Dacre, it is a pleasure to ask you some questions about Bram Stoker. Can you tell us where Bram got his inspiration to write ‘Dracula’?
Dacre Stoker (DS): I have been studying Bram’s possible inspirations and motivations, his research and his writing of Dracula for the past 15 years. What I have come up with is that his gothic masterpiece can be best described as a perfect storm of events, which blended his personal life with real life events that he included in the novel, as well as meticulous research.
I feel very strongly that Bram absorbed his dark and deep sense of imagination while growing up in Ireland, stemming from traditional Irish folklore about banshees, pookas, and changelings. He even mentioned in the one interview that he had always been interested in the legend of the vampire and it is “a very fascinating theme, since it touches both on mystery and fact". In the Middle Ages the terror of the vampire depopulated whole villages.
What was it like for Bram to grow up in Dublin at that time?
DS: Bram was born in Black 1847, not a great time to be born as Ireland was suffering from a cholera epidemic and a potato famine, people in the countryside were starving from lack of food, they came into the cites looking for handouts, as a result there was disease and poverty. The scene was described by one as people looking like the walking dead…very sad.
For Bram it was worse. He himself suffered from an undiagnosed illness that lasted until he was 7 years old and confined him mostly to his bed. With the stories he was told of Irish folklore and superstition and his mother´s story of her surviving the cholera epidemic in Sligo as a child, he had plenty of time to develop a rather macabre sense of imagination. It probably did contribute to his writing of Dracula years later.