He's terrifying because of how little is revealed about him. We know nothing of how he came to be a vampire, his personal history or his motivations; nearly everything is left up to our imaginations, resulting in a much scarier monster.
Late-Victorians had fears of degeneration and invasion, directly connected to the results of British Colonization. One of the things that made Dracula so terrifying to Western Cultures was the fear of what they don't know, which in this case is Eastern Culture.
An example of the author using first person point of view to help develop the central idea of fear was when the prisoner had realized that he was helpless in the situation of his current living conditions.
Van Helsing describes him as '… strong in person as twenty men, he is of cunning more than mortal…he is brute, and more than brute, he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not,…' Dracula's brutal strength, callous lack of care for others, and heartlessness are what make him so evil.
While Dracula has wreaked destruction in Transylvania for hundreds of years, his move to England makes him a major threat to the foundations of the protagonists' own society. The protagonists seek not only to remove this threat to their safety, but to rid the world of Dracula's evil forever.
There are items which afflict him to the point he has no power and can even calm him from his insatiable appetite for blood. He is repulsed by garlic, as well as sacred items and symbols such as crucifixes and sacramental bread.
Count Dracula - Impaled by Van Helsing and his men with spears. His body was then kept in a coffin to be put and hidden in Van Helsing's secret vault. He was later resurrected when one of the thieves who broke into Van Helsing's secret vault were killed while stealing his coffin.
Dracula does not change in any meaningful way over the course of the plot, and he is never depicted reflecting on any actions. His appetite for blood is a kind of compulsion and while he is shown to be evil and monstrous, he is not presented as morally accountable in the same way a human might be.
The accompanying text tells of how he roasted, boiled and flayed people, or forced mothers to eat their own children. Along with the legend of his seemingly pathological cruelty, Vlad is now remembered as the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, which was first published 125 years ago in 1897.
Dracula ascended to become a much more powerful version of himself through an ancient ritual and clashed with the creator of the rite, a Sumerian sorceress named Aamshed. Though he won the battle, he was later consumed by the souls of all those murdered by his kind.
In 1476, while marching to yet another battle with the Ottomans, Vlad and a small vanguard of soldiers were ambushed, and Vlad was killed and beheaded — by most reports, his head was delivered to Mehmed II in Constantinople as a trophy to be displayed above the city's gates.
In Bram Stoker's original tale, it was never revealed precisely how he became the monster, although it was heavily implied through the research Van Helsing did into his past: when he was still alive, Dracula frequented “Scholomance”, a school of dark magic in Transylvania run by the Devil; it seems as though this was ...
However the fictional character, created by author Bram Stoker, was in fact based on a real historical figure called Vlad the Impaler. Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, was a 15th-century warlord, in what today is Romania, in south-eastern Europe.
Dracula was introduced as a myth, a legend, and the perfect villain so to say, only to the Western world. During his on and off reign of Wallachia, he was considered sometimes a hero, sometimes a cruel ruler, even by his contemporaries.
I would say traditionally Abraham Van Helsing, the entire group of Vampire Hunters were his enemies but Van Helsing lead the group. Harker was more a victim but he became a Valiant foe but it was Van Helsing he lead him with the rest of the group.
Garlic, specifically the chemical compound allicin inside garlic, is a powerful antibiotic. Some European beliefs around vampires stated they were created by a disease of the blood, so a powerful antibiotic would “kill” a vampire.
While Stoker's novel is primarily a Gothic fiction novel, Coppola's film is, first and foremost, a romance – and it's a romance between the titular character Dracula and Jonathan Harker's wife, Mina.
In the original 1897 Dracula novel by Bram Stoker, the 1931 film, and the 1992 film Dracula will not / does not burn in the sunlight. In the original novel Dracula was nocturnal, the day is not his natural time. It's his usual time of rest but he can move about by day.
