V is for Vampire the A to Z guide to everything undead (Skal, David J)

From low-cut negligees to low-flying bats, from silver bullets to

wooden stakes, from the gender-bending disciples of Dracula to the

fans of Anne Rice, this entertaining, encyclopedic compendium of

vampirology answers such burning undead questions as:

—How did the folklore surrounding garlic, mirrors, wooden stakes,

and other eerie artifacts evolve?

—Why does Dracula's cape always have a big, stand-up collar?

—What accounts for the persistent cultural connection between

gays and lesbians and vampires?

—Why are bats the premier emblems of vampirism?

—What are the best vampire movies ever made? The worst?

And everything else you want to know about the fascinating, seduc-

tive, dark-cloaked creatures of the night.

V 18 FOR VflHIPIRE

David J. Skal is a respected scholar in all things macabre and the author of

Hollywood Gothic and The Monster Show. A frequent talk-show guest and lec-

turer, his many media appearances have included "The CBS Evening News,"

"Joan Rivers," "Charlie Rose," and NPR's "All Things Considered."

David J. Skal

18 FO

VflHlPIRE

The A-Z Guide

to Everything Undead

A PLUME BOOK

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Plume, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

First Printing, September, 1996

10 987654321

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBUCATION DATA

Skal, David J.

V is for Vampire : the A-Z guide to everything undead / David J. Skal.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-452-27173-8

1. Vampires. I. Title.

GR830.V3S57 1995

398.45—dc20 95 15522

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Galliard

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by

any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior

written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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FOR INFORMATION TLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC.,

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For Ron Borst, Jeanne Youngson,

and Lokke Heiss

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are in order to numerous individuals and institutions for their assis-

tance and advice in the research and writing of V Isfor Vampire. First, I

want to gratefully acknowledge my dedicatees: Ron Borst, who, as usual, pro-

vided access to his unparalleled collection of visual materials; Jeanne Young-

son, founder and president of the Count Dracula Fan Club in New York; and

Lokke Heiss, physician and fellow traveler in the vampire realm, who has

demonstrated to me his nuanced mastery of both Nosferatu and Nuprin.

A special thank-you is due to my agent, Malaga Baldi, who liked the concept

and energetically marketed the proposal, and my editor at Plume, Peter K.

Borland, who acquired it.

Ron and Howard Mandelbaum of Photofest assisted my picture research

with their characteristic professionalism. Tom Weaver and Mark Martucci gen-

erously provided dozens of hard-to-find videotapes. Robert Eighteen-Bisang,

founder of the Transylvanian Press and vampire bibliographer extraordinaire,

helped fill gaps with his truly amazing database.

Institutional collections consulted included the Elmer Holmes Bobst Li-

brary of New York University; the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York

Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Margaret Her-

rick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Free Library

of Philadelphia Theatre Collection; the Vernon Alden Library of Ohio Uni-

versity; and the Library of Congress.

Other individuals who offered courtesies, correspondence, conversation,

illustrations, advice, assistance, and simple enthusiasm include Sheppard Black,

the late Carroll Borland, Sam and Susan Crowl, James V. D'Arc, Bernard

Davies, Norine Dresser, Geraldine Duclow, Robert Haas, Donal Holway,

Carla Laemmle, Robert James Leake, Scott MacQueen, Raymond T. McNally,

viii Acknowledgments

William G. Obbagy, Gary Don Rhodes, Laura Ross, Elias Savada, Johanne

Tournier, Dale Tucholski, Gordon Van Gelder, Delbert Winans, and Scott

Wolfman.

A final, special acknowledgment must be given to the memory of the late,

distinguished scholar of gothic literature, Devendra P. Varma. I met Dr. Varma

at the 1994 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, where we

had a long and stimulating conversation on the vampire in literature. I was

looking forward to renewing our dialogue when I learned of his death in Octo-

ber 1994. The loss of his impeccable erudition and boundless enthusiasm

leaves a void in the study of the fantastic that will not be easily filled.

INTRODUCTION

Vampires, Descending

a Staircase

Did you ever notice how the best scenes in vampire movies tend to happen

on staircases? You know the picture: the draped, pallid figure with blazing

eyes and crimson lips posing majestically on an ancient, crumbling stairway that

somehow represents all human possibilities, our deepest hopes and fears. Capa-

ble of bestowing death or granting eternal life, the vampire can lead us up the

stairs to a transcendent superhuman real-

ity, or (as Poe might have put it) down,

down, inexorably down to our basest in-

stincts and animal desires. In the mirror

the vampire reflects nothing, yet in reality

it reflects everything. Sometimes the crea-

ture spreads its cape in a reflexive gesture,

assuming a stance that is a dark travesty of

crucifixion, for the vampire is both savior

and destroyer. It is on staircases that vam-

pires condescend to mingle with mortals,

on staircases that they greet and seduce

their victims, dispatch their enemies, de-

scend to commune with the lower realms,

the better to entice us with the promise

of a higher consciousness and destiny.

Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland make thei

entrance in Mark of the Vampire (1935).

(Photofest)

x Introduction

My first impression of vampires came in 1959 with a television skit on The

Garry Moore Show in which an American housewife (Carol Burnett) dis-

covered Count Dracula (Durward Kirby) hiding in her living room closet.

"Good evening!" he said, striking a rigid pose in evening clothes. She

slammed the door. I was seven years old, but even then knew that this meant

something. Once open to vampires, the closet door could never be slammed,

not really. I don't remember anything else about the broadcast, except that

my mother explained the basics. Vampires, she said, came out of coffins.

They bit you on the neck. They wore "fancy" clothes, and they always said

"good evening."

Soon after, vampires began to pop up everywhere in the bedroom com-

munity of Garfield Heights, Ohio, where I grew up. While a third grader at

Garfield Park Elementary School, I can remember an older girl on the play-

ground—I'll call her Maxine—who significantly deepened my appreciation of

things undead. Maxine was the classic kid of whom parents disapproved; she

was a rambunctious tomboy who "had ideas." Maxine was already free-falling

through puberty while the rest of us stood merely tottering at the edge of

the abyss. As a denizen of this scary, uncharted realm, Maxine was a wealth

of information on fascinating subjects. She knew about unpleasant medical

conditions of certain of our teachers.

from Tolstoi in adding a far more downbeat conclusion, but

the grisly sense of closure serves the tale well. Bava directed Karloff, Mark

Damon, and Michelle Mercier in a screenplay by Marcello Fondato and

Alberto Bevilacqua. (American International)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 29

Arturo Dominici

Black Sunday.

(Photofest)

Black Sunday

Cinema, Italy 1960. One of the all-time great vampire films, directed by

Mario Bava under the original title La maschera del demonio. This film

caused quite a stir on the playground, as I recall, and I can still remember

making notebook scribbles of Barbara Steele's staring eyes, gothic cheek-

bones, and flying hair instead of paying attention to Mrs. Kimball and the

multiplication tables (which I only learned imperfectly—blame it on the

undead). The screenplay, by Ennio De Concini and Bava, is supposedly

based on Gogol's short story "The Viy," and recounts the story of

Princess Asa, a seventeenth-century Moldavian witch (Barbara Steele),

who has a spiked mask hammered onto her face before being entombed in

the supernatural equivalent of a nuclear garbage dump—a windowed crypt

with a highly visible cross that she must stare at for eternity. Eternity lasts

only a couple of hundred years, however, and Asa returns, drinking blood

and attempting to possess the soul of her great-granddaughter. The only

relationship the film bears to the Gogol story is the image of a witch rising

from her coffin, and one senses that the attribution to Gogol is just pre-

30 David J. Skal

tentious overreaching. But Black Sunday doesn't need to beg for re-

spectability—it's an unassailable classic, full of unforgettable set pieces and

masterfully sustained atmosphere. Upon its American release, Variety

noted with interest that Barbara Steele bore a "strong resemblance" to the

country's new first lady, Jackie Kennedy. The film has had a number of

alternate tides, including Revenge ofthe Vampire and House ofFright. With

John Richardson, Andrea Checchi, Ivo Garrani, and Arturo Dominici.

(American International/Galatea-Jolly)V

Black Vampire

Cinema, USA 1973. Originally tided Ganja and Hess (alternately, Posses-

sion, Black Evil, and Black Out), Bill Gunn's low-budget, slow-moving

thriller is a kind of art-house version of Blacula. Gunn postulates an an-

cient African society of blood-drinkers, whose curse remains dormant in a

sacrificial knife—until, of course, someone gets stabbed with it. The relent-

lessly laid-back dialogue can be quite unintentionally funny, as when a

woman is unfazed by her new lover's confession of vampirism. "Every-

body's some kind of freak," she says. "Everybody I know is into something,

you know? You're into horror movies. I can dig it. When it gets too heavy

and I can't cut it, believe me, you'll be the first to know." With Duane

Jones (star of Night of the Living Dead), Marlene Clark, Leonard Jackson,

and Bill Gunn (who also scripted). (Kelly-Jordan Enterprises)T

The Black Vampire

An obscure melodrama presented in Camden Town, London, in the late

1920s; of note only because Florence Stoker, Bram's widow, assumed it

was yet another plagiarism of Dracula. It wasn't.

Blackwood, Algernon

See "Transfer, The."

Blacula

Cinema, USA 1972. One wishes that this film was, somehow, much better

or much worse than it is, or that a wickedly satiric cross-cultural sensibility

was at work. Sadly, Blacula is just a formula vampire movie with a mostly

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 3

black cast, proving only that white fangs are indeed effective when dis-

played against dark skin, but little else. The most imaginative scenes are

near the beginning, when it is revealed that the original Count Dracula

(Charles MacCauley) once dabbled in the slave trade and put a vampire

curse on a certain African Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall), who is

locked in a coffin until a pair of gay interior decorators (grossly stereo-

typed) bring the box back to Los Angeles in a lot of Transylvanian an-

tiques. Marshall, a classically trained actor, is an imposing presence,

reading ridiculous dialogue with an authoritative, Othello-style rumble.

But nothing is surprising as Mamuwalde tries to woo the reincarnation of

his lost African love. The film reaches its climax in a sewage treatment

plant, just the sort of touch that compels critics to say rude things. With

Thalmus Rasulala, Denise Nicholas, Elisha Cook, Jr., Vonetta McGee, and

Gordon Pinsent. Directed by William Crain. Screenplay by Joan Torres

and Raymond Koenig. An uninspired sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream,

was released in 1973. (American International)

Blake, Edmund

Edmund Blake was the first actor to portray Dracula in the familiar

evening-clothes-and-opera-cape persona devised by playwright-producer

Hamilton Deane and unveiled in Derby, England, in 1924. Almost noth-

ing is known about Blake as a performer, except that he had a prominent

gold front tooth. He resurfaced briefly in 1927 to appear in a rival version

of Dracula commissioned by Bram Stoker's widow Florence when she

grew tired of paying royalties to Deane. The adaptation, written by Charles

Morell but owned by Stoker, was a complete flop, and Edmund Blake

thereafter seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.

Bloch, Robert

See cloaks and capes.

Blood

The ultimate human symbol, blood—like the vampire itself—has the

power to assume almost endless metaphorical forms. As the primarily vital

fluid, blood has been held in awe since prehistoric times, and is prominent

in the imagery of most religious and folk traditions. Blood is our physical

32 David J. Skal

connection to the ancient, atavistic past, as well as our immediate bond of

kinship and fealty. The ancient belief that there is no essential difference

between the physical reality of blood and the less tangible qualities of

spirit, courage, and purposeful consciousness—that "the blood is the life,"

quantifiable and transferable—is notably at the root of cannibalism,

blood sacrifice, and vampire legends in a wide variety of cultures. Blood, in

many traditions, is believed to absorb or transmit evil; the removal of

blood from the body, therefore, can often provide a cathartic cleansing.

An old Arabic saying, "The blood has flowed, the danger has passed," cap-

tures the historical dynamism of both animal and human sacrifice. Outside

of Voodoo, Santeria, and some Maori tribal rites, literal blood sacrifice is

now rare, but the torrential prevalence, in recent decades, of simulated

blood in popular culture is significant, less as a reflection (or cause) of real

life violence than as an exorcism of diffuse cultural anxieties in a postmod-

ern age of image and artifice. Next to the Catholic ritual of the mass and

the culture of AIDS (q.v.), vampire entertainment is our richest modern

repository of blood-related themes, ceremonies, and obsessions. See also

Catholicism; Christianity; folklore.

Blood Addiction

Theater, USA 1980. A company-developed play by the Iowa Theater Lab,

a touchy- feely hom*oerotic troupe headed by Ric Zank. Other Stages de-

scribed the piece thus: "Performed in a black void, Blood Addiction was of-

ten mysteriously, hauntingly illuminated by the guttering, fickle flames of

candles" providing "suggestive, allusive, intuitional impressions of the pri-

vate lives of the master vampires." See also hom*osexuality.

Blood and Roses

Cinema, France/Italy 1961. Roger Vadim's loose update of "CARMILLA"

was originally titled Et mourir de plaisir (And Die of Pleasure), but re-

leased in America only after its lesbian eroticism was significantly cut. The

film has a somewhat better reputation than it deserves, perhaps because of

Claude Renoir's accomplished cinematography. It received decidedly

mixed reviews upon its stateside release. Film Quarterly called it "the most

elegant and intelligent vampire film in decades, despite a few lines such as,

'What do you make of these marks on her throat, Doctor?' " Brendan Gill,

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 3 3

A masquerade costume covers the real

thing in Roger Vadim's erotic chiller

Blood and Roses. (Photofest)

writing in The New Yorker, begged

Vadim that Blood and Roses "be his

last crack at a supernatural thriller.

Vampires just aren't what they

used to be; they seem to lack

the old—well, I guess you'd have

to call it spirit. The setting for

this preposterous farrago is, of all

places, Hadrian's Villa. It is beau-

tiful and will survive." With Mel

Ferrer, Elsa Martinelli, and Annette

Vadim. (Paramount/Les Films EGE

Documento)T

The Blood Drinkers

Cinema, Philippines 1966. I saw this film largely out of desperation; the

original Dracula was not shown on Cleveland television for most of the

1960s—long before the advent of home video—and I felt cruelly de-

prived. I had to satisfy myself with any junk that came down the pike. The

Blood Drinkers had a nifty advertisem*nt and I had high hopes when I

took the bus to downtown Cleveland for the fifty-cent matinee at the Hip-

podrome Theatre—the very place where the Lugosi film had premiered in

Cleveland thirty-five years before. Alas, none of the vampire mystique that

must have been contained in the Hippodrome walls rubbed off on The

Blood Drinkers. It was the cheesiest movie I had ever spent money on—the

film was full of Filipino performers with bad skin and worse wardrobes: I

can almost swear that one of the vampires wore a polka-dot cape. The film

was so cheap that only part of it was in color—the rest was filled out with

tinted black-and-white sequences. My current research reveals that the

film was directed by Gerardo de Leon, and starred Amelia Fuentes, Ronald

34 David J. Ska I

Poster for The Blood Drinkers.

Remy, and Eddie Fernandez. I don't remember

who did what. But you know . . . that ad still

looks pretty good. (Hemisphere Pictures)

Blood Fetishism

Sexual gratification through blood drinking has

been a well-documented clinical phenomenon

since Richard von Krafft-Ebbing's Psychopathia

Sexualis (1892), but it has only been in the last

decade that real-life blood drinkers have culti-

vated an identification with vampires of the

imaginary sort. A contributing factor to this

new phenomenon, no doubt, has been the mass

rehabilitation of the vampire image in Anne

Rice's The Vampire Chronicles and elsewhere;

the once villainous revenant is now more likely to be presented as a sensi-

tive outcast craving meaningful human contact. In the standard psycho-

analytic interpretation, the root of the "vampire's" alienation is his/her

arrested development at the oral/sad*stic stage of sexual development.

Blood, as a potent symbol of human warmth and belonging, can also

become an erotic fixation for children in abusive families, where tangled

emotions of love, pain, power, and powerlessness (and, too often, the lit-

eral presence of blood) trap the child in a limbo-state of infantile rage and

insatiable hunger. For some blood fetishists, the gratifying act is wholly

masturbatory, involving self-bleeding or, in more extreme cases, self-

mutilation. For others, who share their practice, bloodletting/drinking is

a preferred way of establishing intimacy or trust. Since human teeth make

exceedingly crude instruments for opening veins, modern vampires tend

to use razor blades, knives, or syringes to make incisions; the blood may

then be sucked directly or, more ritualistically, sipped from a chalice, cor-

dial glass, or other vessel.

The explosive growth ofvampire literature, imagery, and entertainment

has given many blood fetishists, for the first time in their lives, a positive

sense of connectedness. Several books in the last few years have explored

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 35

this unsettling sexual netherworld, including Norine Dresser's American

Vampires (1989), Rosemary Ellen Guiley's Vampires Among Us (1991),

and Carol Page's Bloodlust (1991). (My own 1993 book, The Monster

Show: A Cultural History of Horror, contains a detailed and, I hope, re-

vealing interview with a practicing California "vampire.") Richard Noll's

Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons: Twentieth-Century Reports in the Psy-

chiatric Literature (1992) recounts several of the more psychopathic

cases, including the notorious English "acid-bath" murderer John Haigh,

who killed nine people between 1944 and 1949 in order to drink a cup of

their blood. Haigh, before his trial and execution, was judged to be sane,

despite his claim that "I was impelled to kill by wild blood demons." He

assured his mother before his execution that "my spirit will remain earth-

bound for a while. My mission is not yet fulfilled."

It should be noted that mere fact of blood arousal does not necessarily

indicate a propensity for violence. While it is true that many serial killers do

drink blood, a more typical scenario involves consensual erotic play involv-

ing relatively mild forms of biting, cutting, and sucking. Neither is blood

fetishism necessarily correlated with satanism—many practitioners consider

their activities to be essentially pre-Christian, rendering satanic considera-

tions meaningless—though satanists are frequently attracted to the dra-

matic trappings of vampirism. See also psychoanalysis; sadomasochism.

Blood of Dracula

Cinema, USA 1957. The first of producer Herman Cohen's teen-monster

movies (7 Was a Teenage Werewolf'and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein were

next) established a now-familiar formula: take a troubled teen with a lot of

pent-up rage, stir in an unscrupulous authority figure and a dash of mad

science, and presto, all hell can break loose. Sandra Harrison stars as a girl

whose widowed dad has taken up with an expensive floozie. They ditch

her in a private girl's academy where a power-crazed science teacher

(Louise Lewis) plans, somehow, to upset the male-dominated scientific es-

tablishment with a Mr. Wizard-style chemistry set and a Transylvanian

amulet she twiddles in a darkened room. She only succeeds in turning the

impressionable Harrison into a small-time serial killer with really big teeth.

This movie is simultaneously awful and entertaining, and that chemistry

set can't be beat for low-budget shamelessness. Directed by Herbert L.

Strock, from a screenplay by Ralph Thornton. (American International)^

36 David J. Skal

Blood of the Vampire

Cinema, UK 1958. Light-years ahead of Dr. Christiaan Barnard, this better-

than- average costume piece posited a truly original means to revive a

staked vampire: give him a heart transplant. Dr. Callistratus (played with

an enhanced Bela Lugosi visage by Sir Donald Wolfit, the over-the-top

Shakespearean actor who inspired the play The Dresser) is not a supernat-

ural vampire, but all this transplant/resurrection business has resulted in a

blood condition amounting to the same thing. Callistratus sets himself up

as the head of a nasty Victorian prison, where he can experiment with

blood however he pleases. Wolfit's icy portrayal evokes the death camp

doctors who were still in business the decade before this film was released.

Technically, the film has a rich look to it and makes some clever use of

trompe Poeil painted backdrops. With Vincent Ball, Barbara Shelley, and

Victor Maddern. Henry Cass directed from Jimmy Sangster's Hammer-

style script. (Eros Films/Universal- International)

The Blood-Spattered Bride

Cinema, Spain 1972. Another soft-p*rn

lesbian spinoff of "Carmilla," though the

menage- a- trois theme suggests D. H.

Lawrence's "The Fox" more strongly than

it does J. Sheridan Le Fanu's story. The

film contains one of the most bizarre images

of a sleeping vampire in cinema history,

when the young husband finds the creature

(who will seduce his wife) supine beneath

the beach, her breasts and scuba goggles

peeking through the sand. Directed by

Vincente Aranda. With Alexandra Bastedo,

Maribel Martin, and Simon Andreu. (Mor-

gana Films)Y

Blood of the Vampire: Sir Donald Wolfit bats

Bela Lugosi eyes. (Photofest)

DONALD WOLFIT-BARBARA SHELLEY

VINCENT BALL- VICTOR MADDERN

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 37

Blood Ties

Television, USA 1991. "Wake up, blond and blue-eyed America!" wrote

television critic John J. O'Connor in the New York Times. "Those swarthy

types living down the street, the ones with the dark hair and smoldering

eyes, they're very likely to be vampires." This pilot, which, not surpris-

ingly, never took off, "sticks its neck out trying to be a parable of racism

and American assimilation of foreign blood," according to TV Guide. The

script actually included the following line of dialogue, self-righteously de-

livered without an ounce of intended humor: "We're Americans—and it's

time we came out of the coffin."

Borland, Carroll

American actress (1914—1994) and protegee of actor Bela Lugosi, best

known for her role as Luna the bat-girl in Mark of the Vampire (1935).

