We attended the Wilmington Geek Expo this past weekend, a one-day event celebrating all things geek. Independent comics were promoted, cosplay competitions were held, and even the 501st Legion was in attendance. One of the featured guests for the convention was Rich Davis, the writer and creator of the smash-hit independent comic Cult of Dracula.
The series was first released through Second Sight Publishing and is now published by Source Point Print. The story is currently in the middle of its second chapter, Rise of Dracula.
The horror comic series is causing big waves in the comic book world and continuously selling out. While on a quick turnaround from his base of operations in Knoxville, TN, where Davis also owns Nirvana Comics, the writer sat down with Horror Geek Life to discuss where Cult of Dracula came from and where the title is going.
Horror Geek Life: An opening tagline on the graphic novel’s cover reads, “From Rich Davis’s Nightmares.” So, we have to ask, what are your nightmares?
Rich Davis: That’s a great question, so a lot of people don’t know this about me, but have you ever heard the legend of the Belle Witch?
HGL: Yeah.
Rich Davis: Okay, well, that’s my family. I’m 100% serious on my mother’s side, so in my family, haunting dreams are a real thing, and I have been haunted by very real waking nightmares my whole life. There’s not a night that goes by that I don’t wake up at least once completely paralyzed, and I see people walking around me, wherever I am. It’s just par for the course with me by now. I see things in the shadows. I see spiders all the time. So, when I started writing comics, I kinda wanted to… Well, to be honest, I thought it sounded cool.
Plus, I grew up inspired by the cowboy horror folk legends, the Tobe Hooper and the Tom Savini, these people who created the image of themselves ways before anyone else did. So, I just think, okay, I’m gonna be a cowboy here and make it sound cool, but there is truth in there because everything I write has been a nightmare, pieces here, pieces there. And you know, for branding purposes, it’d pretty damn cool.
HGL: Has what scares you changed since starting the comic?
Rich Davis: You know, especially since Cult has been with me so long, I’ve been working on it since 2012. Ten years I’ve been working on it. Growing up, vampires terrified me, but I love it. I’m the easiest person in the world to scare. I want to be scared. Some of my earliest memories were hiding behind this big, black leather couch in the living room, peeking over the edge and watching Scooby-Doo, terrified. But I love it, okay, I love the rush of being scared. Nothing else has ever come close to that high for me. Horror is it.
When I was writing Cult of Dracula, I thought about what Stephen King said: “Wanna write good horror, write what scares you.” So, vampires scare me, serial killers scare me, cults scare me, and not due to what they do but what they can get other people to do for them. Charles Manson never killed anyone, but he was one of the most feared individuals of the modern age. He never killed anyone, but he got prom queens and high school football stars, the all-American kid, to go out and literally butcher people for him. It may be connecting some dots. It might be taking a few leaps, but what can social media make people do? We get to explore that in Rise of Dracula, the sequel to Cult of Dracula. The power of double-speak, the message.
HGL: The Spin.
Rich Davis: THE SPIN! When I started writing Rise around 2016, and I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you fall, I was influenced by what was going on politically at that time. I saw the power that Donald Trump had to make people believe things that were flat-out untrue. That is the type of power that cult leaders have that just scares the shit out of me. Same thing, to connect that back to vampires, vampires have that same power.
HGL: That allure to trance you into inviting them in.
Rich Davis: Exactly! You invite them in. They can’t just charge through the front door. So, I guess I can say the core things that scare me still scare me, but how and why they terrify me have changed.
HGL: Closer to the book, who is your favorite character to write?
Rich Davis: Hands down, Lucy. I love Lucy. Lucy is, and I’ve said this before, the Lucy character is heavily inspired by my wife, Amber. Obviously, this is a fictionalized version. A lot of the things that go on between her and Arthur in the book are snapshots of my life with Amber. Arguments that we had, stupid shit that we did, fun things that we did, the way we loved each other.
