In the sixty years between Gunga Din's ‘Golden Year’ release and the dawn of the 21st century, Victorian literature adaptations endured as staples of Hollywood despite a litany of industry disruptions: the onset and aftermath of World War II, the massive declines in ticket sales due to the widespread adoption of television, the rise of the summer blockbuster with the releases of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977), and the advent of VHS and DVD home-video technology. As the industry evolved, so did film adaptation of colonial texts, a shift on full display in the work of David Lean as he moved from the nostalgic postwar nationalism of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist (1948) to the 70mm Hollywood spectacle of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and the Merchant Ivory prestige of A Passage to India (1984). Though Lean provides a potent example of the Cinema of Empire's longevity, perhaps the most prominent figure in Hollywood film's ongoing devotion to the Victorian era is Count Dracula, who is not only likely the most filmed character of all time (with the possible exceptions of fellow Victorians Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes) but also has amassed a body of academic criticism that has made Bram Stoker's 1897 novel one of the most studied texts of the 19th century. Such insights are especially true when considering that, while the vampire has a range of origins from early accounts of demon possession to the legacy of Vlad the Impaler, Stoker's Count has dominated the image of the vampire in popular culture and academic criticism with even autonomous nosferatus from different narrative universes owing a debt to Dracula. That Stoker's novel appears just two years after the first public film screening to offer commentary on the state of the body in the age of the cinematographic image further establishes its legacy as forever intertwined with the cinema.

Dracula made his film debut in Murnau's German Expressionist classic Nosferatu, though Stoker's estate successfully sued for infringement as Murnau had never secured the rights to the novel. The first official adaptation would arrive nine years later in 1931 when Tod Browning's Dracula became an instant phenomenon for Depression audiences and sold out theatres nationwide.