Nicolae Padararu

Mr. Padararu was more than influential in spreading the lore about Dracula, as key figures behind DTU can attest.  He passed away at the age of 72 after a long battle with cancer.  We share our sympathies with his family during this time, and we thank Mr. Padararu for his dedication to sharing the story of Dracula.

The obituary is available here, via CESNUR.

By Johnny Caldwell
BBC News

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7976938.stm

Published: 2009/04/01 14:08:09 GMT

© BBC MMIX

DRACULA AUTHOR’S DESCENDANT

JOSH WINGROVE

October 1, 2008

As a child, it was easy for Dacre Stoker to pick a Halloween costume.

Mr. Stoker said he knew he was a blood descendant of Bram Stoker, author of the iconic Dracula, as a boy growing up in Montreal.

“When Halloween time came, it was like, ‘you’re a Stoker!’” remembers Mr. Stoker, 50, who now lives in South Carolina.

“You may be related to one of the greatest writers in history, but you don’t make a big deal about it.”

Print Edition – Section

He later confirmed that he was, precisely, the great-grandnephew of Abraham (Bram), and left it at that.

So, it came as a surprise when he got an e-mail from Ian Holt about five years ago. Mr. Holt, a New-York-based Dracula historian, wanted to “resurrect” the classic tale – which has been the subject of dozens of subsequent novels and films, none of which appeared to bear the Stoker name.

So Mr. Holt, 39, recruited the living Mr. Stoker to take part. Today, they have finished The Un-Dead, a 568-page manuscript set to see daylight next fall.

“I got in touch with Dacre and he thought I was this nut job. But after listening to me and discussing my vision of what I had in mind, he got very interested,” said Mr. Holt, an actor who originally pitched the idea as a film.

“He came up with the idea that if we really want to honour Bram, we should do it like a novel first. And it took off like a rocket.”

The novel is set 25 years after its famous predecessor, and follows the story of Quincey Harker, the son of original characters Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray. It ills in the back stories of the original characters while advancing the story of young Quincey, Mr. Holt said. He refused to go into specifics, saying only that a slew of characters reappear. Mr. Holt and Mr. Stoker have sold the Canadian, British and American publishing rights for several million dollars, their publishers say, and shooting is scheduled to begin on a film adaptation next year.

The Un-Dead has since swept up the lives of Mr. Holt and Mr. Stoker, a former teacher and Canadian Olympic pentathlon coach. He now works as a seminar instructor of, among other things, blood-borne pathogens.

“I’ve got a fascination with the body, having been a coach and athlete … the role of getting your blood in really good condition to compete. And here I am with this other side of me,” he said in an interview late yesterday evening.

“Yeah, I’ve got a lot to live up to.”

Stoker’s blood relation resurrects Dracula

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk,
• Monday October 06 2008 14:42 BST
• Article history

  Van Helsing and his intrepid band of vampire hunters might have disposed of Bram Stoker’s creation Dracula more than a century ago, but a sequel to the novel by Stoker’s great grand-nephew will see them under attack from the undead once again.

Dacre Stoker delved into his ancestor’s handwritten notes on the original Dracula novel to pen his sequel, Dracula: The Un-Dead – the original name for Dracula before an editor changed the title. The novel, out next October, draws on excised characters, existing character back-stories and plot threads that were cut from Stoker’s original novel, first published 111 years ago.

The new book is set in London in 1912, a quarter of a century after the Count apparently “crumbled into dust”. Vampire-hunter Van Helsing’s protégé Dr Seward is now a disgraced morphine addict, and Quincey, the son of Stoker’s hero Jonathan, has become involved in a troubled theatre production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself. The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents’ terrible secrets, but before he can confront them a family member is found murdered, impaled in Piccadilly Circus.

The original is written in classic epistolatory form, alternating between different narrators; the sequel adopts a more direct storytelling route. “[This] makes it more immediately accessible to a modern thriller readership, while remaining faithful to the spirit and atmosphere of the Victorian original,” said publisher Jane Johnson of HarperCollins UK.

The book has caused a storm in the publishing world, selling for more than a million dollars to Dutton US, HarperCollins UK and Penguin Canada. A film version is also in the works, with shooting expected to begin next June.

Dacre Stoker, who formerly coached the Canadian Olympic Pentathlon team and now lives in the US, is writing the novel with Dracula historian Ian Holt, a member of The Transylvanian Society of Dracula. The Un-Dead is the first Dracula story to be fully authorized by the Stoker family since the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi.

