THE FILMS:IT IS SAFE to say that most adults – most children for that matter – will be surprised by their first reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Few figures in fiction have been so promiscuously depicted on film as has the haematophagous Transylvanian. There is, perhaps, some poor chap, raised on a desert island since infancy, who is capable of approaching the novel with no preconceptions. Everybody else will harbour images of Christopher Lee's urbane lounge lizard, Bela Lugosi's hissing waiter or Max Schreck's bipedal rat.

Many of the surprises are welcome. There is an explicit eroticism to the prose that we don’t expect from 19th-century fiction. The villain’s tendency to become younger after feasting on blood has rarely figured in film adaptations.

There are, however, disappointments. Most shockingly, Dracula is absent from the novel for a vast proportion of its central section. Quincey Morris, the caricatured American who assists the heroes, seems to have emerged from a different, less interesting book. The muddled denouement flits by in a perfunctory rush.

Thank goodness the novel did not first emerge in 2012. In recent decades, film-makers have come under increasing pressure to remain slavishly faithful to source material. Even before the movie has emerged, the internet buzzes with complaints about supposed deviations from the sacred text. This actor is too old. That actor has the wrong nose. Consider the recent case of The Hunger Games. In the days following the release of the successful film version of Suzanne Collins’s novel, Twitter hosted a series of unsavoury arguments concerning the supposed inadvisability of casting an African-American actor as a character who was not specifically identified as being black in the text.

One can only imagine what Stoker’s first fans, if gifted a sort of carrier-pigeon-based internet, would have made of the film versions. Virtually nobody bothers with that ending. Few films include Quincey Morris. Quite correctly, directors and writers tend to ignore the sections that, in a 19th century precursor of Challenge Anneka, find the vampire hunters trundling tediously about the West End of London in search of Dracula’s prepared lairs.

Cinema has been slightly more merciful to Stoker’s book than it has to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Only a vague scent of that philosophical novel remains in the various film adaptations.) But, right from the start, film-makers have focused on those elements that seem properly cinematic and ignored the narrative ballast.

There were, of course, sound legal reasons for FW Murnau, director of the first genuine classic derived from the novel, to diverge from Stoker’s text. The German director’s Nosferatu remains among the most influential horror films ever made. Murnau, already a master of expressionist cinema, turned Dracula into a hook-clawed, delicately fanged, walking nightmare named Count Orlok. The picture, released in 1922, contains startling images: plagues of rats, a weirdly speeded-up section, the villain’s shadowy ascent up a staircase. Like all subsequent versions, Nosferatu ditched much of the novel, but enough remained for Florence Stoker, the author’s widow, to decide that the film-makers, who had failed to secure the rights, were in breach of her copyright. She ordered the picture to be destroyed, but one print escaped her attentions and allowed Murnau’s beast to stalk Earth.

Count Orlok, as played by Shreck, has turned up on T-shirts and album covers ever since. But, when thinking of Dracula, few consumers of popular culture reach first for that image. We think, rather, of a cape, slicked-back hair and an aristocratic politeness.

The first authorised adaptation of Dracula emerged on the London stage in 1924. Fans of Upstairs Downstairs – and of authority figures in Ealing comedy – may be surprised to hear that the role was first essayed by a young Raymond Huntley, who went on to play Sir Geoffrey Dillon in the well-remembered ITV series. But it was Bela Lugosi’s turn in the Broadway production that properly defined Dracula.

Not surprisingly, Universal Pictures wanted Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, to take on the role for the film. But the great silent actor was succumbing to throat cancer. Lugosi, a Hungarian of some charm and no small ego, was cast and delivered a performance of such sublime oddness that every subsequent Dracula has felt the need to kowtow. For generations, children, when imitating the count, adopted those goulash vowels. Tod Browning’s 1931 film, hindered by budget problems following the Wall Street Crash, looks a little stagy and creaky at the corners.

But it became part of a creative wave that did more to codify horror conventions than did any similar movement in literature or theatre.

Universal Pictures decided how a werewolf walked, what Frankenstein’s creature looked like and how Count Dracula talked. The studio could copyright Jack Pierce’s make-up on those first two projects, but it couldn’t stop actors wearing a cape or slicking back their hair. The sleek, xenophobic version of Dracula – as in Stoker, Lugosi’s foreignness is a key aspect of the character’s repellence – remains the default position for actors attempting the role.

Mind you, as science fiction took over in the 1950s, and horror became ever less respectable, film studios seemed increasingly reluctant to tackle the story. It was not until 1958 that another major English-language version of Stoker’s original novel was released.

Terence Fisher’s Dracula, made for the British studio Hammer, offers a smoother, less shadowy take on the story. Christopher Lee is more animalistic and aggressive than Lugosi. Once again, the novel is ruthlessly filleted. Amazingly, Hammer even managed to ditch Renfield, the pathetic blood junkie whom many readers identify as their favourite character. But the visual grammar remained close to that of the Universal version. Dracula still dresses like a visiting ambassador at the Court of St James’s.

Other interpretations followed. In 1979, Frank Langella offered an absurdly suave take on the vampire in a rarely unearthed, mainstream adaptation by John Badham, director of Saturday Night Fever. The reliably eccentric Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu with the reliably eccentric Klaus Kinski in the central role.

Then, in 1992, somebody made a serious effort to return to the novel. Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, released in 1992, would still infuriate those carrier-pigeon Stoker fans we imagined earlier, but it is one of the few adaptations that finds a place for Quincey Morris. The structure is largely drawn from the book. However, the best aspects of the picture are all innovations: the nods towards early cinema; the allusions to Vlad the Impaler; Gary Oldman’s old-lady hairdo. Nothing in this baggy picture made the case for faithfulness to the text as a virtue in itself.

No, the movie versions of Dracula – the character and the novel – rarely chime with the one imagined by Bram Stoker. The count has taken on the quality of mythical being: a creature so buried in the collective psyche that no definitive version is possible.

Bram need not swivel in his grave. He (working posthumously with Universal Studios) produced something more durable than a mere literary character. He created folklore. Few Nobel laureates can make that claim.

One bite and you’re hooked: The best film versions of ‘Dracula’

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror(FW Murnau, 1922) Murnau's loose, expressionistic adaptation did things with shadows that were more unsettling than the blood-letting that characterises more recent, less obtuse versions.

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)Many experts prefer the Spanish-language version made simultaneously on the same sets. But Bela Lugosi (above) remains the definitive Dracula.

Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)Considered unimaginably explicit at the time, the Hammer version now seems just the tiniest bit cosy. But Christopher Lee is still impressively animalistic.

Count Dracula (Jess Franco, 1969)A fascinating oddity featuring Christopher Lee's only Dracula for a studio other than Hammer. Sticks surprisingly close to the novel. Features a perfectly cast Klaus Kinski as Renfield.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)Herzog pays tribute to Murnau with a version that is relentlessly weird but defiantly serious-minded. Kinski (below) upgrades to the title role.