Murray Mysteries: Dracula for the Modern Day
Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula has been adapted many times through the years, across a plethora of mediums. With more movies then you can shake a stick at, plays, television shows, and even a lackluster Broadway musical, the story of the vampire Count Dracula’s trip to torment the English and perish at the hands of the equally well-known Doctor Van Helsing has been told countless times throughout the decades.
Murray Mysteries, a Knöves Storytelling production, has taken up the task of adapting Dracula to audio drama. The show follows a modern Mina Murray looking into the weird goings on around town, as the greater, familiar mystery begins to unravel before her and her friends.
Murray Mysteries takes particular care in how it adapts the spirit of Dracula into a modern setting. But what does a modern faithful adaptation of Dracula even look like? Showrunner May Toudic is a PhD researcher focusing on modern literary adaptations of Victorian novels. This also made her the go to person for me to ask about this very topic.
“I’ve had a lot of people tell me this is the most faithful adaptation they’ve seen. As an adaptation scholar, I don’t consider faithfulness to be anywhere near the most important thing to strive for, but I am still very excited every time someone praises us on it – a compliment is a compliment! I think most of this faithfulness comes from two very different places. The most obvious one is direct reference to the novel. I write every episode with the book next to me, going through it page by page. When I really like a line, and I think it still works in our context, I will occasionally quote directly from the novel. But most importantly, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I’m writing around what I believe to be the core of the story. To me, Dracula is a found family narrative. Simple as that. A group of people are thrown together by circumstances and become very important to each other. Those narratives are very prominent in queer culture and stories, so changing elements of gender and sexuality when it comes to the characters wasn’t going to denature the story. If anything, it was going to highlight an element of it that was always there.”
-May Toudic, on adapting Dracula to modern times.
The format of the original novel really complements the modern state of audio drama horror. The book is a series of reports, journal entries, and statements from various characters, detailing the events of the story through different perspectives. A large number of audio drama horror podcasts follow this same format, sometimes staying with one character’s reports, or presenting an after action report of multiple characters’ perspectives. While the “found footage” nature of these shows are clearly inspired by movies like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project, given that Dracula is a literary classic, it’s not hard to argue that this style of horror owes some of its genes to Stoker’s novel.
Read more: The Audio Drama Renaissance
According to Toudic, retelling the story of Dracula in an audio drama medium was a bit more of a happy accident.
“…I wrote my Masters dissertation on web series adaptations of classic literature and was planning to make my own. That was the plan until I started trying to cast the series in the autumn of 2020 and realized that not only was the pool of dedicated, reliable actors in my remote Scottish university town limited, but there was very little chance I would actually be able to get those actors in the same room to film while respecting Covid safety regulations. I had been working on a fan-made online musical over the summer and really enjoyed the dynamics within our cast and crew, so I thought if I could change the format to have actors record separately, I would be able to work with these people I already knew and trusted. From there, audio drama seemed like an obvious choice. I grew up with big fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and The Bright Sessions, and I knew there was still a lot to be done in that medium, including adaptation – there are a lot of dramatic readings and full-cast audiobooks out there, but as far as I know, no audio drama adaptations of classic literature. Doing something so new, without much of a template, was somewhat terrifying but it was also really exciting. I taught myself to write and edit for audio, to find or make good foley, and to direct voice actors. It was and still is a lot of work, but the independent audio drama community is such a warm and supportive place, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
-May Toudic, on how Murray Mysteries became an audio drama
(Since Murray Mysteries launched, there have been a few more audio dramas coming down the pipeline that convert classic literature to audio, such as the upcoming Queer Pride and Prejudice. I guess Queer Dracula was both taken and assumed.)
Unlike the original novel’s starting point of Jonathan Harker’s No Good Very Bad Trip To Transylvania, this version of the story starts from Mina’s point of view, letting the audience meet the other characters before having to take on Dracula himself. As Toudic said, since Dracula is at its core a found family narrative, it’s important to get to know the found family.
There are several challenges to converting Victorian stories to modern times. Toudic is aware of these challenges, but sees the opportunities within them, so long as they are addressed responsibly.
“The lack of representation is a big one, but it is also a great opportunity. I think everything that could be considered a challenge is also really exciting if you look at it the right way. How do you infuse more representation into a very normative story? How do you update events that wouldn’t happen in the twenty-first century or jobs that no longer exist? Every one of these issues is an opportunity to do something new, something fun. For Dracula, the biggest challenge was probably to update the representation of mental illness. I didn’t want to dismiss Jonathan’s trauma the way the original novel seems to do, and I didn’t want to risk being offensive in my representation of Renfield, or any of Dr Seward’s patients, because the Victorian understanding of mental illness in the story is very much outdated. I did my best, partly with the help of our resident psychology student and partly by drawing from my own experiences and trying to show the characters as much compassion and understanding as possible.”
-May Toudic, on some of the common challenges of adapting Victorian novels and Dracula to modern time
Modern storytelling was built on the foundation of the stories that came before them. Dracula is one of these foundational stories, and flavors of it can be found in several newer stories. Murray Mysteries both honors this original story while using the tools that came out of its influence.
When thinking about adaptation and how it can go right or wrong, it’s understandable to question why we might continue to adapt old stories. What could we hope to add to these stories that aren’t already there in the original text? How many changes does it take for an adaptation to no longer match the spirit of the original property?
“Socially and culturally, a lot of the things we are grappling with right now can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Things like class structures, rapid technological advancements, queer subcultures, deep divisions in regards to race and gender… At the same time, these topics are often absent – or very veiled – in the literature of the time. So whether it means transposing Victorian stories into a modern setting or just revisiting that time period with a modern lens, adaptation allows us to fill these gaps, write over these silences and deal with our present through the past.”
May Toudic, on why we are drawn to retell Victorian stories
Seasons 1 and 2 of Murray Mysteries have already been released, with the third and final season coming soon.
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