My journey to resurrect my great grand uncle Bram Stoker's legendary masterwork began for me what seems a lifetime ago. As a child, the connection to my famous ancestor always seemed to come to the forefront around Halloween. I didn't make a big deal about it later in life since I had never read the book. However, every now and then in some walk of life I would be introducing myself, or filling out a form and someone would say, "Stoker? Any relation to the guy who wrote Dracula?” I came to realize that there are many, many Dracula buffs out there. Dracula and vampirism certainly has had a huge impact on the world's culture. I guess that really shouldn't have surprised me since Bram's "Dracula" is published in 50 languages around the globe and is the second most popular selling book of all time after the Bible. Yet, I still had never gotten around to reading that darn book.

In 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. 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 really sad that all the trash Hollywood had put out had monumentally sullied Bram's and my family's literary legacy.

In my research, I realized that the history of Dracula is pretty tragic. Bram died before the book became popular and F.W. Murnau stole Bram's story for his 1921 film, Nosferatu. The family sued and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed, luckily a few survived. That unfortunate incident led the family to become so jaded that they never renewed the copyright and never received any royalties from any of the films about Dracula ever made. Only the Bela Lugosi/Todd Browning 1931 masterpiece was made with my family's blessing and cooperation—not surprisingly that film is considered a classic. The popularity of the Lugosi film actually only made matters worse. There was money to be made. When the Stoker family lost the rights they also lost control of Bram's characters. Hollywood and novelists, because the book is in the public domain, have cannibalized and bastardized the original story and characters so much over the last century, that Bram's genius original vision, except to the die hard fans, has practically lost to generations. It was many years later that I met an interesting character, Ian Holt , a screenwriter who had been obsessed with Dracula since he was a child. Ian had traveled to Transylvania and actually spent the night in the ruins of the historic Prince Dracula's castle in the town of Poenari. As a speaker at Dracula '97 in LA—the celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the release of Bram's novel—Ian met a friend who introduced him to the family and later tracked me down.

Ian's story ideas for a sequel to Bram's work really sparked a lot of those old feelings I had when I did my college paper. Ian and I decided to work together to reestablish the Stoker lineage and vision of the story by resurrecting Bram's original themes and characters just as Bram conceived them over a century ago. Our intent is to give both Bram and Dracula back their dignity. 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.