The stylish new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic novel has gripped television viewers, but the story it wants to tell about God is left tantalisingly underexplored

A surprising amount of the critical response to the new BBC adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, has focused on the count’s sexuality. This is the least controversial aspect of their treatment. The homoeroticism is there in Stoker and, even if it weren’t, Dracula’s physical domination of other men and his cheerful lack of a sexual identity, in the strictly modern sense, are entirely appropriate to a fifteenth-century aristocrat and warlord.

In the original nineteenth-century novel, sexual desire of any kind is an unwholesome presence, threatening and even fatal unless thickly cloaked in the language of love and matrimony. But the spectre that haunts this bold, clever new Dracula isn’t sex: it’s religion.

Dracula has no reflection: he is a mirror for our preoccupations. There is no single, authoritative version of the vampire count, even in the beautiful splintered mess of Stoker’s novel, and there is no way to create one to satisfy the cravings of those who return to him again and again, in book and film and television. Perhaps that is why the Moffat/ Gatiss Dracula pulls in so many directions.