Stoker said he only got around to reading his great grand-uncle’s novel when he went to college. “Word got out about my family connection to the old vamp and I grew tired of being unable to answer people’s questions. So, I chose to finally break down and read the novel for a research paper on Bram and his possible motivations to write the story,” he said. “I had seen so many film versions of Dracula and was terribly surprised that very few of the films had any resemblance to Bram’s original novel. Because the novel was so good and had stood up so well over the years, I found it exceedingly sad that all of the trash Hollywood had put out monumentally sullied Bram’s and my family’s literary legacy.”

Stoker later met Holt, a screenwriter, and the pair decided to work together to resurrect Bram Stoker’s original themes and characters. “Our intent is to give both Bram and Dracula back their dignity,” Stoker said. “Maybe even more important is to give the novel’s legions of loyal fans what they have been waiting over a century for … the return of the real Dracula.”

Stoker’s original Dracula, the forefather of the wave of vampire novels currently flooding the bookshops, has never been out of print since it was published in 1897, and according to Dacre Stoker’s agent is only outsold by the Bible. The sequel will be competing with two other high profile vampire novels published next year: film director Guillermo del Toro’s debut The Strain, about a vampiric virus which invades New York, and Justin Cronin’s The Passage, about a vampire plague spawned by medical experiments.

Arts, Briefly

Dracula Lives

Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF

Count Dracula, the great-granddaddy of vampires, is poised for a comeback (not counting any previous incarnations in which he was portrayed by Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, George Hamilton or Udo Kier). That Transylvanian bloodsucker will return in a new novel whose authors include the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, the author of the original “Dracula,” the novel’s publisher announced. The new book, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, a Dracula historian, was acquired for United States publication by Dutton Books. It is scheduled for an October 2009 release and will be the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Lugosi. Film rights for “Dracula: The Un-Dead” were also acquired by a group of producers that includes Jan de Bont, the director of “Speed” and “Twister.

Copyright 2008 New York Times

DRACULA: THE UN-DEAD

LONDON, 1912: Someone is stalking the brave band of heroes who had defeated the vampire Dracula a quarter-century ago.  Could it be the vampire that was thought to be dead and buried is yet the un-dead?

Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew and blood descendant, Dacre Stoker, and award-winning Dracula documentarian and historian Ian Holt have sold North American-English publishing rights of the Stoker-family-authorized sequel to Bram’s classic novel for well over mid – seven figures U.S. to an alliance of Dutton U.S. (Brian Tart), Harper U.K. (Jane Johnson), and Penguin-Canada (Laura Shin) brokered by Danny Baror of Baror International and Ken Atchity, of Atchity Entertainment International, the literary manager representing Stoker and Holt. The novel will appear in October 2009.

Laura Shin, senior editor of Penguin-Canada, who signed up for two additional sequels, said , “I was thrilled by this page-turning story and loved spending time with those great characters-Stoker and Holt did a fantastic job melding the old with the new, and I found the work to be a virtually seamless continuation of the original. The story has all the hallmarks of a historical novel, but with a modern sensibility that gives it wide-spread appeal.” Dutton and Harper signed a single novel deal. Although other precedent-setting foreign deals are already closed from preempts, Baror is planning to sign the bulk of world territories at the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair.

Using Stoker family connections, the writers were able to access Bram Stoker’s hand-written notes for his novel – which, before an editor changed the title, was to have been called The Un-Dead. “Our story,” said Stoker, “includes characters and plot threads that had been excised by the publisher from the original printing over a century ago.” Dracula is one of the most recognized fictitious characters in the world, having spawned dozens of books and movies; the original novel, according to historians’ best estimates, has sold millions of copies-second only to the Bible, available in over fifty languages–and generated hundreds of millions of dollars. The Un-Dead is the first Dracula story to enjoy the full support of the Stoker clan since the original 1931 movie starring Bela Lugosi. Lugosi’s appearance in Hamilton Deane and John Balderston’s stage production of the story on Broadway in New York fifteen years after Bram Stoker’s death in 1927 sparked the original novel’s bestselling popularity.

It has never been out of print since.

AEI’s Ken Atchity, Chi-Li Wong, and Michael T. Kuciak (”Life or Something Like It,” “Joe Somebody,” “Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not!”) will produce the film with Blue Tulip’s Jan de Bont (”Twister,” “Speed,”
“Minority Report”), and are expecting to see it go before the cameras in June ‘09. The script has been completed by Ian Holt with the story co-written by Alexander Galant, who are both managed by AEI and agented by Ron Gwiazda and Amy Wagner at Abrams Artists.

Both Stoker and Galant are Canadian, though Stoker now lives in the U.S. and Holt, who has visited Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania and is a member of The Transylvanian Society Of Dracula, lives in Long Island, New York.