Dracula

Bela Lugosi as the definitive Dracula.

VAMPIRE REDUX

By TOM SOTER
from DIVERSION, OCTOBER 1994

The lid of the coffin creaks open. Slowly, ever so slowly, thin bony fingers grab the side of the box. Evil hangs in the air like cobwebs. Then, the lid comes up – and suddenly, an elegantly dressed man in tuxedo and flowing black cape is standing before us. His piercing eyes are red and his smile inviting, as he speaks with the silky manners of a well-heeled diplomat.

“Good evening,” he purrs in an oh-so-odd yet familiar accent. “I...am Dracula.” He smiles again, this time showing teeth. “I bid you welcome.”

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. The vampire is back. Not that he ever left. Since Bram Stoker introduced Dracula to the world in 1897, the undead count and his followers have literally refused to stay down, appearing in books, plays, radio programs, ballets, cartoons, comic strips, TV series, commercials, and, of course, movies. In November, Tom Cruise stars in a big-screen adaptation of Anne Rice's best-selling Interview with the Vampire, followed by A Vampire in Brooklyn, starring Eddie Murphy and possibly a big-screen sequel to BramStoker's Dracula (1992), reportedly about vampire-slayer Abraham Van Helsing.

Nearly a century after his first appearance in print, the count and his legions continue to fascinate. Indeed: at the Broadway opening of the play Dracula in 1977, a woman was overhead saying, “I’d rather spend one night with Dracula, dead, than the rest of my life with my husband, alive.”

Certainly Bram Stoker never dreamt that his creation would attain such popularity or immortality. But vampires touch a particular subconscious nerve. As Walter Kendrick noted in The Thrill of Fear, vampirism makes “the horror of death and dying...safe; it is turned into a celebration of being permanently alive, forever immune to decay.” Vampires are part of a long literary tradition (The Vampyre, 1819; Varney the Vampire, 1847) in which eroticism is closely associated with horror. In choosing vampirism, Stoker was also tapping into myths that had held power for centuries as explanations for plagues and other illnesses.

In the Victorian era, when Stoker was writing, the idea of vampires took on other meanings, as well. “To enter the castle of Dracula is to enter the Victorian mind, upstairs and downstairs, with all its sexual contradictions and complexities, hidden rooms, and closeted skeletons,”noted David J. Skal in Hollywood Gothic. "...Dracula read today is first and foremost the sexual fever-dream of a middle-class Victorian man, a frightened-dialogue between demonism and desire.”

Stoker, an Irish-born stage manager, had been writing for years before he concocted Dracula (original title: The Un-Dead) in 1897. The name for his villain came from 15th century Prince Vlad V of Wallachia, known as both Vlad the Impaler (because he impaled foes on stakes) and Dracula (Rumanian for “Son of the Devil”). The details of Dracula’s native Transylvania, which the author never visited, actually came from a guide book. The novel was an immediate success, but Stoker died before seeing what he had wrought. The first great vampire movie, Nosferatu (1922) was based on his book and set the creepy mood for future tales, but it was Dracula (1931) that laid out the traditions.

Poster for unauthorized film version.

It was here that we were first shown the vampire as a disarmingly suave creature of the night, quite unlike Stoker’s cadaverous old man with pointed ears, bad breath, and hairy palms. As played by Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi, 49, the “count glides across drawing rooms and crypts with equal aplomb; no charnel-house air clings to him,” Kendrick observed. “Lugosi attempted to evoke ideas of aristocratic corruption rather than the literal rot of the grave.”

Lugosi himself was a far cry from the creepy count. In private, he was quiet and soft-spoken, a man fond of good cigars, who longed to play comedy and wept when he heard Hungarian folk melodies. Nonetheless, the actor – who was hired only after Lon Chaney died and Chester Morris turned it down – effectively transformed himself into the eerie character.

In the process, however, he ruined his career. After Dracula, he was hired for nothing but ghouls. “Where once I had been the master of my professional destinies, with a repertoire embracing all kinds and types of men...I became Dracula’s puppet,” he lamented. “The shadowy figure of Dracula, more than any casting office, dictated the kinds of parts I played.” After countless vampire roles and even the indignity of a Las Vegas act in which he stepped out of a coffin, he died in poverty in 1956.

Lugosi’s film laid out other staples of the form, as well: the coffin in which the vampire must sleep during the day; the young woman who must be saved from becoming a vampire; the disbelief in vampires until women and children start dying, drained of blood; the idea that friends and family may be secret enemies, since vampires look normal until they strike; the mesmerizing power of the count, who can also appear as a bat or a wolf but cannot be reflected in a mirror.