Borland's appearance in the film by director Tod BROWNING was an im-

portant contribution to horror iconography, standardizing the image of

the lank-haired, almond-eyed female vampire that probably influenced

cartoonist Charles Addams when he created his ghoulish "Morticia" char-

acter. Borland, who retired from acting in the late thirties, has given many

interviews about her relationship with Lugosi (she insists it was all pla-

tonic), especially her experiences working with him on stage in Dracula.

But beyond a letter from Lugosi asking her to try out for a condensed

vaudeville -circuit version of the play in late 1932, hard documentation of

her stage work is elusive. Borland had

brief appearances in the Universal se-

rial Flash Gordon (1935) and Sutter's

Gold (1936). She made a comeback,

of sorts, in the low-budget Scalps

(1982). Borland's manuscript Count-

ess Dracula (c. 1930), which had in-

terested Lugosi as a possible stage

Carroll Borland and Jean Hersholt in Marie

of the Vampire. (Courtesy of Carroll Borland)

38 DavidJ.Skal

vehicle, recently resurfaced and was published in 1994 by Magiclmage

Filmbooks.

Boucicault, Dion

Irish- born actor and playwright (1820?-1890) best known for The

Shautjhran, London Assurance, and Love in a Maze, Boucicault made his

London stage debut in 1852 in The Vampire: A Phantasm. Boucicault's

Vampire was the latest in a long string of theatrical adaptations of John

Polidori's "The Vampyre: A Tale" (1819), and was especially influenced by

Le Vampire (1820) by Charles Nodier. The Boucicault play substituted a

new vampire, Sir Alan Raby (a.k.a. "Gervase Rookwood"), for Polidori's

original Lord Ruthven, and rather audaciously set its action in three cen-

turies, past, present, and future. Boucicault later trimmed the third act and

presented the play in America as The Phantom. The vampire, resurrected by

"moonbames," forges his own will to reclaim his former castle, but is found

out by the too-recent watermark on the document. According to biogra-

pher Townsend Walsh, the acting chores fell to Boucicault himselfwhen his

employer, the great nineteenth-century actor Charles Kean, "deemed 'vam-

pires' beneath his tragic dignity." The London Examiner noted that Bouci-

cault "enacted the 'monster' with due paleness of visage, stealthiness of pace

and solemnity of tone." Following is an excerpt from Boucicault's abridged

version, in which Alan Raby barnstorms his prey:

Alan. Thou lovest me, thy soul is mine. Come to my heart, thou can'st

not escape the spell my spirit has cast upon thine. Why do you

repulse

—

Ada. Because that breast upon which you press me, seems to be the

bosom of a corpse, and from the heart within I feel no throb of

life!

Alan. Ah! dost thou know me, then?

Ada. Away—phantom! demon!—thy soul is dark, thy heart is cold.

Alan. Ada—thy life must pass into that heart.

Ada. Avaunt!—leave me!—my father—Edgar—oh! my voice is choked

with fear—avoid thee, fiend! abhorrent spectre!

[Retreats into room]

Alan. She is mine.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 39

The Vampire was not well received by the critics. As the Examiner com-

mented, "If there is truth in the old adage that 'When things are at the

worst they must mend,' the amelioration of spectral drama is not distant,

for it has reached the extreme point of inanity. ..." The Illustrated Lon-

don News complained that "much ingenuity has been thrown away on a

subject barren of interest, and, to some extent, disgusting." Boucicault's

acting, however, was roundly praised. The Era reported that he "looked

the Vampire to perfection. . . . His deathy hue and rigid cast of counte-

nance, his high and bald forehead and spare figure, his measured accents

and grave demeanour, were all in keeping, and his 'make up' was in each

act quite a study."

Boucicault found a special fan in Queen Victoria, who attended the

benefit premiere and returned the following week to view the drama a sec-

ond time. She commissioned a watercolor portrait of Boucicault in the

role of the vampire and wrote in her journal (quoted by Boucicault biog-

rapher Richard Fawkes), "Mr. Boucicault, who is very handsome and has a

fine voice, acted very impressively. I can never forget his livid face and

fixed look. ... It quite haunts me." But upon her return visit, Victoria

found the play itself an ordeal. "It does not bear seeing a second time,"

she wrote, "and is, in fact, very trashy."

In its transatlantic incarnation as The Phantom, the play seems to have

fared better with the public. According to its original publisher, Samuel

French, the 1856 New York engagement at Wallack's Theatre "was

crowded to excess, and the enterprise netted ten thousand dollars in a run

of eleven weeks, unprecedented in the history of the New York Stage."

One interesting aspect of Boucicault's conception of the vampire is the

possibility that he may have been the first actor to incorporate the appear-

ance of a BAT into his performance. Odell's Annals of the New York Stage

cites Mrs. M. E. W. Sherwood's 1875 recollections of the play: "Then . . .

comes a vision of Boucicault playing the 'Vampire,' a dreadful and weird

thing played with immortal genius. That great playwright would not have

died unknown had he never done anything but flap his bat- like wings in

that dream-disturbing piece." See also theater.

The Brainiac

Cinema, Mexico 1961. An evil baron is burned on earth as a wizard, but he

returns from outer space 300 years later in a meteor, with the ability to

40 David J. Skal

metamorphose into a papier-mache monster with a brain-sucking pro-

boscis. Thus, he fits (somewhat uneasily and over- literally) into the cate-

gory of "psychic" vampires. This one has a camp following; if you're so

inclined, by all means track it down. With Abel Salazar (who also pro-

duced) and German Robles, who also teamed up for the Mexican fright

fests The Vampire and The Vampire's Coffin. Directed by Chano Urveta.

Screenplay by Adolpho Portillo. (AIP-TV)V

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Cinema, USA 1992. A major disappointment. Francis Ford Coppola's $50

million vampire movie was just the latest in a long string of films that have

appropriated Stoker's title and characters for highly idiosyncratic exer-

cises in filmmaking. Therefore, it was not surprising that Bram Stoker's

Dracula would emerge as an essential subversion of the 1897 Stoker text;

what was surprising was the uncritical way that journalists and critics alike

swallowed the studio's laughable assertion that Coppola's film was the

first truly faithful adaptation of the Stoker

novel—a classic love story, no less.

Now, whatever Dracula is, it is not a love

story; it is difficult, in fact, to imagine a more

antiromantic narrative. Stoker's Dracula is a

cunning Darwinian superman; he does not

seduce—he seizes. While he grows younger

as he drinks blood, he never becomes attrac-

tive. The sexuality in Dracula is both rancid

and repellent. The story's nightmarish power

derives in large part from the tension

wrought by a highly "civilized" Victorian

surface narrative

clashing with a raging sub-

text of unsublimated animalism.

Following a string of expensive flops, Cop-

Bram Stoker's Dracula: Cover of the paperback

movie tie-in edition of Stoker's novel.

(Courtesy of New American Library) >»"—»'

fr i«"*HZ)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 4

pola was ready to reestablish his credibility with the Hollywood main-

stream by producing an on-time, on-budget commercial film for a major

studio. James V. Hart's screenplay, originally tided Dracula: the Untold

Story, was stalled in TV-movie limbo when actress Winona Ryder brought

it to Coppola's attention. In one sense, Hart's script was indeed "un-

told"—by Bram Stoker, since Hart had replaced Stoker's ravenous monster

with a lovesick revenant seeking the reincarnation of his fourteenth-century

wife. On the other hand, the theme was extraordinarily derivative; it had

been used by screenwriter Richard Matheson in his 1973 television adap-

tation of Dracula, as an ongoing plot device in the sixties soap opera

Dark Shadows, and even in the blaxploitation flick Blacula (1972).

(Television's Saturday Night Live picked up on the Blacula connection

and ran an amusing skit lampooning Bram Stoker's Blacula the week be-

fore the Coppola film opened.) And the inspiration for all these reincarna-

tion tales was The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff pursuing a parallel

romance across the millennia.

Bram Stoker's Dracula was promoted like a steamroller by Columbia

Pictures (it had the most extensive merchandising tie-ins of any film before

Jurassic Park); as a result, there was almost no independent, intelligent re-

porting on the film's evolution—just an avalanche of sycophantic puff

pieces and coffee-table books. In the major media, only Newsweek called

the film's bluff, going as far as to run parallel texts from the novel and the

screenplay to reveal the 180-degree switch in sensibility.

The casting, to say the least, was odd. Gary Oldman as Dracula is more

pixie-ish than princely; neither Winona Ryder nor Keanu Reeves as the

young lovers is convincingly British; Tom Waits' Renfield (like Oldman) is

often vocally incomprehensible; and Anthony Hopkins as a near- crackpot

Van Helsing seems manically adrift, almost undirected. The operatically

inclined costumes by Eiko Ishioka are on the whole very impressive—but

where is the opera? (Not every sartorial concept works, however; Lucy

Westenra's huge-collared dress was supposedly inspired by the anatomy of

a frilled lizard, but creates a far more bizarre effect: the Victorian virgin

served up as a white cheese pizza.)

The film operates like a broken, very expensive kaleidoscope, jamming

image atop precious image until the whole thing ends up feeling dis-

jointed and insubstantial. Of course, all the film's incongruities and flaws

and superficiality were applauded by Coppola partisans as evidence of a

brilliant "postmodernist" sensibility. The postmodernist defense, of course,

42 David J. Skal

is the last refuge for anything these days that has no point of view, bor-

rows egregiously, and finally makes no sense.

Coppola's real attitude toward Stoker may be revealed in his voice-over

commentary on the Criterion Collection laser disc of the film, when he

tells us, "Very few people have gotten through the book, if truth be known

. . . it's very hard going. . .

." For Coppola and company—obviously. (Co-

lumbia Pictures)T

Breasts

See DECOLLETAGE.

"The Bride of Corinth''

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 ballad "Die Braut von Korinth" sug-

gests a horror version ofRomeo and Juliet, in which a family's opposition to

a burgeoning love affair is circumvented by the maiden's death and resurrec-

tion as a vampire to consummate her passion in blood. The ballad is usually

cited as one of the first "respectable" literary treatments of vampirism.

Goethe was later much impressed by John Polidori's 1819 story "The

Vampybe," which he (like much of Europe) attributed to Lord Byron.

The Brides of Dracula

Cinema, UK 1960. Hammer Films' first follow-up to its wildly successful

Horror of Dracula (1958) doesn't feature Dracula at all but instead re-

volves on a Suddenly, Last Summer-like premise: a dragon-lady baroness

(the peerless Martita Hunt) entices young women to her castle to provide

nourishment to Baron Meinster, her captive vampire son (David Peel).

Mom feels guilty about her son's predicament—somehow, she fostered his

vampirism by indulging his taste for decadent friends and unspecified but

"wicked" games. The Oedipal tension reaches a climax when the baroness

is finally neck-penetrated by the son. The thinly veiled Freudian theme was

picked up by the reviewer for the London Evening Standard, who noted,

disapprovingly, that the golden-haired vampire "capitalises on current

fashion by resembling Oscar Wilde's Bosie with fangs." (Actor Peel may

have had more in common with another Wildean personage: at the age of

forty, Peel's ability to play a role half his age brings to mind The Picture

of Dorian Gray.) Reviled by many reviewers when it first appeared (the

London Observer called it "a ludicrous monstrosity"), The Brides of

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 43

"Bosie with fangs"? David Peel vamps

Yvonne Monlaur in The Brides of Dracula.

(Photofest)

Dracula is now widely considered

something of a minor classic, pre-

figuring the complex sexual themes

that have been more recently ex-

panded upon by Anne RlCE and

others. With Peter Cushing (as

Van Helsing), Freda Jackson, and

Yvonne Monlaur. Directed by

Terence Fisher from a screenplay

by Jimmy Sangster, Peter Bryan,

and Edward Percy. ( Universal-

International)T See also hom*o-

sexuality; Wilde, Oscar.

Browning, Tod

An American film director (1882-1962), who created one of the darkest,

most obsessive bodies of work in cinema history, Browning produced

three highly influential vampire films: London After Midnight (1927),

Dracula ( 193 1 ), and Mark of the Vampire ( 1935). London After Mid-

night was one of Browning's many successful collaborations with Lon

Chaney, Sr., featuring the actor as a razor-mouthed bat-man in a beaver

hat. Dracula is Browning's most celebrated film, but the extent to which

he actually directed it is a matter of some dispute (cinematographer Karl

Freund may actually have handled much of the directorial chores). Mark

of the Vampire was in many ways a remake of both London After Midnight

and Dracula; it was one of Bela Lugosi's final Hollywood appearances as

a vampire in a noncomedic role. All three of Browning's vampire epics are

full of overlapping plot elements and visual references and are probably

best regarded as some kind of ongoing, "unfinished" film. Browning

loved unsavory topics—gangsters, con artists, sideshows—and his most

44 David J. Skal

Tod Browning, vampire-movie maven.

notorious effort was Freaks (1932), fea-

turing living sideshow oddities. Despite his

rigorous use of a well-defined set of themes,

Browning showed surprisingly little inter-

est in the technical aspects of filmmaking,

and many of his films have a slapdash feel

to them. Another of Browning's obsessive

motifs was castration, which has its own

curious and persistent relationship to vam-

pire stories. (Anne Rice, author of The

Vampire Chronicles, was interested enough

to write a major novel on the castrati of the

opera world, Cry to Heaven.) Following

the disaster of Freaks, Browning's career went steadily downhill; nonethe-

less, he retired in 1939 a wealthy man, living the rest of his days in a

strange, self-imposed seclusion.

Bruce, Lenny

Controversial "dirty mouth" comic of the fifties and sixties, Lenny Bruce

transformed American humor with his relentless assaults on the hypocrisy

and complacency of American culture in the Cold War era. Bruce forever

subverted the image of Dracula with a series of skits (most notably

"Beautiful Transylvania") which presented the vampire as a tired old Jew-

ish man with a nagging wife and a pill habit—a satirical

jab at the odd me-

dia spectacle generated by actor Bela Lugosi who, in 1955, underwent a

well-publicized treatment for narcotic addiction. Bruce himself was no

stranger to chemical substances and died of an overdose in 1966.

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

Cinema, USA 1992. Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula

was merely the central event in the 1992 plethora of body-fluid entertain-

ment; glomming onto its spillover publicity were scads of lesser efforts like

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Buffy (Kristy Swanson) is a Valley Girl cheer-

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 45

leader destined by a forgotten bloodline to destroy a monster who feeds

on just exactly the kind of kids who hang out in shopping malls and see

the same movie more than once. The bloodsucker is the once-handsome

Rutger Hauer (favored, for a while, by Anne Rice as the ideal vampire Le-

stat), who has not aged well and here resembles nothing so much as Kurt

Vonnegut on a bad hair day. With Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, and

Luke Perry. Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui from a script by Joss Whedon.

(Twentieth-Century-Fox)T

Bunnicula, a Rabbit-Tale of Mystery

Fiction, USA 1979. What excuse could there be for a children's story

about a vampire bunny rabbit who evaporates from his cage to suck the

juice from innocent carrots and tomatoes? Three million Bunnicula books

in print, that's what. Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that kids pick up

on all the campy references to grown-up vampire stories in Deborah and

James Howe's singular oeuvre, and suspect that it is primarily parents who

are driving the sales of these slim, lucrative volumes. Perhaps it affords

them a sanitized, guilt-free way to pass on to their children their own mor-

bid interest in things vampiric. But it still seems to me a lot like giving a

kid a coffin with training wheels. If we really want to stretch things, I

guess it could be pointed out that rabbits, through their recent cultural

proximity to Easter, must embody some kind of death-and -resurrection

energy. Hare-raising stuff.

Bunston, Herbert

A British character actor (1870-1935) best known to readers of this book

for his portrayal of the ineffectual Dr. Seward in the 1931 film version of

Dracula, Bunston made his stage debut in London in 1897, the year of

DracuWs publication, and he acted at the Lyceum Theatre at the turn

of the century while it was still being managed by Bram STOKER. His fa-

vorite role was Cassius in Julius Caesar, though he was more usually cast

in bland administrative parts: magistrates, professors, ministers, and the

like. He originated the role of Dr. Seward in Horace Liveright's Broad-

way and roadshow productions of Dracula with Bela LuGOSi beginning in

1927, and repeated the part for the 1931 film. For fans who can't get

enough of the Bunston charisma, his Hollywood films from the early thir-

ties include The Last ofMrs. Cheney, Charlie Chan's Chance, The Monkey's

46 David J. Skal

Paw, Once a Lady, Almost Married, Clive ofIndia, and others. He died at

the age of sixty-four, of a heart attack, in Los Angeles.

Burial Customs

Since a vampire is usually conceived to be a reanimated corpse, it is not

surprising that burial customs in a wide range of cultures evolved with the

implicit or explicit purpose of immobilizing the body after death. The

grave marker, in its most primitive form, is a stone meant to create a heavy

physical barrier against reanimation. A STAKE driven through the heart can

also effectively pin a corpse to its coffin, while simultaneously destroying

the body's blood pump. In their 1935 study, The Cassubian Civilization,

Lorentz, Fischer and Lehr-Splawinski recount the vampire -related burial

customs of the Cassubian Poles, many of which, they say, have persisted

even into the twentieth century:

In order to be protected against the doings of the vampire, care has to

be taken in the first place that the dying person receives the Eucharist. If

a little earth from under the threshold is put in his coffin, he cannot re-

turn to the house. Further, the sign of the cross is made on his mouth,

and the crucifix from a rosary or a coin is placed under his tongue for

him to suck. A brick is put under his chin, so that he may break his teeth

on it. Or a net is put into the coffin, all the knots of which the vampire

must undo before he can leave his tomb, and this lasts many years, for,

according to some, he can undo only one knot a year. Or a little bag full

of sea-sand or poppy-seed is placed in his coffin, or the way to the grave

is strewn with sea-sand or poppy-seed; the vampire must then count all

the grains before he is able to get out and return to the house, and this

likewise lasts a very long time, for, according to some authorities, he

counts but one grain a year. He is also laid in the coffin face downwards,

so that he may not find the way to the upper world, but descend deeper

and deeper into the earth.

ula? According to family historian Frank Westmore, it actually happened.

(Any veteran who can provide a photograph will have an eternal place of

honor in the next edition of V Isfor Vampire.)

Deafula

Cinema, USA 1975. Peter Wechsberg wrote and directed and starred in

the world's first and only horror movie for the hearing-impaired. Tran-

sylvanian accents, screams, etc. are, of course, totally beside the point in

Deafula, which is acted completely in sign language. A rarity, a print or

tape ofwhich I was unable to locate anywhere. (Signscope)

Deane, Hamilton

Irish-born actor-manager, who, enamored of Bram Stoker's novel Drac-

ULA from an early age, secured the dramatic rights to the book from the

author's widow in 1924. It is Hamilton Deane who is most responsible

for our contemporary image of Dracula as the unctuous, immaculately

dressed foreigner wrapped in an opera cape—a vision radically opposed to

the repellent, cadaverous old satyr imagined by Stoker. Deane, however,

was making a canny dramatic choice—in order to conform to the conven-

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 73

Hamilton Deane, original stage adaptor of Dracula.

tions of the drawing-room mystery melo-

drama, Dracula needed to be reimagined as a

sort of chap who might plausibly be invited

into drawing rooms to begin with. The for-

mula clicked, and Deane toured the British

provinces successfully for three years before

taking the play to London, where it defied

critical calumny and was a major hit. The

American rights were purchased by the flam-

boyant producer-publisher Horace Liveright,

who enlisted John L. Balderston to com-

pletely rewrite Deane's script for Broadway.

Deane originally intended the part of Dracula

for himself, but opted for the character ofVan

Helsing, who had far more stage time and much longer speeches. Deane

finally did play Dracula in London in a 1939 revival; strangely, no pho-

tographs of him in character seem to have survived. He died in 1958. See

also Dracula, The Vampire Play.

Dearg-due

A dread species of Irish vampire, which quite possibly informed the imagi-

nations of Ireland's greatest vampire authors, J. Sheridan Le Fanu and

Bram Stoker. The name of the creature translates from the Gaelic as

"Red Blood Sucker." See also folklore.

Decolletage

The view of a woman's bosom is an essential component of modern vam-

pire iconography, especially prominent in the advertisem*nt of films. From

a Freudian perspective, infantile oral appetites underly the psychology of

vampirism, and it is therefore not surprising that the neck bite in vampire

movies is often framed and photographed with a woman's plunging neck-

line and/or exposed breasts in the same field of vision. Sometimes a line of

74 David J. Skal

Christopher Lee and

Barbara Shelley in

Dracula, Prince of

Darkness. (Photofest)

blood is shown connecting the neckbite to the cleavage, diagrammatically

tracing the displacement. The bite wound itself—two reddish, circular

spots—may register in semiconsciousness as a kind of graphic shorthand for

nipples (or staring eyes—see "Christabel"). The advertising graphic for

the Frank Langella version ofDracula (1979) features the count ogling

a supine victim's neck, but our gaze is pulled instead to the undead uplift of

the woman's breasts—their levitation is the most supernatural thing about

the whole image, the breasts having been rendered in progressively larger

states of inflation for various posters, ads, book covers, etc. In more recent

films, such as Graveyard Shift (1987) and any number of vampire pic-

tures featuring lesbianism, the bloodsuckers tend to go for the breasts di-

rectly, avoiding the need for neck euphemisms. Incidentally, there is no

truth to the claim that a vampire bite on the breast is properly called a "Bra

Stoker." See also doppelsauger; Freud, Sigmund; psychoanalysis.

