Abraham Van Helsing

For today's countdown to Halloween post, I have decided to give an homage not to a horror villain or monster, but one of the classic heroes ofthe horror genre. You probably know that Dracula, is my favourite horror novel. I often blogged about it, for my first experience of it, please read this post from 2018. Well, the novel does not only have a great villain, he has great heroes fighting him. Among them, there is of course the Professor Abraham Van Helsing.The archetypal vampire hunter, which I blogged about in 2014. Yet he has seldom been portrayed properly in the many adaptations. He is often depicted as an action man, far younger than he should be, or sometimes like a raving lunatic, more dangerous than the vampires he hunts. But in Bram Stoker's original novel, Van Helsing is first and foremost an ageing and kindly academic, doctor, metaphysician, philosopher, one of the greatest minds of his time, as well as a faithful Catholic (or at least the latter is implied). In sum, he is a XIXth century superhero, a Sherlock Holmes, without the coldness. In fact, at times he somehow reminds me of Gandalf: a mentor, a leader, but also a powerful and selfless man. I found this portrait in this entry, which I think is one of the few where he looks at least somewhat like he did in the source material. So yes, in sum, let's hear it from Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula's foil and the saviour of human civilisation. Without him, we would all be vampirised by now.