- Scare Me!
- Posts
- Dracula Daily's Matt Kirkland on Why 250K+ Readers Still Subscribe to Stoker
Dracula Daily's Matt Kirkland on Why 250K+ Readers Still Subscribe to Stoker
The story behind a viral newsletter that's keeping Dracula undead.
Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Matt Kirkland, a designer, artist, and all-around creative person who publishes Dracula Daily.
In 2020, Matt Kirkland began to wonder what it would be like to read Dracula in “real” time.
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel is written as a series of letters, postcards, journal entries, and even audio recordings, with events spanning seven months from May through November. Stoker’s characters mail each other letters, seek help from experts, and conceal private anxieties in their journals, gradually compiling a record of events that spans perspectives and places.
Over the course of a weekend, Kirkland organized the novel’s dated entries into a series of emails and scheduled them to send on their corresponding dates. (The novel was copyrighted in the US in 1899 and has since passed into the public domain.) And thus: Dracula Daily was born.
Today, more than 250,000 readers (including me!) subscribe to receive the entire novel in dated installments. Sometimes, days go by with no developments; other times, Stoker’s characters work around the clock to solve the mysteries of Dracula—and save their own lives.
If you’d rather binge it all—while still getting a glimpse of the reader replies, memes, and commentary that make the newsletter feel so lively—you can now purchase it in book form, too.
I recently spoke with Matt about what it’s like to go viral, what the newsletter says about our relationship to older literary texts, and a few of the other projects he’s worked on recently.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity, concision, and flow.
Thanks for reading Scare Me! Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to receive a new edition every Thursday.
Michelle Delgado: I get the sense from your past interviews that you didn't necessarily expect to spend years of your life talking about Dracula on a regular basis. How has your relationship to this story evolved? Do you have complicated feelings about the newsletter, as a creative person who does a lot of other work?
Matt Kirkland: You're right, I didn't have any sort of special relationship with Dracula or vampire literature—you know, besides that I grew up in the 90s and was in love with Buffy Summers. But that's pretty tangential.
I do a lot of creative projects. I have a real job, but I like to do stuff for the internet on nights and weekends. I’ve known people that have had something go big, and they always said it's going to be the thing that you put the least effort into, or the thing that feels the least like you. So, I don't feel surprised or bothered by the fact that I'm not a big vampire guy, but a vampire thing went big. I think it's just delightful that it struck a chord.
So much of the power of Dracula Daily as a thing was about people's responses and community around it. I feel so little of the responsibility lies with me—I've been able to just participate and enjoy it like everybody else. I really felt like a beneficiary of it happening. So I never grumble, like, "Oh man, I gotta load up the Dracula emails again." I still feel just very pleased, you know?
Do you have a relationship to the horror genre generally? Or is Dracula Daily the window into it for you?
Yeah, it's absolutely the window into it for me. I've read some horror books, but it's just not my thing. I really need a guide to be like, "Here's your intro to the genre. Here's what's great about this. Here's what you're looking for here."
I must have read [Dracula] in high school or something. I definitely picked it up because it's a classic. When I'm in doubt of something to read, I do sort of trust longevity as a guide of quality. If they're still printing copies a hundred years later, there's probably something interesting that I would enjoy.

Treasures from the Scare Me! library
So much of the conversation I see on social media, particularly around Booktok, is like, “We all have brainrot. We can't read books anymore. No one's reading literature.” So I think it's amazing that a quarter-million people sign up to receive this hundred year old novel in installments and get so hyped about it. Does that give you an interesting lens on our relationship to literature?
I'm a big reader, and I really the Victorians, like Anthony Trollope. It's my favorite kind of comfort read. The sense [that] nobody reads books anymore, or what we read has been so debased in its quality or complexity—that's a real bummer, the-world-is-ending kind of sentiment.
I don't come from a literature background; I went to public school, I was an art major. No one made me read a hard book in my life, ever. I just got into reading the classics because I found them so delightful, because I thought they were interesting, and they reward involved reading. I think this Dracula experience has [given] a lot of other people a taste of, like, "This was intimidating as a capital C classic for a while, but it turns out it's super fun and it's funny in parts. And I'm kind of invested in the story." Hopefully it's just a taste that people can have that unlocks other things that they will enjoy reading, too.
