The Vampire Within: What a Forgotten Swedish Dracula Tells Us About American Authoritarianism
What a 19th-century Swedish reinvention of Dracula reveals about modern authoritarianism, systemic rot, and the stories we cling to when we’re too afraid to see what’s already inside.
A forgotten Swedish Dracula retelling exposes the true horror of our time: not foreign invaders, but charismatic insiders. The vampire isn’t at the door—he’s in power. And we keep missing him because we’re reading the wrong story.
Introduction
Vampires are back—but not the ones with glittering cheekbones and tragic eyes. Not the misunderstood lovers of early-2000s pop culture. These are older, darker figures, and they are wearing very human masks. In 1899, a little-known (in the West) Swedish adaptation of Dracula appeared in serial form under the title Mörkrets makter—Powers of Darkness. For over a century, it was mistaken for a standard translation. But it wasn’t. It was a reinvention. A version of the tale that stripped away the foreign mystique and instead cast the vampire as something far more unsettling: a charismatic insider. In this story, Count Dracula isn’t a distant threat from the Carpathians—he’s a politically connected conspirator, whispering into the ears of the elite, orchestrating a new world order from within the salons and drawing rooms of power.
This kind of shift—the same story told through a different cultural lens—fascinates me as both a teacher and a gestalt language processor. In Holistic Language Instruction, I wrote about how comprehension depends not just on decoding the words in front of you, but on what you already bring to them. Background knowledge isn’t optional. It’s the scaffold. And so when a culture takes a well-known story and changes it—shapes it to reflect its own fears, its own moment—we should pay attention. It tells us not only about the story, but about the society doing the telling. That’s the premise of my upcoming book, Decolonising Language Education: that language, story, and culture cannot be untangled from one another—and that how we interpret the world depends profoundly on where we’re standing when we read it. Which brings me back to Mörkrets makter. Because this forgotten vampire story may speak more clearly to today’s American moment than the original ever did. And if we don’t understand what kind of monster we’re dealing with, we won’t recognise him when he walks into the room.
What Mörkrets makter Was
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is a towering work of Gothic fiction—but it’s also an epistolary novel, a narrative stitched together from diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and ship logs. For some readers, that layered format invites deep immersion. But for many others—especially those without academic training or consistent access to books—it can feel like a dense thicket, full of narrative dead ends and delayed payoffs. For GLPs like me, this kind of fractured storytelling can be deeply disorienting. We don’t just decode word by word. We build big-picture understanding from complete units—and if those units arrive too fragmented or out of sequence, we’re left scrambling for cohesion. It’s not that we can’t read it; it’s that it doesn’t land where it needs to land to make meaning accessible.
Now consider Mörkrets makter, the 1899 Swedish adaptation of Dracula. It wasn’t published as a novel. It ran in the newspaper, in serial form—bite-sized episodes delivered regularly, using a far more linear and digestible narrative structure. It wasn’t a translation, either. It was a reinvention. The story was streamlined, characters renamed, and entire plotlines removed or altered. Dracula himself became something else entirely: no longer a remote and exotic vampire creeping into London, but a charismatic, homegrown tyrant—an ideological force embedded in the highest echelons of society. Gone were the theological musings and the obsession with Victorian virtue. In their place: secret meetings, political rhetoric, and the chilling sense that the Count’s power came not from the supernatural, but from the willing complicity of those around him.
This version made the story available not just to a broader readership, but to a different one—working-class Swedes who didn’t have the time, training, or perhaps even the inclination to read a dense English novel. And what it offered them wasn’t just accessibility, but relevance. The Count’s menace wasn’t foreign; it was local. He didn’t need to cross oceans—he was already here, shaking hands with aristocrats and planning revolutions behind velvet curtains.
Perhaps most unsettling of all is how the story ends. In Stoker’s version, Dracula is hunted down and destroyed—a clean moral resolution. But Mörkrets makter gives no such comfort. The protagonist escapes with his life, but not his peace of mind. Dracula vanishes. The conspiracy continues. And the world remains as it was: corrupted, collusive, and uninterested in accountability. The horror doesn’t end—it simply disperses, dissolving back into the institutions that allowed it to grow. For the Swedish public in 1899, watching their monarchy strain under pressure and industrial capital reshape every corner of life, that ambiguity may have felt far more truthful than a tidy British ending ever could.
Why This Framing Mattered in Sweden
To understand why Mörkrets makter landed the way it did in Sweden, you have to step into the historical atmosphere of the time. At the turn of the 20th century, Sweden was not the image of Nordic stability we might project backward from today. It was a country in flux—modernising rapidly, yet still shackled to an old social order. The monarchy remained intact, but its authority was increasingly symbolic. Beneath it, the aristocracy still held wealth and power, but the ground was shifting. Industrialisation had taken root. Cities were swelling. A new working class was emerging, along with growing labour movements and a sharp uptick in socialist organising. There was agitation in the air—not yet revolution, but a deep sense that something wasn’t working, that those in power were looking after themselves while the rest struggled to keep up.
