas are inherently linked to the vampire symbol, because it’s always possible for the symbol-user to disconnect that idea and decide that this time around, vampires mean something else. You can only establish that one depiction is “wrong” by appealing to some other depiction, which on examination will turn out to be equally arbitrary.

I guess I didn’t get around to saying “monosemism” or “polysemism.”