Deneuve, Catherine

See The Hunger.

Devil's Commandment, The

See / Vampiri.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 75

Dhampir

In gypsy tradition, a dhampir is the child of a vampire, blessed with special

powers to detect and destroy the undead. The term was adapted by Scott

Baker for the title of his freewheeling 1982 novel, Dhampire.

"Dinner with Drac"

TV horror-host Zacherley's 1958 novelty song "Dinner with Drac"

made the top-ten charts during a sick humor craze that coincided with the

release of classic Universal horror pictures to television, Lenny Bruce's

Transylvania skits, monster magazines, etc. "Dinner with Drac" consisted

largely of grisly limericks maniacally delivered by Zacherle to a downbeat

jazz accompaniment.

My favorite: "For dessert, there was bat-wing con-

fetti / And the veins of a mummy named Betty. / I first frowned upon it

/ But with ketchup on it / It tasted very much like spaghetti!"

Doppelsauger

In German superstition, a weaned child who returns to the breast—

"double-sucker"—is likely to become a vampire. Interestingly, the belief

parallels the psychoanalytic theory of vampirism, linking vampire fantasies

to an inability to move beyond the infantile, oral stage of sexual develop-

ment. See also decolletage; Freud, Sigmund; psychoanalysis.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1857-1930)

made several literary forays into vampirism, including the stories "The Par-

asite" (1891), "John Barrington Cowles" (1894), and "The Adventure of

the Sussex Vampire" (1924), in which Holmes investigates a bogus blood-

sucker. "The Parasite" contains a classic literary example of the psychic

vampire, a deceptively passive woman who nonetheless drains a professor's

mental energy, driving him to acts of violence and crime. Sherlock Holmes

was teamed with a master vampire by novelist Fred Saberhagen for his

1978 pastiche, The Holmes-Dracula File, and Doyle himself was fictionally

paired with Bram Stoker (a real-life friend) for Simon Hawke's 1988 novel

The Dracuta Caper.

76 David J. Skal

Dracula

Fiction, UK 1897. The T. Rex of the vampire world entered our mortal

realm via the imagination of part-time Victorian novelist Bram Stoker,

who by day managed the affairs of the charismatic actor-producer Henry

Irving and his prestigious Royal Lyceum Theatre. By night, Stoker wrote

reams of melodramatic potboilers, none of which has had the staying

power of Dracula; nearly a century later, the book has never been out of

print and has inspired more film and stage adaptations than any novel in

history. The following notice in the Spectator encapsulates the plot and is

typical of the novel's initially favorable, yet somewhat guarded, reception:

Mr. Bram Stoker gives us the impression—we may be doing him an in-

justice—of having deliberately laid himself out in Dracula to eclipse all

previous efforts in the domain of the horrible—to "go one better" than

Wilkie Collins (whose method of narration he has closely followed),

Sheridan Le Fanu, and all the other professors of the flesh-creeping

school. Count Dracula, who gives his name to the book, is a Transyl-

vanian noble who purchases an estate in England, and in connection

with the transfer of the property Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor,

visits him in his ancestral castle. Jonathan Harker has a terrible time of

it, for the Count—who is a vampire of immense age, cunning, and ex-

perience—keeps him as a prisoner for several weeks, and when the poor

young man escapes from the gruesome charnel-house of his host, he

nearly dies of brain-fever in a hospital at Buda-Pesth. The scene then

shifts to England, where the Count arrives by sea in the form of a dog-

fiend, after destroying the entire crew, and resumes operations in vari-

ous uncanny manifestations, selecting as his chief victim Miss Lucy

Westenra, the fiancee of the Honourable Arthur Holmwood, heir-

presumptive to Lord Godalming. The story then resolves itself into the

history of Lucy's protectors, including two rejected suitors—an Ameri-

can and a "mad" doctor—and a wonderfully clever specialist from Am-

sterdam, against her unearthly persecutor. The clue is furnished by

Jonathan Harker, whose betrothed, Mina Murray, is a bosom friend of

Lucy's, and the fight is long and protracted. Lucy succumbs, and, worse

still, is temporarily converted into a vampire. How she is released from

this unpleasant position and restored to a peaceful post-mortem exis-

tence, how Mina is next assailed by the Count, how he is driven from

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 77

England, and finally exterminated by the efforts of the league—for all

these, and a great many more thrilling details, we must refer our readers

to the pages ofMr. Stoker's clever but cadaverous romance. Its strength

lies in the invention of incident, for the sentimental element is decidedly

mawkish. Mr. Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he

has made of all the available traditions of vampirology, but we think his

story would have been all the more effective if he had chosen an earlier

period. The up-to-dateness of the book—the phonograph diaries, type-

writers, and so on—hardly fits in with the mediaeval methods which

ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula's foes.

While Dracula is without question the most famous piece of vampire

literature in history, Stoker's ugly, animalistic conception of the count has

been stubbornly resisted by filmmakers and dramatists. Stoker was cer-

tainly aware of the romantic, Byronic image of the vampire that domi-

nated the page and stage in the early part of the nineteenth century, and

he deliberately went in another direction. His Dracula is a Darwinian su-

perman who blurs distinctions between humans and predatory animals;

the popularity of the novel reflected middle-class Victorian uneasiness with

the reductionistic message of evolutionary science. But the image of the

brooding, fatal seducer so dear to the Romantic sensibility lent itself far

better to dramatic adaptations than did Stoker's bestial bogeyman, and the

popular image of Dracula today is a distinct hybrid. In recent years the

novel has been the subject of countless critical studies, and the lack of a

firsthand account by Stoker of his intentions in its composition has fueled

a cottage industry of provocative speculation on the book's psychosexual,

scientific, and political subtexts.

Dracula

Theater, UK and USA 1924/27. See Dracula, The Vampire Play.

Dracula

Cinema, USA 1931. Perhaps the most influential bad movie ever made,

Dracula broke the long-standing Hollywood taboo against out-and-out

supernatural themes, thus awakening the American cinema to its dream-

like, fantastic possibilities (leading, of course, to the horror cycles of the

thirties and forties, the science fiction cycle of the fifties, and straight on to

78 David J. Skal

Never out of print since its 1 897 publication, Bram Stoker's Dracula has provided endless

inspiration to dust-jacket designers and illustrators. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borsr/Hollywood

Movie Posters, and Dr. Jeanne Youngson, The Count Dracula Fan Club)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 79

Bram Stoker:

Dracula

Ein Vampirroman

BRAM STOKER

DRACULA

1 ,.i!lC

U:it

^ 1

80 David J. Skal

Bela Lugosi in an atmospheric publicity

photo for Dracula.

the Spielbergian blockbusters of the

present day). None would have hap-

pened in exacdy the same way had

Dracula not been produced by Uni-

versal in 1931—Universal, in fact,

might have folded that year without

the significant revenue Dracula pro-

duced. The historical importance of

Dracula has, unfortunately, led to its

being grossly overrated from an artistic

standpoint. In reality, the film is stagey

(while paradoxically lacking most of

the theatricality of the stage play on

which it is based), badly paced and

edited, and watchable today primarily

for Bela LUGOSl's classic line readings and the manic scenery-chewing of

Dwight Frye as his lunatic helper. Tod Browning is the nominal director,

though according to cast member David Manners, the production was

held together by the efforts of cinematographer Karl Freund (which may

explain why Freund had so little time to show off the fluid, mobile camera-

work that had been his signature in Germany). This may sound like

heresy, but Dracula would be a far better film if tightened to an hour

from its present seventy-five minutes; all the cuts could come from the op-

pressive dead air that hovers in virtually every shot and scene after the first

two reels. Screenplay by Garrett Fort (with Tod Browning, uncredited).

Also starring Helen Chandler, Edward Van Sloan, Frances Dade, Her-

bert Bunston, Charles Gerrard, and Joan Standing. (Universal)T

Dracula (Spanish-Language Version)

Cinema, USA 1931. The artistic shortcomings of Universal 's 1931 English-

language Dracula are vividly underscored by this fascinating Spanish version

shot on the same sets at night by a completely different producer, director,

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 8

cast, and crew. During the early days of talking pictures, Hollywood rou-

tinely shot dozens of foreign-language versions of its domestic films in

order to maintain the lucrative foreign markets, which had no interest in a

"dubbed" product—the novelty and excitement of talking pictures was

hearing actors speak in their natural voices. Most of these films are now

lost or forgotten, but the Spanish version of Dracula was in many ways a

rival production to the Tod Browning version—its associate producer,

Paul Kohner, had been frustrated in his attempts to bring an English-

language Dracula to the screen in collaboration with director Paul Leni

and actor Conrad Veidt in the title role. Made for a fraction of the cost of

the Browning film, producer Kohner and director George Melford (best

known for Valentino's The Sheik), upstaged the English version scene by

scene and shot by shot. The real star of the picture is cinematographer

George Robinson, whose mobile camera, dramatic lighting, and visual

effects frequently look a decade ahead of their time. The Spanish actor

Carlos Villarias (contract name: Charles Villar) proves a campy lookalike for

Bela Lugosi, and Kohner cast his bride-to-be, the photogenic Mexican

ingenue Lupita Tovar, as the female lead. Nearly every published account

of the film mentions Tovar's filmy negligees and plunging necklines (see

decolletage) as one of the film's great revelations, and I will not argue

otherwise. The film was beautifully restored in 1992 and released to home

video, where it made the best-seller charts and, I am told by insiders, did

better for MCA than the videocassette of Spartacus. Also starring Barry

Carlos Villarias in

the 1931 Spanish-

language version of

Dracula. (Courtesy of the

Cinemateca de Cuba)

82 David J. Skal

Norton, Pablo Alvarez Rubio, Eduardo Arozamena, and Carmen Guer-

rero. An absolute must-see. (Universal)T

Dracula

Television, USA 1958. John Carradine starred in the first television adap-

tation of Bram Stoker's novel as part of NBC's Matinee Theatre series.

Sadly, no kinescope or videotape seems to have survived—nor, apparently,

even a script or production photos. Has anyone seen this curiosity? If any

information or pictures surface, I'd love to include them in a future edi-

tion of V Isfor Vampire.

Dracula

Theater, UK 1964. Fifty years to the day after Hamilton Deane premiered

his version of Dracula in Derby, England, playwright Tudor Williams un-

veiled his own adaptation, with actor Paul Geaves in the title role. Accord-

ing to an unsourced clipping, "In a strange way it all seemed faintly

possible. The diagnoses and theorisings of Professor Van Helsing bore a

strong resemblance to those snap decisions at the foot of the bed that are

such an accepted convention of television hospital shows, and which we

have learned to treat with a kind of cowering respect."

Dracula

Television, UK 1969. Denholm Elliott was weirdly miscast as a chubby,

Friar-Tuckish vampire in a low-budget but often inventive spin on

Stoker. The characters of Renfield and Jonathan Harker, for instance,

were combined through a surprise plot twist—the nameless, fly-eating lu-

natic is revealed to be none other than Harker himself, who has returned

to England from Castle Dracula a psychotic mess. Elliott's neck penetra-

tion of heroine Susan George is one of the kinkiest scenes of its kind I've

ever seen, and all the more surprising for sixties television—the chubby

chomper gets down on his knees next to her bed (thus raising all kinds of

oral sex expectations). After some preliminary nuzzling, he draws back his

lips to reveal impressive Nosferatu-style rat-fangs with which he snags

her jugular. The sucking and kissing of the open wound goes on at

surprising erotic length, and Elliott's complete on-camera disintegra-

tion provides another unexpected thrill. Directed bv Patrick Dromgoole;

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 8 3

also starring Conn Redgrave, Suzanne Neve, Bernard Archard, and Joan

Hickson.

Dracula

Television, Canada 1973. Part of the Purple Playhouse series, this video-

taped dramatization featured actor Norman Welsh as a white-haired vam-

pire closely following Bram Stoker's description. Nehemiah Persoff took

the role ofVan Helsing while Blair Brown, later TV's Molly Dodd, pro-

vided the count with diversion and refreshment. Directed by Jack Nixon

Browne.

Dracula

Television, USA 1974. Dan Curtis, the producer of Dark Shadows, got

the scoop on Francis Coppola almost twenty years before Bram Stoker's

Dracula in his stylish production scripted by Richard Matheson (IAm

Legend) that was obviously a heavy source of inspiration for the Coppola

extravaganza. Matheson combined Stoker's original story with a motiva-

tional subplot in which Dracula (creepily portrayed by the spookily cheek-

boned Jack Palance) attempts to recapture his reincarnated love of five

hundred years past. There are many impressive sequences, including Drac-

ula's marvelously understated response to being discovered indulging his

habit in Mina's bedchamber. With Nigel Davenport, Pamela Brown, Fiona

Lewis, and Penelope Horner.

Dracula

Theater, UK 1974. A tongue-in-cheek dramatization by Ken Hill, replac-

ing Dr. Seward's asylum setting with a Victorian girl's school.

Dracula

Cinema, USA/UK 1979. John Badham's lush remake of the Deane/Balder-

ston stage vehicle was a box office disappointment when first released, but

holds up surprisingly well on video. In a sense, Frank Langella's Byronic

vampire—a role he originated on stage a few years earlier—ushered in the

age of Anne Rice's sexy, introspective bloodsuckers. Screenplay by W. D.

Richter. With Laurence Olivier, Kate Nelligan, Donald Pleasance, Trevor

Eve, Jan Francis, Tony Haygarth. (Universal) T

84 DavidJ. Skal

Dracula

Theater, New Zealand 1982. Auckland's Mercury Theatre presented this

soft-rock musical adaptation, composed by Stephen McCurdy with book

and lyrics by Ian Mune. According to Variety, the story was "given a

Brechtian slant, so that the inhabitants of a small township, told that the

wealthy Count Dracula is interested in buying property, are greedily anx-

ious to exploit him, thus deserving the zombie fate that is theirs at the fi-

nal curtain."

Dracula

Theater, UK 1984. Actor Daniel Day Lewis, who turned down the role of

the vampire Lestat in Neil Jordan's 1994 film of Interview with the

Vampire, may well have had his fill of vampires after portraying Count

Dracula in Chris Bond's 1984 adaptation for London's Half Moon The-

atre. Nonetheless, he seems to have been quite impressive in the part. The

Guardian noted that, "The first appearance of Daniel Day Lewis's superb,

stooping, spindle-shanked Dracula produces a genuine frisson, not least as

he runs his nose up Dr. Van Helsing's arm as if smelling her mortality."

(Yes, Van Helsing was a woman in this one.) The Financial Times re-

ported that Lewis "hobbles, crouches and snarls like a bleach- blond

bloodless Richard III," while Time Out described him as a "pincer-fanged,

black-cloaked Dracula howling like a werewolf, whirling across the heads

of the audience to carry off his prey." The fang-in-cheek script included

generous dollops of class warfare humor, as well as the use of cocaine to

momentarily revive a damsel running on empty.

Dracula

Theater, Scotland 1985. The Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead

wrote one of the most critically acclaimed Dracula adaptations of modern

times, a script that has yet to receive an American production. Though

criticizing its length (three and a half hours), the Guardian called it "an

astonishingly brave and ambitious piece of work," and praised Lochhead

for delving "deep beneath the psycho-sexual surface of Stoker's story in an

attempt to marry his imagery with modern ideas about women's sexuality;

its language is a daring and often highly successful mixture of domestic

naturalism and high melodrama, pun, alliteration, and pure poetry."

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 85

Dracula A.D. 1972

Cinema, UK 1972. Christopher Lee returned in the sixth installment of

Hammer's Dracula series, as the count is revived by hippie-satanic rituals in a

modern London and reels from a Carnaby Street hangover. Most novel mo-

ment: a vampire's death by running water—in this case, a shower, thereby

merging supernatural and Hitchco*ckian horror traditions. Directed by Alan

Gibson from a script by Don Houghton. With Peter Cushing, Stephanie

Beacham, and Christopher Neame. (Hammer/Warner Brothers)T

Dracula: A Modern Fable

Theater, USA 1978. Norman Bein's satire was presented off-off-Broadway

in midnight performances that capitalized on the concurrent popularity of

the Frank Langella Broadway revival of Dracula. Bein's play was set in

Hollywood: the heroine has flown to L.A. to bury her younger brother

who has suddenly died. He turns up, seemingly alive, explaining that his

"death" was just a publicity stunt for a Dracula movie. But we know bet-

ter. Drac himself shows up with a familiar chestnut—looking for the rein-

carnation of his lost love.

Dracula: A Musical Nightmare

Theater, USA 1978. Another late-seventies riff on Dracula, one that prob-

ably deserves more revivals than it's been given so far. With book and

lyrics by Douglas Johnson, and music by John Aschenbrenner, Dracula: A

Musical Nightmare is a concept show combining the story of a third-rate

English touring company and its production of Dracula with music hall

song and dance routines. The New York Theatre Review called the style

"very much in the mode of Cabaret, complete with a leering M.C. who

takes on the tide role. The music hall portions are fun and the play-within-

a-play presentations of segments of Dracula manage to be both sinister

and sensual ... [an] extremely stylish and remarkably entertaining

evening." The original Los Angeles production featured Hill Street Blues

regular Joe Spano as the vampiric master of ceremonies.

Dracula: A Pain in the Neck

Theater, UK 1981. The tide seems to sum up this obscure production,

which was described by Time Out: before the curtain, "the audience is in-

vited to wipe their feet on garlic impregnated Batmat. Fizzy blood and

86 David J. Skal

gingerbread crucifixes are served in the interval. . . . Dracula speaks like a

co*ckney sergeant-major pretending to be an Italian waiter. Mina is a bossy

girl who wears undignified face packs in bed. . .

." Get the picture?

Dracula and Son

Cinema, France 1976. Edouard France, the director who went on to much

better things, like La Cage auxfolles (1978), got his start with this report-

edly funny vampire spoof starring none other than Christopher Lee, but

the film is hard to evaluate in its English-language version, which wasn't

just dubbed but completely rescripted—atrociously. (Quartet Films)T

Dracula Blows His Cool

Cinema, West Germany 1979. This is a truly bizarre film. The vampire's

castle becomes a garish tourist trap, with the count reduced to providing

oral room service for paying customers looking for the thrill of a chill. The

idea of Dracula as a capitalist whor* is an interesting idea, but this movie

isn't interested in ideas. Directed by Carlo Ombra, with Gianni Garko as

Dracula. (Lisa-Barthonia Film)

Dracula: Dead and Loving It

Cinema, USA 1995. This must have sounded like a great idea on paper. A

companion piece to Mel Brooks' classic farce Young Frankenstein, this time

taking on the other great horror icon. But Dracula: Dead and Loving It is

mostly a mess. Leslie Nielsen's casting as Dracula is inexplicable, except for

the box office value of his name as comedy star (though it must be said he

has carefully studied Bela LuGOSl's vocal mannerisms, which is more than

most impersonators do). Unlike Young Frankenstein, there is no attempt

here to recreate the black-and-white world of the classic horror films, and by

aiming darts at every Dracula variation from Lugosi to Langella to Lee to

Coppola, Brooks ends up missing all targets. Peter MacNichol steals the

show with an inspired impersonation of Dwight Frye's classic Renfield,

and Anne Bancroft has a fun in a cameo as a pushy, crucifix-dispensing gypsy.

But the screenplay, by Brooks, Rudy De Luca, and Steve Haberman, is slug-

gish and uninventive. Still, one cannot suppress a smile at lines like "Yes, we

have Nosferatu." If only there had been more of them. With Steven Weber,

Amy Yasbeck, Lysette Anthony, Harvey Korman and Mel Brooks, as the

vampire's nemesis Van Helseng. (Columbia/Castle Rock)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 87

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

Cinema, UK 1968. One of the original posters for Dracula Has Risen

from the Grave added the word "obviously" as a tag line to the tide, illus-

trated by a shapely neck sporting twin Band-Aids. The film itself, the third

Hammer entry featuring Christopher Lee, is free from such campy humor,

though the famous scene in which Lee pulls a stake out of his chest may

well provoke an ironic chuckle or two. Newsweek, in a Vietnam mindset,

had some trouble with the hero, "an atheist who refuses under any cir-

c*mstances to flash the crucifix [to protect the heroine]. He loves her

though, and that's enough to save the day and night. Imagine a war being

won by a conscientious objector." Purists and sticklers beware: there is a

scene in which Dracula casts a reflection. Horrors! Directed by Freddie

Francis, from a script by John Elder. With Rupert Davies, Veronica Carl-

son, Barbara Ewing, and Barry Andrews. (Hammer/Warner Bros.)T

Dracula, or Out for the Count

Theater, UK 1985. Charles McKeown, coauthor of the surreal film com-

edy Brazil, seems to have reworked this material over a period of several

years. It was first performed in Manchester, England, in 1978, under the

tide Dracula Is Undead and Well and Living in Purlfleet (not to be con-

fused with Dracula Is Dead and Well and Living in London—the working

tide for the film Dracula A.D. 1972). Time Out described the end result:

"You'll find no Hammer Horror here, no creepy, creaky casries or ghoul-

ish undead. Charles McKeown's Dracula is a 30's screen idol, complete

with entourage of Busby Berkeley vampiresses, who, against Roger Glos-

sop's stylishly elegant Art Deco set, elegandy dances and sings before sink-

ing his fangs into his willing victims' necks. It's a great idea and even a

greater shame it fails." Actor Tim Flavin, who played Dracula, lip-synched

nostalgic recordings in much the same manner popularized by Dennis

Potter in Penniesfrom Heaven.

