After his bride disappears on their European honeymoon, Richard Renfield traces her to a castle ruin in the Carpathian mountains, and confronts its undead inhabitants, determined to restore her to life and bring her home.

SYNOPSIS:

Note - This script was written before LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER (by my friend, screenwriter Bragi Schut) and the Nicholas Cage film, RENFIELD, were both written and produced. It is a serious attempt to be a prequel to Bram Stoker's DRACULA. Because the films listed above have been produced, I am aware that there may be little interest in another Dracula-based film for the present. However, this is one of the best screenplay I have written, and it deserves a place here.

I have always had problems with the concept of vampire stories in general, and Bram Stoker’s tale, DRACULA, in particular. First, the mythology of vampirism holds that after the vampire bites their victim, either very soon, or over several similar attacks, the victim becomes a vampire, too. This seemed to me to be an “Achilles Heel” to the concept, as, just like the miracle of “compounding interest,” legions of newly-created vampires would soon over-run the world.

Second, the Stoker tale begins splendidly, but after the “first act,” it becomes a kind of 19th Century “soap opera,” returning, as it does, to England and its dreary English “classist” social scene. Fortunately, for the novel, it manages to get back to a narrative drive in the denouement in “Act 3,” with the chase back to Transylvania. But, by then, the story had lost me, the reading experience having become a boring slog. Still, an appeal lingered.

And I had been bothered about one detail from the novel: how had Dracula, while still aboard ship on the voyage to England, come into psychic contact with the hospitalized Renfield? To me, it made no sense. It’s never explained, and it seemed to imply that they had met somewhere in the past. But, nowhere was that episode provided. And, how was it, if it had happened, that Renfield had survived it? I thought: therein lies a tale. And in it, I discovered the answer to my vampire population problem, not to mention the dreary confines of 19th Century England.

THE SLEEP OF REASON is a prequel to Stoker’s story, telling how the lunatic, Renfield, originally met and survived his first encounter with Dracula in Transylvania. And, this story, primarily, takes place where the original always should have, in that ruin of a castle in the Carpathian Mountains. The narrative moves across 30 years, with Renfield, a resident of Carfax Asylum, the patient of Dr. Manfred Devorer, one of the new breed of psycho-therapists, and a rival of Freud. In a harrowing series of sessions, the two stories running in parallel, Devorer dissects Renfield’s memories of the experience, forcing him to re-live it:

On a business trip to America during the Civil War, Englishman, Richard Renfield, in New Orleans before its fall, meets a young woman, Elsbeth, rescues her from a difficult employer, they fall in love, and he whisks her out of the war, and back to England. Against his family’s wishes, he marries her, and is promptly disowned. No matter…

On their honeymoon, a backdoor tour of the real Europe (i.e., “on the cheap”), Renfield’s bride vanishes from their hotel room. Shattered, Renfield sets out to find her, searching fruitlessly for months. Eventually, he returns to England, and over the next two years, finding no direction or happiness, he enters a seminary, intending to become a priest. But, then, just prior to his ordination, he realizes that he is still married, believes, in fact, that Elsbeth is, somehow, still alive. So he asks for a stay, and, now, with all the knowledge of a priest, but none of its constraints, he returns to Transylvania, determined, now, to find her.

All of this happens by page 30, in the first act.

Back in the village where she had disappeared, he redoubles his search, eventually discovering a link to his wife through an old peasant woman and a Gypsy wine merchant, supplier to the inn-keeper where they had stayed. The Gypsy tells him of a castle ruin in the mountains, hinting of a connection. So, Renfield hires the wine merchant to take him there.

They ascend into the desolate wilderness until they arrive at the “abandoned” castle, straddling a mountain peak. Approaching a massive, studded door, Renfield attempts to enter, but finds it locked and barred. The Gypsy refuses to go further than the courtyard outside the battlements. He sets up a tent alongside the wagon, and placing various “armaments” and strange “barriers” at the entrance, he leaves the wagon to Renfield. By now, Renfield realizes what the Gypsy is guarding against. But, with darkness and a storm coming on, he decides to find entry to the castle in the morning, and settles inside the wagon for the night.

The Gypsy had provided Renfield with a unique wine distilled from garlic with a variety of masking fruits. As the storm arrives, and Renfield steels himself with the wine, he’s bitten by a large “spider,” and begins to hallucinate. Then, visited at the storm’s peak by something crawling first on the wagon’s roof, and then attacking him inside, he fights it off, and smashes his way out. Delirious, he staggers to the jagged castle wall and begins to climb amidst the pounding wind and hail, the furious lightning, and the sheeting rain. A hundred feet up, with the storm raging around him, he manages to reach a window, pulls it open, gains entry, and collapses, exhausted.

From there, the next morning, he finds the Gypsy gone, so he explores the huge castle from its highest turret to its subterranean dungeon. Eventually, in the days and nights ahead, he meets its undead residents, including his lost bride, Elsbeth, now a vampire consort of Vlad Dracula. Armed with some of the Gypsy safeguards, he’s able to protect himself and confront his adversaries: the King Vampire and his disaffected concubine, Elizabeth “Batory” (history’s Blood Countess), and to manipulate the complex sexual politics which have come to hold the castle in thrall. In an escalating war of wills with the vampires, he learns how they control their numbers, and manages to hold his own until he can form a plan to rescue Elsbeth.

And in a wild denouement, an apocalyptic war of Good vs. Evil, Renfield attacks his vampire hosts to free his lost love. But, after destroying Vlad’s concubine, but failing to kill Vlad or rescue Elsbeth, he’s left only to save her from an eternity as an “undead”. Somehow after that, he manages to escape from the castle, a shell of the man he once was, and finds his way back to England and into the care of the “good” Dr. Devorer.