Welcome to XOXO, Popverse! Our Valentines gift to you this year is a week-long celebration of all things love and romance in pop culture, from our favorite couples to which superheroes would make the worst dates. (It's the X-Men.) Find our love notes to you right here. 

Absolutely no shade to 'My Heart Will Go On' or 'I Will Always Love You,' but I prefer my movie soundtrack-specific love songs to be a bit more on the gothic side. And if you're familiar with one of the greatest horror adaptations of all time (scientifically proven), you probably won't be shocked to learn that my personal favorite is 'Love Song for a Vampire,' the single recorded and composed by Annie Lennox as part of the soundtrack for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

But it's not just the synths and sadness of this number that keeps me coming back. The song came about through some pretty unlikely circumstances, and helped usher in a new era of Draculism that we're still dealing with today. Considering it's love week here at Popverse, I figured there was better time to talk about it.

Anne & Annie

The beginning of 'Love Song for a Vampire' isn't in the pages of Bram Stoker's seminal horror work at all, though it does come out of one of the most important vampire works in pop culture history. According to an Off the Records recounting of the song from 1993, Annie Lennox agreed to record the song not because of Van Helsing's arch-nemesis, but because of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. However, it wasn't just a shared interest in creatures of the night that got the singer into the writer's work.

Folks familiar with Rice's Vampire series may know that, right before she wrote Interview with the Vampire, Rice's six-year-old daughter died of leukemia. The author's grief is manifest in the pages of her multi-book spanning history of vampire, particularly in characters like Claudia, the vampire who remains an eternal child thanks to her curse. Lennox, too, was dealing with grief as she was diving into the Vampire Chronicles, having given birth to her stillborn son in 1988. Lennox would eventually agree to doing the song, says OtR, because of this connection she shared with Anne Rice's immortals, even though her interest in Dracula itself was low.

Little did she know, however, that she was contributing to one of the biggest shift's in the character's modern history.

Dracula the lover

The most significant change Bram Stoker's Dracula makes to its source material is the inclusion of a tragic bacstory for its titular monster. In the Francis Ford Coppola retelling, Dracula (Gary Oldman) is the historical Vlad the Impaler, who curses God and earns his vampirism after his wife commits suicide.. Part of the reason Dracula is so intent on geting to England, in this version, is that he believes Mina Murray (Winona Ryder) to be the reincarnation of his beloved.

These days, the idea of Dracula as a sympathetic - and particularly romantic - character is everywhere you look. It's at the heart of the latest Dracula adaptation from Luc Besson, which stars Caleb Landry Jones in the titular role and Christoph Waltz as a vampire-hunting priest. It's part of what drives Netflix's Walachian vampire to madness in Castlevania. Hell, Hotel Transylvania's Dracula is even defined by his being a single father after his wife passed.

With a story as ubiquitous as Dracula, which both eternally changes and is eternally changed by the shifting landscape of pop culture, it's impossible to pinpoint the moment that it enters a new era. However, if the modern, post-Anne Rice version of the character were ever to be the subject of some documentary or video essay, I'd wager that the backing track would sound a lot like this:

Bram Stoker's Dracula is streaming on Netflix now.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." Join Popverse's weekly explorations of the best opening moments of horror cinema in The Coldest Open, and then check out:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.