It seeps into the book, and I hope it comes across in the comic itself, but in the script, when I’m writing Lucy, it really comes across I’m enjoying writing her. It hurts sometimes to write her. I very rarely get through a Lucy scene anymore without tears. It hurts to tap into that. But I feel like you have to bring truth to the art, God, that sounded pretentious as ****.
There are times when I look back at the stage play that Cult of Dracula started, and I don’t recognize who wrote that. I see where I was phoning it in, but now that I tap into that past and really get real, get raw — and actually, tapping into something real works so much better.
HGL: Who is the most challenging character for you to write?
Rich Davis: (The writer takes a moment) Lucy. Lucy is very hard to write due to the emotion evolved. It’s a lot like being an actor. You find that pain from your life, and you substitute it for the pain in your character’s life, that laughter, that love, and you substitute. So, Lucy is very difficult due to the emotional impact on me, and because there is this pressure, I put upon myself to stay true to Amber’s honor and memory when I write her. It’s difficult, damn it, Chase, it’s just difficult.
Other than Lucy, the other complex character to write was Renfield in Cult of Dracula. I had a very clear idea of who I wanted Renfield to be, a really clear image of him, inspired by Manson or Jim Jones. Renfield was difficult, though, because I wanted him to have music to his voice like Manson. If you listen to Manson speaking, good god!
HGL: Hell of a songwriter, too, Manson.
Rich Davis: You know, actually, yeah! If you just read something Manson wrote, and you didn’t know it was written by Charles Manson, you could understand why he was hanging out with the Beach Boys. I mean, he’s insane but a damn fine poet. So, writing a character like Renfield in a way that will touch the people, and by touch, I mean get in their head. You could easily read Renfield as some guy rambling nonsense, but if you sit down and really look at what he is saying, he is saying something.
So, when I set out to extend the story, I had to add in the element of him feeling like the constantly forgotten child, needing Dracula’s love, and that added layers to an already layered character. Renfield would be the most complex character that I have written.
HGL: Who is your inspiration?
Rich Davis: Anne Rice defined everything I know about vampires, everything I love about them. Quentin Tarantino, for his dialogue and pacing, no one can handle a broken narrative like Tarantino can. Music is a tremendous influence on me, I don’t write anything without a soundtrack in my head for it, and I listen to some weird shit too. Like there is one scene in Cult of Dracula, Lucy is saving Author from the three brides, and Lucy has this strong heroic moment. Now, if you had a guess about what song I was listing to when I was writing that scene, what do you think it would be?
HGL: Top of my head? Something poppy, um, Katy Perry, “Teenage Dreams.”
Rich Davis: Damn, that’s pretty close — Nicki Minaj, “Super Base.” I’ll just pick a song and play it and play it and play it till the scene is done. Any and every genre, music is a big influence on what and how I write.
HGL: How many chapters do you see your saga being?
Rich Davis: Well, when I first pitched it to publishers, I told them it had to be either one volume of six issues or three volumes of six issues. It couldn’t be two, and it couldn’t be four. Those were the choices I gave them cause I always saw the story as eighteen issues, but since I’ve been writing it and the title has become as popular as it has, it kind of has taken on a life of its own.
While I’m finding that I might be narratively done with the story of Dracula, it’s not done with me. I can’t talk a lot about it, but the publishers and the readers are hungry for more once Reign of Dracula is over — the third and final chapter. I believe issue one of Regin comes out on October 1st, and I’ll finish those six issues. Then we are looking at how to expand the world out. I can’t go much more into that, but I can tell you it’s grown past the original eighteen issues I planned.
HGL: What’s on the horizon for you?
Rich Davis: We have Reign of Dracula coming out this year. We’ve announced Prometheus Unchained, which is my Frankenstein adaption. It’s is gonna be so much fun.
HGL: You told me about the pitch for that concept, and I am very excited about this.
