Who is your Dracula? Max Schreck’s toothy Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi in a tux, the lantern-jawed host of Hotel Transylvania? This notorious shapeshifter “exists for us even before we know who he is” says theatre director Yngvild Aspeli, who is bringing a puppet bloodsucker to the Edinburgh fringe this summer. “There were stories of vampires long before Bram Stoker but he gave new life to them.”

After watching her deeply creepy show Dracula: Lucy’s Dream, that eerily waxen, lifesized puppet has for me become as indelible as top-hatted Gary Oldman or gorily grinning Christopher Lee. It matches Jonathan Harker’s assessment of the count in Stoker’s novel: “The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.” I saw the show on tour in Paris several months ago and it still haunts me: I could swear this Drac disintegrated then reappeared before my eyes, such is the technical sophistication of Aspeli’s French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire. Thanks in part to Emilie Nguyen’s spectral lighting, stunning transformations take place, with the actors and puppets frequently becoming indistinguishable.

“Dracula is a good character for a puppet,” Aspeli says, on a video call from Norway, because the inanimate object “needs the blood-and-flesh actors to make him come alive”. Aspeli has drawn upon a 1901 Icelandic translation, Powers of Darkness, in which Valdimar Ásmundsson “took many liberties, adding and changing characters” to Stoker’s original. While Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s recent feminist revamp at the Lyric Hammersmith gave Mina Harker control of the narrative, this version has Mina’s dear friend Lucy at its heart. Stoker’s ill-fated Lucy goes from giddily receiving three marriage proposals in one day to fits of sleepwalking and being vampirised by Dracula. But Aspeli’s productions often “take the female character out of the victim position” she says. “Not to change the story, but the perspective.” On stage, the result is a sisterly counterforce to the story’s patriarchal men of science who take charge of the case – and the women.

Stoker, who was also a theatre manager, portrayed Dracula as a kind of puppet master. “This question of manipulation will always be important,” Aspeli says. Her retelling explores trauma and how psychological abuse can “control you even after it’s no longer happening – what does this action do to your body and mind afterwards?” This has long been an interest and informed the company’s name when she founded it in 2008. “The plexus solaire [solar plexus] is where emotion sits in the body.” As for polaire? “I work with polarity – in all my shows there is a balance between sanity and madness, reality and illusion.” (Aspeli’s feverish version of A Doll’s House has Nora dancing the tarantella, as in Ibsen’s play, and takes it as the cue to introduce an enormous version of the spider that gives the dance its name.)

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream presents such an atmospheric, fully realised world that it is a surprise when only five people come on at the curtain call, visibly tired – they have been incredibly industrious in and out of the shadows. The props, too, are minimal. It all resembles a conjuring act – “the power of illusion” declares Aspeli. “I like the kind of old-school handcraft of puppetry and how to create something almost out of nothing.”

The scale of the puppets, she says, is integral to each production. “If you were an actor controlling a much smaller puppet, it says something different about the relationship. What interests me is the relationship that can be created between the actor and the puppeteer equally.” Her lifesize puppets, inspired by the bunraku tradition, are made to be as light and anatomically correct as possible to ensure realistic movements.

As in the novel, sound plays a key part in her Dracula – there are piercing howls and an eerie song composed by Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, The Children of the Night, a description Stoker’s Dracula uses when Jonathan hears wolves howling. As a young girl, Aspeli feared wolves herself and blames the vicious beast named Gmork in The Neverending Story. “That was my nightmare wolf!”

Since Plexus Polaire’s founding, Aspeli has seen puppetry’s growing reputation as an art form for adults. At the fringe – where she has previously performed with the UK clowning outfit Jammy Voo (“so I know the dripping ceilings!”) – they will perform in a 1,200-capacity venue at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. That’s no niche proposal. “This is something that has taken a long time, but the art form can exist equally, and in the same spaces, as other theatrical expressions.”

The idea that puppetry is not just kids’ entertainment may be established, she says. “But it’s still something that has to be said, ‘Do not send your small children to Dracula!’” She cackles. “I will not take the responsibility!”