Dracula, Prince of Darkness

Cinema, UK 1966. Having been sun-baked to ashes in Horror of

Dracula, Christopher Lee missed Hammer's first follow-up, Brides of

Dracula, but returned as an oddly mute king of vampires for Dracula,

Prince of Darkness, directed by Terence Fisher from a script by John San-

som. The lack of dialogue in this film supposedly had something to do

with Lee's salary and distaste for the original script. Dracula's resurrection

88 DavidJ. Skal

is accomplished in a particularly grisly fashion—a honeymooning husband

is suspended and throat-slit over Dracula's powdery remains by his faithful

servant Klove, who stirs up the count like a satanic pot of Sanka. The Mo-

tion Picture Association ofAmerica objected to the Grand Guignol excess of

the resurrection scene as it was originally scripted: "The business ofKlove de-

capitating Alan and the subsequent scene showing the torrents of blood

pouring into the coffin, together with Klove's throwing ofAlan's head aside,

is simply too sickening to be approved," the association wrote. The British

censors also objected and the scene was toned down. But one scene from

Stoker's original novel, long avoided in dramatizations, is finally realized here

as Dracula suckles his victim with vampire blood from a wound he has

opened in his breast. Dracula, Prince ofDarkness also contains a gruesome,

quasi-gang-bang involving a group of monks, a female vampire (Barbara

Shelley), a table, and a stake. (Hammer/Warner Bros.)V See also rape.

Dracula Rising

Cinema, USA 1992. This low-budget Roger Corman number was in-

tended to capitalize on the big-screen Dracula craze of 1992, but seems

to have been released primarily on video. It's the old Dracula-seeks-his-

reincarnated-love gambit again. A young art restorer (Stacey Travis) takes

an assignment in Transylvania, with predictable results. In flashbacks, she's

burned as a witch for carrying on with Vlad, the son of Dracula (Christo-

pher Atkins), who is trying to live down his heritage by becoming a monk.

The real problem, however, is another monk (Doug Wert), who seems to

want Vlad for himself. They both end up as vampires, with a nice under

current of hom*oerotic tension that would make Anne Rice proud. Di-

rected by Fred Gallo. Screenplay by Rodman Flender and Daniella Purcell.

(Concorde/New Horizons)T

Dracula: Sabbat

Theater, USA 1970. It was inevitable, after the Manson-curdled climax of

the psychedelic sixties, that Dracula would form the basis for a piece of

ritual theater. Dracula: Sabbat, by Leon Katz and directed by Laurence

Kornfeld, received outstanding reviews when it was presented by the Judson

Poet's Theatre. George L. George, critic for Backstage, called it ".

. .a quasi

religious spectacle that holds the sometimes unnerved audience under its

spell for two tense unbroken hours ... a visually startling and mind-

expanding pageant, where the forces of evil fight for the possession of souls

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 89

as in the old Morality plays." Clive Barnes of the New York Times called the

piece "a mixture of the frankly repulsive and the eccentrically beautiful," and

Jack Kroll of Newsweek found it "... a work of absolute authenticity—with a

beauty, dignity, gravity and sensuality rare to the point of near-extinction in

any part of our contemporary theater." Kroll especially praised Crystal Field,

an actress "with the fructuous body of the Venus ofWillendorf and the face

of a Victorian maiden rapt by Heaven [who] gives a wonderful performance

as the girl metamorphosed into transcendental profanity by Dracula."

Dracula Sucks

Cinema, USA 1979. This is the inevitable title for the inevitable film. p*rn

veterans Jamie Gillis, Annette Haven, and Serena starred in this reportedly

elaborate piece of erotica that got embroiled in producer/distributor law-

suits in the early eighties and now can't be found anywhere.

The Dracula Tape

Fiction, USA 1975. The much-maligned Dracula gets to tell his side of the

story in Fred Saberhagen's amusing novel. No one understands the count,

it seems. "Lucy I did not kill," he tells us. "It was not /who hammered

the great stake through her heart. My hands did not cut off her lovely

head, or stuff her breathless mouth-

—

that mouth—with garlic, as if she

were a dead pig, pork being made ready for some barbarians' feast." What

about that notorious incident at the castle, with the baby in the bag, and

the mother devoured by wolves? It never happened, the count insists—in

fact, the wolves used their extraordinary hunting instincts to find the lost

child in the woods for a happy family reunion. The thing in the bag was a

calf, a late supper for the count's trio of brides. And so on. Whether you

will swallow the count's impassioned spin-doctoring is probably a matter

of individual taste, but Saberhagen sustains his conceit effectively, provid-

ing nasty chuckles on almost every page.

Dracula (The Dirty Old Man)

Cinema, USA 1969. Supposedly, this started out as a bottom- of- the -barrel

attempt at a "serious" horror film, but someone who realized what an

unholy mess it was tried to salvage it by overdubbing a completely new,

cornball soundtrack that only compounded the disaster. In addition to

Dracula, there is a werewolf and many, many breasts. The producers, per-

haps, thought nudity would make this watchable. They were wrong. Star-

90 David J. Skal

ring Vince Kelly and Ann Hollis. Written and directed by William Edwards.

(Boyd Productions)T

Dracula: The Story You Thought You Knew

Theater, USA 1983. Richard Sharp's acclaimed adaptation of the vampire

classic was a two-season hit at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and won ad-

ditional praise when restaged in 1985 in a downtown San Francisco church.

The play's set drew most of the plaudits: designer Richard Hay created a

semicircle of gothic arches framing a monumental bas-relief of St. Michael

driving Lucifer into hell. Director Richard Geer employed a chorus of gray-

robed living-dead "statues" who provided a choreographic counterpoint to

the dramatic action, anchored in the San Francisco production by Dan Kern

as Dracula and John Astin (the ghoulish Gomez of TV's original Addams

Family) as Van Helsing. The San Francisco Chronicle critic Bernard Weiner

commented: "The draw for this production is not a 'star' but the stunningly

original concept that makes this 'Dracula' seem fresh all over again and well

worth a visit. . . . The special effects are ingenious—Bibles and crosses ex-

ploding, props moving on their own, a chair that seems to levitate, fluores-

cent veils, etc. The final effect, as a wooden stake is hammered into Dracula's

heart, is enough to blow you away. Rarely does a special effect earn an ova-

tion, but that's what occurred opening night—what an ending!" (Needless

to say, if any reader witnessed this event, we'd love to hear the details.)

Dracula Unbound

Fiction, UK 1991. Acclaimed science fiction writer Brian W. Aldiss, who

cleverly applied time travel to the Mary Shelley legend in Frankenstein

Unbound (1973), here takes a similar approach to Bram Stoker, with

somewhat less successful results. Nonetheless, Aldiss' speculation on the

vampire's evolutionary link to the reptile world is brilliantly original and

carried off with the usual Aldiss flair. The positing of real vampires in

Stoker's England anticipates the alternate-universe gambit of Kim New-

man's kaleidoscopic novel Anno Dracula (1992).

Dracula, The Vampire Play

Theater, UK and USA, 1924-1927. Hamilton Deane and John L.

Balderston's efficient theatrical adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel is re-

ally two plays: Deane's original, which was the only version performed in

England from 1924 to 1939, and Balderston's 1927 complete rewrite for

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 9

HORACE LIVER1GHT

PRESENTS

THE WORLD FAMOUS

VAMPIRE THRILLER

ha BBAM

Original handbill for Dracula: The Vampire Play.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

Broadway. The Broadway version formed the

basis for the famous 1931 film version starring

Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning

(though to cover all the bases, Universal Pic-

tures also bought film rights to the Deane

version and the original novel, plus a curious

and turgidly verbose stage adaptation Stoker's

widow had commissioned from playwright

Charles Morrell). The play is significant for its

introduction of the popular image of Dracula

as an unctuous seducer in evening clothes and

opera cloak—an appearance far removed from

Stoker's rancid satyr. The Deane/Balderston

Dracula is, in fact, a variation on the familiar

image of a vaudeville magician, an appropriate

strategy given the play's frequent reliance on startling "magic" effects

—

flash bombs, fog, disappearing boxes, trapdoors, and the like. The play-

wrights dropped the broad geographical sweep of the novel, leaving out

the Transylvania sequences entirely and setting the entire action in and

around the Seward Sanitorium. The play was greeted with critical raised

eyebrows on both sides

of the Atlantic, but it nonetheless was a huge

moneymaker, earning over two million dollars on Broadway and on tour.

The play has gone on to be a staple repertory item and is constantly re-

vived by regional theaters, colleges, and community groups. Dracula was

given a major revival on Broadway in 1977 in a stylish, intentionally campy

production with sets and costumes designed with macabre whimsy by Ed-

ward Gorey and directed by Dennis Rosa, with Frank Langella as the

count. To accommodate the star, dialogue was padded and expanded,

some of it lifted directly from the 1931 film ("I never drink . . . wine,"

etc.). See also cloaks and capes; Liveright, Horace; theater.

92 David J. Skal

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Cinema, Spain/West Germany/Italy 1969. This film is a dreadful mash of

monsters, including aliens, a mummy, and a werewolf, notable only for

being Michael Rennie's final film. Featuring Paul Naschy (who also wrote

the script) as the wolf-man. Directed by Hugo Fregonese and Tulio Demi-

chelli. Also known as Assignment Terror. (Prades/Eichberg/International

Jaguar)T

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Cinema, USA 1971. A shameful cheapie, marking the ignominious career

ends of two veteran actors, J. Carroll Naish and Lon Chaney, Jr., as a mad

scientist and his zombie hench-thing. Zandor Vorkov makes a sleazy, goa-

teed Dracula with a ray-gun in his ring, as if his legendary demonic powers

require some kind of technological boost. The fact that some of the origi-

nal electrical equipment from Universal's Frankenstein films was hauled

out of storage for the sets doesn't add interest; it just makes the whole

thing seem even more depressing. Also featuring Anthony Eisley. Directed

by Al Adamson. (Independent-International)V

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Cinema, Spain 1972. You can't keep a good title down, apparently. But

Spanish horror maven Jesus (a.k.a. Jess) Franco failed to impress Vari-

ety's film critic, who pointed up the absurd inconsistencies of the story:

"... Franco never seems quite to decide when and where the scene is set.

Though there's a blinking lab with plenty of electric current, the rooms

are inevitably lit with candles; sometimes we'll see a modern car following

a horse and buggy; the vampire's coffins are lit with a spotlight from the

ceiling; the wind whistles constantly, but nary a leaf ever moves upon a

tree. Make-up and thesping are best left uncommented upon." Also known

as The Screaming Dead.

Dracula Was a Woman

See Bathory, Erzebet.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 93

Dracula's Daughter

Cinema, USA 1936. Universal's long-awaited sequel to Dracula went

through its own extended period of developmental hell: though they orig-

inally intended it as a starring vehicle for Bela Lugosi and Jane Wyatt (as

his daughter), the director James Whale and screenwriter R. C. Sherriff

found it impossible to get their original concept past the censors. Sher-

riff 's story featured a long Transylvanian flashback in which the cruel

count amused himself with elaborate palace games involving young lovers

and severed arms; a local wizard, fed up with the debauchery, interrupts

the revelries and casts a spell that turns the count's degenerate guests into

swine and Dracula himself into a vampire. Whale, Sherriff, Lugosi, and

even the character of Dracula were dropped from the production, which

was finally scripted by Garrett Fort and directed by Lambert Hillyer. Ac-

tress Gloria Holden made an austere, soignee Countess Zaleska, a reluc-

tant vampire who unsuccessfully seeks a psychiatric cure. She also has

distinct tendencies toward lesbianism: her blood-seduction of a young

streetwalker (Nan Grey) is the film's most famous scene, and it still packs a

punch. Novelist Anne RlCE credits this film as a major early inspiration for

94 DavidJ. Skal

her vampire novels; in Queen of the Damned, she paid it homage by nam-

ing a quasi-gay bar in San Francisco's Castro district "Dracula's Daugh-

ter." The film also starred Otto Kruger as the psychiatrist (a part originally

intended for Cesar Romero); Edward Van Sloan, reprising his role as Van

Helsing; and Irving Pichel as a Lugosi-esque servant who undermines his

mistress' recovery program for his own undead ambitions. (Universal)T

Dracula's Dog

Cinema, USA 1978. No, this is not a satirical vampiric counterpart to Tim

Burton's Frankenweenie, but rather a merely laughable horror film with a

canine twist: Dracula relocates to modern Los Angeles, with his hound

Zoltan standing in for the old-country wolves. Directed by Albert Band.

Screenplay by Frank Ray Perelli. (Vic/Crown)T

Dracula's Dragster

Marketed by Aurora Plastics in the early 1960s, Dracula's Dragster con-

flated two then-current crazes in model kits: customized sports cars and

Hollywood movie monsters. The kit featured Dracula at the helm of a

souped-up coffin on wheels, wearing a jaunty driver's cap and toasting the

night sky with a martini glass sloshing with blood. I know this one from

the advertisem*nts only; try as I could, I never found the actual kit in a

store—likewise for its contemporaneous counterpart, Frankenstein's Flivver.

Dracula's Widow

Cinema, USA 1988. Christopher Coppola, nephew of Francis, seems to

have directed this absurdist (or maybe just absurd) horror film as a kind of

film school in-joke. Sylvia Kristel, star of the soft-core classic Emmanuelle, is

surprisingly prudish here, dressed to the chin in the kind of severe, dress-for-

success outfits favored by scary female executives. She was evidently directed

to imitate the rigid wrist-flexing of Max Schreck in the 1922 Nosferatu,

generous clips of which are incorporated into the film. When Dracula's

widow attacks, she transforms into a gargoylish creature who rips her vic-

tims to shreds, leaving hands and eyeballs for the police to scrape off the

floor. A mess, it went straight to home video. With Josef Sommer, Lenny

Van Dohlen, Marc Coppola, Stefan Schnabel, and Rachel Jones. Script by

Christopher Coppola and Kathryn Ann Thomas. (DeLaurentiis)T

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 95

Dragula

A heavy-handed comic spoof that appeared in the National Lampoon in

the early 1970s, Dragula featured a gay vampire who could change into a

toothy French poodle, nipping his victims on the ankle, etc. A woman fi-

nally learns how to outwit him: "Sink your fangs into these, tooth fairy!"

she cries, flashing her breasts, which prove as effective as holy water. Done

today, Dragula would be considered beyond the pale, politically speaking,

but for its time it still has a certain sophom*oric charm. Dragula was also

the title of a 1973 gay p*rn film starring Casey Donovan. See also hom*o-

sexuality; LESBIANISM.

Drakula

Cinema, Hungary 1921. Little is known about this lost film, but it is spec-

ulated to be the first, unauthorized film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The director was Karoly Lajthay (1885-1945), and the cinematographer

was Lajos Gasser. Drakula's actors included Margit Lux, Paul Askonas

(who later acted with Conrad Veidt in The Hands ofOrlac), Karl Jotz, Myl

Gene, Elemer Thury, Lajos Rethey, Oszkar Perczel, Paula Kende, Dezso

Kertesz, Karoly Hatvani, Lajos Szalkai, Aladar Ihasz, and Bela Timar. We

can only speculate at this point that it was Askonas who first took the role of

Dracula, and that Lajthay's production may have inspired F. W. Murnau's

Vilma Banky in a

vampirish scene from an

early Hungarian film.

96 David J. Skal

Atif Kaptan in Drakula Istanbulda.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/

Hollywood Movie Posters)

equally unauthorized adapta-

tion, Nosferatu, also filmed in

1921, but released the follow-

ing year. Drakula was filmed

in Berlin, like many Hungarian

films of the time, and used

German as well as Hungarian

performers (Askonas and Jotz

were German). Of some tan-

gential interest to Drakula is

the photograph, reproduced

here, of silent film actress

Vilma Banky in a decidedly

vampirish scene from an un-

identified Hungarian film

from

the same period.

Drakula Instanbulda

Cinema, Turkey 1953. The first non-Western film adaptation of Dracula

starred Atif Kaptan as an interesting amalgam of the earlier Max SCHRECK

(bald and fanged) and Bela Lugosi (evening wear and cape) interpre-

tations of the role. No print or video of this oddity has turned up in

America, but stills have been widely published, revealing the story to be

set in contemporary Istanbul. Directed by Mehmet Muhtar. Umit Deniz'

screenplay drew both from the Stoker novel and The Impaling Voivode

by Ali Riza Seyfi.

Dreyer, Carl

See Vamptr.

Elvira

Popular television horror movie hostess of the 1980s, portrayed by actress

Cassandra Peterson. The busty, Valley ghoul-accented Elvira, clad in slinky

black and topped by a bloodcurdling bouffant, is not exacdy a vampire,

but a creepy compromise on the theme by television producers who were

unable to negotiate character rights from the original TV horror hostess,

VAMPIRA. In addition to her television program, videocassettes, and prod-

uct endorsem*nts, Elvira starred in her own feature film, Elvira, Mistress

ofthe Dark, a horror spoof released in 1988. See also decolletage.

Espionage

Would it surprise you to learn that the CIA resorted to dirty tricks involv-

ing vampires in the 1950s? According to Nathan Miller in Spying for

America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence, Air Force Colonel Ed-

ward G. Lansdale, a major covert operator of the postwar era, launched a

two-tiered strategy to defeat insurgent Communist Hukbalahap guerrillas

in the Philippines. In addition to promoting land reform and social initia-

tives, Lansdale "also launched a campaign of dirty tricks to keep the Huks

off balance," writes Miller. "One ingenious operation played on the Fil-

ipinos' superstitious dread of vampires. Lansdale arranged for the body of

a Huk killed in an ambush to be punctured on the neck in two places,

drained of blood and left at a crossroads. The Huks, as frightened of vam-

pires as anyone else, fled the area."

98 David J. Skal

Ewers, Hanns Heinz

This German writer (1871-1943), whose stories and novels frequently

dealt sensationally with the occult, published a moody symbolist book

called Vampir just about the same time F. W. Murnau was completing

his vampire film masterpiece, Nosferatu: Eine Stmphonie des Grauens.

Both works treated the vampire legend as a metaphor for the enervation

wrought on Germany by the First World War; in Nosferatu the symbolism

is fairly muted, but in Vampir, Ewer takes things right over the top. To il-

lustrate his point that the war came about because "humanity had become

stricken with a wild fever and had to drink blood to make themselves well

and young again," Ewers brings on German patriot Frank Braun (who

had, ten years earlier, figured in Ewers' novel Alraune, about a vampirish

laboratory-grown woman), who doesn't realize until the book's conclu-

sion that he himself is a vampire. In a perversely creepy anticipation of the

Hitler era, the story is resolved only when the half-Jewish mistress Lotte

Levi feeds the all-Aryan Braun "red milk" from her lacerated breasts, sacri-

ficing herself in much the same way as the heroine of Nosferatu. Upon the

book's English translation (as Vampire) in 1934, The New Republic noted

that Ewers finished this novel "several years before anyone took the Nazis

seriously. . . . Yet if 'Vampire' had been written under the Fiihrer's leader-

ship it could hardly have been more in tune with the theme songs of the

Nazis; its pages fairly drip with the mysticism, nationalism and symbolism

dear to their hearts." The Nazis themselves were confused by Ewers, who

was appointed to the new Dichter-Akademie in 1933, only to be de-

nounced as a purveyor of entarte kunst—decadent art—and drummed

summarily from his post. See also anti-Semitism.

Fangs

While the vampire's telltale bite is an indispensable part of undead lore,

the use of animallike teeth in its production is distinctly a matter of liter-

ary, theatrical, and cinematic fashion. In Victorian fiction, the protagonists

in both Varney the Vampyre and Dracula were described as having

protruding teeth—though their contemporaneous lady colleague in "Car-

milla" showed no oral anomalies. (She did, however, produce a needlelike

sting when she fell upon her victim's breast—suggesting a chipped tooth,

at the very least.) Max Schreck, the Dracula-inspired vampire of Nosfer-

atu (1922), had frontal fangs patterned after a rat's teeth, a highly effec-

tive touch that has, strangely, not been much imitated. For London

After Midnight (1927), Lon Chaney sported fearsome dentures resem-

bling the uniformly filed and sharpened choppers of

a witch doctor. But starting with Tod Browning's

m ^^gg^^ DRACULA, the dominant approach to vampire teeth

M JH ^^^ m Hollywood was understatement, and virtually all

Jmkmk movie vampires of the thirties and forties relied on

jfl B piercing stares as a kind of theatrical euphemism

j^f '

I for oral penetration. The fashion for prosthetic,

I pointed canines made with modern dental tech-

niques began with HORROR OF DRACULA (1958),

m 7 in which Christopher Lee was afforded an un-

Bk precedented range of facial expression; the actor

The generic Halloween variety.

1 00 DavidJ. Skal

made a memorable trademark of gradually curling back his upper lip to re-

veal the pearly frights. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), audiences

were treated to a quasi-clinical display of fang-buds sprouting in the upper

gums of the doomed Miss Lucy.

