That’s my Dracula

Vampires are everywhere you look today. Movies, television, Airline Highway. The superstar cast and crew of Twilight will roll into town soon, and now LSU English instructor John Edgar Browning ups Baton Rouge’s bloodsucker quotient with his latest book Dracula in Media, an encyclopedic look at 700 appearances of the character in film, theater, television and even videogames since 1921.

As a kid, Browning was seduced originally by Frank Langella’s dashing, amiable version of the iconic vampire in 1979’s Dracula. Then Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 created a Big Bang of vampire interest—and finally encouraged Warner Brothers to produce the adaptation of New Orleans author Anne Rice’s long-gestating The Interview with the Vampire.

“[With Coppola’s film,] suddenly Dracula’s mystique was forever shattered—or demystified—by the juxtaposition of Vlad Tepes of Romania,” Browning says. “The process of breathing life, and a sense of truth—be it partial or not—into the fictional character of Dracula astounded me. From then on, I was hooked.”

Dracula in Media is available now at the LSU Union bookstore, and on amazon.com.