In that climate, the original Dracula—a story about a foreign threat invading London—might have felt somewhat beside the point. The menace wasn’t coming from abroad. It was already here, in the salons of Stockholm and the chambers of parliament. Mörkrets makter captured that unease with uncanny precision. Dracula wasn’t an outsider in this version—he was part of the system. A smooth-talking manipulator who trafficked in ideology and influence, not just blood. He spoke in the language of leadership, wealth, and vision. And those around him—the supposed pillars of society—were either taken in by his charisma or already part of the plot.
This was horror reimagined not as the invasion of the monstrous, but the revelation of the monstrous within. The fear wasn’t that the walls might be breached; it was that the rot was already in the foundation. For Swedish readers, many of whom were watching real-life political shifts with suspicion or hope (depending on their position), this framing hit a nerve. It named what people were increasingly sensing: that the old structures of power weren’t just outdated, they were dangerous. And that those who seemed to rule with legitimacy might in fact be the very ones preparing the way for something much darker. Mörkrets makter didn’t invent that fear. It articulated it—and in doing so, made the story not just more accessible, but more true.
Parallels with the U.S. Today
It’s tempting, when looking back at something like Mörkrets makter, to view it as a historical curiosity—a footnote to Dracula, a literary oddity born of its moment. But moments echo. And the anxieties that pulsed through Swedish society in 1899—the suspicion of elite collusion, the fear that institutions were no longer working in the public interest—are not foreign to the United States in the 2020s and beyond. If anything, they’ve become ambient noise: so ever-present they fade into the background until another crisis brings them roaring to the surface.
In today’s America, conspiracism is no longer the domain of fringe pamphlets or whispered phone calls. It’s broadcast nightly. It trends. It merchandises. From QAnon and the so-called “deep state” to vaccine paranoia, Great Replacement rhetoric, and fantastical narratives about stolen elections, the country has been saturated with stories that, like Mörkrets makter, revolve around secret cabals and hidden agendas. But unlike the Swedish adaptation, which framed such fears as a cautionary tale, American political culture has embraced them as a kind of populist mythology—a choose-your-own-nightmare where the monster always wears the other party’s colours.
And yet the true danger is not the presence of conspiracy theories, but the way they obscure actual conspiracies: the long-term erosion of democratic norms, the coordinated dismantling of regulatory safeguards, the open embrace of authoritarian tactics dressed in the language of patriotism. Like the Count in Mörkrets makter, today’s strongmen don’t need to lurk in shadows—they hold press conferences. They smile for cameras. They speak in slogans that promise to “drain the swamp” even as they concentrate power among loyalists, silence dissent, and make backroom deals that drain public coffers instead. The vampire doesn’t sneak into the house. He’s already been elected.
What Mörkrets makter recognised—what Stoker’s original did not—is that the real horror is not the foreign invader or the monstrous other. It’s the one who blends in. The one who is charming, plausible, well-dressed. The one who doesn’t need to break down the door because he was always inside, invited, even applauded. In today’s America, that figure has become almost ordinary. We know his face. We argue over him at dinner. He sells books. He hosts rallies. And in doing so, he makes the monstrous seem mundane.
That is what makes the story so unsettlingly current. Mörkrets makter didn’t just reframe Dracula—it reframed how power operates in a society on the edge of transformation. And whilst Sweden moved on, restructured, and evolved, the U.S. now finds itself standing at a crossroads that looks eerily familiar. The vampire isn’t knocking. He’s setting policy. And we still haven’t figured out how to name him.
The Monster Is Familiar
In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire is unmistakably other. He is foreign, Eastern European, exoticised and racialised—a stand-in for the anxieties of a waning empire. His intrusion into Britain plays out like a parable of reverse colonisation, where the imperial centre is suddenly under threat from the margins. The narrative depends on Dracula being defeated not just to preserve individual lives, but to symbolically reassert British moral and cultural superiority. Order is restored. The old country remains sovereign. The monster is slain, and the borders—literal and symbolic—are once again secure.
That framing made sense in an imperial Britain obsessed with classification and control. The Gothic horror of Dracula wasn’t just about bloodsucking; it was about the fear of contamination—racial, moral, political. The foreigner as corrupter. The outsider as threat. Empire demanded those binaries, and the novel reflected them. But Mörkrets makter flips that entirely. In the Swedish version, the Count isn’t an invader from outside civilisation—he is civilisation. He wears its clothes, speaks its language, and is embraced by its elite. His power doesn’t depend on dark magic so much as dark deals. He is not destroyed at the end, because he was never truly separate from the system in the first place. He is the system.
This shift is critical, and it speaks directly to the present. Today’s authoritarianism doesn’t come storming across the borders in dramatic fashion. It doesn’t wear fangs or wave foreign flags. It evolves within the institutions we were told to trust—police departments, legislative bodies, media conglomerates, tech platforms. It walks and talks like legitimacy. And that’s what makes it so dangerous. We’ve been conditioned, especially in the United States, to expect horror to come from somewhere else—from the outside. But horror now is administrative. It’s algorithmic. It’s dressed in patriotic language and framed by well-lit press events.
