Bi-homicidal

Bi-homicidal is a mordant expression used to describe the 2020 BBC adaptation of Dracula, where the Count’s apparent sexual interest in men and women is inseparable from his appetite for blood. The term is not presented as a conventional sexual identity. It is a joke that redirects the audience from erotic fantasy to the practical fact of predation: Dracula is “bi-homicidal” because he kills across genders, not because he maintains ordinary romantic or sexual relationships with his victims.

Meaning and Context

The expression appears in discussion of the adaptation’s unusually overt treatment of Dracula as a figure of lust as well as darkness and evil. The Count, played by Claes Bang, is charming and personable, but his casual conversation and light-hearted manner coexist with demonic plans, the deliberate torment of victims, and eventual killing. His sexuality is first referenced obliquely when Sister Agatha Van Helsing asks Jonathan Harker whether he has had sex with Dracula. The question places sexual possibility inside the story while leaving the Count’s actual conduct grounded in blood-drinking and violence.

The phrase therefore joins two meanings that the vampire tradition has often kept in uneasy proximity. Dracula’s attraction appears broad enough to encompass men and women, while his underlying impulse remains the bloodlust that drives his hunt. The result is not a romance between equals but a predatory pattern in which desire, curiosity, domination, and death are repeatedly collapsed into the same encounter.

The Adaptation’s Clarification

The expression’s meaning is explicitly clarified by writer Moffat, who warned viewers not to take the Count’s sexual presentation too literally. Dracula is described as “bi-homicidal,” rather than bisexual in the ordinary sense: he is killing his victims, not dating them. Moffat further explains that the Count is not actually having sex with anyone; he is drinking their blood, and this appetite extends to both men and women.

That clarification makes the expression a form of dark comic precision. It acknowledges the erotic charge surrounding Dracula without allowing that charge to obscure the mechanism of his encounters. The Count’s sexuality is staged as implication, performance, and atmosphere, whereas his feeding is concrete. The joke works because the audience can recognize the sexual coding but is then forced to translate it into the more brutal vocabulary of homicide.

Relation to Vampire Conventions

Bi-homicidal belongs to a long history in which vampires have been portrayed as increasingly selective, elegant, and intimate predators. Varney the Vampire, first published in instalments in 1845, helped establish familiar physical features such as sharpened, fang-like teeth, while its enormous Penny Dreadful narrative made the vampire a sustained popular figure. Carmilla, serialised from late 1871 to March 1872 and published in book form in 1872, developed the image of the nocturnal, emotionally and physically predatory vampire whose feeding could be presented with greater selectivity and elegance.

The expression also differs from the eroticized image established by later screen vampires. In Nosferatu, Count Orlok is threatening rather than beautiful and carries none of the erotic overtones that later audiences came to expect. Dracula’s public image was subsequently fixed more powerfully by Bela Lugosi’s 1931 performance, which made the murderous Count compelling and helped establish the classic vampire as a charismatic figure. Bi-homicidal names the point at which that charisma becomes self-conscious: the seductive surface remains, but the phrase insists that the underlying act is killing.

Comic Reversal and Cultural Significance

The term exemplifies the modern freedom to make vampires almost anything: villains, sympathetic figures, openly social beings, or figures whose traditional traits are played for comedy. Contemporary vampire fiction and screen drama can turn the old bloodsucker into a good character as readily as a bad one, while still preserving the central tension between human intimacy and supernatural danger.

Its comedy depends on reversal. A phrase that initially sounds like a description of sexual openness is recast as a description of indiscriminate murder. That reversal exposes the instability of the vampire’s erotic appeal: the same charm that invites fascination also disguises a lethal appetite. In the BBC adaptation, bi-homicidal thus functions as a compact expression of Dracula’s defining contradiction—he is personable enough to flirt with the language of desire, yet fundamentally committed to feeding, domination, and death.