Dracula: 10 References And Easter Eggs You May Have Missed

Bram Stoker's Dracula did a great deal to establish how we tend to think of the vampire as a horror archetype today. In traditional folklore in previous centuries, the vampire was more of a graveyard ghoul, closer to what we today would think of as ghosts and zombies than the undead aristocratic supervillain.

But Dracula was not the first character to play with the idea of a seductive vampiric aristocrat. Indeed, Stoker drew influence from some of the popular fictions earlier in his own century and Gatiss and Moffat pay tribute to them too here.

Amongst the fellow passengers that Dracula arranges to travel on the Demeter is one who willingly seeks a greater "partnership" with the Count and gives himself into Dracula's power. That character is named Lord Ruthven and that name is taken from one of Stoker's biggest influences.

Ruthven is the title character in The Vampyre, an 1816 story believed by many in the nineteenth century to be authored by poet and adventurer Lord Byron but actually the work of Byron's physician John Polidori. It turned the vampire into a seductive Byronic lord arriving mysteriously in London society (the name "Ruthven" was borrowed from a Byron-style character in the melodramatic novel Glenarvon by Byron's former lover Caroline Lamb).

Lord Ruthvens have featured in several vampire and Dracula stories between Polidori and Gatiss and Moffat including as the prime minister in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula novels and in both DC and Marvel comics, so it's a name with almost as much pedigree as that of Dracula himself.