Each age gets the vampire it demands. Humanity’s need to titillate itself with doses of controlled terror is a constant, but that terror can take many forms. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a sensation when it was published at the end of the 19th century. The character he created lodged in the popular imagination, going on to feature in countless horror movies.

Today’s vampire tales, from Anne Rice to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, serve modern metaphors. The vampires can be harbingers of disease, addiction or adulthood, or camply ironic figures steeped in a knowing awareness of horror lore. The Victorian era had different concerns and fears. Stoker’s Dracula is filled with a dread of sexuality, and a terror of ancient unruly things from the lands outside the empire and civilisation.

Tales of blood-drinkers and shape-shifters are as old as storytelling itself, and feature in the folk mythology of many cultures. Stoker was not even the first to combine the two: undead vampires were a staple of the gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The basic elements of Dracula were present in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, written in response to the same challenge that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dracula and Frankenstein eventually became the central iconic figures of the B-movie horror genre, combining and competing to frighten cinema audiences in the 20th century.

However, Stoker never enjoyed Shelley’s literary status. Frankenstein has been read as a literary text — a precursor of everything from feminism to science fiction — while Dracula is still regarded as a potboiler that somehow snagged on the popular imagination.

In this age of summer schools and tourist traps, Dracula is commemorated in two parts of Europe: Romania, the bloodsucking count’s homeland in the novel, and Ireland, Stoker’s birthplace.

Horror fans and academics debate the respective merits of the two geographical sources. On the one hand, there is the novel’s Transylvanian setting, and tenuous links between Dracula and the historical figure of Vlad Tepes, the 15th-century ruler known as Vlad the Impaler. On the other, there is Stoker’s Irish origin and the influence the country had on his imagination.

It is not difficult to spot Irish influences in Dracula, both literary and historical. As Paul Murray points out in his new biography of Stoker, From the Shadow of Dracula, the writer never visited eastern Europe, but his mother had grown up in Sligo, and vivid tales of famine and cholera featured in Stoker family lore. Eight years before Dracula, Stoker published The Snake’s Pass, a horror novel set in Ireland.

Several Irish writers, among them Lord Dunsany and Sheridan LeFanu, had penned tales of gothic horror, while the playwright Dion Boucicault, best remembered for melodramas such as The Shaughraun, wrote a drama called The Vampire in 1852.

Melmoth the Wanderer, by the eccentric Dublin clergyman Charles Maturin, became a classic of the genre. Its protagonist is doomed to immortality and, like Dracula, has lived for hundreds of years.

Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and imprisonment, adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth in a wry homage to Maturin. Stoker, a near-contemporary, knew both Wilde and his mother, who published tales of the Celtic supernatural under the nom de plume Speranza. Lady Wilde’s work, full of blood-drinking spirits and soul-eating dogs, anticipates Dracula’s world.

It is easy to forget that Dracula is a composite figure, his various attributes formalised by almost a century of horror films. Stoker may not have been the first to combine bloodsucking and shape-shifting, but by adding near-immortality to the mix he stumbled on an archetype.

In the novel, Dracula has the power to assume animal shape: he can take the form of a bat, and arrives in England as a giant wolfdog. However, the character of Dracula changes shape in other ways, not least to meet the needs of different audiences. When a Dracula figure made a guest appearance on Buffy it was as an emblem of old Europe, a paradigm of sophistication. Unlike the coarse American vampires, the count was suave and sophisticated, a different class of bloodsucker.