By Brian Boone
A lot of what people know about vampires stems from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. It’s inspired or been adapted into more than four dozen movies, including the comical 2023 take, Renfield, focusing on Dracula’s long-serving and long-suffering servant and mentee. With that film hitting theaters this month, here’s a look into the complicated history of Renfield.
• Renfield is often depicted as Dracula’s manservant, but he was originally much more than that. He worships Dracula as a godlike figure among men. In Stoker’s Dracula, R.M. Renfield is a 59-year-old resident of a mental health facility because he’s compelled to consume living things because he believes it will give them special powers. Dracula recruits him by sending him flies and moths.
• Renfield’s fate is a major plot of Dracula, not often seen in films. He attacks his attending physician and tries to escape, because he’s under the spell of Dracula. The vampire then strikes a bargain with Renfield — if he worships him, he’ll ensure his mortality by feeding him bugs and rodents.
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• While vampires don’t really exist — at least not in the sense that books and movies depict them, as immortals who sleep in coffins, can’t go out in the sun, and live forever because they drink human blood — there is an identified psychological disorder given as a diagnosis to people who think they’re vampires. Oddly, it’s not named after the most famous vampire, Dracula, but his devoted acolyte. First written about in 1992 by Dr. Richard Noll, Renfield’s Syndrome arrives in three stages — the patient consumes their own blood, then animal blood, and then the blood of other humans. Its name is just one of many examples of how influential the novel and character have been.
• The character of Renfield also single-handedly influenced a major vampire fiction trope. He inspired the concept of a “familiar,” or the vampire’s dutiful employee and bidding-doer, taking care of the boss’s needs and acquiring victims out of the wish and desire that they’ll someday “turn” them into a vampire.
Dracula is available now from Canterbury Classics.