My daughter would like to get involved in her middle school’s dramatic production. Unfortunately, their play this year will be “Dracula.” I will be speaking to the director to make sure this will be a “G” and not “R”-rated production. I was wondering, though, if there would be anything intrinsically wrong with a Catholic being involved in such a show. In some ways I suppose it could be good – the stories testify to the power of the cross and the Eucharist – but I wasn’t sure if there was any specific guidance from the Church regarding vampire lore.
So far as I know, the Church says nothing about vampire lore. The character, Dracula, though, was based by his creator Bram Stoker on a fifteenth-century Romanian nobleman named Vlad the Impaler. Vlad is believed to have been a petty tyrant who satisfied his bloodlust under the causes of Romanian security and the protection of the Church. (The causes themselves may have been just, but his actions in their name certainly were not.)
It is possible that Stoker, in creating the story of Dracula, fictionalized Vlad the Impaler, a bloodthirsty mass-murderer, by turning him into a bloodsucking quasi-human monster. Read in that light, the story of Dracula can almost be read as a morality tale told in the style of a horror story. Perhaps you can prepare your daughter for participating in the play by giving her this perspective on the lessons we can learn from this particular story.
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I was wondering, though, if there would be anything intrinsically wrong with a Catholic being involved in such a show. In some ways I suppose it could be good – the stories testify to the power of the cross and the Eucharist – but I wasn’t sure if there was any specific guidance from the Church regarding vampire lore.