Journals of the Undead

Tag: bram stoker

  • Mina Harker

    Out of all Mina Harker’s I’ve seen, there’s only one I like: Peta Wilson’s Mina in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The worst one, in my opinion, was Helen Chandler’s Mina in Dracula (1931). Bela Lugosi was superb in his role and that’s why his Count Dracula is iconic. As for Mina… She was reduced to a mere background character – shame on you, script writers.

    If you’ve read Bram Stoker’s novel then you know what Mina was like: she was written as a strong character and played an important role in tracking down Dracula. Without her contribution, the others wouldn’t have found him when Dracula fled London. Stoker wrote her as a woman of the future.

    What about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), you might ask? Well, Winona Rider’s Mina was too easily led for my liking. Her getting charmed by Dracula I could understand, Gary Oldman’s Dracula was quite likeable, but there was one scene that ruined the film for me. SPOILER ALERT: when Mina tried to seduce Van Helsing and declared her love for Dracula I had to cover my eyes because it was so bad and out of character. And it made me question her feelings towards Jonathan.

    Ok, ok, I know that film adaptations can be different from the original source. My peeve is that some of those adaptations take a strong character and make her weak. Which is very different from having a weak character that becomes strong as the story progresses – that is called character growth. When the opposite happens it’s called regress.

  • Books That Inspired Journals of the Undead

    Books That Inspired Journals of the Undead

    I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life and the amount of books I’ve read far exceeds the amount of stuff I’ve put on paper myself. When I do write, as it often happens, inspiration comes from an unexpected source.

    I’ve mentioned before that I was studying at uni when I wrote Journals of the Undead and, as part of a research, needed to borrow The Capital by Karl Marx from the library. I had read some of the works by Charles Dickens (Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol) before so I knew that London in the 1800s was a tough place for the poor but what I read in The Capital was truly shocking. When I started to work on Tiredness, the first story, I incorporated some of that into the story so that we wouldn’t forget how bad things used to be and avoid history from repeating itself. Sadly, there is still plenty of workplace exploitation and poor living conditions in the 21st century.

    Fast forward to the 9th chapter, Revelry, which was inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray with its decadence and the main character’s questionable morals. I’ve always loved Oscar Wilde’s witty language and cracking one liners and I remembered some of them whilst coming up with my own ones. Revelry was written in late 2009, around the same time when the film Dorian Gray came out so it was influenced by that as well, in addition to Wilde’s original story.

    Dracula by Bram Stoker. This book left such a big impression on me that it was written into the novel. In the 5th chapter, Encounter, three of the characters are discussing the book, when they first read it and how it affected them.

    Poetry… Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats are among my favourite poets. All three are mentioned throughout the stories and a supporting character is named after one of them.

    Another author I want to mention in this post is Jorge Luis Borges. None of his works directly influenced Journals of the Undead but I love how timeless his stories are and was intrigued when I learned that, for Borges, his stories were never really finished, they remained live: he would rewrite or edit them throughout his life meaning that different editions of the same book could be rather different.