Vampirism in the Ether: Radio’s Horrific Potential in Orson Welles’s “Dracula”

ABSTRACT:The Mercury Theatre on the Air adaptation of Dracula updated the novel’s protomodernist fears of technology, subsuming and enthralling its subjects through the new medium of radio. Retaining the novel’s moments of travel, Orson Welles would bleed diegetic layers of the epistolary form together and rework the narrative’s relationships to reflect the asymmetric dynamics of broadcaster and listener. I argue that Welles evokes debates around radio to highlight the medium’s potential to both empower and subjugate.