Everybody loves Dracula in one form or another. When Bram Stoker wrote the story of a Transylvanian vampire count on a quest to update himself by moving to England (at the time the home and head of a vast and bustling empire), he encapsulated a whole range of themes, from predation and corruption, through love acknowledged, love muted into good and honest friendship, loss, power, supernaturalism, paternalism, religion, and ultimately the conquering of an avatar of evil through the unified concern of a circle of friends, and their ultimately bold action against the undead monster in their midst. Oh, and the utter badassery of Mina Harker – we will be taking no questions on that, thank you.

And now there’s a sequel.

The Holmwood Foundation is a full-blown, full-on sequel to the original Dracula, set in the modern world, with all its modern conveniences. It’s being told in a traditional drama podcast format – series and episodes – and the second episode is about to drop.

Here’s the headline: pitting the fundamental, predatorial hunger of Dracula against the modern world makes him a lot scarier than he’s been in any version since the original novel. 

Modern Dracula – More Than Fang-Fiction?

There’s no way that should work. The original Dracula novel was heavy with mood and scent, drowsy with dreams, and velvety with transgressive desires that were at odds with the approved social structures of the day. 

It absolutely shouldn’t work in a modern world, where arguably anything consensual goes, and is shared instantly with a whole community of like-minded people. We should, in fact, be too sophisticated for Dracula in 2025, where one tweet can raise an army of pitchfork-touting villagers, and frequently does, to stand against our vampire overlords. 

That’s the problem. Dracula has in some sense become static in his trappings. Compared to the real, human evils we see day in and day out, he’s become almost an archetype of unthreatening horror, because yadda yadda sunlight, garlic, running water, stake through the heart, the end.

Setting The Holmwood Foundation in the here and now though actually allows its writers, Big Finish alumni Georgia Cook and Fio Trethewey, to prove that we’re not, in fact, in any sense too sophisticated for Dracula in 2025. 

Not, at least, if you do it right.

The Second Headline

The second headline is: they’ve done it right.

Here, there are a bold handful of creative leaps taken to achieve something fresh and terrifying. Fundamental to The Holmwood Foundation, for instance, is the idea that Dracula the novel was written by Bram Stoker (a friend of the Harkers, natch) in a way that would make an entertaining story, while the gang of friends who killed the actual Dracula quietly built a foundation specialising secretly in all things vampire, while protecting the world from the knowledge of all such terrors. Think Torchwood, with fangs.

What’s more, Mina and Jonathan Harker (Rebecca Root and Sean Carlsen respectively) are more alive than you might expect, albeit in a surprising way that adds substantively to the Dracula legend.

In fact, Root and Carlsen, both of whom are Big Finish favourites and phenomenally gifted actors, take double duty in The Holmwood Foundation. In the first instance, they play Mina and Jonathan. But they also play Maddie Townsend and Jeremy Larkin, who each work at the Foundation in very different capacities. 

It’s…complicated.

Straightforward given the way that Cook and Trethewey have written it, but complicated to explain without spoilering you ahead of time. For complicated in this instance, read intriguing. Read brilliant. Read “Ooooh… tell me more, ya enigmatic reviewer-git…”

Clever Things In The Structure

What you need to know about Episode 1, Across The Moors (available for the pleasure of your lugholes at The Holmwood Foundation website) is that there’s about 90 seconds of set-up at the very start, with archivist Maddie unpacking a skull from a particular expedition. After which, buildings explode, Mina and Jonathan make their presence felt in the modern day, and there’s an awful lot of running. 

Across the Yorkshire Moors, which the episode title should probably have told you. 

Where Dracula takes a longish while to build its terrors, The Holmwood Foundation obeys the requirements of the modern age and gets you running in fear almost immediately, only pausing for breath as and when the drama comes to natural pause-points, during which it takes the opportunity to build characterisation and sharp, spiky, and understanding relationships between the characters – including the four played by Root and Carlsen. 

That’s just one of a handful of gloriously clever things going on in the structure of The Holmwood Foundation. Where Dracula was a novel told in the epistolary form (through bunches of letters and recordings between characters), The Holmwood Foundation is a drama podcast told through the found-footage technique of having characters regularly record audio updates for one another.

Which frankly is a mark of storytelling genius, given the format. 

But where such found-footage ideas often struggle is in finding a believable reason within the structure of their storytelling for people to essentially talk to themselves a lot. The Holmwood Foundation writers make the solution to that structural challenge a fundamental necessity of the storytelling. 

Big tick.

So – an innovative approach to a now-classic horror novel, utilising both a modern setting and modern storytelling techniques, which allow it to deliver immediate drama and pace, while updating and substantively adding to the original?

What’s not to love?

Frankly nothing, but there’s more to talk about. 

Mina and Maddie, Jonathan and Jeremy

Where, particularly in the case of relentless and unparallelled badass Mina Harker, Dracula challenged societal norms and understandings of women’s capability, The Holmwood Foundation takes on modern equivalents of those issues. It’s an unmistakeably queer and queer-allied story and production, and even in Episode 1, there are tender moments where Maddie being a trans woman is touched upon, both in terms of practical necessity while on the run across the Moors, and in terms of explaining what trans people are to people who are out of their own time, like Mina and Jonathan. 