As elongated, penetrating objects, vampire fangs are textbook phallic

symbols, and in recent years increasingly liberated special effects technolo-

gies have made it almost de rigueur for vampire films to feature a semi-

p*rnographic "master shot" of vampire teeth as they thrust forward to

their full length and hardness. In the case of female vampires, a voluptuous

mouth filled with piercing fangs is usually interpreted as the most recent

cultural update of the classic vagin* dentata and male castration anxi-

ety. A cursory glimpse at recent vampire films shows that the traditional,

minimalist representation of extended canines has lately given way to

more baroque concoctions, often based on exotic animal models—piranhas,

sharks, saurian carnivores, etc. See also bite marks; Freud, Sigmund.

Fangs, the Vampire Musical

Theater, USA 1993. An overly ambitious, critically panned piece of gay mu-

sical theater produced by New York's Wings Theatre Company, a kind of

hangover from the vampire media excesses of 1992. Written by Clint Jef-

feries and composed by Michael Calderwood, Fangs was set on the French-

German border during World War I—an interesting place and period, of

course, what with its essential relationship to German Expressionism, Nos-

feratu, etc. But the promise of the piece was scuttled by a confused plot.

As the New Tork Native's critic L. C. Cole noted, "Wartime espionage,

vampire lovers, women's rights, religious hom*ophobia, the joys of being a

funloving spy—Jefferies tries to find time for them all. But his thematic for-

ays don't enhance each other; they merely leave us puzzled as to which plot

is number one."

The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me,

But Your Teeth Are in My Neck

Cinema, UK 1967. Roman Polanski's stylish, celebrated horror spoof, called

Dance of the Vampires in Britain, isn't half so funny today as it seemed on

its first release. The specter of Polanski's then-wife Sharon Tate and her

gruesome murder by the Manson "family" a year after the film's release

still haunts every frame in which the beautiful actress appears, lending

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 101

Sharon Tate and Ferdy

Mayne in The Fearless

Vampire Killers.

(Photofest)

the proceedings a gloomy,

haunting fatalism that sits

uneasily with the film's over-

all aspiration to slapstick.

On its first American re-

lease, The Fearless Vampire

Killers was so drastically

cut

and reedited that Polanski

requested his name be re-

moved from the credits. It

has subsequently been re-

stored: the video disc cur-

rently available includes not

only the cut footage but two sets of credit sequences—Polanski's original,

and the animated cartoon added by MGM. The film has much to admire

(and perhaps a bit too much; Polanski's cut often feels interminable); I

especially liked how much Polanski himself resembles Gustav Von Wan-

genheim, the young hero of Nosferatu (1922) in both costume and ap-

pearance. Ferdy Mayne as the evil Count Krolock is a masterful vampire, a

plausible amalgam of both the Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee tradi-

tions. (A bizarre detail I noticed only on a second viewing: one of the

revelers at the big bloodsuckers' ball is carefully made up to be a dead

ringer for Laurence Olivier as Richard III. There has to be a story behind

this.) With Jack MacGowran, Alfie Bass, Ronald Lacey, and Jessie Robbins.

Polanski coscripted, with Gerard Brach. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

fellati*

It may seem strange that black magician Aleister Crowley and born-again

Christian Anita Bryant have anything in common, but when it comes to

the subject of blowj*bs, both seem to hear bat wings flapping.

The classic act of oral sex was frankly called "vampirism" by Crowley,

who understood that the unconscious mind makes no distinction between

1 02 David J. Skal

vital body fluids—blood, milk, or sem*n. Both fellati* and vampirism have

strong associations with hom*oSEXUALITY; the antigay crusader Anita

Bryant once explained to Newsweek magazine that "sperm is the most con-

centrated form of blood . . . the hom*osexual is eating life." hom*osexual

practices, male and female, have been encoded in the decidedly oral trap-

pings of literary vampirism ever since J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla"

(1872) and Count Stenbock's The Sad Story of a Vampire (1894).

hom*osexual or heterosexual, fellati* has always carried a certain air of

perversity, a "forbidden" practice all the more alluring for its exoticism.

Several commentators have noted the overtones of fellati* that color the

famous sequence in Dracula wherein the count's three vampire brides

attempt to seduce Jonathan Harker: "The girl went on her knees . . .

Lower and lower went her head ... I could hear the churning sound of

her lips and tongue. ..."

The erect penis consists primarily of blood—co*cksucking, therefore, is

almost literal bloodsucking; blood provides the feast, the hardness, the

whole point and purpose. In Anne Rice's immensely popular vampire

novels, there are frequent descriptions of undead encounters in which hot

blood spurts sensuously against the back of the vampire's throat. While

real life blood drinkers do exist as a sexual minority, for the vast majority

of Rice's readers such descriptions resonate only in terms of their associa-

tion with memories or fantasies of ejacul*tion into the mouth. In Ray

Carton's audacious novel Live Girls, a young man becomes addicted to a

Forty-second Street peepshow where a vampire hooker sucks blood as well

as sem*n; he worries that the marks on his penis are the lesions of a sexu-

ally transmitted disease. It is interesting to note here the belief of many

Victorian medical specialists that loss of sem*n was tantamount to the loss

of blood, and for whom female sexuality generally took on many of the

qualities of vampirism. There is a long literary and artistic tradition linking

org*sm and death—the "death" usually being that of the male.

Vampires who pig out on penises can be seen in films like Erotikill

(1973), Spermula (1976), and (with a crunchy, scrotum-shriveling sound

effect) in Ken Russell's Lair of the White Worm (1988). Oral penile

contact, of course, is only to be expected in p*rn films with titles like

Dracula Sucks (1979) and Gayracula (1983). When correctly viewed,

even the stodgy 1931 film version of Dracula contains a few, um, jaw-

dropping surprises. Dracula's rabid servant, Renfield, has been bitten by

the count, but shows no marks, at least not on his throat. During the sea

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 03

voyage to England, there is a rather remarkable composition as Renfield

opens the vampire's coffin box; surely somebody noticed that, as Dracula

sits up, his face makes a bullseye for Renfield's pants—as ifhoming in hun-

grily on a blood -filled breakfast burrito. See also Freud, Sigmund.

Fetus

A modern variation on the vampire. In late-twentieth-century popular cul-

ture, in films ranging from Rosemary's Baby to It's Alive! to Alien, the un-

born are regularly depicted as something nearly undead—monstrous,

invading parasites, often the puritanical price to be paid by women for

sexual activity and/or sexual pleasure. In Victorian times, anxiety over

women's sexuality gave rise to the image of the female, fin de siecle vam-

pire; in our own time, the demonic fetus serves a similar function.

Fevre Dream

Fiction, USA 1982. George R. R. Martin's highly atmospheric meditation

on vampires and riverboats on the mid-nineteenth-century Mississippi is a

prime example of what might be called "Americana gothic"—a novel so

compellingly wrought and lyrically imagistic that it's hard to believe no

one has yet filmed it. The story concerns the Ahablike obsession of one

Joshua York, himself tainted with vampire evil, to destroy the blood-

drinking pestilence spreading down the Mississippi like river silt. The book

is filled with macabrely evocative echoes of Twain and Melville that irre-

sistibly bring to mind Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American

Novel (1960) and its exploration of the gothic undercurrents of nine-

teenth-century American literature.

Folklore

The vampire belongs to the broad folklore category of revenant beings, in

particular those creatures who return from the dead to do harm to the liv-

ing for reasons of revenge, malice, or simple hunger. But a vampire is not

merely a malevolent spirit; to fully qualify as undead, a vampire must do

more than merely frighten or bedevil—it must in some way drain the

BLOOD or vital essence from its victim. Blood is highly metaphorical in the

vampire world (as it is in ours); its loss is usually considered more than a

simple medical deficit—something of the soul or personality or innocence

is taken, too. Blood also suggests other vital fluids—particularly milk and

1 04 DavidJ. Skal

sem*n, with all their tangled connotations of sexuality, familial bonds, and

oral dependency. These evocative, constantly shifting associations help

make the vampire a timeless mythological construct. The vampire draws

its power from not meaning precisely anything, but suggesting everything.

Virtually every civilization has had some variation on the theme of the

vampire, though it is the eastern European model that has had the largest

impact on literature and popular culture. Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, best

known as the biographer of Sigmund Freud, interpreted vampire folklore

in terms of sexual repression and the incest complex; his 1931 study On

the Nightmare argues that the classic incubus, or night-terror, is the

vampire's antecedent, its oppressive paralysis representing buried mem-

ories of incestuous assault or guilt over incestuous desire. Because a direct

acknowledgment of incest was taboo, the anxiety became fantastically

elaborated and objectified in vampire legends. (See also NIGHTMARE; PSY-

CHOANALYSIS.)

In general, the European vampire was a reanimated corpse, or a ghost

who ethereally transports blood back to its corpse—a physical body is

somehow replenished by blood in either case. The vampire is active at

night, when it can go about its business unobserved and prey on sleeping

victims—sunlight is not necessarily an impediment; it just makes things

difficult. (The destruction-by-sunlight theme was an invention of the

cinema, introduced in 1922 by F. W. Murnau in his landmark film, Nos-

FERATU.) According to various traditions,

a vampire can be repelled or

kept immobilized in its coffin by a variety of means—by crucifixes or holy

relics, or evil-absorbing botanicals like garlic or aconite. In some strains

of the legend, a vampire cannot cross running water, abide the thorn of a

wild rose, or enter any dwelling where it has not been invited (afterward,

of course, it can come and go as it pleases). Sometimes the vampire can be

confused or thwarted by obsessive-compulsive rituals—the liberal strewing

of poppy seeds, for instance, which the vampire must individually count

each night before leaving its grave. Heavily knotted cords can prove

equally vexing.

Vampires in western folklore are created in any number of ways. Sui-

cides, blasphemers, and other transgressors are likely candidates; so are

children born with cauls, hair, or teeth. Red-haired or left-handed children

are suspect in some cultures, witches and necromancers in most. Destruc-

tion of a vampire is accomplished by a range of mutilation rituals per-

formed on the corpse: burning, decapitation/dismemberment, or most

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 05

Impalement by wooden stake is the classic,

cross-cultural method of destroying a vampire

pest. Illustration from Varney the Vampyre.

classically, impalement by a wooden

STAKE.

Vampires are prevalent in non-

Western folklore as well, where they of-

ten blur with spirit- beings of a more

generalized malevolence. Excellent, de-

tailed discussions of even the most ob-

scure vampire relatives can be found in

Matthew Bunson's The Vampire Ency-

clopedia (see bibliography).

See Appendix B for an alphabetical

listing of the names of vampires and

vampirelike creatures from folklore tra-

ditions around the world.

Fool There Was, A

See Bara, Theda.

Freud, Sigmund

The father of psychoanalysis had little to say directly about vampires, but

his insights into oral sadism, hysteria, phallic symbolism, and the death

wish have given vampire commentators their major critical compass over

the years. The Freudian prism yields its best results when applied to early

works like "Carmilla" and Dracula, which were created before Freud's

work had been popularized, and are therefore free of prior theoretical con-

tamination. Late -twentieth-century vampire entertainment tends to wink

endlessly at Freud and Freudian cliches and often has almost no uncon-

scious content to be excavated—it's all on the cynical surface. Freud him-

self appears as quasi-undead in Snoo Wilson's 1973 avant-garde play

Vampire, heart-staked in a casket as he endlessly drones on about his theo-

ries of sex and culture.

1 06 David J. Skal

Frid, Jonathan

See Dark Shadows.

Fright Night

Cinema, USA 1985. The first vampire

movie to spend one million dollars on

special effects, Tom Holland's Fright

Night is not entirely successful in find-

ing the proper balance between humor

and horror; nonetheless, the picture

is an entertaining eyeful, whether it is

scoring points with over-the-top visuals,

or more discreetly, with such touches

as having its vampire (Chris Sarandon)

nonchalantly whisding "Strangers in

the Night." Sarandon's teenage neigh-

bor (William Ragsdale) suspects the

worst and enlists the burnt-out host of

the local television horror movie show

(Roddy McDowall) to banish the evil

forever—or at least until the sequel,

Fright Night Part II (1988), which

featured a memorable sequence with a

vampire on roller skates. The makeup

in both films was elaborate and inven-

tive; the New York Post's "Phantom of

the Movies" dutifully noted that Fright

Nighfs heroine Amanda Bearse "sports

the champ vamp choppers of all time

—

stalactitic fangs gleaming from a crim-

son kisser that take up half her face."

Another Post critic, Rex Reed, was not

quite so taken. Of cinematic vampires,

Reed quipped, "Like bad filmmakers,

they're fearless, persistent pests, and

hard to get rid of." Nonetheless, the

final twenty minutes or so of the film

—

Fright Night: Chris Sarandon

undergoes a spectacular

transformation. (Photofest)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 07

everything after Sarandon intones "Welcome to Fright Night . .

—

constitute a wildly entertaining vampire Gotterdammerung that will keep

you gasping, and reaching for the rewind button. (Vistar/Columbia) T

From Dusk Till Dawn

Cinema, USA 1996. 1 loved the trailer's tag line: "No interviews. Just vam-

pires." No matter that it takes half the film before Mexican monsters turn a

nasty killers-on-the-lam story into an absurdly entertaining special effects

pig-out. Two brothers, one psychopathic (George Clooney) and one psy-

chotic (Quentin Tarantino) meet their match in a south-of-the-border

vampire/biker bar demurely called the Titty Twister. The dive is built atop

a buried Aztec ruin; presumably (it's never really explained) ancient blood

sacrifices had something to do with the present goings-on. But this isn't

the kind of film in which you try to explain anything, and director Robert

Rodriguez doesn't, probably to his credit. Tarantino wrote the script long

before Pulp Fiction, reportedly for spare change while working as a video

store clerk. The effects were created by the resourceful KNB EFX Group

(one partner, Robert Kurtzman, wrote the original story), but their most

inspired efforts seem to have been reduced to mere subliminal flashes in an

effort to secure an R rating; what we're left with are endless repetitive vari-

ations on the same gooey melt-downs and morphings. With luck, we'll see

an unrated director's cut on video. With Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, and,

in a memorable bit of comic casting, makeup effects maven Tom Savini as a

lovable psycho called Sex Machine. (Miramax)

Frye, Dwight

American character actor Dwight Frye (1899-1943) was best known for

his role as the insect- eating madman Renfield in the 1931 film version of

Dracula. Previously a versatile stage actor, Frye nevertheless became

typecast in Hollywood horror roles (he followed Dracula with the part of

the hunchbacked laboratory assistant in Frankenstein). Frye is often con-

fused with Bernard Jukes, the British actor who originated the Renfield

role in London and on Broadway in 1927; a memorable photo of Jukes

cackling maniacally is frequently misidentified as Frye (who never acted on

stage in Dracula until years after the film). Frye was a devout Christian

Scientist who kept a series of heart attacks a secret from his family until a

1 08 David J. Skal

final coronary killed him on a trip to the movies with his young son,

Dwight, Jr. His death was especially tragic as it came on the eve of his be-

ing cast in a good role in a major nonhorror film. Other Frye films perti-

nent to the theme of this book are The Vampire Bat (1933) and Dead-

Men Walk (1943). Shock-rocker Alice Cooper recorded a memorable

song, "The Ballad of Dwight Fry," misspelling his last name—curiously

reverting it to its original, pretheatrical spelling.

Garland, Judy

According to critic Camille Paglia, the legendary singer and drug addict

Judy Garland may also have been a vampire. In her New York Times Book

Review appraisal of David Shipman's Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an

American Legend (1993), Paglia states: "The great stars are sacred mon-

sters, amoral vampires who drain those around them to feed the world." I

remember a description of one of Garland's front-row fans during one of

her final tours, a young man who purportedly wrang his hands until they

bled—whether Garland shook them or licked them, I don't know. But I

also remember a Cleveland lawyer in the sixties who waged a media cam-

paign against movie monsters, especially vampires, which he felt were de-

faming to Romania and Romanians. He specifically cited an appearance by

Judy Garland on Jack Paar's television show in which she made a joke

about her psychiatrist being "from Transylvania." Following her drug-

overdose death in 1969, Garland's coffin remained in storage, uninterred

for an

unusual length of time. The circ*mstantial evidence mounts, inex-

orably. See also addiction; alcoholism.

Garlic

It's hardly surprising in our new age of body-fluid horrors and reawakened

vampire consciousness that the old reliable of bloodsucker repellents, com-

mon garlic, has reasserted itself as a popular folk remedy. In the age ofAIDS

(q.v.), garlic sales have soared everywhere as vague quasi-medical claims

("the goodness of garlic") appeal to our free-floating sense of blood

contamination, encroaching death, and cultural dread. Garlic has, in fact,

been prized for centuries for its well-known (if poorly understood) blood-

purifying and immune-boosting properties; modem science points to garlic's

1 1 DavidJ. Skal

high concentration of sulfurlike compounds which make it effective as both

an antibacterial and antifungal agent. It is easy to understand how prescien-

tific societies, which often superimposed evil spirits on disease, could extend

garlic's powers as a natural remedy into the supernatural realm as well. Ac-

cording to folklorist Wayland D. Hand, "... the communication of human

ills to trees is both ancient and widespread, as in the absorption of disease

and miasmas by such common plants as potatoes, onions, and garlic."

In vampire superstitions and stories, garlic affords protection against

the undead when worn wreathed around the neck, festooned on doors, or

rubbed around windows and entrances. In some traditions, when vampires

are killed by staking and decapitation, the mouth of the corpse is stuffed

with garlic as additional vampire prophylaxis. The superstition is often

played for laughs, as in the recent film Innocent Blood (1992), which in-

cludes a gag about the garlicky breath of a mafioso and its undead implica-

tions. Hamilton Deane's 1924 stage version of Dracula also contained

some tasteless ethnic/garlic humor; the least offensive bit was Dracula's

snarling explanation of his visceral response to the plant: "I lived too long

in Italy to care for the smell of garlic!" See also folklore.

Gautier, Theophile

Influential poet and novelist of the French Romantic movement, Theophile

Gautier (1811-1872) wrote an 1836 story, "La mort amoureuse," contain-

ing an especially erotic evocation of an undead courtesan, Clarimonda, who

bedevils a young priest. The following excerpt is from a 1903 translation by

F. C. de Sumichrast, titled "The Vampire":

One day I was seated by her bed breakfasting at a small table, in or-

der not to leave her a minute. As I pared a fruit I happened to cut my

finger rather deeply. The blood immediately flowed in a purple stream,

and a few drops fell upon Clarimonda. Her eyes lighted up, her face as-

sumed an expression of fierce and savage joy which I had never before

beheld. She sprang from her bed with the agility of an animal, of a

monkey or of a cat, and sprang at my wound, which she began to suck

with an air of inexpressible delight. She sipped the blood slowly and

carefully like a gourmand who enjoys a glass of sherry or Syracuse

wine; she winked her eyes, the green pupils of which had become ob-

long instead of round. From time to time she broke off to kiss my

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 111

A turn-of-the-century illustration for Theophile

Gautier's story "The Vampire."

hand, then she again pressed the wound

with her lips so as to draw out a few more

red drops. When she saw that the blood

had ceased to flow, she rose up, rosier than

a May morn, her face full, her eyes moist

and shining, her hand soft and warm; in

a word, more beautiful than ever and in a

perfect state of health.

"I shall not die! I shall not die!" she

said, half mad with joy, as she hung

around my neck. "I shall be able to love

you a long time yet. My life is in yours, and

all that I am comes from you. A few drops

of your rich, noble blood, more precious

and efficacious than all the elixirs in the world, have restored my life."

The scene preoccupied me a long time and filled me with strange

doubts concerning Clarimonda . . .

Golden, The

Fiction, USA 1993. By the end of 1992, vampire novels were appearing at

the rate of nearly one a week, and needless to say, the general quality be-

gan to drop along the precipitous trajectory of a wooden STAKE. There-

fore, the appearance of Lucius Shepard's The Golden provided ample and

welcome evidence that the Great American Vampire Novel was alive and

well. And what, exactly, is a "Golden"? Shepard introduces the concept in

his brilliant first paragraph: "The gathering at Casde Banat on the evening

of Friday, October 16, 186— , had been more than three centuries in the

planning, though only a marginal effort had been directed toward the cer-

emonial essentials of the affair, its pomp and splendor. No, most of that

time and energy had been devoted to the nurturing and blending of cer-

1 1 2 DavidJ. Skal

tain mortal bloodlines so as to produce that rarest of essences, a vintage of

unsurpassing flavor and bouquet: The Golden." Shepard, previously best

known as a leading stylist of cyberpunk science fiction, brings both a self-

assured narrative voice and a virtuoso speculative imagination to this land-

mark opus, the delicious plot details of which I will allow you to discover

for yourself. A must-read if there ever was.

Graveyard Shift

Cinema, Canada 1987. What better cover occupation for a vampire than

driving a cab all night? Actor Silvio Oliviero makes a sexy, breast- biting

urban predator in Gerard Ciccoritti's more than passable monster movie.

