‘Renfield’: How does Dracula make a familiar?

Warning: Light spoilers for Renfield to follow.

We all love an underdog story, but what’s been stopping us from showing the same love to an underling story? Whatever such barriers existed, they seem to be no more thanks to Renfield, the tongue-in-cheek bloodbath of a film about one man’s struggle against his abuser. The twist? His abuser is Dracula.

Starring Nicholas Hoult as the titular, fed-up servant, Renfield follows the plight of Robert Montague Renfield, the long-time lackey to Dracula who’s had it up to his neck with the vampire lord’s narcissistic tendencies, and flees to modern-day New Orleans to make a new life to himself. Unfortunately, settling in is a bit of a chore when the shadow of Dracula and a hyper-violent mob lingers over your city.

Luckily, Renfield has superpowers, which allow him to become a one-man slaughterhouse after digesting bugs and spiders, so he’s not totally helpless in his rather gory quest for emotional freedom. The rather resentful caveat to this is that he got his powers after becoming Dracula’s familiar.

What is a familiar?

In the context of Renfield, a familiar is a human who was granted a portion of Dracula’s power by Dracula himself, resulting in that person becoming immortal and gaining the aforementioned bug-fueled superpowers.

But how do these cronies come to be exactly?

How does Dracula make a familiar?

To begin to answer this question, we have to go all the way back to the film that started it all; 1931’s Dracula, the film to which Renfield serves as an official sequel.

In Renfield, the nuances behind Renfield’s devotion to Dracula don’t go beyond any indication that they just teamed up one day back in the early 20th century, but Dracula had already shed a bit of light on that subject nine decades ago.

In Dracula, an unwitting Renfield, then a mortal real-estate solicitor, rolls up to the vampire lord’s then-residence to discuss some business matters with him. During Renfield’s visit, Dracula hypnotizes him, which leads to the poor solicitor losing consciousness, after which he’s promptly attacked by Dracula and transformed into his familiar.

All of this to say that in order for Dracula to make a familiar, it seems like a bit of bloodshed is involved. Given that vampires have historically been known to transform humans into vampires simply by biting them and drinking their blood, which in turn results in the bitten becoming more and more susceptible to the vampire’s influence (a dynamic that gels with the narcissistic Dracula quite well), it’s probably safe to assume that all the familiars in Renfield became so at the cost of docking their red blood cell count through two little holes in their neck.

Renfield is currently playing in theaters.