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Queen Elizabeth I was known to be an all-powerful monarch, a warrior who defeated the Spanish Armada, a leader loved by her subjects and a muse for Shakespeare. The late Queen of England and Ireland - who ruled from 1558 until her death in 1603 - was so legendary that her reign was officially crowned the Elizabethan era, its very own epoch of the famed Tudor period. But one rumour has threatened to crack her tenable legacy, leading doubters to ask whether the Virgin Queen was the fiercely independent leader that history claims her to be.

An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, published just seven years before his legendary gothic novel Dracula. Brian Cleary stumbled upon the 134-year-old ghostly tale while browsing the archives of the National Library of Ireland. Gibbet Hill was originally published in a Dublin newspaper in 1890 - when the Irishman started working on Dracula - but has been undocumented ever since. Stoker biographer Paul Murray says the story sheds light on his development as an author and was a significant “station on his route to publishing Dracula”. The ghostly story tells the tale of a...

Dracula-centric projects, from Universal's remake to Renfield to the series The Brides are blooming. But what brought the Count back? Vampires are at the top of the horror-movie monster pyramid, and their fans have enjoyed watching them onscreen almost since the dawn of film as a medium. In the past decades alone, interest has peaked with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. However, despite being adapted many times, Dracula hasn't been a huge deal in pop culture since Francis Ford Coppola took the Count out for a spin in 1992, when the director adapted Bram...

Now you can own Dracula’s castle Transylvania's Bran Castle, long connected with Bram Stoker's indelible creation, is for sale. Count Dracula never lived in Bran Castle, in the Transylvania region of Romania, because he was a fictional character. But look, it’s a Gothic-looking castle in Transylvania — plus, Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker’s indelible creation, was reportedly imprisoned here. So it’s no surprise that it’s commonly called “Dracula’s Castle,” and that (like Transylvania’s Hunyad Castle and Poenari Castle in Wallachia) it’s often linked with the vampire legend. And now, you can own it. If you...

Although the novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, has surely been one of the most influential works of genre fiction ever written, ironically the central point of the book has nearly always been missed. Fortunately, a new novel co-written by Stoker’s great-grandnephew brings that aspect of the Dracula myth back to its appropriate place of primacy. Stoker’s clear intention in the original novel Dracula was to make the devil, literally Satan, real to readers by depicting a naturally occurring but preternatural stand-in, Count Dracula. This is indicated throughout the book by direct references to Dracula as a devil, and by imagery...