A female video director suffering from cancer (Helen Papas) finds undeath

a viable alternative to chemotherapy—and thereby demonstrates the vam-

pire's larger contemporary function as a fantastic bargaining chip with death

anxiety. Director Ciccoritti scripted. Oliviero returned in Ciccoritti's sequel,

The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II (1988) . (Cinema Ventures/Lightshow

Communications )T

Guzla, La

The French playwright and poet Prosper Merimee (1803-1870) used

vampires as the subject of five dramatic ballads in La Guzla (1827):

"La Belle Sophie," "Jeannot," "Le Vampire," "Cara-Ali le Vampire,"

and "Constantin Yacoubovich." Merimee drew upon the work of Dom

Augustine Calmet for his vampire basics and capitalized on the craze for

vampire stories, plays, and operas that swept Europe in the aftermath of

John Polidori's 1819 Lord BYRON-inspired story, "The Vampyre." See

also THEATER.

Hammer Films

An independent British film company, founded in the 1930s, Hammer fi-

nally found its goldmine in the 1950s when it inaugurated a series of low-

budget but lush-looking horror films beginning with Curse ofFrankenstein

(1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), both of which helped make a

horror superstar out of actor Christopher Lee. Vampires were central to

the Hammer formula, its films including The Brides of Dracula (1960),

Kiss of the Vampire (1963), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966),

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of

Dracula (1969), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire

(1970), Scars of Dracula (1970), Twins of Evil (1971), Vampire Cir-

cus ( 1971 ), Dracula A.D. 1972 ( 1972), The Satanic Rites ofDracula

(1973), Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974), and Legend of the

Seven Golden Vampires (1974). Bright red blood and bountiful female nu-

dity were staples of the Hammer product—the nudity, often in the context

of vampire lesbianism, didn't debut until the 1970s, but after that, there

was no turning back. Hammer has been long dormant, but its complete

holdings of scripts and literary properties were recently purchased by

Warner Bros., which announced plans to film unproduced Hammer scripts

and remake certain Hammer classics.

Harker, Jonathan

The hero of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, Jonathan Harker was

named after Joseph Harker, a scenic artist at London's Lyceum Theatre,

which Stoker managed for the great Victorian actor-impresario Henry

Irving. According

of wolfsbane and monkshood, is also a perennial fixture in the

lore of werewolves and vampires. Its supposed antivampire properties may

derive from ancient medicinal uses as a heart and circulatory stimulant.

Aconite is also one of the most toxic herbal substances known and must be

"Film entries followed by the symbol T are available on home video.

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 3

used in minute medicinal quantities; its potential to poison as well as to

heal probably helped to engender a certain aura of awe and magic over the

ages. The plant, which displays striking blue, bell-shaped flowers (hence

the name "monkshood"), is native to central and southern Europe, but is

cultivated as an ornamental elsewhere. In medicine, the plant's roots yield

the chemically active substance; in vampire folklore, the leaves are usually

enough to do the trick. See garlic.

Addiction

Vampire stories tend to assume the form of each generation's special fears

and afflictions. The rise of chemical dependency as a major social problem

in the late twentieth century has colored contemporary vampire stories

with the metaphors of addiction. Some of the correspondences are obvi-

ous: the vampire provides an easy metaphor for both pusher and addict,

enslaving or enslaved through vein puncturing and blood contamination.

The recent confluence between intravenous drug use and AIDS (q.v.) has

intensified the addict/vampire connection, since AIDS anxiety has had

much to do with the rise of vampire imagery and entertainment in the last

decade. There is probably also a more subtle link between the self-destructive

behavior of the addict and the ancient belief that suicide is one of the

surest routes to undeath.

In the film Dracula's Daughter (1936), Countess Zaleska's morbid

blood craving is presented as a psychological addiction potentially treatable

by science and psychiatry. In House of Dracula (1945), the count seeks

out a medical doctor for a cure for his compulsion; however, like many an

addict in need of a fix, he sabotages his treatment program. The implicit

themes of addiction in vampire movies became almost grotesquely literal in

1955 when actor Bela Lugosi, famed for his Dracula characterization,

publicly committed himself to a drug rehabilitation program. Soon after,

the controversial, cutting-edge comedian Lenny Bruce, no stranger to

drugs himself, introduced stand-up routines lampooning Lugosi-Dracula

as a pill-popping, reefer-puffing has-been. Barnabas Collins, the remorseful

New England vampire of the 1960s television soap opera Dark Shadows,

also sought treatment, which was only intermittently successful. Many films

and stories have placed vampires in blood banks or hospitals, a comedic

parallel to the real-life problem of drug pilfering by addicted medical per-

sonnel. The quasireligious overtones of many currently popular twelve-step

4 DavidJ. Skal

rehabilitation programs reinforce the idea of addiction as a kind ofdemonic

possession. See also AIDS; ALCOHOLISM.

The Addiction

Cinema, USA 1995. A curiously reactionary film by Abel Ferrara, which

seems to equate intellectual modernism with living death. A New York Uni-

versity graduate student, Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor) spends so much time

reading existential philosophy and looking at concentration-camp photos

that she lacks the moral center to repel a female vampire (Annabella Sciorra)

when she is attacked on a Greenwich Village street. (In Nicholas St. John's

screenplay, the vampires always offer their victims the chance to just say no,

but of course they never do.) Gorgeously photographed in black-and-white,

The Addiction occasionally groans under unnecessarily pedantic philosophical

dialogue. With Edie Falco, Michael Fella, Paul Calderon, and, smarmy as

ever as a vampire who's seen it all, Christopher Walken. (October Films)

Advertising

As the ultimate symbol of consumerism, the vampire has frequently found

employment in consumer advertising. Legend has it that Bela LUGOSI was

once asked to endorse a product called "Dra-Cola," an abortive brainchild of

Royal Crown bottlers in the 1940s. I can vividly remember a 1960s televi-

sion commercial for Isodettes throat lozenges featuring actor Dennis

O'Keefe as "Count Sore Throat Pain," extolling the benefits of Isodettes' ac-

tive ingredient, the local anesthetic benzocaine. "When you contract a cold,

it relieves the minor pain in the throat," O'Keefe warbled in a mock Lugosi

accent. "It spoils all my fun." The Isodettes commercial came in the wake of

an early sixties monster boom, spurred by Universal Pictures' aggressive li-

censing of its monster characters for a staggering variety ofproducts. The im-

age of Dracula was used to enhance the commercial prospects of such items

as T-shirts, toys, pencil sharpeners, bubble gum, and swizzle sticks. Dracula

has even been used as a public relations emissary for the Lutheran Church

("Are your kids learning about the power of the cross on the late, late show?

With all due regard to Hollywood, there's more to Christianity than stop-

ping vampires."). Folklorist Norine Dresser, in her 1989 study, American

Vampires, enumerates a wide range of vampire-driven advertising, including

but not limited to home security systems ("Protects you against uninvited

guests"), cat food, insecticide, pizza, and computer software. See also

ALCOHOLISM; LUGOSI, BELA.

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 5

AIDS

The earliest vampire superstitions were fueled in no small part by pre-

scientific peoples' frightened responses to poorly understood medical phe-

nomena. Plagues, wasting diseases, and invisible contagions were often

attributed to the wrath of the recently dead, giving rise to an increasingly

embellished mythology of fear and its attendant rituals of scapegoating

and purification.

The epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome gave the

modern world a primitive shot of fear in the 1980s and 1990s, and the

characteristics of AIDS itself weirdly echoed the classic motifs of vampire

legends. A blood-borne, wasting malady appears, each victim capable of

creating others through vein-puncturing or unconventional forms of sex.

Science is baffled. Self-appointed moral guardians come forth, waving reli-

gious talismans, insisting that the affliction is the work of the devil. None-

theless, the vampire seems unstoppable; in the streets, there is a steady

procession of coffins.

AIDS is the undeniable subtext of the explosive growth of vampire en-

tertainment in all media during the last decade; to the conscious mind, the

reality of AIDS can be almost too much to bear, but on the plane

of fantasy, the threat of AIDS death can be bargained with—defanged, as

it were.

Vampire entertainment also permits one of the few socially sanctioned

outlets for images of rape. The woman who entertains fantasies ofvampire

rape is not doing so because she wants to be raped; she is more likely fright-

ened by the prospect of rape and controls the fear through a desensitizing

process of ritual fantasy, over which she has complete control. Similarly, the

vampire represents a complete control over mortality, a supernatural immu-

nity to death in an age ofimmune dysfunction. The mass appetite for Anne

Rice's vampire novels (they have all been major bestsellers) demonstrates

the need for transcendent images in a time of modern plague. Rice's vam-

pires are also powerfully androgynous beings, whose supernatural sexuality

can withstand any amount of blood contact. Not surprisingly, Rice has a

huge cult following among gay readers.

Stephen Jones' The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide (1993) lists nearly

150 vampire-related features released throughout the world from 1980-

1989, but over seventy from 1990-1992 alone, suggesting a major annual

increase in vampire media, at least during the first years of the current

6 DavidJ. Skal

decade. Needless to say, the activity coincided with a cultural crescendo of

AIDS anxiety. Frank Rich

to Bernard Davies, cofounder of the London-based

Dracula Society, the novel Dracula is filled with obscure personal refer-

1 1 4 David J. Skal

ences and private jokes of this type. Harker, in the book, is a real estate

lawyer who travels to Transylvania to sell an English estate to Count Drac-

ula, only to be trapped in an evil web of vampirism. Dramatists and film

adaptors have sometimes found it useful to merge the character with that

of Renfield, Dracula's insectivore assistant, in an attempt to streamline

the sprawling narrative.

Highgate Cemetery

A mecca for aficionados of the undead, Highgate Cemetery in what was

then suburban London is generally believed to be the site chosen by Bram

Stoker when he created the restive resting place of the vampire Lucy

Westenra in his novel Dracula. Miss Lucy was buried in what the author

described as "a lordly death-house in a lonely churchyard, away from

teeming London; where the air is fresh; and the sun rises over Hampstead

Hill, and where wildflowers grow of their own accord."

Highgate was founded in 1839 as an alternative to the appalling con-

ditions of London's central graveyards, which included unsanitary over-

crowding, grave-robbing, and even body-snatching by medical schools in

search of cadavers. Highgate was conceived

as a sylvan retreat where death could be sen-

timentalized in the Victorian fashion—here

the dead weren't really dead, only sleeping.

In Dracula, Stoker literalized this Vic-

torian conceit almost to the point of par-

ody. Lucy Westenra barely has time to doze

before she's up and about, terrorizing stray

children with her terrible thirst. The scene

in which Professor Van Helsing and his

cohorts break into Lucy's tomb and destroy

her is Dracula's most horrific scene and a

benchmark sequence in vampire fiction.

Stoker's conception of this episode may

have been influenced in part by an actual

The crypts that inspired Bram Stoker.

(Photo by the author)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 1 5

incident at Highgate. The violation of Lucy's grave has a distinct reso-

nance with the notorious 1869 exhumation by the poet-painter Dante

Gabriel Rossetti (at one point a Stoker neighbor) of his wife, Elizabeth

Siddal. Lizzie had been buried seven years when Rossetti had second

thoughts about the notebook of his unpublished poetry he had buried

with her. According to popular legend, Lizzie was in a remarkable state of

preservation—an odd prefiguration of Stoker's undead Lucy.

Lucy's haunting ground today is a wildly romantic setting. Two of its

structures alone would give it claim to world-class moodiness. The Egyp-

tian Avenue, gated with massive obelisks, is a shaded lane of iron-doored

tombs, each bearing the ancient death symbol of the inverted, extin-

guished torch. The Lebanon Circle comprises an inner and outer ring of

catacombs in both the Egyptian and classical styles, sunk into the ground

around the base of a huge, centuries-old cedar tree. The older, western

part of the cemetery was closed in the mid 1970s and became badly over-

grown. However, through the persistent efforts of a volunteer group, the

Friends of Highgate Cemetery, it was declared a historic site in 1983. Fi-

nancial considerations make complete restoration impractical; instead,

Highgate is conserved as a managed wood-

land, not a landscaped park. The result is

stunningly atmospheric, and guided tours are

available most days.

The Highgate guardians aren't crazy about

the cemetery's vampire associations, but con-

cede that it is an important part of the place's

mystique and generates needed revenue. For

a fee, film and television crews have been

allowed to capture gothic effects that could

be approximated but never duplicated on a

soundstage. See also burial customs.

hom*osexuality

Since vampire stories create tension and inter-

est through the presence of a sexual "out-

The Rossetti gravesite.

(Photo by the author)

1 1 6 DavidJ. Skal

sider," it is not surprising that hom*osexuality, implicit or explicit, has been

employed in film and fiction to evoke aspects of vampirism. Curiously, the

image has vacillated wildly between negative stereotypes of the gay sexual

predator to glamorous evocations of a liberating pansexuality.

The persistent, pop-cultural interplay between images of hom*osexuality,

bisexuality, and vampirism date to J. Sheridan Le Fanu's quasi-lesbian 1872

novella "Carmilla." In Bram Stoker's Dracula the theme is soft-pedaled

but still palpable; the men in the story think they are saving Lucy Westenra's

life by repeatedly transfusing her, while in reality they are opening their own

veins and bodies to the invasive thirst of a male monster.

In the landmark 1931 film version of Dracula, director Tod Brown-

ing—who knew better than anyone how to pluck Freudian nerves in pop-

ular culture—staged the visit of Renfield to Castle Dracula as a distinctly

hom*oerotic seduction. Browning shot his interpretation of the scene over

the producer's objections: "Dracula should go only for women and not

men!" Carl Laemmle, Jr., scrawled on his copy of the shooting script. In

Browning's film, Renfield's unrequited love for Dracula becomes the only

compelling story line; the heterosexual hero and heroine are bloodless

ghosts by comparison.

The first follow-up to the Browning film, Dracula's Daughter

(1936) featured an austere, contralto-voiced heir to the Dracula curse.

Played by actress Gloria Holden, Dracula's Daughter displays decidedly

Sapphic tastes; in the film's most famous scene, Holden picks up a street-

walker on the pretext of using her as a model. The original script, which

called for nudity, was toned down considerably for filming, where the

mere sight of the girl's bare shoulder triggers a deadly vampire attack.

The 1960 film The Brides of Dracula has a premise reminiscent

of Suddenly, Last Summer: a beautiful young man, overindulged by his

dragon-lady mother, somehow becomes a vampire. Mom (the great Mar-

tha Hunt) lures young girls to the castle to feed him; the thick Oedipal

tensions are resolved only when the mother is herself penetrated (i.e.,

bitten) by the son. "Would you believe we once had gay times here?" the

tormented baroness asks, in campy deadpan.

Vampirelike slurs against gays have been standard ammunition for the

religious right for quite some time. Consider Anita Bryant's charming as-

sertion that "the male hom*osexual eats another man's sperm. The hom*o-

sexual is eating life." Tangled blood themes also run beneath the surface

of gay clashes with the Roman Catholic Church over AIDS (q.v.) issues. It

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 1 7

was somehow appropriate that a 1989 demonstration at St. Patrick's

Cathedral specifically disrupted the communion service—the purest ritual

sublimation of the blood-drinking, "life-eating" impulse in Western civi-

lization. In some parts of the world, the metaphors become deadly literal

—

in the West Indies, a favorite sport is the beating and even killing of gay

men, who are called (interestingly enough) "batty boys," and who are be-

lieved to be ghosts ofSodom and Gomorrah who actually drink the blood

of slum dwellers.

In an astute essay, "Children of the Night: Vampirism as hom*osexuality,

hom*osexuality as Vampirism," Richard Dyer examines the ways in which

"the languid, worn, sad, refined paleness of vampire imagery" intersects

with popular stereotypes of gay "decadence." Language filled with murki-

ness and mystery has traditionally informed the presentation of gay images.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Dyer points out, if a book "was called Women in

the Shadows, Twilight Men [or] Desire in the Shadows then it had to be about

queers. This imagery derives in part from the idea of decadence, people who

do not go out into public life, whose complexions are not weathered, who

are always indoors or in the shade. It may also relate to the idea that lesbians

and gay men are not 'real' women and 'real' men, [that] we have not

got

the blood (with its very different gender associations) of normal human be-

ings." See also AIDS; Count Torga, Vampire; Daughters of Darkness;

Fearless Vampire Killers, The; fellati*; Garland, Judy; Interview

with the Vampire; lesbianism; Murnau, F. W.; Rice, Anne; Vampire

Lesbians of Sodom; Vampire Lovers, The; Wilde, Oscar.

"Horla, The"

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) published his terrifying story of a pos-

sessing, demonic "Horla" in 1887, four years before losing his own mind

to the ravages of syphilis. The story is routinely cited as an important

"psychic vampire" tale, but in truth it has more in common with Poe's el-

egantly crafted evocations of clinical paranoia. It is still worth reading, but

its relationship to vampire literature is perhaps more tenuous than gener-

ally supposed.

Horror of Dracula

Cinema, UK 1958. Released in New York City the same day as Alfred

Hitchco*ck's Vertigo, Horror of Dracula (called simply Dracula in the

1 1 8 David J. Skal

Christopher Lee and Melissa

Stribling. (Photofest)

U.K.) proved to be as influ-

ential to the vampire genre

as the Hitchco*ck film was

to the psychothriller. Made by

Hammer Films as a follow-

up to its The Curse of Fran-

kenstein (released the previous

year), Horror of Dracula for-

ever broke the monochro-

matic cobweb conventions of

earlier vampire movies with a

bright red swath of Techni-

color blood from which horror

films have never recovered.

The film was an astonishing success by any standard; it has been reported

that Horror ofDracula had the largest cost-to-profit ratio of any film ever

released in Great Britain. While hardly a definitive treatment, it is nonethe-

less a tight and satisfying adaptation of the Stoker novel and was pro-

duced on a budget of about $200,000—or, one two-hundredth the cost

of Francis Ford Coppola's far more problematic Bram Stoker's Dracula

(1992).

In keeping with the stage and film tradition linking adaptations ofDrac-

ula and Frankenstein, actor Christopher Lee, who played the monster in

The Curse ofFrankenstein, was cast as Count Dracula, with a distinct Jekyll/

Hyde coloration. At one moment urbane and Oxford-accented, Lee could

shift effortlessly into animal-fanged fury (Lee was the first Dracula to sport

fangs since Nosferatu in 1922).

As usual, the script took many liberties with Stoker's story line, many of

them interesting. Jonathan Harker is introduced not as an innocent real

estate agent, but rather as a vampire hunter who obtains a position in

Dracula's employ in order to destroy him, but Harker is destroyed instead.

The story takes place not in England or Transylvania, but in a peculiar

European never-never land that embodies aspects of both. The part of

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 1 9

Renfield has been completely eliminated—a disappointment for purists

—

but the drama does move more swiftly without an encumbering subplot.

(Hammer Films) T See also Cushing, Peter; Dracula; Hammer Films;

Stoker, Bram.

House of Dracula

Cinema, USA 1945. John Carradine makes his second appearance as

Dracula in this entertaining finale to the Universal Pictures horror cycles

of the 1930s and 1940s. Here, there is an attempt to scientifically rational-

ize the monsters: Dracula, for instance, has a blood disease, the WolfMan

(Lon Chaney, Jr.) suffers from pressure on the brain, etc. Both seek medical

treatment from Dr. Edelman (Onslow Stevens), who is also tinkering with

the comatose Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange). Carradine made the

most ambivalent vampire yet depicted on screen, constandy sabotaging his

treatment to nip on the side. There are some nice bat transformations and

an especially atmospheric scene in which the count hypnotically compels a

female pianist to play music she does not know. Directed by Erie C. Kenton

from Edward T. Lowe's script. ( Universal)

House of Frankenstein

Cinema, USA 1944. The first go-for-broke "house party" of the major

Universal Pictures monsters (minus, for some reason, the Mummy), the

episodic House of Frankenstein resurrects Count Dracula (John Carra-

dine) for its memorable first sequence. Boris Karloff is a mad scientist es-

caped from prison with Frankensteinian ambitions; he finds refuge in a

traveling carnival whose chamber of horrors contains the staked skeleton of

Dracula. Spike removed, the revived vampire agrees to do Karloff's bid-

ding, until he is once more reduced to dust by an ill-timed sunrise. Also

starring Lon Chaney, Jr., J. Carroll Naish, Elena Verdugo, Glenn Strange,

and George Zucco. Directed by Erie C. Kenton from a script by Edward T.

Lowe. ( Universal)

House of the Vampire

Fiction, USA 1907. George Sylvester Viereck's first novel foreshadowed

his later difficulties with the U.S. government, which imprisoned him for

his vociferous Nazi sympathies in the 1940s. House ofthe Vampire is stylis-

tically naive, but there is no doubt about the author's ideological leanings

20 DavidJ. Skal

as he tells the story of Reginald Clarke, a modern-day vampire in Manhat-

tan, a man of letters who absorbs creativity instead of blood from a succes-

sion of male proteges. The result falls with distinct unease somewhere

between the worlds of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche (an instantly

identifiable portrait of Wilde, in fact, adorned the cover of the German

edition). Near the end of the book, the monster explains himself to the fe-

male friend of his latest victim:

"In every age," he replied, with great solemnity, "there are giants who

attain to a greatness which by natural growth no men could ever have

reached . . . But to accomplish their mission they need a will of iron

and the wit of a hundred men. And from the iron they take the

strength, and from a hundred men's brains they absorb their wisdom

. . . with Titan strides they scale the stars and succeed where millions

fail. In art they live, the makers of new periods, the dreamers of new

styles."

