Dracula, Told From the Getaway Car: ENHYPEN's 'THE SIN' and the Vampire Who Runs

In 1897, the vampire did not get to speak. Bram Stoker's Dracula is told through letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, and almost none of them belong to the Count. The story is written by the people chasing him: a solicitor, his fiancée, a doctor, and a band of hunters led by Abraham Van Helsing.

ENHYPEN's THE SIN series hands the pen to the other side. Its vampire is not the threat in the shadows. He is the one running, with the person he loves in the passenger seat, while a hunting party closes in. This autumn, that story gave the group its first No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

The story so far

Leader JUNGWON explained the premise to Complex in August. "In this world, it's taboo for a vampire to bite a human—actually, it's illegal," he said. "But wanting to spend a lifetime with the person they love, they bite them. Having committed that taboo, they're hunted by the pursuit unit."

That was THE SIN : VANISH, released in January. THE SIN : BLISS, released on August 21, picks up mid-chase. Maeil Business Newspaper describes the album as following a vampire and his lover who break a taboo and flee, "only to realize that being together is a blessing after repeated threats and conflict." The title track, "Bloody Paradise," is in JUNGWON's words "a blood-colored paradise": "With you, even this blood-soaked situation feels like paradise."

The sound swerves too. According to Complex and Maeil Business Newspaper, "Bloody Paradise" is a Brazilian funk track, produced with JULiA LEWiS, with lyrics contributed by Gaeko of Dynamic Duo.

The parallel: a novel made of documents

Dracula is famous for its form. Wikipedia's summary puts it simply: "The narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles," and it "has no single protagonist." The reader assembles the monster from other people's notes.

ENHYPEN's albums work in a similar way. Like VANISH, BLISS threads narration interludes between its songs to carry the plot. "We placed each song and each narration in between the songs accordingly," JAKE told Complex. The story is not told in one video or one lyric. It is stitched together from tracks, interludes, a webtoon and an anime, the way Stoker stitched his from journals.

The difference is whose papers they are. In Stoker, the documents belong to the hunters, and the Count is hunted and killed. In THE SIN, the documents belong to the fugitives. The chase is the same shape. The sympathy has moved.

The older ancestor: Carmilla

Before Dracula there was Carmilla. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella, first serialized in The Dark Blue, predates Stoker's novel by 25 years and is often called one of the most influential vampire stories ever written. It is a story of a vampire whose danger and affection cannot be pulled apart.

THE SIN lives in that tension, but resolves it differently. Le Fanu's narrator is the one being pursued by a vampire. ENHYPEN's vampire is the one being pursued, and all he wants is a life together. The bite is still the forbidden act. What changes is that the story asks us to stay with the couple after it.

Why the long game works

None of this was improvised. Complex notes that ENHYPEN has kept a single vampire universe since its 2020 debut, across albums, the webtoon Dark Moon: The Blood Altar (read more than 200 million times, per Complex) and an anime. "We built this vampire storyline from the beginning as a core," JAKE said, "and we can really try and explore different music genres with that storyline."

That patience is now visible on the chart. Yonhap reported that THE SIN : BLISS debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 98,000 equivalent album units, 92,000 of them from album sales. It was the group's seventh top-10 album and its first chart-topper, after peaking at No. 2 twice. It was also their first release as a six-member group.

On the road, the BLOOD SAGA tour drew about 30,000 fans over three sold-out nights at Macau's Galaxy Arena in October, KSW News reported, after a third date was added when fan-club presales sold out in about ten minutes.

ACROSS ASIA

China has its own classic of love across a forbidden line. Liaozhai zhiyi, known in English as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, is a collection of close to 500 stories by the Qing-dynasty writer Pu Songling. The publisher of its earliest surviving printing, in 1766, claimed Pu first meant to call it Tales of Ghosts and Foxes, and fox spirits and ghostly lovers run all through it. Some critics read the collection as a quiet criticism of the society around it. Like THE SIN, it lets the supernatural lover be more than a threat.

A fresh perspective: the monster as narrator

Gothic fiction has always been about who gets to tell the story. For a century, the vampire was the subject of other people's diaries. ENHYPEN's series lets him keep the diary himself, and fills it with a chase, a bite and a baile-funk paradise.

Applause, then, for a group that bet early on one myth and kept rewriting it from the inside. Stoker gave the hunters the last word. ENHYPEN gave it to the runaways, and a lot of listeners decided to run with them.