Everyone knows how tough Dracula is. He's the biggest, meanest, and more importantly, most famous vampire in modern culture. He's also conveniently in the public domain. So how do you show just how awesome your character is? Make them fight Dracula.
This trope occurs whenever a previously established character or characters are pitted against Dracula. If the characters who fight Dracula have never appeared before, that is not this trope. So if Dracula were to be pitted against Captain Planet, that would be this, but if a new Dracula movie with an original cast of characters were to come out, that would not count.
In some settings, this makes some sense, but in others, not so much. Note that this trope just involves the character fighting Dracula. They don't actually have to beat him (although in many cases, they find a way to do so).
Related to The Worf Effect. A subtrope of Cool Versus Awesome. Has a great chance of happening in a Vampire Episode.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Batman Vampire was a trilogy of tales told under DC's alternate-universe Elseworlds label, in which Batman fought Dracula, becoming a vampire himself in the process. Dracula himself is only the first's part villain though, with the following sequels dealing with the consequences of his plan.
- Batgirl: In one issue, Batgirl and Supergirl fought twenty four Draculas. They escaped from movies.
- Dracula (Marvel Comics): In Marvel Comics Dracula has at some point fought nearly everyone, as well as holding down his own popular title, The Tomb of Dracula for years. He's fought (deep breath) Doctor Strange, Blade, The Frankenstein Monster, Jack Russell from Werewolf by Night, other miscellaneous monster-hunter characters, the X-Mennote , Doctor Doom, Captain Britain and MI13,note Spider-Man, the Hulk, Monica Rambeau of The Avengers, and Thor. Thor has even fought Dracula when the latter was amped by the blood of a god, and Dracula's also come close to curb-stomping Silver Surfer! (Who was admittedly having a rough day.) The only person that really gave Drac trouble was Apocalypse - and even then, Dracula would have killed him, but for the intervention of Abraham Van Helsing. Oh and of course Deadpool who wooed and married a potential powerful bride for him.
- In the Army of Darkness comics, Ash fights Dracula in the storyline appropriately named "Ash vs. Dracula".
- Superman once fought a Dracula expy that he defeated by letting the pseudo-Drac bite him (he's solar powered; apparently, his blood stores sunlight).
- Planetary's Elijah Snow. One of the most humiliating for Dracula, Snow simply froze him solid and then smashed him to pieces with a Groin Attack.
- Dracula vs. Zorro, Diego De La Vega encounters the Count in Spain and later France while visiting Europe. After barely surviving a battle with the count aboard a ship, Zorro makes use of the power of true faith to get the means to harm the vampire. In the end the hero manages to defeat Dracula by putting the supposedly real crown of thorns Jesus bore, with it not mattering if the relic was the original item or not as there was faith reverence for it. Moarte, the host of Longbox of the Damned, highly recommends it.
- Dracula is sent back in time by Satan to destroy King Arthur in Dracula vs. King Arthur.
- Solomon Kane fought Dracula in a pair of interconnected tales that ran in Dracula Lives! and Savage Sword of Conan.
- Santa fights him for control of the North Pole in the aptly named Santa Versus Dracula
- Dracula is an enemy regularly fought by Vampirella with his backstory being retconned into him having the same origin as Vampi's, being an alien from a vampire planet rather than a Romanian warlord.
- Unsurprisingly, he also appears in American Vampire, though he is faced by the supporting cast in a limited miniseries focused on them rather than the primary characters Pearl or Skinner.
- Victoria Undead II: Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula is, well, just that with Holmes and Watson coming across the cast from the Dracula novel who are currently engaged in trying to stop him.
- In the Top Cow crossover Monster War, Dracula fought against its heroes The Darkness, Witchblade, the Magdalena and Lara Croft. Unusually for this trope, Drac was not the Big Bad, but rather The Dragon to Mr. Hyde.
- In the 2019 Xena Warrior Princess mini-series, Xena, Gabrielle and Discord end up in the Romanian forests. Xena and Gabrielle fall under the thrall of a vampire lord named Sângele Regelui ("The Blood King"), who is Dracula in all but name.
Comic Strips
- Scary Gary: When writing his memoir, Gary includes a chapter about his "Epic battle" with Count Dracula. The actual encounter can be summed up in one sentence.
Leopold: He slapped you, and then you cried.Gary: I garnished it a bit.
