Dracula's empathy with the "children of the night" rather than with humans released a dimension of fear: the fear, not of death and the dead, but of being alive (94).
"Dracula"'s original title, up to a month before its publication, was "The Un-Dead," which points toward the essential gift of Stoker's vampires to the 20th cent: a reminder, not of the dreadfulness of death, but of the innate horror of vitality. (95)
The blood is the life ... D. energizes his prey, reminding his victims -- and us -- that they have life in them ... the women he transforms come to apprehend the (sensory) vibrancy of their world.
Stoker's Undead bestow vitality ... Rice uses this as "Vampire sight" (quasi angelic) ... Stoker associates it with animals.
Life engorges death ... lucy is not stilled ... she turns not to marble, but to blood.
Lucy is the first dead girl we have met who is in her heart alive.
(I, of course, was an alive girl who in my heart was dead.)
Her kind has no love of death and no sympathy with stillness.
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