Re-Imagined Radio reprises a 2018 live recorded performance by
Metropolitan Performing Arts actors and other community volunteers at
Kiggins Theatre in downtown Vancouver, Washington. All new sound effects
and ambiences designed to send delightful shivers up your spine.

Dracula,
the legendary novel by Bram Stoker, first published in 1897, is
considered one of the greatest horror novels ever written. The novel
examines the concepts of lust, sex, gender roles, and society’s fears of
the unnatural during late 19th and 20th century Victorian society.
Today, we accept the reality of vampires. In Stoker’s time, they were
but myth. Nobody knew what they were, or how to deal with them. Over
time, the focus of its many interpretations has come to be how evil
abnormality can evolve from one source and infect the surrounding
society with discord and misfortunes. Dracula, the vampire, infects
others with his evil.

Stoker, an Irish writer and theatre
manager, drew inspiration for his novel from tales of Vlad the Impailer,
or Dracula, born 1431 into a noble Transylvania family. His father was
called “Dracul” because he belonged to the Order of the Dragon in
Romania. “Dracula” means “son of Dracul.” Therefore, Vlad was known as
“son of the dragon” or “son of the devil” which may have been the
beginning of the legend that he was a vampire.

As a warrior,
Vlad was known to impale people on stakes and leave them to die. He was
reported to have once dined among his victims, and to have eaten bread
dipped in their blood. Killed in 1476, Dracula’s head was cut off and
displayed in Constantinople. In 1931, archaeologists exhumed his grave
and took the skeleton to the History Museum in Bucharest, where it
disappeared, leaving many mysteries about Prince Dracula unanswered and
thus contributing to the legends surrounding Dracula.