The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Dracula and the Turn of the Tide
What connects a vampire count and feuding fishing families? Five miles of coastline, storms at sea, and two contrasting imaginations.
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Overview
The association of Whitby with Bram Stoker’s Dracula is fairly well-known; the writer Leo Walmsley less so. Michael Clegg takes us on a journey around the places that inspired both authors, Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay, just five miles apart on the Yorkshire coast. With the help of excerpts from two films based on their novels, ‘Turn of the Tide’ (1935), and ‘Scars of Dracula’ (1970), Clegg provides a guide to their work and the very different tales they have to tell.
What also connects the stories of Bram Stoker and Leo Walmsley is a common theme: intrusion of the foreign. In the case of Dracula, this is obvious enough, with the arrival on the shore at Whitby of an undead from Eastern Europe. Yet for the parochial small village of Robin Hood’s Bay, even those from nearby Whitby might be considered foreigners. The novels of Walmsley depict the insularity of this community, especially in his semi-autobiographical novel, ‘Foreigners’: "You might have your father and your grandfather born in the place and yet you’d still be a foreigner, unless you did everything exactly the same way they did it." And of course Bram Stoker, being Irish, would have been viewed as much more so.