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metal pipe. Bodies had to be aligned just so. Once the clamps were removed, the donor’s heart literally served as a blood pump. But, like gassing up the SUV without benefit of a meter, the transfer was difficult to measure. Too much blood? Too little? In some cases, the blood donor was simply weighed before and after “the operation,” to borrow Stoker’s apt phrase, and the difference used to estimate the volume taken. (A bit late, no?) In Dracula, Van Helsing demonstrates an alternate method. For several tense minutes, his gaze darts among Lucy, Arthur, and his pocket watch, used to time the flow. Once some unexplained threshold is reached, he announces, “It is enough.”

It is enough. A bloom returns to Lucy’s cheek, and the possibility of her heart being overwhelmed by too much blood has passed. Arthur, who could’ve suffered excessive blood loss, is shaky but also fine. While the medical dangers have been avoided, however, a supernatural one remains. Dracula, unbeknownst to all, continues to feed on Lucy. Over the next ten days she receives three more transfusions, each helping her less. The heroic efforts fail to save Lucy’s life. Dracula drinks her to death, and Arthur’s dream of marrying the beautiful young woman is dashed. Heartbroken, he consoles himself with the fact that a consummation of sorts had taken place: “The transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride.”

Performing “the operation” of transfusing blood

But alas, Dracula’s bride as well.

Dr. Van Helsing, demonstrating a knack for good guesses, concludes that poor dead Lucy is now one of the Un-Dead. A trip to the cemetery later confirms his hypothesis. Lucy lurks among the tombstones, feeding off a child. Transformed by Dracula’s blood, she is “like a nightmare of Lucy,” her sweetness “turned to adamantine,” her purity to “voluptuous wantonness.” She approaches Arthur, who has joined the doctor: “My arms are hungry for you,” she purrs. A brandished crucifix forces her retreat.

In the scene set the night thereafter, Stoker was clearly intent on steaming his audience’s reading glasses. The lid of Lucy’s coffin is lifted and her sultry form is revealed. With meaty stake in hand, Arthur awakens her with a great thrust. Lucy writhes, moaning behind deep red lips. Her “body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions.” Arthur plunges again, drawing blood. “He looked like a figure of Thor,” hammering, “driving deeper and deeper.” But for the reality of the stake that finally pierces her heart, she seems to be enjoying this. Lucy gives a final shudder, then is still. If Dracula is even aware of her demise, he doesn’t give a damn. Once he’s “turned” a woman, he loses all interest in her and moves on.

JUST BENEATH THE SURFACE, BARELY, DRACULA IS A CAUTIONARY TALE about the evils of submitting to one’s darkest desires. This reflects Bram Stoker’s Victorian and Christian sense of morality. At the same time, the writer was savvy enough to know that excessive finger-wagging does not a bestseller make. By making the sex metaphorical, he was able to push against the edge of propriety, just this side of objectionable, without sullying either his own or his upstanding characters’ reputations. Lucy, for instance, dies a virgin, despite her having been, forgive the inelegance, penetrated countless times in various ways—fanged by Dracula, poked by doctors, infused with donor blood, staked by her fiancé. In the end, as death releases the vampirism from her body, Lucy returns to a picture of purity, her original self. What Stoker accomplished with words reminds me some of Alfred Hitchcock’s approach to horror while shooting his 1960 film Psycho. When asked after its release why he hadn’t used color film, which was, of course, available at the time, Hitchcock replied, “Because of the blood. That was the only reason.” Had he shot the infamous shower stabbing scene in Technicolor, the studio censors would’ve done their own slashing. “I knew very well I’d have the whole sequence cut out,” he said. In black and white, though, he could get away with,