What Inspired Me
The scene: It’s January 4, 2020 and you don’t know what you want to watch. You and your partner spend 45 minutes trading ideas, working the unruly list down to about three candidates. After extensive debate, you finally settle on something and open Netflix to see this on the homepage:
I have no idea what we were supposed to watch that night, because the moment I saw this, nothing else mattered. I needed it. I was already enthralled by Claes Bang only having seen the trailer. I’d never heard of him before, but the moment I saw him, I knew he was perfect for the role.
Just a few months earlier, my partner had unwittingly unlocked a piece of me that had long lay dormant: a bona fide, certifiable neckbeard. Turns out, I have unreasonably strong opinions about Count Dracula—who he is, what he should look like, dress like, talk like… everything. I’ll save the nerd-out for Tumblr, but suffice to say, I have very high standards for the character.
When I saw Claes, it was like the hells had opened and finally delivered unto us the man who was meant to be Dracula. Everyone is going to have their preferences—there are a lot of great performances out there, and you certainly can’t deny the charm of Bela Lugosi or the menace that is Christopher Lee—but for me, Claes is king.
Claes in BBC's Dracula (2020), episodes one, two, and three from left to right
The team behind the 2020 Dracula series must be commended for what they accomplished. Claes Bang’s co-stars, Dolly Wells and John Heffernan, brought their A-game with standout performances in their own right. The writers, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, tiptoed the fine line between honoring the original story while infusing it with new energy and new ideas. The first two episodes are completely flawless (in my flawless opinion) and bring a fresh take to the story while keeping the essence of Dracula intact. The third episode is very divisive, taking a hard turn into modern-day England—but I loved it. It was creative, bold, and irreverent and it was something I’d never seen before, which leads me to…
This series’ approach to retelling the story with their own spin was so inspiring that I started to think about how I’d write a Dracula story. How would I change it, without changing too much? How would my Dracula differ from the Draculas envisioned by Stoker, or Lugosi, or Bang?
I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I started jotting down notes and ideas, which then inspired more ideas for me to write down. Before I knew it, I was outlining a series. I wanted to do what Moffat and Gatiss had done—tell a modern-day Dracula story, but I also wanted to tell a backstory for Dracula that would flip the script on Stoker’s novel, like what Winnie Holzman did with The Wizard of Oz when she turned it into Wicked.
I was torn, and for the first few months, I flip-flopped between Medieval and modern. I had so many ideas, and no idea where to start. Eventually, I reasoned that if I wanted to tell both stories, I needed to write them in chronological order—I didn’t want the modern timeline spoiling what happens in the Medieval one.
So, I got to work and began with a few key questions that shaped the foundation for the series:
What happened between Dracula and the Church?
Why is he so adverse to the Crucifix, but not other religious symbols? If he’s a manifestation of evil, or the Devil, you’d think any symbols of God—regardless of faith or creed—would garner the same response.
To me, this suggests there is history between Dracula and the Christian Church, so I wrote it.
Who was Dracula’s mystery lover referenced in Stoker’s novel?
We only hear of this lover once, when Jonathan is pretending to be heavily sedated after being ambushed by the brides. Dracula intervenes and reprimands his brides, claiming Harker as his own. They whine and cry: “You yourself never loved. You never love!"
And that’s when we get the briefest glimpse into Dracula’s past: “Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:— ‘Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past.’”
There is a story here, and one I don’t think we’ve truly seen explored. Some adaptations have dabbled with the idea, playing it safe with some sort of weird love triangle with Mina Harker, which doesn’t make a lot of sense and is just… unsatisfying. So, I wrote what I’d wished someone else had written: a fitting love story worthy of such a prominent part of Dracula’s past.
Copyright 2025 Rian C. Stone. All rights reserved.