The story begins with Jonathan Harker’s journal. Explaining himself clearly, Harker sets the scene, he being a real-estate solicitor sent to help the Count Dracula order himself for the forthcoming move to the estate Harker has purchased for him in England. The opening sequence stays with the ideas of basic horror literature. It is a dark night with a full moon, and Harker travels in a small coach through ominous woods. Leonard Wolf states in his preface to Dracula that the typical gothic settings include ”…ruined castles, noisome caves, prison cells, vaults, sepulchers, monasteries or convents. There are rooms with trapdoors, secret passageways, portraits that leave their walls and walk, animated skeletons, and talking ghosts, ” all of which are incorporated in Dracula. Stoker has employed classic horror elements to create the sense of foreboding that is present throughout the novel. Harker’s first vision of the castle Dracula shows the gothic presence that Stoker has used to relay Dracula’s story.

”Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.”

Brian Lumley, a British author, has created his own vampire universe with his Necroscope series. Although his books have several other plot lines in which vampires are only a part, they still retain a certain gothic feeling that is reminiscent of Dracula. In this section, Lumley describes the tomb of an ancient vampire, Thibor.

”Hewn from the raw stone of the hillside itself, the tomb had long since caved in; most of its roof of massive slabs lay in a tangle of broken masonry, where the flags of the floor were cracked and arched upwards from the achingly slow groping of great roots. A broken stone joist, leaning now against the thickly matted ruin of a side wall, had once formed the lintel above the tombs wide entrance; it bore a vague motif or coat of arms, hard to make out in the gloom.”

The description follows closely to Wolf’s interpretation of a gothic scene. Another instance in Vamphyri! where there is obvious influence from Dracula is when the character Thibor describes his vision of the castle belonging to the vampire Faethor Ferenczy.

”Picture it, then, that strange old castle up in the mountains: its walls wreathed in mist, its central span arching over the gorge, its towers reaching like fangs for the rising moon.”

Anne Rice, considered the modern daughter of Dracula, has also incorporated these essential gothic elements in her Vampire Chronicles. Within her current six books she has captured nearly every aspect of the vampire culture. She has set her scenes not in ancient ruined castles, but in a romantic, 17th century New Orleans plantation house.

”And the harpsichord; that was lovely. My sister used to play it. On summer evenings, she would sit at the keys with her back to the open French windows. And I can still remember that thin, rapid music and the vision of the swamp rising beyond her, the moss-hung cypresses floating against the sky. And there were the sounds of the swamp, a chorus of creatures, the cry of birds. I think we loved it. It made the rosewood furniture all the more precious, the music more delicate and desirable. Even when the wisteria tore the shutters off the attic windows and worked its tendrils right into the whitewashed brick in less than a year.”

The southern atmosphere, though drastically different from Dracula’s disheveled mountain castle, still seems a proper setting for a horror novel. There is a sense of decay, a balance between life and death, which mirrors the plot of the story. The land is yet unconquered and mysterious, just as the characters of Rice’s story take the reader on a conquest of undiscovered territory: the territory of a vampire.