Fan Works
- Occurs in the second book of Child of the Storm. Dracula tries to kidnap Carol in order to get her blood, which he believes will make him (and any other vampires he sires from then on) immune to sunlight. When Harry tries to intervene, he hands the young demigod his arse. Word of God is that he's based on Charles Dance — this is a Vampire Monarch who earned the Red Baron of "the Impaler" long before he was turned, and is a Physical God with the power and skill to match Thor in one-on-one combat. However, Harry and his friends are able to pull a Kansas City Shuffle and distract him long enough to snatch Carol, and then he scarpers when fellow Physical Gods Thor, Loki, and the Hulk — all of whom are very protective of Harry — show up.
- A crossover in which the Wattersons from The Amazing World of Gumball attempt to stop the aforementioned Vampire Lord from wiping out the human race, which can be read it in full here
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Films — Animation
- The Batman vs. Dracula: Batman fights Dracula. An attempt to weaken and seal Dracula away in the past resulted in his staked, chained corpse being entombed in a remote Gotham cemetery. The Penguin accidentally releases him whilst looking for a mafia treasure and the vampire lord begins amassing a vampiric ghoul army.
- Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf: Dracula is the villain of the movie.
Films — Live-Action
- In Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the Wolf Man fights Dracula.
- Billy The Kid vs. Dracula: Yes, this is a real movie. Oddly enough, the vampire has a different name in the movie, making the title a little misleading.
- Dracula is the Big Bad of Blade: Trinity. Fitting, since he was one of comic incarnation Blade's main adversaries.
- Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula: After a heist goes wrong, outlaw couple Bonnie and Clyde crash a mansion inhabited by the recently revived Dracula.
- Les Charlots contre Dracula (Crazy Boys vs. Dracula Junior) is a 1980 French movie, part of a series of films by comedic foursome "Les Charlots" that spoofed a variety of genres, this specific issue being a parody of horror movies.
- Dracula vs. Frankenstein: The climax involves the Frankenstein monster, having fallen for Judith Fontaine, rescuing her from Dracula (who wanted to make her his bride) and battling him. It doesn't end well for the monster, but its actions delay Dracula long enough for him to get caught by and burned up in the sunlight.
- Emmanuelle vs. Dracula: Buxom beauty Emmanuelle uses her sexual charms to help save her friends from being attacked by bloodsucking vampires. Though she spends most of the film dealing with a male vampire who isn't Dracula, as well as her transformed friends. Dracula himself doesn't show up until the last 10 minutes of the movie, to take the credit for everything that happened.
- The Librarian faces off against vampires in the third film, The Curse of the Judas Chalice. Dracula is their leader, but is pretending to be someone else.
- El Santo takes on Dracula in two of his films, Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula and Santo y Blue Demon contra Drácula y el Hombre Lobo. He fought regular non-Dracula vampires in a number of his other films, too.
Literature
- Sherlock Holmes matches wits with Dracula in the 1978 novel Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula; or the Adventure of the Sanguinary Count by Loren D. Estleman.
- Another Holmes/Dracula clash is recorded in Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File. Although it ends up being played with, since Dracula in this continuity is subject to Alternate Character Interpretation and is less evil than typically thought, and Holmes's antagonism rests mainly on a misunderstanding; once it's cleared up, the two end up working together.
- The Dresden Files:
- Dracula is alive, and is in fact the primogenitor of the Black Court, the youngest and a particularly powerful species of vampire. Word of God states that he makes a brief cameo appearance in Proven Guilty, though we can't tell at the time because he and his human lover are froze statues.
- Played with in Battle Ground: Harry fights Drakul — Dracula's father — and about six other vampires. And Harry is hopelessly out of his league in that fight. Two other Wardens get killed, one gets sucked into a teleportation gate of a kind no one else had seen before, and the only reason the rest of the heroes survive is because Drakul decides he's accomplished enough that night and leaves.
- Universal Monsters: The plot of book 1 deals with this, as Dracula has escaped from his movie and the heroes have to find a way to send him back. They have to fight him again in book 6.
Live-Action TV
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In season five, Buffy fights Dracula. Neither of them really wins: Buffy is unable to kill him, but she does manage to shoo him out of Sunnydale.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys sixth season episode "Darkness Visible" Hercules fights Dracula. Instead of time travel, the whole Dracula setting is moved to ancient Greece complete with Prince Vlad, strigoi, spooky castle, and Turks. Only references to God are replaced with Gods.