(According to Skal, one tradition had a specific technical function: the stand-up collar long associated with Dracula was actually created for a stage production to hide the actor’s head when he stood with his back to the theater, allowing him to leave the cape behind and “disappear” down a trapdoor.)

It was also in Dracula that general audiences first became aware of the many ways to ward off or kill vampires (garlic, the cross, the stake in the heart, sunlight), and heard the lines that have since been much parodied (“I do not drink...wine”).

But such traditions soon needed changing, as success bred excess and vampire films appeared by the score in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Overexposure made the horror hackneyed, causing the vampire more damage than any ray of sunlight ever could. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) poked fun at his habits (Bud: “You make enough noise to wake up the dead.” Lou: “I don’t have to wake ‘em up. He’s up”), while TV’s The Munsters turned him into an old Jewish Grampa. One movie even included a title song that warbled, “My son, the vampire, will leave you pale. He drinks your blood because he doesn’t like ginger ale.” By Blood of Dracula (1957), the vamp had become camp, as a neurotic teenage girl finds herself transformed into a blood-sucker by her mad science teacher.

Hammer Films revived the character.

It took England’s Hammer Studios to save the count, pumping new blood into him by transforming the character into a sexy seducer, a James Bond with fangs, whom women eagerly embraced. With tall, athletic Christopher Lee as Dracula, the character became a ravenous creature of the night for whom women longed. “Dracula is tremendously sensual,” explained Hammer director Terence Fischer. “This is one of the great attractions of evil.”

Indeed, Horror of Dracula (1957), the initial film in Hammer’s series, explicitly lays out what was implicit in Stoker’s Victorian novel: the danger of giving in to sexual desires. It also offers blood-drenched chases, a wild fist-fight, and spectacular effects, including an ending in which the vampire, forced into the rising sun, explodes into dust. Critics were appalled (“This film disgusts the mind and repels the senses,” said one), but the movie made a mint and more quickly followed.

By the 1970s, however, the novelty of sex and violence had grown thin and some producers decided to try and make the vampire sympathetic. He was now shown as an angst-ridden character cursed by a compulsive disease, like alcoholism. TV's soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-71) transformed the undead sinner into near-saint, depicting its popular vampire star Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) as a heroic figure, separated by his disease from the woman he loved.

Others followed suit. In Blacula (1973), a centuries-old black vampire (William Marshall) is a noble figure, searching for love and carrying an incurable disease that forces him to kill or die. Such problems took on new meaning in the age of AIDS, and also in movies like The Hunger (1983), in which vampires are seen as seductive but lonely outcasts, frightening but frightened of being alone.

William Marshall starred as Blacula, a black vampire.

Even Chistopher Lee felt that Dracula had changed with the times. “I think he’s a very sad person,” observed the actor. “He’s not a hero, but an anti-hero in many ways. He has a tremendous ferocity and power, but he doesn't always have it under control.”

By the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire had becomea Byronic hero, a fanged Romeo searching for his Juliet among the bloodless corpses he leaves in his wake. “Above all, it is a love story between Dracula and Mina – souls reaching out through a universe of horror and pathos” claimed director Francis Ford Coppola at the time. “Doing justice to the complex character of Dracula was one of our main goals. He’s been portrayed as a monster or as a seducer, but knowing his biography made me think of him as a fallen angel.”

Such were the feelings of Anne Rice, whose Interview With A Vampire introduced a new generation of walking corpses. Stoker’s vampires, she said in Psychology Today, are “presented as close to animals. But I always saw them as angels...finely tuned imitations of human beings imbued with this evil spirit."

The groundwork for such a shift in perception had been laid by the suavely melancholy Frank Langella in Dracula (1979) and the courtly George Hamilton in the parody Love At First Bite(1979). In the latter movie, Hamilton’s romantic, old world values make him less a force of evil and more an oasis of sanity among the chaos that consumes the world.

Devil or angel, Dracula and his ilk will always hold an ambivalent, deep-rooted fascination for his audiences. Indeed, who can ever forget the thrill and the fear at seeing Lugosi’s voluminous cape engulfing one sleeping woman after another? Or feel the disgust and the excitement as Lee’s bloody mouth rises from his willing victim? Was there ever a nightmare more haunting than an attractiveƒ monster that attacks while you sleep? “Most monsters take and trample, Dracula alone seduces, courting before he kills,” Skal noted.

