Re-Imagined Radio presents Dracula

Re-Imagined Radio reprises a 2018 live recorded performance by Metropolitan Performing Arts actors and other community volunteers at Kiggins Theatre in downtown Vancouver, Washington. All new sound effects and ambiences designed to send delightful shivers up your spine.

Dracula, the legendary novel by Bram Stoker, first published in 1897, is considered one of the greatest horror novels ever written. The novel examines the concepts of lust, sex, gender roles, and society's fears of the unnatural during late 19th and 20th century Victorian society. Today, we accept the reality of vampires. In Stoker's time, they were but myth. Nobody knew what they were, or how to deal with them. Over time, the focus of its many interpretations has come to be how evil abnormality can evolve from one source and infect the surrounding society with discord and misfortunes. Dracula, the vampire, infects others with his evil.

Stoker, an Irish writer and theatre manager, drew inspiration for his novel from tales of Vlad the Impailer, or Dracula, born 1431 into a noble Transylvania family. His father was called "Dracul" because he belonged to the Order of the Dragon in Romania. "Dracula" means "son of Dracul." Therefore, Vlad was known as "son of the dragon" or "son of the devil" which may have been the beginning of the legend that he was a vampire.

As a warrior, Vlad was known to impale people on stakes and leave them to die. He was reported to have once dined among his victims, and to have eaten bread dipped in their blood. Killed in 1476, Dracula's head was cut off and displayed in Constantinople. In 1931, archaeologists exhumed his grave and took the skeleton to the History Museum in Bucharest, where it disappeared, leaving many mysteries about Prince Dracula unanswered and thus contributing to the legends surrounding Dracula.