As fledgling English lawyer Jonathan Harker treks into the Carpathian Mountains to complete a real estate transaction, frightened peasants warn him of horrible dangers that await him. Harker, terrified by eerie events along the way, finally meets his client, Count Dracula, a tall, gaunt old man with a surprisingly powerful handshake.

Harker soon realizes that he is a prisoner in Dracula's sumptuously furnished castle—a castle strangely devoid of mirrors. One night he is accosted by three voluptuous women, whose sensuous dancing and inhumanly red lips arouse and terrify him. Later, as fifty coffin-size boxes are brought into the castle in preparation for Dracula's departure, Harker knows that the count plans to do more in London than see the sights.

Back in England, Harker's fiancée, Mina Murray, is deeply worried. She hasn't heard from Harker in months, and her friend Lucy is acting very strangely. Ever since a ship loaded with fifty boxes of reeking earth wrecked nearby, Lucy has been sleepwalking and exhibiting an "odd concentration." No one, not even Lucy's fiancé, Dr. John Seward, can explain her sudden condition. And no one yet suspects that the rational modern world must now confront an ancient evil it is ill equipped to recognize—let alone defeat.

Part Gothic novel, part modern horror story, and part morality play, Dracula is the vampire saga that started it all.