I have a theory that part of Dracula's enduring appeal is that it has a very proto-internet humor. Do you feel like there's some kind of resonance there that just strikes a chord and makes it kind of uniquely suited for internet culture?
I think what works is that it is weird and there's surprising stuff in it—but we have a grounding for what we expect. And that conflict is where the natural joke feels like it's going to show up, or where it becomes easy to share.
If you wanted to share this about a book that people didn't have some background on, you'd have to be like, "Okay, so: There's the thing called a vampire. And there's this guy from Transylvania. And..." You'd have to explain too much before the thing can really sort of work.
That’s a good point. Dracula has become a recognizable character, but there’s that weirdness in the book, the oddity of it, the lost awareness of some of its jokes or really bizarre digressions. Maybe there's just something in us that finds these things funny, regardless of era or time.
There's so much that people just don't expect in there—especially if your idea of it is the way that Dracula or vampires have filtered into pop culture. If you just [know] Bela Lugosi and Count Chocula, then [reading the book involves] finding out that there's a cowboy who shoots his guns at Dracula. [Someone] steals a wolf from a zoo and then throws it through a window. You wouldn't believe someone if they were, like, "No, that really happens in the book!"
There was a newsletter this week that featured the scene where Jonathan tells Mina about trying paprika for the first time. He’s like, “Oh my God. Have you heard of this stuff? This is great. I gotta get the recipe.”
It's just so relatable and feels so modern. Everyone's traveled to some place, found some amazing food, and been excited to share it. Then there's the other layer of like, English people don't have spicy food, or spice in their food at all. So you're like, "This guy had to travel all the way to Eastern Europe to try a pretty low key spice."
One of my favorite things early on was [hearing from] someone with some expertise about the Bradshaw's Guide. So, at one point, Jonathan is still kind of clocking to the idea that he's alone in the castle with Dracula. There aren't servants, and actually, Dracula's running around doing the housework. Which is its own sitcom level of comedy, right? But he hears someone clearing the table, and then he sees Dracula run into the library and grab a book, and then pretend to read. Which is funny enough on its own—it's just classic screwball comedy.
And then [a subscriber told me] it says that he grabs a Bradshaw's Guide—which is not just a book, it's a train timetable. This is not a book you're reading for fun. This is not a book you're engrossed in. This is like, not only are you trying to act cool by grabbing a book off the shelf, but it's the equivalent of pulling the phone book. Upside down.
That's so funny! I didn't realize that at all.
Right! It's something I never would have Googled. [A subscriber] brought it to my attention. It adds so much richness and doubles down on the joke. Yeah, that was great.
Are there any other books that kind of are of that era that you're fond of, or that share a little bit of Dracula’s zany weirdness?
I mean, it's a little cliche, but Moby-Dick is really a favorite.
I own it, but I haven’t read it yet! What’s your pitch for Moby-Dick?
My pitch for Moby-Dick is that first of all, it's hilarious. It's just very, very funny. You have the sense of sitting with a mad genius in a way that is really delightful.
You've got to have some tolerance for that friend who knows way too much about a topic and can drop into the lore, because this is what Melville does through the book. But the plot is interesting, and the writing is just incredible, too. And it's very funny—I like the digressions.
The first time I read it, I was just out of college, and I was like, "What is this book? I have no clue." But now it's something I just go back to it because I enjoy it. It's so big and so complicated—the plot’s not complicated, but all the little digressions feel complicated, because you're always rabbit trailing. It's like David Foster Wallace sort of stuff. When I reread it, I'm always finding something new.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu captures some of that social horror, but I wouldn’t call it a comedy in any way. Did you see it? What did you think of it?
I saw the original Nosferatu for the first time in the fall of 2023—I was new to that. And then I saw the Robert Eggers one in theaters.
[I found it] hard to evaluate, because I sort of know too much about Dracula and the history. But I loved how much movie it was. That thing started with the dial up to 10, and then it was just all movie for 90 minutes. There were quiet points, but it was this creeping dread and big feelings all the time.
My other takeaway was, not even Eggers can make Dracula scary anymore—and Eggers’s stuff is scary! But even he can't make a scary vampire movie, because vampires seem fundamentally defanged.
