In Dracula, references to animals, usually sinister nocturnal creatures, are frequent, and the vampires have animal-like properties; indeed, the Count himself is capable of full shape-shifting into a wolf or a bat as well as having command over the ‘creatures of the night’. Parallel to this, in the second half of the nineteenth century humankind’s connection with the animal kingdom was of great interest when Darwin’s theory of evolution took hold in simplified form, together with the fear that a reverse process might also occur and humans once more become beast-like (the theory of ‘Degeneration’).