BBC's Dracula Miniseries: A Modern Vampire for the Streaming Age

The BBC miniseries 'Dracula,' adapted by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, premiered on BBC One and became available on Netflix on January 4, 2020. The three 90-minute episodes reimagine Bram Stoker's novel with a focus on knowledge, blood, and eroticism. Danish actor Claes Bang portrays a vampire who is intellectual, aristocratic, and sexually ambiguous, drawing from Hammer Film Productions' version rather than Nosferatu. The series shifts from the epistolary form to a more visceral narrative, featuring a chess game between Dracula and Sister Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells), a character given new prominence. The second episode, set on the ship Demeter, adopts a postmodern tone, while the third brings Dracula to 21st-century London, where he encounters Zoe Van Helsing, also played by Wells, a scientist with cancer whose blood is poison to him. The finale explores themes of love and death, with Dracula and Zoe sacrificing themselves. The series also introduces a Black Lucy Westenra as an 'It Girl' obsessed with vanity, critiquing contemporary culture. Gatiss and Moffat add irony and a new personality to Dracula, making him a skilled chess player and a dionysian, Byronic figure.