There’s a single, simple explanation of trans identity which Root delivers with such straightforward plainness that in this age of increasing anti-trans activism coming from the tops of governments, it will lift your heart if you’re any kind of ally. It miiiiight even force a tear from your cynical old eyes, because it throws the sharp acidic slime found on modern comments sections into such intense relief, it’ll make you want to be a better ally.

And it would be monstrous, while acknowledging the power and the immersion that Root brings to the story, to review The Holmwood Foundation without also doffing any hat we had to Sean Carlsen, whose double performance as Jonathan Harker and Jeremy Larkin of the Foundation is a thing of realistic panic and comic joy.

In Dracula, Jonathan Harker is, to be fair, a bit wet all round. Not as wet as he was made in some film versions, but still… meh. The Jonathan of The Holmwood Foundation is not the same Jonathan. He’s had experiences, he’s had a life, and then… well, then he’s here in the 21st century, so Carlsen anchors him in his love of Mina, but also delivers a man that his Mina could justifiably love. 

But it’s as Jeremy that Carlsen’s given more scope to really have fun.

Jeremy has precisely zero chill, and a deeply relatable dedication to the word “Fuck.” So being thrown out of his previously-safe, now exploded building and chased across the Yorkshire Moors by a bunch of Drac-exultant hell-fiends really ruins his day. 

Carlsen pitches Jeremy in a way that makes us both identify with the “Why me?” of his whinging, but also lets us laugh at his utter lack of ability to cope with the way his day and his life are going. It’s enough of a comic wave to earth us in the drama, to give us a semi-hysterical laugh amid the madness, and keep up keeping on with Maddie and Jeremy, Mina and Jonathan.

Board A Train?

That said, in Episode 2, Train Fiend, Carlsen as both Jonathan and Jeremy is crucial to the onward thrust of the drama, and the shift to the modern day becomes much more potent. 

While you’re being chased over the Yorkshire Moors, you could practically be in any century, so primally Baskervillian is the nature of the horror (with, in this instance, additional rat-catching skulls. Did we mention it was complicated?). 

When you shift to a train journey and a plan, the very nature of modern technology means your focus is shifted into the present – which is why having a “train fiend” literally tear away your modern complacency works so well in The Holmwood Foundation to deliver the fear of a Dracula coming to gradual terms with the world in which we live. 

As with some of the best Hinchcliffe-era Doctor Who, there’s a sense of disconnected body parts having an overwhelming influence on the world here – the skull uncovered by Maddie and rescued from the Foundation’s “Westenra building” has a distinctly Image of the Fendahl vibe, which means later mentions of a “hand” will also key the listener in to a kind of “Dracula Must Live” vibe if they happen to be fans of Classic Who.

But what The Holmwood Foundation manages in its first two episodes is pacing, panic, a dedication to following some of the tropes of the classic Dracula – both stakes through the heart and garlic are used within the first two episodes – plus a joyous independence to swirl the traditional around with the modern and create something fresh and successfully terrifying.

A Diversity of Voices

Root and Carlsen very much take centre stage in the first two episodes, and they fill those spaces with warmth, sharp dialogue, comedy and terror, so that you’ll want to jump on board The Holmwood Foundation early and ride with it all the way.

By the time you reach Episode 3, Convalescence, which naturally we’ve heard because reviewer privilege is real, darlings, you’ll find the canvas of the story expanding as we meet more and younger characters, including Samuel Clemens as Arthur Jones, the absolute revelation that is Basil Waite as Thomas Van Helsing (Come onnnn, you know your curiosity’s piqued by that idea), Michelle Kelly as Henri Martin, (who brightens the tone of absolutely everything and has possibly one of the best lines in the first three episodes), and Robyn Holdaway, adding a twist on the found-footage idea as CAM, the podcaster within a podcast.

Oh and then of course, there’s Dracula, in the frankly bone-chilling voice of Attila Puskas. Again, in great Hinchcliffian tradition, he’s used sparingly early on, and that restraint means when you hear him, his impact is doubled at the very least.

The Big Finish Connection

A brand new take on the Dracula legend that modernises the story, takes it forward in innovative new ways, tackles different but pertinent social stereotypes, embraces queer identities and diversity at a time when those things are senselessly under threat, and which comes with several stamps of audio storytelling quality is always going to be welcome in our lugholes, and the chances are high that if you’re reading this, it’s going to be welcome in yours, too. 

Cook and Trethewey are Big Finish stalwarts, as are Root, Carlsen and Clemens. Katherine Armitage on script editing duties has a broad career, but has also Done The Thing for the Big Finish gang. Benji Clifford, sound wizard and podcast-chatter at BF takes on sound duties here, too. There’s even, in Episode 2, a delicious cameo for Young War Doctor actor Jonathon Carley. The challenge is to see if you can spot him before the credits tell you who he played. 

So it’s fair to say if you’re a fan of Big Finish, The Holmwood Foundation has you covered.

But it also bristles with a kind of indie energy that lets it do exciting things free of, for instance, a gazillion years of canon. 

Absolutely, Dracula comes with a gazillion years of canon, but Holmwood dances neatly along the line of honouring its source material and extending it, translating it, turning it into something new enough to make the old stuff work in new, exciting ways, both in terms of its storytelling duties and its aim to deliver you quite a hefty hit of dopamine.

Go check out The Holmwood Foundation today, and add it to your podcast rotation – it’ll make your week better.

And you know you need that right about now. Tony Fyler