Our Modern Dracula

There is no agreement on the literary merits of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Told from a series of letters, diary entries and ship manifests and laden with hyperbolic Victorian prose, the book itself is not always welcoming or engrossing. I admit my own disappointment in my first reading, and that I have only read the novel twice now (the second time it was far more enjoyable, perhaps because I had time to think about the count).

But what cannot be disputed is the staying power of Count Dracula. It hardly seems that a year goes by without the Count showing up in a movie, hardly a month where he is not alluded in a television show or children's program. Boris Karloff's face has become synonymous with plastic, colorful Halloween directions.

For better or worse, Dracula is one of western literature's most popular characters, perhaps only rivaled by Sherlock Holmes. 

However, many are ready to disavow Dracula as the king of monsters. Certainly, the works of Lovecraft are more literary and frightening than those of Stoker. The cosmic nihilism and occultism surrounding Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep is more frightening than a mustache-twirling monarch from the eastern steppes. One can make the argument that the mythos has undergone a similar process to that experienced by the count, one in which the source material has been continuously been added to, reinterpreted and re-imagined for new generations of readers and writers. But Cthulhu has yet to permeate the zeitgeist as much as Dracula. One need not look far for a Dracula costume, but Cthulhu...well...

So, if a monster were to emerge in our time, that would hit the same cultural resonances as the count, who would it be?

It is my opinion that we only have one answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3ZbnfXEuyc

Let me be clear about my argument:

Pennywise is clearly not a character created in a vacuum. The fear of clowns was nothing new in 1986, and the ultimate nature of the character seems to suggest no small amount of influence from Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. What makes Pennywise a groundbreaking and staying villain are his mannerisms, the drops between childlike innocence and extreme gore. His laugh, contorting in and out of the pipes that make a civilization's underbelly, and his ominous warning.

"Everything down here floats."

And then, there are thematic similarities to Dracula. Just as Dracula attacked women, a demographic which Victorian society viewed to be almost entirely helpless, Pennywise goes after children. As the Count cannot sleep without Transylvanian dirt, Pennywise is sewn into the very fabric of a small Maine town. Then, there is Henry Bowers, a sadistic bully who turns into a character quite similar to Dracula's Renfield.

Already another movie is being made. The first ruined clowns for my generation, and I cannot imagine that the remake will do anything less. Modern copyright law protects Pennywise from the sort of exploitation that made the count proliferate, but should the character ever become public domain it is hard to imagine that its legacy will end with its author. Or, leaving it to the man himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzC3ZZyC5Go