Episode Details

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will! … Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring. … I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome …”

He’s no cartoon. He’s no misunderstood monster. Instead, the infamous Count Dracula is a hideous perversion of humanity. This parasitic undead being preys spiritually and physically on the innocent, and must be destroyed. Join us as we explore Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and its incredible reflections of good heroes who use common and sacred weapons to hunt and to slay this incredible evil.

Excerpt from Dracula

This starts with Dr. Van Helsing speaking. He’s not a cartoon or an action hero. He’s a gentle, fierce, and fatherly professor.

“But before we go let me see you armed against personal attack. I have myself, since you came down, prepared your chamber by the placing of things of which we know, so that He may not enter. Now let me guard yourself. On your forehead I touch this piece of Sacred Wafer in the name of the Father, the Son, and . . .”

There was a fearful scream which almost froze our hearts to hear. As he had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it . . . had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of whitehot metal. My poor darling’s brain had told her the significance of the fact as quickly as her nerves received the pain of it,and the two so overwhelmed her that her overwrought nature had its voice in that dreadful scream.

But the words to her thought came quickly. The echo of the scream had not ceased to ring on the air when there came the reaction, and she sank on her knees on the floor in an agony of abasement. Pulling her beautiful hair over her face, as the leper of old his mantle, she wailed out.

“Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement Day.”

They all paused. I had thrown myself beside her in an agony of helpless grief, and putting my arms around held her tight. For a few minutes our sorrowful hearts beat together, whilst the friends around us turned away their eyes that ran tears silently. Then Van Helsing turned and said gravely. So gravely that I could not help feeling that he was in some way inspired, and was stating things outside himself.

“It may be that you may have to bear that mark till God himself see fit, as He most surely shall, on the Judgement Day, to redress all wrongs of the earth and of His children that He has placed thereon. And oh, Madam Mina, my dear, my dear, may we who love you be there to see, when that red scar, the sign of God’s knowledge of what has been, shall pass away, and leave your forehead as pure as the heart we know. For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us. Till then we bear our Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His Will. It may be that we are chosen instruments of His good pleasure, and that we ascend to His bidding as that other through stripes and shame. Through tears and blood. Through doubts and fear, and all that makes the difference between God and man.”

There was hope in his words, and comfort.

Interview about the vampire with Geoffrey Reiter

Geoffrey Reiter (Associate Editor) is associate professor and coordinator of literature at Lancaster Bible College. He holds a BA in English from Nyack College and a Ph.D. in English from Baylor University, along with an MA in Church History from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the author of several academic articles on genre fiction and philosophy and has also written for Christianity Today online.

We explore questions like:

1. How did we both discover Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula?