Aside from Frankenstein’s creature perhaps, is there another movie monster as iconic as that most famous of vampires: Dracula? At the same time, has familiarity turned Dracula into something less than a monster? Is the famous count with the two pointy teeth still capable of instilling fear, or has he become too much of a cliché, even a cartoon? For our spooky October episode, Sam, Julie and Matt have packed their stakes, crucifixes and garlands of garlic and are heading to deepest Transilvania to look in on three versions of the Count, ironically starting with the one who isn’t even called Dracula: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), in which the wonderfully named Max Schreck played the famous vampire with the serial numbers filed off. Then there’s Christopher Lee, the tall, dark stranger, in Terence Fisher’s 1958 film Dracula (or Horror of Dracula, as it was called in the US); and finally, we check out Francis Ford Coppola’s self-proclaimed return to the original novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), in which Gary Oldman chews scenery at least as much as he nibbles on the necks of nubile Victorian ladies. How do these three films succeed at bringing the famous vampire to life (or should that be undeath)?

(And if this isn’t enough vampirism for you, there’s always our podcast episode on Werner Herzog, in which we touch on the director’s 1979 take on Nosferatu.)