Rich Davis: Thank you, there’s been a couple of times where I’ve wanted to go ahead and finish up Dracula so I can get on to Frankenstein. There’s that, we’ve announced a children’s book, it’s called Brontosaurus Brown.
HGL: That is an awesome title.
Rich Davis: Well, Amber wanted to write this book, she had the idea for it, and sadly she passed away. Continuing this story is a cathartic way to continue her story. So, Brontosaurus Brown is a young dinosaur who goes on an adventure with children. For anyone who has read Cult, Rise, and Reign, it’s gonna be something very different. Then we have the motion-comic for Cult of Dracula in development. Interest in a television series is in the deep, deep stages of pre-production. There are a lot of plates spinning right now.
HGL: You mentioned that your three chapters of Dracula all have something of a genre change. Can you go into that?
Rich Davis: There is a very intentional genre shift from Cult to Rise, as there will be with Regin. It was always a plan to have the first chapter feel like a lost Tobe Hooper movie and for the second chapter to feel the same but for John Carpenter. They’re pretty much the two biggest horror movie influences on my life. And yes, The Purge was very big on shaping Rise. Many of the elements in The Purge franchise the plays on match what Carpenter’s works played on, too.
These sick societies, people just trying to survive it the best they can, and this big overarching feeling of a societal manipulation by a government or institution you just can’t trust. So, definitely, a big genre change from Cult to Rise. And an even bigger genre shift is planned from Rise to Reign. If Cult is a Tobe Hooper film and Rise is a John Carpenter film, then Reign of Dracula is a George Miller film.
HGL: So, we’re going to the apocalypse?
Rich Davis: Oh, we are going to the apocalypse! And this has all been discussed, so I’m not giving anything away. When you finally take a look at all three chapters altogether, you are going to see some very striking similarities to the armageddon in “Revelation.” Not just from a Christian perspective but also from the Judaic perspective, an Islamic perspective, and the Hindu perspective.
We all have these stories about the end times, and they are all scarily similar to each other. I get to pull a lot of elements in from that, and we take the divine aspect out of it. We’re talking the ****ing apocalypse. There are vampires, angels, demons, and some sorry soul humans still hanging around, and these people are still trying to carve out whatever living they can.
HGL: What is your favorite vampire movie?
Rich Davis: Interview with the Vampire. It’s not the best by any stretch of the imagination, but it is my favorite because of the effect it had on me as a person. The only other movies that come close would be either Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the ’92 film, and maybe taking the third spot would be Horror of Dracula.
HGL: As a comic shop owner, you have your finger on the pulse of what titles are selling. You come into the comic game with a genre book, not a traditional superhero tale. Why was that?
Rich Davis: Superhero comics are dead. They just don’t know it yet.
HGL: Bold statement; please elaborate.
Rich Davis: So, and this is to take nothing away from the success of the MCU or the success of Marvel Comics or DC cause anyone working for them is more successful than me. What I’m seeing is superheroes have too much legacy debt. I mean, where do you start reading Batman?
HGL: No idea?
Rich Davis: There’s your big problem right there, and I see this in the shop every day. Fewer and fewer teenagers are reading superheroes. Little kids still love them, but nowadays, more and more people are reading manga. I mean, roughly over 60 percent of what we carry at the store isn’t superhero-related. It’s just that in the superhero genre, what I think has happened is that we’ve been so spoiled with fifteen years of the MCU that what used to be this niche culture has become too pop culture, and we as a people like to rebel against pop culture.
I think we’re seeing a lot of people walking away from superheroes to appear cool, but we are in a golden age of independent genre comics! If you tell me you’re into horror, I can’t just hand you the horror book of the month. I have to follow up with okay, do you like vampires, ghosts, demons, werewolves, zombies, witches? Do you like horror-comedy, gore porn, thrillers? There is a list now. Not only is there one comic for you, but there are probably fifty! We have so much access we are no longer limited to the same two companies using the same Spider-Guy or Batdude over and over again.