Viereck's book received dismissive reviews (The Nation: "Of course the

theme of the consuming power of greatness . . . has been eternally inter-

esting . . . The difficulty with Mr. Viereck's treatment lies in his purely

melodramatic conception of character, an utter lack of subtlety in dealing

with the whole situation, and a distressing congestion of large words") but

he kept plugging away at the theme, rewriting the story for the theater (as

The Vampire) a few years later. Viereck also explored the vampire theme in

poetry ("The Singing Vampire" [1911]). One of his most notorious liter-

ary exploits was a 1905 hoax in which he suggested that Oscar Wilde had

faked his own death to avoid further humiliating public scrutiny after his

release from prison.

Hunger, The

Cinema, UK/USA 1983. Tony Scott's stylish adaptation of Whitley

Strieber's 1981 novel jettisons most of Strieber's quasi-scientific rational-

izations in favor of slick, sensuous visuals, and the gambit works. Catherine

Deneuve is a chic bisexual vampire named Miriam Blaylock, astonishingly

long-lived due to her pure and ancient vampire bloodline. Her longtime

companion (David Bowie) has less of a pedigree and begins aging rapidly.

Miriam seeks out a medical specialist in the aging process (Susan Sarandon)

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 121

Catherine Deneuve

and David Bowie in

The Hunger.

and ends up switching her affections, storing the crumbling Bowie in a

chained box in the attic. Sarandon's cold-turkey convulsions as she tries

unsuccessfully to shake off the titular Hunger are one of the best evoca-

tions I've seen of vampirism as addiction. This film is a lot of fun to

watch, especially the sex scenes—a close viewing of the lesbian action re-

veals that Deneuve employs a body double, while Sarandon alone bares

all. The best set piece has Bowie aging several decades while sitting in a

hospital waiting room. My favorite line is Sarandon's, as she tries feebly to

explain to her boyfriend the nature of Miriam Blaylock's lavish attentions:

"She's that kind ofwoman. She's . . . European." Screenplay by Ivan Davis

and Michael Thomas. (MGM/UA) T

Huntley, Raymond

British character actor (1903-1990) best known for his stage and screen

portrayals of officious, haughty villains and bureaucrats, Raymond Hunt-

ley holds the all-time record for stage appearances as Dracula, a role he

played almost nonstop in England and America from 1926 to 1930. He

initially turned down the chance to play the role stateside in 1927, thus in-

advertently making a star out of producer Horace Liveright's second

1 22 DavidJ. Skal

choice, the expatriate Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi. Huntley

came to America in 1928 to play the role on tour; his total

number of performances as Dracula was in the thousands, far

more than that of Lugosi (whom Huntley never met or even

saw in the stage production). I interviewed Hundey shortly

before his death, and he shared numerous amusing anec-

dotes about Dracula, notably that Hamilton Deane's orig-

inal production was so threadbare that he was required to

provide his own evening clothes for the role. Hundey was

always faintiy embarrassed by the role, which he felt in-

hibited his career; nonetheless, he worked steadily in

British film, television

(

Upstairs, Downstairs), and on

stage until the year he died.

Raymond Huntley as Dracula.

/ Am Legend

Fiction, USA 1954. Like Jack Finney's frequently filmed The Body Snatch-

ers, Richard Matheson's masterful science fiction/horror thriller / Am

Legend also provides a subtextual commentary on the anxious underside of

American society in the fifties. Instead of the good life, Matheson gives us

unlife: a plague has virtually wiped out the human race, leaving the sub-

urbs and shopping centers inhabited by roaming, thirsting vampires. The

focal character, Robert Neville, stages an existential one-man stand against

the encroaching darkness—a theme echoed in his second SF novel, The

Shrinking Man (1956). IAm Legend has been filmed twice, first with Vin-

cent Price in The LastMan on Earth ( 1964) and later with Charlton Hes-

ton as The Omega Man (1971). George Romero's landmark zombie film,

Night of the Living Dead (1968), owes much to both the Matheson novel

and the 1964 film adaptation.

J, Vampire

Fiction, USA 1984. Science fiction writer Jody Scott uses the vampire as the

springboard for a tour de force of social satire in J, Vampire, which also

employs time-travel, aliens, and feminist LESBIANISM—the female narrator,

a 700-year-old Transylvanian vampire named Sterling O'Blivion (the name,

perhaps, a nod to another character of the same improbable surname in

David Cronenberg's film Scanners), is in love with a shape-changing alien

who assumes the form of Virginia Woolf. The plot is too twisty for a brief

synopsis, but J, Vampire brims with imagination and invention and will

either delight or confound aficionados of both the gothic and SF tra-

ditions. The title /, Vampire was also used in 1990 by author Michael

Romkey for his more traditional novel of a contemporary vampire in Paris.

1 24 David J. Skal

Image of the Beast

Fiction, USA 1968. Philip Jose Farmer's notorious p*rnographic novel

opens with a scene that is hard to beat for complete repulsiveness, and for

its rather overliteral illustration of vampirism's psychological links to the

CASTRATION complex. A group of policemen watch a film of one of their

colleagues, Colben, meeting his very kinky end at the hands and mouths

of a pair of ersatz vampires: "Dracula cackled again, showing two obvi-

ously false canines, long and sharp. Then he bent down and began to

chew savagely on the penis but within a short time raised his head. The

blood and spermatic fluid was running out of his mouth and making

the front of his white shirt crimson. He opened his mouth and spit out the

head of the penis onto Colben's belly and laughed, spraying blood . .

." If

you need to read more, try finding a copy of the 1979 reissue by Playboy

Paperbacks. See also fellati*.

Incubus

This is a lewd male demon closely related to the oppressive nightmare,

believed to have sexual relations with immobilized sleeping victims. The

female counterpart of the incubus is the succubus. The concept of the in-

cubus crystallized in the Middle Ages, when outbreaks of incubation and

succubation were rife in cloisters and monasteries. Today, of course, we

recognize the phenomenon as a hysterical reaction to conditions of en-

forced celibacy rather than demonic predation. The modern image of the

sexually seductive vampire is a hybrid of the incubus/succubus and the

ZOMBIE-Iike bloodsuckers of European folk traditions. See also folklore.

Innocent Blood

Cinema, USA 1 992. John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in

London and Michael Jackson's Thriller video, was responsible for this al-

ternately very funny and very gruesome romp about a female vampire in

Pittsburgh (Anne Parillaud, the sexy assassin of La Femme Nikita) who has

sufficient scruples to feast only on criminals and mafiosi. She miscalculates

an attack on mob boss Robert Loggia, who, instead of dying, returns as a

formidable vampire opponent. The film's most outrageous special effects

set piece involves the sunlight- disintegration of the blood-converted Don

Rickles in a hospital room. Anthony LaPaglia plays the cop who finds him-

self falling for the lady vamp. Script by Michael Wolk. (Warner Bros.) T

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 1 25

Interview with the Vampire

Cinema, USA 1 994. The sturm und drang accompanying the transference

of Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire (1977) to the screen has

all the makings of a grand opera bouffe—or at least a gossipy behind-the-

scenes book. The film rights were purchased ages ago, and at various times

performers like John Travolta, Jon Voight, and even Cher had their names

attached to the project in its various development incarnations as a theatri-

cal feature, a television mini-series, and even a Broadway musical. When

producer David Geffen announced that the film would finally be made,

with director Neil Jordan

(

The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves) at

the helm, Rice and her fans rejoiced . . . until Geffen announced the de-

cidedly against-type casting ofTom Cruise as the vampire Lestat.

Outraged, Rice took her case to the media, denouncing both the pro-

ducer and the actor, in advance, for ruining her book. Cynics might well

point out that surrounding the film with an air of controversy and antici-

pation for the better part of a year was a tremendous publicity bonanza for

both Rice and the film. After a while, the news value of Rice's umbrage

played itself out, but the novelist recaptured media attention when she

viewed an advance videocassette of the completed Interview, and promptly

fell in love with Cruise and everyone else involved with the film. Interview

with the Vampire opened in November 1994 and was an immediate com-

mercial hit; whether it is a completely successful adaptation of the book is

another matter.

On the positive side, Interview with the Vampire is a lavishly mounted

fever-dream, embellished with lurid cinematic set pieces—certainly one

of the most visually successful vampire movies ever produced, and a neces-

sary corrective to the garish frou-frou of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram

Stoker's Dracula. Sadly, the artful shadow play of cinematographer

Philippe Rousselot was reduced to mere murkiness in most American the-

aters, where the money-grubbing practice of projecting at three-quarter

normal brightness (to save electricity) is now almost universal. Production

designer Dante Ferretti provided some stunning tableaux, notably at the

Parisian Theatre des Vampires with its honeycombed catacomb.

But the lead actors, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, while handsomely filling

their roles from a physical standpoint, lack the kind of classical vocal train-

ing needed to carry off a stylized costume picture—Pitt's drone is particu-

larly damaging

in that he delivers voiceover narration as well as dialogue.

1 26 DavidJ. Skal

(It occurred to me about halfway through the screening that Interview

would be immeasurably improved once it was dubbed into French. Please,

someone: send me a video when it happens.) Twelve -year- old Kirsten

Dunst, as the doll-like vampire child Claudia, strikes exacdy the right tone

of cloying creepiness in a part many feared would be played by an older ac-

tress to avoid a kiddy-p*rn mood.

Many Rice fans were anguished by rumors that the book's implied

hom*oerotic allegory was going to be sacrificed to avoid offending a main-

stream audience, or because Tom Cruise just said no. But in the end Cruise

cruises just fine, eyeing hunky Pitt hungrily through gauzy bed curtains,

and consummating their blood link with a sky-high vampire org*sm, of

sorts. It would be a dense audience indeed that didn't have some idea what

all the male-male sucking and suckling is really about. (See fellati*.) Syn-

dicated columnist Liz Smith asked a pointed question about the meaning

of such an elaborate celluloid closet: Why couldn't film characters just be

gay, instead of disguised as vampires? Rice answered Smith toward the end

of a rambling trade ad in which she reviewed the film. "Ms. Smith," she

wrote, "the gays are us. . . . There is no disguise. Gay allegory doesn't exist

apart from moral allegory for every-

one." See also hom*oSEXUALITY.

Isle of the Dead

Cinema, USA 1945. One of the

few nonderivative treatments of the

vampire theme to come out of Holly-

wood, produced by Val Lewton (Cat

People, The Body Snatcher), Isle ofthe

Dead stars Boris Karloff as an au-

thoritarian Greek general who be-

gins to lose his sanity when faced

with an unstoppable plague. He be-

comes obsessed with an innocent

Isle of the Dead:

Boris Karloff and Katherine Emery. (Photofest)

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 1 27

girl, convinced that she harbors a vrykolaka, or vampirelike spirit of pesti-

lence—thus crazily reasserting his sense of control. The psychology is un-

usually astute, and the atmospherics up to Lewton's celebrated standards.

With Ellen Drew, Mark Cramer, and Katherine Emery. Mark Robson di-

rected from Ardel Wray's screenplay. (RKO) T See also catalepsy.

IfJ The Terror From Beyond Space

Cinema, USA 1 958. The still effective prototype for the Alien films was set

on a spaceship returning from Mars with a scaly, shadowy, blood-drinking

monster lurking in the bulkhead. The noirish black-and-white photogra-

phy and well- sustained sense of menace has kept the film watchable and

scary. During production, the word "Vampire" was used in the tide in

place of "Terror." With Marshall Thompson (who starred the same year

in another film combining spaceships and blood drinking, First Man

Into Space), Shawn Smith, and Kim Spalding. Directed by Edward I. Cahn.

(United Artists) T

Jewelry

"Do you like jewelry, Lily? This ring is very old, and very beautiful." So

progressed Gloria Holden's lesbian seduction of Nan Grey in the 1936

film Dracula's Daughter. Precious stones and their decorative settings

crop up repeatedly in vampire stories and films, possibly because jewels

connote a certain transcendent permanence that parallels the vampire's

immortality. Ostentatious jewelry also signifies class distinctions and the

vampirelike transference of energy that passes from the working classes

to their monied masters (see also class warfare). Notable examples of

vampire jewelry include the medallion and signet ring worn by Count

Dracula in the 1931 film version and its many imitations, and on the

protective side, the profusion

of silver crosses adorning the

necks of a multitude of active

and would-be victims.

Jonathan

Cinema, West Germany 1970.

This hard-to-find film has an

inflated reputation due to its

fascinating premise and simul-

Jonathan: Vampirism as political

metaphor. (Courtesy of Ronald V.

Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

1 30 David J. Skal

taneous inaccessibility

—

Jonathan, a retelling of Dracula as a parable of

fascism, never received an American release and is presendy only viewable

on boodeg videos from German television. Sadly, writer/director Hans

W. Geissendorfer's ambitions never congeal into a satisfying artistic state-

ment, and the film tries to trade on its intentions rather than its achieve-

ments. Some films should exist only in legend; Jonathan, sadly, is one of

them. With Jurgen Jung, Hans Dieter Jendreyko, and Paul Albert Krumm.

(Iduna Films)

Karloff, Boris

The actor best-known as the Frankenstein monster nearly played the role

of Dracula in a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel scripted for

him in the late 1950s, but never produced. According to producer

Richard Gordon, Karloff was enthusiastic about the project, which fell

through because of scheduling conflicts. His only concern: "Just so long

as I don't have to imitate Bela." See also Black Sabbath; House of

Frankenstein; Isle of the Dead.

Kerouac, Jack

The guiding light of beat writers was also a devotee of darkness in the guise

of the living dead; Kerouac's

autobiographical fantasy Dr. Sax

( 1959) featured a vampire named

Count Condu, an undead dream-

inhabitant of Kerouac's home-

town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Kerouac also wrote program

notes on Nosferatu for the

New Yorker Film Society in

Kiss of the Vampire: Isobel Black

prepares to "initiate" Edward

DeSouza with something more

substantial than a smooch. (Photofest)

132 DavidJ.Skal

1960; because of his heavy nighttime drinking, a daylight Sunday screen-

ing was finally arranged in order for Kerouac to view the film sober. See

also ALCOHOLISM.

Kiss of the Vampire

Cinema, UK 1 963. A gem of a vampire picture from Hammer Films, Don

Sharp's atmospheric film concerns a pair of honeymooners in Bavaria (Ed-

ward DeSouza and Jennifer Daniel) who come under the malign in-

fluence of the undead Dr. Ravna (Noel Willman) and his white-robed

cult of blood-drinking acolytes. Kiss of the Vampire was thoroughly

butchered when the film was edited for television in the late sixties; every

shot of a vampire's FANGS, for instance, was censored, and the film was

padded with a newly shot subplot to fill out a two-hour time slot. The film

was aired under the title Kiss of Evil. Fans had almost given up hope of

ever seeing this film again when, in 1995, MCA Home Video uncovered

the original negative and released a pristine videocassette. Among the

film's revelations is a complex vampire psychology revolving around guilt,

disease, and self-delusion. Vampire hunter Professor Zimmer (Clifford

Evans) tells the endangered bride's husband how he lost his own daughter

to the corruptions of Dr. Ravna, joining his "smart set" in an unnamed

decadent city. "She came home eventually . . . what was left of her came

home. She was riddled with disease. And she was a vampire." According to

Zimmer, the vampire deludes itself into regarding a "filthy perversion" as

"some kind of new and wonderful experience, to be shared by the favored

few." Kiss of the Vampire is one of the few films to associate vampires

explicitly with cultism. Script by John Elder (pseudonym for producer

Anthony Hinds). (Hammer/Universal)

La-Bas

Fiction, France 1891. J.-K. Huysmans, one of the most influential nine-

teenth-century French decadents (his novel A Rebours [Against the Grain,

a.k.a. Against Nature] is thought to have been one of Oscar Wilde's in-

spirations for The Picture of Dorian Gray), created a sensation when he

published La-Bas (Down There), for the book contained graphic descrip-

tions of satanic rituals, blood sacrifice, and vampirism. The real-life, Sade-

like atrocities of Gilles de Raille are recounted: "Vampirism satisfies him

for months. He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in

the blood smeared chill of the tomb. . . . He even goes so far—one day

when his supply of children is exhausted—as to disembowel

a pregnant

woman and sport with the foetus. After these excesses he falls into horrible

states of coma. . .

." Huysmans paints an unforgettable portrait of a female

vampire of the succubus school—Mme. Chantelouve, powerfully alluring

yet distincdy repulsive: "He undressed, casting a rapid glance at Hy-

acinthe's face. It was hidden in the darkness, but was sometimes revealed

by a flare of the red-hot fire. . . . Swiftly he slipped between the covers. He

clasped a corpse; a body so cold that it froze him, but the woman's lips

were burning as she silently gnawed his features."

Lair of the White Worm, The

Fiction, UK 1911; Cinema, UK 1988. Bram Stoker's final, lunatic novel is

not precisely about a vampire, but it echoes much of Dracula in its fever-

ish concern with fantastically blurred boundaries between women and ani-

mals. The book's sickeningly hallucinatory sex imagery may have been the

direct result of the syphilis thought to have been affecting Stoker's mind

in his final years. Lady Arabella March is a kind of lamia, or supernatural

1 34 David J. Skal

snake-woman, who prefers victims made of literary cardboard rather than

flesh and blood. Despite its crudities, the book is nonetheless a Freudian

field day. Filmmaker Ken Russell produced an extremely loose and campy

adaptation in 1988, incorporating some concepts from his unproduced

screenplay for Dracula. Amanda Donohoe played Lady Arabella, with

Catherine Oxenberg the object of her lesbian-lamia affections. T

Lake of Dracula

Cinema, Japan 1971. Highly Westernized Japanese women who wear

their hair in Mary Tyler Moore-style flips are besieged in this film by a

HAMMER-style male vampire who accents his shadowy cape with a nifty

white scarf. Despite his fashion sense, the monster is maladroit in his neck-

side manner and makes an excessive number of abortive attacks on his in-

tended victim, from which she is usually able to run away. With Mori

Kishida, Midori Fujita, and Osahide Takahari. Directed by Michio Ya-

mamoto. Screenplay by Ei Ogawa and Katsu Takeura. (Toho Films) T

Lamia

A female demon of classical antiquity, the lamia is a sexual predator

thought to be half woman and half serpent. The lamia is a clear prefigu-

ration of the modern female vampire and

has often been evoked in supernatural lit-

erature, from Bram Stoker's The Lair of

the White Worm to Whitley Strieber's The

Hunger. See also "Christabel."

Landau, Martin

An American actor (born 1931), perhaps

best known for his starring role in the 1960s

Mission Impossible television series, Landau

took the role of Dracula in a 1984 national

tour of the Edward Gorey-designed stage

Martin Landau as Dracula in a 1984 revival of the

Deane/Balderston stage play.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 35

revival of the Hamilton DEANE/John L. Balderston play. In 1994 he

scored a tour de force—and won an Oscar—in the role of the aged, drug-

addicted Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's outlandish biopic, Ed Wood.

Langella, Frank

An American actor (b. 1940), with dark eyes and sensuous face, under-

stated line readings and knowing glances tossed to the audience, Frank

Langella made a charismatic stage Dracula in the Edward Gorey-designed

Broadway revival in 1977, and repeated the role on screen for Universale

big-budget 1979 film. While Langella studiously avoided the traditional

Bela Lugosi mannerisms, the Deane/Balderston stage play was rewrit-

ten to give the star additional dialogue and stage time, incorporating fa-

mous lines from the Lugosi film ("I never drink . . . wine") that were not

part of the original play. Despite some guarded reviews, the revival had the

kind of success usually reserved for Broadway musicals, and Langella was

deluged with fan attention. As he later told the Washington Post, "The

crowds outside the stage door were uncontrollable and certainly the closest

I have ever come to knowing what it would be like to be a rock star."

Richard Eder of the New York Times called Langella "a stunning figure as

Dracula: tall, pale, Byronic, with an occasional prosaic reflex as if he were

mentally counting coffins." He was succeeded in the role by a string of ac-

tors including Jean LeClerc, Raul Julia, David Dukes, Jeremy Brett, and on

a 1984-1985 revival tour, Martin Landau. Langella's appearance was

about the only thing that linked the play and the film remake, which jetti-

soned the campy stylization of the stage production for elaborate location

settings and a lush eroticism. In the long run, the Dracula role did not

seem to help Langella's movie career (as Bela Lugosi found before him,

Dracula is a very hard act to follow), though he has continued his distin-

guished work in the theater—most recently to high critical acclaim in

Austin Pendleton's 1994 biographical drama, Booth. See also theater.

Last Man on Earth, The

See IAm Legend.

Le Fanu, J(oseph) Sheridan

An Irish writer (1814-1873) of elegant ghost stories and gothic novels,

Le Fanu's most notably influential vampire tale was "Carmilla," pub-

1 36 David J. Skal

lished in 1872. "Carmilla" powerfully influenced Le Fanu's fellow Irish-

man Bram Stoker in the composition of his 1897 novel Dracula; Stoker,

in fact, originally planned to set his story in Le Fanu's semi-imaginary

country of "Styria" instead of the now-familiar Transylvania. LeFanu had an

instinctive, pre -Freudian grasp of the underlying psychodynamics of vam-

pirism, and "Carmilla" is usually acknowledged as the first literary conflation

of same-sex love with vampirism. See also hom*osexuality; lesbianism.