To round out the conversation, I totally went down a rabbit hole on your portfolio site looking at all the cool projects you've done outside of Dracula Daily. Is there anything else that you've worked on that's been really fun or cool, or that you're proud of?
Well, thank you. That's really nice of you to say. My side projects are mostly whatever I'm interested in right now.
One that people have had a really warm response to is Dumb Cuneiform. I was reading old books, and I wanted to know, what's the oldest book? What's the oldest thing that I can read? So I got a book of translated cuneiform tablets.
It turns out they're really boring. They're like little letters; you get some human drama, but a lot of them are just receipts or accounts. And I was like, "This is like someone's dumb what I had for breakfast Twitter archive just got fast forwarded into the future." That'd be funny, if there was a service that would take your dumb tweet and send it to you on a cuneiform tablet.
So that's what I did. Someone can send me their short message, and I will transliterate it into cuneiform and send it to you in the mail on a piece of dried clay.
How did you teach yourself cuneiform?
Well, I looked around for the easiest one to do. Cuneiform is a writing system, like Roman letters are a system, but it's not a language. I found old Persian is kind of the simplest—it's syllabic, so I'm kind of replicating the sounds of the English words, or whatever language people send me, into the syllables that are available in old Persian. And then I just did some practice until I was like, “Yeah, that looks like the thing in museums. Sure. Good enough.”
It only works when someone sends me something and I get to actually follow through on it. When it first came out, it was mostly jokes, and now it's mostly love letters or anniversary sorts of things. It's surprising like that. It sort of shifted into people thinking, “Right, if I'm going to model this idea of something that lasts, then it's going to be like, happy anniversary to my wife of 50 years” kind of stuff. It's just very sweet.
I like that juxtaposition, too—between the very absurd and the very meaningful.
I also noticed a few projects related to Charles Williams, which sent me down a very intriguing rabbit hole. What can you tell me about his work?
I can give you the short dive. So, Charles Williams was a British writer in the early 20th century. He was friends with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and that's how I found out about him. In college, I was reading all of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, and then I was like, “Well, I read all their books. What else do we have?”
I found out that they had this writing group called the Inklings. And so there are kind of these side characters, [though] nobody nearly as successful as those two. Charles Williams wrote seven novels, a bunch of plays, tons and tons of essays. He worked for a publisher. He was writing to make a living, but it was also like his calling.
I started reading his stuff, and I found out there was a literary society, so I got to join that. And then I got to publish new versions of his novels.
The deal with his novels is that they're what today would be urban fantasy. They all start with regular, modern people—except modern in his case is 1930s England or something—who have some intersection with some kind of magic or occult or mystical thing.
A lot of times, it's a real object. In one of the first ones, the actual Holy Grail shows up. They just find it in a church. There's some Satanic people trying to get it; a Catholic duke and a Church of England guy are also sort of fighting but working together. Like, "How seriously do we need to take this? Is this something that we really need to protect?" There's another one with ghosts. There's another one with some doppelgangers.
But the novels are interesting because they have these core ideas that Charles Williams really did believe. It's interesting to hear someone sketch out some sort of weird theology [or a] slightly occult idea, and he's trying to put it in a novel format, because he's trying to convince you. But he's also a weird writer, so he's not great at convincing. Almost every one has some sort of mystical passage in the middle where it's almost hard to follow what's happening, because he's describing some kind of transfiguration of a character.
I like something that's trying to do something different, and that feels like overlooked, which is why I wanted to put a little effort into helping people discover it. His stuff's always been in print—it's not like they failed or anything—but the only ones that were in print were these cheap, mass produced paperbacks with kind of embarrassing covers. [I republished the novels because I wanted] to hand them to somebody, and I don't want them to be embarrassed to be reading it on the bus.
Up Next: A Conversation with Horror Novelist David Sodergren
Last week, I had a lovely chat with David Sodergren about the joys and opportunities of self-publishing, the projects he’s currently working on, and how Maggie’s Grave almost had a very different ending, among other delights. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you will, too! I’d love to keep growing our little community, so if you know any Sodergren fans, send them my way ahead of next Thursday’s drop.
I’ve also started posting monthly reading recaps and occasional short book reviews over on Instagram. I even bravely posted my first reel (!) and no one even came to my house to make fun of my vocal fry or revoke my ability to post! (Why was I afraid of that…?)

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.
Reply