The genius of Mörkrets makter is that it understood this over a century ago. It saw that power doesn’t always need to transgress norms. Sometimes it rewrites them. It understood that when horror is woven into the fabric of institutions, it becomes harder to recognise—and harder to resist. The monster, in this telling, is not foreign. He is familiar. He dines with ministers. He gives speeches. He passes laws. He smiles. And we—like the characters in the story—are often too mesmerised to see what he really is until it’s too late.
Why This Matters
Stories aren’t just how we pass the time—they’re how we’re taught to make sense of the world. For those of us who live outside its dominant structures—outside whiteness, masculinity, straightness, neurotypicality—they’re also how we begin to notice when something isn’t adding up. As an autistic GLP, I don’t always absorb narratives the way others do. I don’t parse them incrementally. I take in the shape, the rhythm, the whole. I notice patterns first. And when a pattern repeats—when the emotional tone of a moment reminds me of something from a completely different context—my brain lights up. I get this deep, embodied sense of I’ve seen this before. That’s how it is with Mörkrets makter. I didn’t just see it as a strange footnote to Dracula—I recognised it as a map. A version of the story that more accurately reflects the time we’re living through now.
Because the story we keep being handed in the U.S.—in textbooks, on the news, even in horror films—is still Dracula. The foreign threat. The corrupt outsider. The easily identified evil that can be staked through the heart and neutralised in time for credits to roll. But the real danger we face isn’t external, and it’s not new. It’s systemic. It’s procedural. It’s polite. It wears a suit. It passes laws. And Mörkrets makter understood that over a century ago: that power doesn’t always look like a monster. Sometimes it looks like the person everyone’s afraid to question.
When I say I’ve seen this somewhere before, I don’t just mean in books. I mean in institutions that say one thing and do another. In systems that promise equity but deliver surveillance. In meetings where harm is repackaged as policy and those who notice are told they’re imagining things. When you grow up autistic and outside the lines—especially outside the U.S., or in the liminal spaces within it—you get used to seeing behind the curtain. You notice the choreography. You sense when someone is performing empathy whilst reinforcing control. That’s what Mörkrets makter reveals: not just a vampire, but a choreography of complicity. A ritual of power dressed in civility.
And this is why it matters. Because if we keep waiting for the old monster to show up—slimy, snarling, foreign—we’ll miss the one who’s already here. The one whose horror is not spectacle, but strategy. Whose violence is slow, legal, institutional. The story we’re in now isn’t about being invaded. It’s about being hollowed out. And recognising that requires a different kind of literacy—one that comes from lived experience, pattern recognition, and the willingness to say, even when no one wants to hear it: this has happened before. Let me show you.
Final thoughts …
It’s not just that Mörkrets makter was ahead of its time. It’s that we’re behind—dangerously behind. The version of horror it offers, the one rooted not in supernatural fear but in structural complicity, isn’t speculative fiction anymore. It’s reportage. And yet our dominant culture still clings to the comfort of Stoker’s version—the neat plotline, the foreign monster, the heroic professionals who restore order. We’re trained to wait for the obvious villain. But he’s already arrived. Not with bloodstained fangs, but with donor backing, media training, and a platform that sounds just rational enough to keep most people from asking too many questions.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a pattern. And one we can trace, if we’re paying attention. Because whilst political violence escalates and systemic abandonment becomes normalised, what’s sold to us as “solutions”—education reform packages, data-driven literacy initiatives, new leadership teams—is just more of the same architecture, rearranged. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the so-called “Science of Reading” movement, which has gutted reading comprehension and language instruction in the name of phonics and fidelity. Children are no longer taught to make meaning, to think critically, to connect. They are taught to decode. To perform literacy without ever becoming literate in power. It’s not a mistake. It’s design.
And who are the architects? Insiders. Not vampires in castles, but decision-makers in think tanks, publishers, state boards. They pass as neutral, but their choices reshape the world. And whilst they do, they tell us the problem is personal. That our failure to thrive is a matter of grit. That if we just moved the chairs around—restructured, rebranded, reformed—it would all be fine. But systems that were never built for us can’t be fixed by tidying up the furniture. They need to be named. Rejected. Abandoned. And that naming—that reading—can’t happen without community. Without those of us who’ve always lived on the margins, who learned to survive by pattern, who info-dump what we know not to dominate the conversation but because sharing knowledge is how we stay alive.
That is our power. Not reform, not representation, not some bipartisan budget line. But care. Mutual recognition. The refusal to be gaslit into forgetting what we’ve seen. Because the vampire isn’t lurking in the shadows anymore. He’s behind the podium. He’s in the curriculum. He’s hosting the panel on innovation. And the question is no longer whether we believe in monsters—but whether we’ll recognise him in time, before the curtain falls again, and this time we don’t make it out.