This paper explores horror
actor Peter Cushing's ancestral ties with Sir Henry Irving, the great English
stage actor and
Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, in the context of the English
stage and Irving's tours of America, from 1881 to 1889. It examines Bram Stoker's work in April of 1912, that used a new medium of artistic expression and brought Stoker his posthumous fame--the motion picture industry which catapulted Stoker's Gothic novel to the darkest realms of cinematic exploitation and created a new cultural icon in the form of a blood-sucking, malevolent human monster known as Count Dracula.