Motion book publisher Madefire have a history of producing dark, gothic horror stories with the original titles like Houses of the Holy or licensed editions like Dark Horse’s Hellboy. They’ve added to this ghoulish repertoire a new one-shot based on a Bram Stoker short story called Dracula’s Guest, but how does this fit into the portfolio of a company who also publish My Little Pony?

Publisher: Madefire
Writer: Bram Stoker
Artist: David Lupton
Price: Free from the free to download Madefire app

Dracula’s Guest is part of a Bram Stoker short story collection that many believe is an early abandoned first chapter for Dracula itself. In Dracula’s Guest, an unnamed Englishman (presumed to be Dracula’s Jonathan Harker) is visiting a hotel in Munich on his way to Transylvania. Warned by the hotel’s maitre d’ to not stay out night as it is Walpurgis Night (a halloween like night in Germany), the man ignores the advice and after his horses are spooked by a mysterious stranger he leaves his carriage and ends up wandering into a graveyard in a thunder storm. Here he finds a mysterious woman in a tomb along with an iron stake through the roof of her tomb. As lightning strikes the stake and sets the tomb on fire, the man is saved from the blaze by a mysterious wolf and then in turn by soldiers who had been alerted to the man’s potential danger by his future benefactor, a certain ‘Dracula’ who had sent a telegram to the hotel warning of wolves in the night.

As a story, Dracula’s Guest lacks the sustained eeriness of a the longer Dracula book, but features just enough dread and spookiness to make it an interesting tale (especially when read in context with the main Dracula story). For this motion book, artist David Lupton has lifted the story in it’s entirety and so it reads more like an interactive book than a comic with lengthy panels of text appearing alongside Lupton’s dark painted images. We’ve seen Lupton’s work before in  a Madefire series called Metawhal Alpha which he produced with Liam Sharp and he again uses a scratchy, impressionistic style for his painted artwork with a very limited colour palette to give the book a dark and gothic feel that matches the subject matter. It’s reminiscent of Francis Bacon, with a hint of HR Giger, which makes it both surreal and imposing and looks great on the iPad’s screen.

This creepiness is further amplified by an immersive, creepy soundscape (that includes a few dynamic effects, especially for the thunder storm) that soundtracks  the story and is used in conjunction with some relatively subtle animations for a Madefire book. The motion extends mostly to a few of the characters moving in and out of frame, although there is the odd bit of dynamism during the storm sequence, which is only appropriate give the subject matter.  For the most part the motion is confined to text moving in and out of frame and blocking out certain parts of the screen and instead of going for picture box captions, the story is told mostly using solid blocks of black to mask out parts of the image and make it feel like a half way house of comic and book. Inevitably given the subject matter this works much better than having brightly coloured picture boxes all over the place but also gives the book a starkly designed feel which is much more mature in tone an approach.

With titles like Dracula’s Guest, Madefire continue to defy expectations and are creating a truly eclectic library of titles. On the surface it may seem completely at odds to their current strategy of transferring licensed titles like My Little Pony and Transformers into the motion book platform, but don’t forget Dracula’s Guest sits alongside the aforementioned horror books like House of the Holy and Hellboy as well as other literary adaptation such as Liam Sharp and Bill Sienkiewicz’ Sherlock Holmes: The Greek Interpreter, so it’s not completely out of the blue (however as they produce more varied content, perhaps the time is right to start ring-fencing their titles as the readers who are reading My Little Pony or Heroes Club may well not be the same who want to read about gothic vampires!). Although not for everyone, Dracula’s Guest is still a very accomplished motion book and a great reminder of the diverse potential of the medium.

“A strange mix of comic and book that manages to retain faithful to the original material, while presenting it in a dark and sinister new format. The use of long form text makes it more like a book than a traditional comic and may not be for everyone, but with it’s subtle animations, eery soundscape and spooky painted artwork this is another intriguing addition to the Madefire catalogue.”