Since my first watch, I’ve been obsessed with the 1931 film Dracula. On the surface, the movie is somewhat campy by today’s standards. The special effects are laughable, the bats are very clearly bouncing on strings, and Count Dracula’s antics, though fresh at the time, are now so overplayed that it feels like watching an episode of the Simpsons. One could easily watch it as a quaint but laughable film, something to watch with popcorn and chuckle at the movie magic of yesteryear. I could have left it at that, had it not been for the performance of Dwight Iliff Frye as Renfield.

Renfield is introduced in the film as a solicitor, who is called to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania to help him with the business of leasing Carfax Abbey in England. It soon becomes clear that Count Dracula has ulterior motives, as he drugs and hypnotizes Renfield. In the last scene we see of him in the castle, he is unconscious as two of Dracula’s many wives descend on him, before cutting to the same man but changed, aboard a ship to England.

Despite the context of the movie, it was not immediately clear to me that he had been turned by Dracula. Instead, I was completely taken by the spectacle of a man so severely altered that I did not recognize it as anything so tame as vampirism. He possessed a kind of madness that I could not help but envy. His eyes betrayed a glee so complete and unnerving, that for a moment I almost shared his singular devotion… for eating insects. The satisfaction he betrayed was so unburdened by self consciousness that it almost felt romantic. He reminded me of Gollum, but with a sort of childlike innocence.

I think I’ve always been interested in what lies beyond the rigid social norms of civilized society, what happens when you abandon sanity for the unsanitized. Perhaps a year or two ago, I had something of a break with reality. I stopped being able to tell if certain things were real or imaginary, and I had trouble doing normal tasks like going to work. I was convinced that I could tune my mind into something beyond reality. During that time, I developed a sort of body-horror fantasy, a vision of myself with my own chest splayed open, my lungs dragging against the concrete curb as I inhaled deeply. It wasn’t a scary thought for me. Instead it served as a sort of victory over my own fear, to experience the world as intensely as possible without flinching.

The satisfaction that I got from that vision felt akin to Renfields in a way. After a life of living for other people’s expectations, he was finally set free. He experienced the most extreme opposite of his safe and rigid life, and found that it delighted him.

In retrospect, subtext of the film is maybe not so subtle. To be whisked away by another man to commit heinous acts in exotic lands has some fairly conspicuous homoerotic overtones. With that in mind, Renfield’s madness seems more like a disconnection from the greater society, a fixation that he simply cannot ignore despite the ramifications. Instead of fearing it, he leans in, truly embracing his own self.

These days I find myself thinking about the narratives of life, the motifs that shape the actions that we take and the paths that we walk. I have never eaten a bowl of insects. I have never scraped my lungs against the pavement, and in many ways, I have never deviated from the life I was told to live. I am scared of bugs and rats and of cutting open my body to reveal my organs and of running off with a man that I do not know, not because of any profound understanding that these things will hurt me, but instead because of an assumption that the story I live out is the only viable choice for my life, and questioning that assumption undermines my own sanity. What if I cut myself open tomorrow and I do not bleed to death? What if eating a bowl of insects titillates me? What if I found a new kind of comfort in the embrace of a stranger? I do not know, because I have not tried.

Asking “what if?” may be the source of all human achievement, but it is also the source of all insanity. Picking apart narratives will eventually reveal that they are all fiction. There is no true way to tell a story.

All narratives starts with exposition. This is the way that the world works within the context of the story. It allows the reader to interpret the story through the lens that the author provides. In Dracula, it is made very clear early in the story that we should not question the existence of vampires, even though Renfield himself seems to question their existence. If I were to watch the film without that understanding, a very different story would play out.