Neither Dracula or Castlevania were entirely the first of their kind. Bram Stoker did not invent the idea of the vampire, nor did he ever claim to. That honor is a little tricky to pin on any one individual, but one of the first documented works of fiction to tackle the subject was a 1748 poem known as The Vampire written by Heinrich August Ossenfelder. That poem, and a brief vampire craze in the early 1700s, was inspired by the rumors that two exhumed corpses in Serbia may have been vampires. Even in his time, Stoker was beaten to the publishing punch by Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a story about a lesbian vampire, and John William Polidori’s 1819 classic, The Vampyre.

Similarly, Castlevania was far from the first game to feature horror elements. What initially separated the game from the pack, however, were its influences and genre. Unlike games such as Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Atari that had attempted to capitalize on the latest horror hits, Castlevania’s influences can be traced back to the Universal era of horror films. It also didn’t try to scare players like 1986’s Uninvited did but rather take them on an adventure filled with allusions to classic horror. As part of the second wave of NES releases in North America, Castlevania’s approach to this subject matter helped it to become one of the first notable action platformer titles.

Dracula benefited from the same approach. It was published at a time when Victorian readers were obsessed with good adventure novels, which would help to explain why Stoker wrote Dracula to be just as much of an adventure story as a horror novel. The book was frightening to be sure (it was, perhaps, the scariest book of its time), but readers and critics back then were just as likely to speak fondly of Dracula’s more exciting moments as they were its macabre aspects.

One of the reasons why Dracula worked as an adventure novel was because of the character Abraham Van Helsing. Van Helsing was one of the first characters in all of vampire fiction that seemed capable of, and willing to, directly oppose these creatures of the night. He and his band of fellow hunters travel the world to confront Dracula and his vampire horde. This idea of a vampire hunter also allowed Stoker to craft a vampire that was worthy of hunting. His Dracula had many weaknesses for Van Helsing to exploit but was also capable of a great many powers that previous vampires did not necessarily possess. It is the dynamic of these two characters that allowed Dracula to function as a tale of good vs. evil.

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