- Penny Dreadful: (One of the) Big Bads of the entire series is Dracula. Vanessa, Ethan, and most of the main cast go up against him directly in Season Three, but no one manages to defeat him. Vanessa ultimately succumbs and gets bitten, the other characters get smacked around when they try to attack him, including Ethan. In the end, Dracula escapes London, unscathed.
- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode "Transylvania, January 1918" involves Indy traveling with a team of spies to the eponymous region during World War I; and he faces off against a rogue Romanian general/nobleman named Mattias Targo, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler, but it turns out that he's an authentic vampire (probably the real Vlad Tepes himself, or at least Dracula). An uncommon episode, considering that it's the only one of the entire TV series to have supernatural elements (despite the fact that magic is known to exist in the Indiana Jones universe).
Video Games
- In the Animaniacs Licensed Game for the Sega Genesis, Dracula (from the TV series episode, "Draculee, Draculaa") serves as the boss of Studio 4, which takes place on the set of a horror film called Bloodmask: Part 32. This should come as no surprise, as Konami, creator of the Castlevania games, also developed this game.
- In The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, Dracula serves as the boss of the Haunted Castle, and Fred must defeat him to recover a piece of Gazoo's time machine.
- In Frankenstein: The Monster Returns, A vampire (Implied to be Dracula) is the boss of the penultimate stage.
- In King's Quest II, King Graham fights Dracula as his third trial. In the Fan Remake, Dracula is replaced by Caldaur and King Graham befriends him.
- In Looney Tunes, Dracula serves as the Boss of Speedy's stage.
- In Midnight's Blessing, Dracula is after his missing soul, so he can hand it over to the Devil in exchange for true immortality. It's up to a mailgirl, a monster hunter, a vampire hunter and a werewolf to put a stop to him.
- In NetHack, Dracula is a mandatory boss. Unfortunately, for a very long time he wasn't much stronger than a normal vampire lord, a trivial enemy at this point, so players would sometimes just cherry tap him to death with candy bars or other such "Vladsbanes", as they are called by the fanbase. Or just kill him in a single hit with cockatrice corpses or a blessed +7 Grayswandir. He was finally buffed in version 3.6.0 and is now a legitimate threat.
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate features the Castlevania version of Dracula as a non-playable boss character. Due to Ultimate's nature of a Massively Multiplayer Crossover, several characters from many video gaming franchises now have the chance to face off against the Count. While any character in the lineup can fight him in the game's Adventure Mode, World of Light, in the game's Classic Mode, Dracula can only be fought by Luiginote , Pac-Mannote , Simon and Richter Belmontnote and Sephirothnote .
Web Comics
- The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: The "Punch Dracula" story.
- Clan of the Cats: Dracula shows up, and much fighting ensues.
Web Original
- There's a meme of a comic book panel depicting Moon Knight angrily striding down the stone steps of a castle, shouting "I know you're here, Dracula, you big fucking nerd. Where's my goddamn money?", implying that he is about to fulfill this trope.
Western Animation
- One episode of Animaniacs has the Warner Siblings dealing with Dracula, although they don't fight him as much as drive him insane with their antics.
- The Beatles are chased around a wax museum by Dracula, which they first encounter as a wax statue (episode "Misery").
- Dracula was the villain in the Castlevania episode of Captain N: The Game Master, naturally.
- Centurions: The Centurions encounter Dracula in the episode "Night on Terror Mountain". The Count uses Mind Control instead of his vampire powers to turn hero Max Ray and villain Doc Terror into his mental slaves, but is defeated when the other Centurions use the old "exposure to sunlight" ploy.
- Filmation's Ghostbusters: Jake, Eddie and Tracy battle Dracula in the episode "Shades of Dracula". Dracula's design is basically the same as Drac from another Filmation cartoon The Groovie Goolies.
- The Flintstones (of all people) had an encounter with Dracula, er Rockula, in The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone where a vacation to Transylvania, er Rocksylvania, leads Rockula to seek Wilma as his bride. She scares him off by listing the responsibilities of modern marriage.
- Dracula attempted to make Firestar his bride in an episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends entitled, appropriately enough, "The Bride of Dracula!"
- In the Spider-Woman episode "Dracula's Revenge", Spider-Woman fights Dracula, with the Wolfman and Frankenstein's Monster appearing as the vampire's minions.
- Superfriends: The New Super Friends episode "Attack of the Vampire" had the Super Friends battle Count Dracula.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): Dracula appears during the fifth season as part of the Monster Arc, being forcibly recruited by Savanti Romero in order to help him conquer the world.
