Why we keep resurrecting Dracula: obsession, repression, and the gothic sublime

The first trailer for Dracula: A Love Tale opens with a crimson haze, a breathless voiceover, and the unmistakable silhouette of a predator cloaked in velvet. Directed by Luc Besson and starring Caleb Landry Jones as the infamous count, the film promises yet another romanticized descent into darkness. But the immediate response wasn’t awe. Early reactions raised concerns about stylized violence, toxic dynamics, and yet another portrayal of consent blurred under the guise of gothic seduction. Why, then, do we keep doing this? Why can’t we let him die?

More than a century after Bram Stoker gave Dracula to the world, the vampire refuses to remain buried. Whether cloaked in the melancholy of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu or reborn through the fevered lens of French cinema, the count returns again and again. Not because we’ve run out of stories, but because we still haven’t exorcised the one he represents.

This isn’t about one movie. It’s about a myth we can’t abandon. Dracula survives not in spite of his monstrous nature, but because of it. He is obsession personified. He is repression given form. He is the sublime terror that calls to something primal in us, something buried, shamed, and seductive. And every time he rises from the crypt, it is because some part of us asked him to.

The vampire as mirror: obsession and repression

From his first entrance into Western imagination, the vampire was never just a monster. He was a mirror. Gothic fiction thrives on the return of what has been buried, emotions denied, desires exiled, traumas left unspoken. And Dracula, more than any other creature of the genre, encodes that return with terrifying elegance.

Through his hunger, we glimpse the unbearable weight of human obsession. Through his touch, we confront the violence of desire that refuses to be tamed. In Freudian terms, he is the uncanny made flesh, the repressed that breaks through the surface with seductive menace. He crosses thresholds that are meant to remain closed: between life and death, lust and violence, consent and violation. Every bite is an intrusion, but also an invitation. Every victim is both terrified and transfixed.

There is a reason Dracula never reflects in the mirror. He isn’t there to be seen. He is there to reveal. He forces characters and viewers to face what they’ve locked away. And perhaps that’s why he still resonates. In an age of curated identities and relentless self-policing, Dracula embodies the collapse of control. He does not ask. He takes. And in his taking, he shows us what we’re afraid we might want.

The gothic sublime: terror as seduction

Dracula doesn’t just horrify. He mesmerizes. That dual pull is the essence of the gothic sublime, a concept rooted in Edmund Burke’s notion of awe born from terror. The sublime is not about safety or beauty. It is about standing at the edge of the abyss and feeling drawn to fall. Gothic art thrives in that space, crafting pleasure from dread, seduction from monstrosity.

Castles that crumble under moonlight. Corridors that seem to breathe. The soft rustle of silk just before the scream. These aren’t just set pieces. They are invitations. The gothic sublime turns anxiety into atmosphere, fear into intimacy. It allows us to approach the forbidden, not to resolve it, but to dwell in its intensity.

Dracula, more than any other figure, weaponizes this logic. His world is a slow spell of velvet and shadows, of whispered violations and shivering consent. He does not need to chase. He waits. The sublime works in his favor, because he is not simply terrifying. He is irresistible. And that is what unsettles us most.

To encounter Dracula is not to flee from horror, but to lean into it. To watch, transfixed, as the danger moves closer. To feel the chill and still want to stay. The gothic sublime does not rescue us from the nightmare. It teaches us to crave it.

The repetition compulsion: why Dracula keeps coming back

There is no definitive Dracula. Every generation summons its own. From Murnau’s spectral Orlok to Bela Lugosi’s velvet menace, from Coppola’s opulent decadence to Netflix’s fragmented postmodernism, the vampire is reborn endlessly, feeding not only on blood but on our collective anxiety. He does not evolve. He recurs.

This cycle speaks to more than cinematic fashion. Freud called it repetition compulsion, the drive to reexperience what haunts us in order to master it or at least contain it. Gothic fiction thrives on this loop. It tells the same story with different faces, reshaping the trauma without ever resolving it. Dracula is not a myth we grow out of. He is a wound we keep touching.

Each retelling tries to refine the monster or reframe the victim. Some soften him into a tragic lover. Others render him a symbol of corruption, decadence, or plague. Yet no matter how modern the costume or progressive the lens, the story remains the same. A stranger enters. A boundary is crossed. Someone gives in.

What we are reenacting is not just a narrative. It's a ritual. To resurrect Dracula is to acknowledge that something in us remains unresolved. His return is never arbitrary. It is cultural reflex. An echo that answers our deepest uncertainties with the same chilling whisper.

Between seduction and violence: consent in modern Dracula retellings

In every version of Dracula, the question is never simply who dies, but how. The horror lies not just in the blood, but in the surrender. The vampire myth has always blurred the line between passion and violation, and in a contemporary scenario shaped by sharper conversations around consent, that blur has become a site of tension and critique.

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) embraced this ambiguity with lavish dread. Visually striking but emotionally suffocating, the film was lauded for its atmosphere and condemned for its inertia. Lily-Rose Depp’s character, trapped in a cycle of suffering and stylization, reignited the old dilemma: when does gothic elegance become an excuse to aestheticize female pain? When does horror stop questioning power and start romanticizing it?

The same questions now shadow Dracula: A Love Tale. Early glimpses suggest a return to the sensual predator archetype, with Caleb Landry Jones cloaked in mystery and melancholy. But mystery is not consent, and melancholy is not redemption. The film’s promotional tone leans heavily on longing and possession, yet in doing so, may risk glorifying dynamics that should be interrogated, not indulged.

Modern Dracula stories no longer exist in a vacuum. They are haunted by previous versions, by cultural shifts, by new frameworks for understanding intimacy and control. Every creative choice is a negotiation: how to preserve the gothic allure without repeating its worst assumptions. And when that negotiation fails, Dracula stops being a metaphor and starts being a mirror we might prefer to shatter.

The vampire we deserve, the cultural ritual

He endures. Not through reinvention, but through repetition. He returns in cycles, summoned by a culture still fascinated by what he embodies. His presence is not about innovation. It’s about compulsion. About the need to revisit what disturbs us most, dressed in lace, shadows, and the illusion of control.

Each new version raises the same questions. Is he still dangerous? Still seductive? Still relevant? Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale is only the latest iteration of this recurring rite. What changes are the aesthetics, the actors, the historical lens. What remains is the ritual itself. A cultural exorcism disguised as entertainment.

Dracula speaks to what we repress but never resolve. He carries our secrets, our shame, our hunger. He seduces not because he is beautiful, but because he dares to cross lines we’re afraid to approach. His power is not just in what he does, but in what he awakens. And what he awakens refuses to be buried.

His return isn’t a revival. It’s a reckoning. We keep calling him back because we still crave the sublime, beauty that terrifies, horror that fascinates. He is the incarnation of that craving, the embodiment of what lies just past the boundary of restraint. As long as desire and dread remain entangled, he will rise again, timeless and inevitable.