Dracula

Captured by Mitchell Royel—now playing Dracula by Tame Impala. The moment crystallizes: artistry meets vision, and the narrative shifts. This is what happens when creative conviction refuses compromise.

Captured by Mitchell Royel

Captured by Mitchell Royel

The first time I felt the pull of midnight's electric current, I was standing on my apartment balcony, watching the city lights blur into streaks of neon honey. There's something about the witching hour that transforms everything - the air becomes thicker, more alive, pulsing with possibilities that daylight simply cannot contain.

I've always been drawn to the liminal spaces where reality bends at its edges. Those moments when the familiar world dissolves and something far more intriguing takes its place. It's in these spaces that I discovered the true essence of nocturnal transformation - not the gothic romance of old tales, but something far more electric and immediate.

The city at night becomes a different creature entirely. Streetlights become stars, casting their amber glow across empty sidewalks where shadows dance to rhythms only they can hear. I find myself walking these streets, feeling the pulse of something ancient yet thoroughly modern coursing through the concrete veins beneath my feet.

There's a particular corner downtown where the old architecture meets the new, where Victorian ironwork casts intricate shadows against glass and steel. Standing there, I can almost feel the weight of centuries pressing against the present moment. The past doesn't disappear - it layers itself into the now, creating depth and texture that makes everything shimmer with possibility.

What if transformation isn't about becoming something else entirely, but about discovering what was always there, hidden beneath the surface?

I remember one particular evening when the fog rolled in from the harbor, thick and mysterious, turning familiar landmarks into ghostly suggestions of themselves. Walking through this transformed landscape, I felt myself changing too - not into something monstrous, but into something more authentically alive. The boundaries between self and environment began to blur in the most beautiful way.

The allure of the night isn't about darkness conquering light - it's about finding the electric energy that exists in the spaces between. It's about discovering that transformation can be gentle, hypnotic, like waves of sound washing over you until you're not quite the same person who began the journey.

In these midnight wanderings, I've learned that the most profound changes happen gradually, almost imperceptibly. One moment you're walking down a familiar street, and the next you're moving through a landscape that feels both completely foreign and intimately known. The rhythm of your footsteps begins to sync with something larger, something that connects you to every other soul who has ever felt the magnetic pull of the night.

There's magic in surrendering to this transformation - in letting the boundaries of your everyday self become fluid and permeable. Not the dramatic metamorphosis of legend, but something far more subtle and infinitely more powerful. It's about becoming more yourself, not less.

The city's heartbeat becomes your heartbeat. The electric hum of late-night energy becomes the soundtrack to your own becoming. And in that synchronization, you discover that the night doesn't change you - it simply reveals who you were always meant to be.

The dawn always comes, of course, but those who have danced with midnight's electric embrace carry something of that transformative energy with them into the daylight hours. They move through the world with a different rhythm, a deeper understanding of the magic that exists in the spaces between what we think we know and what we're brave enough to discover.

-Deck (of Mitch Leyor)