Forget Twilight's Robert Pattinson: The original Dracula's back

From Vancouver Sun

"My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries and time is on my side."

— Dracula, from Bram Stoker's Dracula

While today's vampires seem more intent on wining us than dining on us, something truly wicked this way comes. Again.

That seemingly toothless pretty-boy Edward Cullen better start baring his fangs, and True Blood's Bill Compton may want to go elsewhere to do his brooding and down his synthesized blood: Drac is back — and with him, a reminder that true vampires are far more monster than man.

Just when the pop cultural craving for all-things-vamp seems like it couldn't get any more bloodthirsty, Dracula is returning in a sequel to Bram Stoker's classic. Dracula: The Un-dead, co-written by Canadian Bram Stoker descendant Dacre Stoker, will be released Oct. 13.

From TV's The Vampire Diaries to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, vampires themselves have changed dramatically from Stoker's late 19th-century classic novel. So, what sets Dracula apart from more sympathetic, humanized vamps such as Twilight's Edward or Anne Rice's vampire Lestat?

The answer is plain, simple — and bone-chilling, says Canadian Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller: the Dracula of Stoker's vision was pure "evil."

"He is someone to be feared, he is powerful. He is the (ultimate) bad guy," says Miller, an English professor emeritus from Newfoundland and Labrador's Memorial University who taught courses on Gothic English literature and is now the Canadian head of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. "He was physically repulsive . . . If you look at these vampires today, you just want to ogle over them — they are just to die for. But . . . Stoker describes (Dracula) as being repulsive. He has bad breath, long pointed finger nails, pointed ears . . . Even though he has seductive power, it is not seductive power in the way we think of it today . . . It was more that he could read people's minds and had full control over them."

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