Gary Oldman as a romantic Dracula.

Nowhere is that ambivalence more clear than in the wryly amusing Lost Boys (1987), a funny yet scary twist on the vampire legend, in which vampires exist not in creepy Transylvania but in a hip beachfront community called Santa Carla. And it is the discovery of such hidden horrors in everyday life that makes even the worst vampire films unsettling.

“Dracula is attractive precisely because he represents the dark side of our own natures,” explained Leonard Wolf in Dracula: The Film and The Legend. “We live in an age that admires energy and power, and we know more about erotic fantasies than may be good for us. No wonder we look up in fear at Dracula.”

Will the undead count’s popularity ever abate? Probably not, for as √ Dracula screenwriter James V. Hart once observed:”Vampires offer a delectable alternative to the drudgery of mortal life and the promises of religion. They offer immortality here and now.”

Not to mention a good scare...

SIDEBAR NO. 1: DR. DRACULA

Dracula lives and in his latest incarnation, he's a neurologist. Published this past September, The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula (Hyperion) is an unusual take on the vampire mythos from an unusual source, first©time©novelist Roderick Anscombe, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He got the idea for the book while watching Bela Lugosi in the 1931 Dracula .

"What did it take to bite through a woman's neck to the carotid artery?" he recalls thinking. "I had been involved in head and neck surgery during my internship as a surgeon in London, and as I recalled the anatomy of the area around the sternmastoid muscle, it was clear to me that drawing blood would be a formidable task, even with fangs. And would the rookie vampire be prepared for the muscular gush of blood from the punctured artery, spurting over his face and clothes in an uncontrollable flow and filling his mouth almost to suffocation?"

Using such reality as his benchmark, Anscombe created a Dracula who was not a supernatural being, but a tortured soul driven by love and strange obsessions, an aristocrat obsessed with blood. "I wanted my Dracula to be a full human being," he notes.

To make a vivid murderer sympathetic is not easy, but the author had a leg up on the task: he had worked for two years as staff psychiatrist at a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. "I've had a couple of patients who have had the same relish for blood," he told Publisher's Weekly . "A number
of serial killers are interested in spilling blood or acquiring blood or seeing blood flow."

But he was also able to see the man behind the murderer, which ultimately helped him paint his realistic Dr. Dracula: "During breakfast, I would read the newspaper stories about a violent crime, and then go to the hospital and talk to the man who committed it. I was struck by the disparity between the public accounts and the humanity. I was aware that the murderer was just another human being."

SIDEBAR NO. 2: FILMS TO TAKE TO YOUR COFFIN

Nosferatu (1922). This silent film has some vivid expressionistic moments and a creepy central figure. Best line: "She has a lovely neck." (Republic, $24.95)

Dracula (1931). Languorous, stately version of the Stoker novel, with Lugosi as a suave, creepy count. (MCA, $14.95)

Spanish Dracula (1931). Same script, much-improved interpretation, shot at the same time on the same sets as the English-language version. Long-thought lost. (MCA, $14.95)

Dracula's Daughter (1936). Strange sequel to Dracula that picks up moments after the 1931 film ends. The hero of the story is a psychiatrist who tries the talking cure on Ms. Vampire. Bad
move. (MCA, $14.95)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). A collection of vaudeville bits strung together, not helped by the sorry spectacle of the once©regal Lugosi acting as stooge to Bud and Lou. (MCA, $19.95)

Horror of Dracula (1957). The initial entry in the Christopher Lee Dracula movies. Bloody good show. The first vampire flick in color. (MCA, $19.95)

Dracula (1973). Dracula as Terminator in a TV-movie version that tries to be faithful to the Stoker novel but suffers from the miscasting of Jack Palance as Dracula, who plays the count as a rampaging engine of destruction. (MPI, $19.95)

Love at First Bite (1979). Amusing parody of the Dracula mythos, with George Hamilton successfully playing a suave Count with a Lugosi accent. (Warner, $19.95)

Dracula (1979). The count as tragic lover in a seductive version of the 1928 play. Laurence Olivier plays Van Helsing. (MCA, $19.95)

The Lost Boys (1987). A perverse Peter Pan story, in which they're blood-sucking vampires in sunny Santa Clara. (TK, $14.95)

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993). The grand opera treatment, turning the vampire story into a tragic love story, along the lines of Romeo and Juliet. (Columbia, $19.95)

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