Lee, Christopher

An elegant, commanding British actor (born 1922), best known as the

leading screen interpreter of Dracula in the post-LuGOSi era, Lee first

riveted audiences in Hammer Films' stylish Technicolor remake Horror

of Dracula (1958), and returned to the role in Dracula, Prince of

Darkness (1965), Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Taste

the Blood of Dracula (1969), Scars of Dracula (1970), Count

Dracula (1970), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of

Dracula (1973), and Dracula and Son (1976). He also played lesser

vampires in films like Uncle Was a Vampire (1959) and made a caped

cameo appearance in The Magic Christian (1969). Lee was the first Drac-

Christopher Lee in |

Dracula Has Risen I

from the Grave

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 37

ula with real sexual magnetism, though his steely erotic purposefulness

makes him a virtual personification of rape—especially the male fantasy

that women who seem to resist really want to be ravished; throughout

Lee's Dracula series, there are repeated instances of frightened women

who nonetheless moan ecstatically at the moment of neck penetration.

The problematic attractiveness of surrender to cruel authoritarianism is

also a component of the Lee/Dracula mystique and much vampire culture

in general—if we're lucky, audiences respond to these films in order to

confront, entertain, and dispel persistent tendencies toward fascism.

Lesbianism

Long an undercurrent of classic vampire stories like "Carmilla," super-

naturalized sexual relations between women have become a common hor-

ror motif in recent decades, paralleling the cultural demonization of male

hom*osexuality, but without the particular overlay of disease imagery that

has colored male-male vampirism in the age ofAIDS (q.v.). According to

Andrea Weiss, author of Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film:

Merging two kinds of sexual outlaws, the lesbian vampire is more than

simply a negative stereotype. She is a complex and ambiguous figure,

at once an image of death and an object of desire, drawing on pro-

found subconscious fears that the living have toward the dead and that

men have toward women, while serving as a focus for repressed fan-

tasies. The generic vampire image both expresses and represses sexual-

ity, but the lesbian vampire especially operates in the sexual rather than

the supernatural realm.

Lesbians made coy appearances from time to time

in early vampire

films—take a look at Gloria Holden's seduction of the streetwalker in

Dracula's Daughter (1936). But the modern lesbian movie vampire

owes much of her popularity to HAMMER FILMS, which, beginning with

The Vampire Lovers (1970), found a goldmine in "Carmilla"-derived

horror films that fully exploited the seventies' new tolerance for onscreen

nudity and violence. The beasts-and- breasts formula continued happily at

Hammer with Lust for a Vampire (1970) and Twins of Evil (1971).

Daughters of Darkness (1971) was a particularly elegant Belgian effort,

imaginatively amplifying the lesbian aspects of the Erzebet BATHORY leg-

138 DavidJ.Skal

"Do you like

jewelry?" Countess

Zaleska (Gloria

Holden) vamps a

streetwalker in

Dracula's Daughter

(1936).

Andrea Rau and

Delphine Seyrig in

Daughters of

Darkness. (Photofest)

end. Perhaps the most celebrated of all lesbian vampire films is The

Hunger (1983), wherein the ageless Catherine Deneuve pursues the sex-

ually ambivalent Susan Sarandon without apology or pity. In literature,

author Jewelle Gomez created a full-scale historical epic of lesbian vam-

pirism in The Gilda Stories (1991). Like hom*osexual men, lesbian readers

and audiences have tended to embrace gay vampires as ironic role models,

responding to the vampire's romantic aspects of rebellion, alienation, and

social transcendence.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 39

The straight world reads the signals differently. Real-life lesbians threaten

the heterosexual male's sense of himself as the center of the sexual uni-

verse—not needing or wanting men's bodies, their disinterest is nonethe-

less seen as judgmental, an "unnatural" challenge to maleness. The lesbian's

sexual independence from men overlaps with the more generalized inde-

pendence extolled by feminism; it is therefore not surprising that the de-

monized image of the lesbian vampire became a stock image in popular

culture and soft p*rn during the feminist revival of the 1970s. Pam Kesey,

editor of the anthology Daughters ofDarkness, cites twenty-six films deal-

ing with lesbian vampires; most appeared during this period of widescale

reappraisal of sex roles and sexual politics. See also "Christabel"; hom*o-

sexuality; i" Vampiri; Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.

Lifeforce

Cinema, UK/USA 1985. Colin Wilson's talky, cerebral science fiction novel

The Space Vampires (1976) was the basis for this $25 million special -effects

disaster directed by Tobe Hooper, who previously had been at the notori-

ous helm of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Instead of blood, the vampires

thrive on bioelectrical energy, leaving their victims withered husks. Some of

the effects are entertaining, such as a full-sized puppet of a mummylike vam-

pire which rises from an examination table to drain a hapless doctor. The

lead vamp, Mathilda May, walks nude around London, windows exploding

in her wake. With Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, and Frank Finlay. Screenplay

by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby. (Cannon/Tri-Star) T

Lilith

In the Hebrew tradition, Lilith is the first wife of Adam, who abandoned

her mate and the Garden of Eden to become the Queen of the Night. The

figure of Lilith has its roots in Babylonian legends and is echoed in various

guises throughout world mythology, often as a kind of sperm-vampire or

SUCCUBUS.

Little Shop of Horrors, The

Cinema, USA 1960. Audrey, Jr., a talkative blood -drinking plant, is the

centerpiece of Roger Corman's legendary low- budget horror spoof and

one of Hollywood's crazier variations on the theme of the vampire. Au-

drey's carnivorous petals probably represent some kind of vagin* dentata,

1 40 DavidJ. Skal

but the film is so funny on the surface that you overlook the deeper impli-

cations. Little Shop was adapted as an enormously successful off-Broadway

musical in the early 1980s and filmed anew in 1986 with a masterful,

Muppet-inspired Audrey II. The original film cost $27,000 and was filmed

in two days; the remake cost $30 million and took over a year to com-

plete. Script by Charles B. Griffith. With Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph,

Mel Welles, and Jack Nicholson. (Filmgroup/American International) T

London After Midnight

Cinema, USA 1927. Director Tod Browning's first excursion into the

world ofvampires has a special mystique because the film's negative and all

known prints have vanished from sight; the American Film Institute has

officially ranked London After Midnight as one of the most important

"lost" films of the silent era. Lon Chaney acted the dual role of a Scotland

Yard detective as well as a pop-eyed, razor-toothed monster in a costume

derived from Dr. Caligari—not a real vampire, it turns out, but part of an

elaborately theatrical ruse to catch a flesh-and-blood killer. Many film col-

lectors believe the film isn't really lost but in deliberate hiding, its owner

waiting for the MGM/Turner copyright

to expire sometime after the turn of the

century. Nonetheless, unsubstantiated

reports of London After Midnight's re-

discovery keep cropping up, like sight-

ings of the Loch Ness Monster. On these

occasions, the phone lines of film preser-

vationists and historians will burn fren-

ziedly from coast to coast, until the latest

close encounter is debunked as yet an-

other cruel hoax. Perhaps the most florid

of the recent rumors had a complete ni-

trate print of the film dangerously close

London After Midnight:

Edna Tichenor and Lon Chaney.

(Photofest)

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 141

to disintegration in a Jersey City refrigerator while its owner's mind un-

derwent a corresponding deterioration due to AIDS dementia. Screenplay

by Waldemar Young, from a story by Browning. With Henry B. Walthall,

Conrad Nagel, Marceline Day, Polly Moran, and Edna Tichenor (as the

kohl-eyed Bat Girl). (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

Lost Boys, The

Cinema, USA 1987. A cult favorite on college campuses, The Lost Boys re-

portedly went through a "development hell" from its original concept as

a wistful juxtaposition of Peter Pan and Dracula to its final form as a

demographically savvy alienated-teenagers-as-heavy-metal-vampires media

event. The film's advertising tag line said it all: "Sleep all day. Party all

night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." While The Lost

Boys is too slick by half, it does have its share of nice touches—including the

clawlike feet by which lead vampire Kiefer Sutherland clings to the rafters,

or the brilliant choice of The Doors' "People Are Strange" for the title

theme. Following several scripts and potential directors, Joel Schumacher

directed from an embattled screenplay by Janice Fisher, James Jeremias,

and Jeffrey Boam. With Jason Patric, Corey Haim,

Dianne Wiest, Edward Herrmann, Barnard Hughes,

Jami Gertz, and Corey Feldman. (Warner Bros.) T

Love at First Bite

Cinema, USA 1979. A completely corny but

nonetheless delightful Dracula spoof. George

Hamilton's pale, pale makeup is an instant parodic

comment on the actor's otherwise carcinogenically

suntanned playboy persona; Hamilton makes a

very funny vampire, coping with the cultural shock

attendant on his relocating from Transylvania to

Love at First Bite: George Hamilton makes do

without a suntan—for eternity,

(Photofest)

1 42 DavidJ. Skal

the Manhattan disco scene. Actress Carroll Borland, protegee of Bela

Lugosi, once told me that Hamilton's performance was an uncanny ap-

proximation of Lugosi's original stage interpretation of Dracula (a perfor-

mance much muted in the 1931 film version). A sequel, Love at Second

Bite, has been announced repeatedly over the years, but as of this writing

has not yet materialized. Stan Dragoti directed, Robert Kaufman wrote.

With Susan Saint James, Richard Benjamin, Dick Shawn, Arte Johnson,

and Sherman Hemsley. (Melvin Simon Productions/American Interna-

tional Pictures) T

Lugosi, Bela

Perhaps no other human being has had such an influence on our modern

concept of the vampire than Bela Ferenc Deszo

Blasko (1880-1956), better

known as the actor Bela Lugosi. The Hungarian political expatriate arrived

in New York City in the early

1920s, establishing himself as a

dependable interpreter of "heavy"

parts (even though his extensive

stage experience in Hungary had

emphasized romantic roles and

comedy). When the British actor

Raymond Huntley turned down

the chance to play Dracula in

the original 1927 Broadway pro-

duction, Lugosi donned the flow-

ing velvet opera cape that would

follow him, quite literally, to the

grave. Hungry to repeat the role

in Universal's 1931 film version,

he accepted a ridiculously small

salary ($500 a week, a quarter of

the money paid to third-billed

David Manners) and thereafter

Autographed publicity illustration of

Bela Lugosi in Dracula.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 43

One giveth, one taketh away:

cultural icons collide as Bela

Lugosi's Dracula cuts cards with

Santa Claus for a seasonal photo

opportunity.

was never able to negotiate a lucrative Hollywood contract. Dracula was

the height of his Hollywood career, and also the beginning of its end.

Lugosi turned down the role of the monster in Frankenstein (1931), lead-

ing to Boris Karloff 's eclipsing him as movieland's most bankable horror

star. Part of Lugosi's difficulties came from his failure to completely master

English; on stage, and to a lesser extent in Hollywood, he learned his roles

phonetically, resulting in the peculiar vocal rhythms and intensity now

universally recognized as "Dracula." Dracula was Lugosi's most famous

role, though he only played him twice on film; as a display of his acting

ability, however, it must take a distinct backseat to his inspired interpreta-

tion ofYgor, the demented monster-keeper of Son ofFrankenstein (1939).

Lugosi's film career continued to slide throughout the 1940s and was

virtually finished after his reprise of Dracula in Universal's Abbott and

Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). He never worked again for a

major studio, and in 1955 made headlines as the first Hollywood star to

go public with a substance abuse problem. Lugosi successfully ended a

decades-long addiction to prescription painkillers, but never made the

comeback he dreamed of. His final films were produced under the dubi-

ous direction of Edward D. Wood, Jr., notorious as "the worst filmmaker

of all time," for films like Bride of the Monster (1956) and Plan Ninefrom

Outer Space (1958). In the latter, Lugosi appeared posthumously in a few

scenes, a stand-in with a cape over his face playing the bulk of the role in-

tended for him. Bela Lugosi died in Hollywood on August 16, 1956, and

1 44 DavidJ. Skal

was buried in makeup and costume as Dracula, at his family's request. See

also Borland, Carroll; Browning, Tod; Landau, Martin; Mark of

the Vampire; Return of the Vampire.

Lugosi, Bela, Jr.

Los Angeles attorney (born 1938), and son of the late horror movie actor,

Bela Lugosi, Jr., brought significant legal attention to publicity and like-

ness rights retained by actors who create unique screen personas while

under contract to film studios and entertainment conglomerates. In a

lengthy court wrangle beginning in the 1960s, Lugosi claimed that Uni-

versal Pictures had exceeded the terms of his father's 1930 contract for the

film Dracula by licensing the actor's image for reproduction on a variety

of merchandise (toys, model kits, Halloween masks, etc.) that had nothing

to do with the direct exploitation of the film. The Los Angeles County Su-

perior Court initially ruled in favor of the Lugosi estate, but the opinion

was overruled on appeal to the California Supreme Court. More recently,

however, a California right-of-publicity ruling restored certain rights of

image exploitation to public figures and their heirs.

Lurking Vampire, The

Cinema, Argentina 1959. I have spent years obsessively searching for a

print or any photographs or information on this film, which, under its

original title, El vampiro acerca, received a flurry of attention in the early

sixties but absolutely no distribution in the English-speaking world. Mike

Parry, writing in the fan magazine Castle ofFrankenstein in 1964, told of

viewing the film in Madrid, calling it "superbly done . . . ranking with the

best of the Hammer efforts, and even superior to them," and including

"many nice expressionistic touches, reminiscent of the German horror

classics of the silent era." The film opens with a sadly revolving carousel

populated with carvings of monsters, witches, and ogres. A narrator in-

tones that "the struggle between good and evil, child and monster, con-

tinues eternally." The frightening merry-go-round becomes a recurrent

visual in a story that blurs the idea of the vampire with that of a child mo-

lester who entices a young girl with lollipops. The menacing stranger is

played by German Robles, the Mexican actor best known for his striking

Dracula-style roles in The Vampire (1957) and The Vampire's Coffin

(1958). All indications are that The Lurking Vampire is a distinguished

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 45

picture deserving of revival and quite likely one of the major "lost" films of

the genre. Has anyone out there seen it? Even a picture from it? If so,

please scream.

Lust for a Vampire

Cinema, UK 1970. Jimmy Sangster directed Hammer's second "Car-

MiLLA"-derived flesh-fest cum blood-feast, set in a nineteenth-century girl's

finishing school. The erotic LESBIANISM went further than anything Ham-

mer had previously attempted, and the film was heavily censored for its

American release. Screenplay by Tudor Gates. With Ralph Bates, Suzanna

Leigh, Michael Johnson, Yutte Stensgaard (as Carmilla/Mircalla), and

Mike Raven (as the vampire Count Karnstein). (Hammer/MGM/EMI) T

Mad Monster Party

Cinema, USA/UK 1967. A live-animation horror comedy with music (no,

The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn't the first), Mad Monster Party fea-

tured a stop-motion Dracula in pursuit of a Barbielike victim. Boris

Karloff and Phyllis Diller contributed their voices. Written by Mad maga-

zine's Harvey Kurtzman and Len Korobkin, and directed by Jules Bass.

(Embassy/Videocraft International)Y

Mark of the Vampire

Cinema, USA 1935. Director Tod Browning was kept on a short leash by

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after the unmitigated disaster of his 1932 film

Freaks. Mark of the Vampire was, evi-

dently, considered a "safe" project,

r -4&bJ^k being a remake of Browning's 1927

y^ r

* C H silent hit London After Midnight.

V^ Once more, the story involved a po-

lice sting using phony vampires to

catch a killer. Bela Lugosi provided

terrific atmosphere in the mute role

of "Count Mora," gliding around a

Mad Monster Party: A stop-motion Dracula

suspends his animation to consider a

snack. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/

Hollywood Movie Posters)

1 48 DavidJ. Skal

Mark of the Vampire: Bela Lugosi and

Carroll Borland menace Elizabeth Allan

and Henry Wadsworth.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/

Hollywood Movie Posters)

cobwebby castle in Dracula drag

with his lank-haired daughter

Luna (Carroll Borland) in tow.

The real star of the show, how-

ever, is cinematographer James

Wong Howe, who visually ele-

vates the material well beyond

Browning's pedestrian direction.

The haunted house atmospher-

ics are occasionally so heavily laid

on as to approach parody, but

the brief film (cut by the studio

from its original ninety minutes to an hour) is still fun to watch—if only

to count the instances of visual cribbing from Universal's Dracula, which

Browning also directed. (Also cut was the original intimation that Count

Mora and his daughter achieved their undead state through incest. ) Lionel

Barrymore receives top billing as a Van HELSING-Iike professor; also with

Elizabeth Allan, Lionel Atwill, and Jean Hersholt. Screenplay by Guy En-

dore and Bernard Schubert. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)T

Martin

Cinema, USA 1976. George Romero, director of Night ofthe Living Dead

(1968), combined

the traditional image of the supernatural vampire with

the trappings of real-life BLOOD FETISHISM in Martin, a film shot for under

$100,000 on sixteen- millimeter color film and enlarged to thirty-five milli-

meter for theatrical release. Romero originally also wanted the prints struck

in black-and-white, but the producer overruled him. Martin, the film's

eponymous blood drinker, sedates his victims with a hypodermic syringe

and opens their veins with a razor blade. The film would have been better

had Romero resisted the temptation to present the character as a super-

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 49

natural monster rather than a psycho-sexual one. Screenplay by Romero.

Starring John Amplas, Lincoln Maazel, and Christine Forrest. (Braddock

Associates/Libra Films/Laurel Group)T

Marx, Karl

"Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living

labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks," wrote Karl Marx in

Das Kapital. Interestingly enough, Marx is buried in HlGHGATE CEMETERY,

which probably has more vampire associations than any burial ground on

earth. See also class warfare.

Midnight

Cinema, USA 1988. Not a real vampire film, but of interest because of its

thinly disguised depiction of the 1950s television horror hostess Vampira.

As Midnight, Lynn Redgrave recites near-verbatim transcripts of Vam-

pira's original routines, but outside the television studio scenes, this film is

an unholy mess. The ultimate reasons that the producers were able to en-

tice performers like Redgrave and Tony Curtis to get involved in such a

ghastly production may have something to do with the vagaries of tax-

shelter laws. Though a slew of sound technicians are credited, dialogue on

the video release is frequently garbled, swallowed, or otherwise just in-

audible. Directed by Norman Thaddeus Vane. With Steve Parrish, Rita

Gam, and Frank Gorshin. (SVS Films/Midnight Inc.)V

Midnight Kiss

Cinema, USA 1993. Joel Bender directed this formulaic vampire thriller,

distinguished primarily by the unnerving performance of Gregory A.

Greer as a monster seemingly strung out on the supernatural equivalent of

crack cocaine. Screenplay by John Weidner and Ken Lamplugh. With

Michelle Owens, Michael McMillen, and Robert Miano. (Midnight Hour

Productions)

Mirrors

The vampire's traditional failure to reflect in mirrors is, on the face of it,

simple evidence of a wraithlike inhumanity; on a deeper level, however,

the idea is more a matter of psychological denial—the reason we block out

the vampire's reflection is to avoid seeing our own face in the glass.

1 50 DavidJ. Skal

Mora

Also known as the mara in Slavic and Scandinavian countries, this version

of the vampire is entymologically linked to the word nightmare, and is of-

ten envisioned as an oppressive, crushing night demon. European Slavs

and Canadian Kashubes regard the mora as a blood drinker. Director Tod

Browning used the word for the name of the primary boogeyman, Count

Mora, in his 1935 film Mark of the Vampire. See also folklore.

"Mrs. Amworth"

Short story, UK 1923. E. F. Benson's oft-anthologized tale of a sweet old

lady, who just happens to float around at night in search of youthful

blood, introduced the theme of "the vampire next door," now a widely

utilized motif, but quite innovative for its time. "Mrs. Amworth" was

adapted for Canadian television in 1975 with Glynis Johns in the tide

role. See also "Room in the Tower, The."

Munster, Grandpa

A popular television character from the 1960s, an over-the-hill Jewish

Dracula portrayed by comedian Al Lewis on the CBS-TV series The

Munsters. The Munster family was composed of monsters who other-

wise behaved like a normal American sitcom clan. Grandpa Munster was

a sanitized popularization of the Lenny BRUCE conception of Dracula as a

drug-ridden old Jewish man with a nagging wife; The Munsters, however,

dropped the wife and all references to pill-popping. The idea of Dracula as

a cute ethnic cuddle toy is weird in the extreme, especially given the ugly

stereotype palpable in Bram Stoker's original concept of the vampire. See

also anti-Semitism.

Murnau, F. W.

A pupil and artistic associate of the great German stage director Max Rein-

hardt, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931) began directing films in

1919. Following two previous excursions into the macabre

—

Der Januskopf

(1920), an early version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Conrad Veidt

and Bela Lugosi, and The Haunted Castle (1921 )—Murnau directed one of

the most famous vampire films of all time, Nosferatu: Eine Stmphonie des

Grauens ("Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror"), an unauthorized version

of Dracula. Released in 1922, Nosferatu combined the theatrical shadows

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 5

and compositions of German Expressionism with natural light and location

settings, a startling innovation for the time. The result was a disquieting

juxtaposition of the fantastic and the familiar. Given larger budgets and

artistic autonomy, Murnau produced several masterpieces

—

The Last Laugh

(1924), Faust (1926), and in Hollywood, Sunrise (1927), generally con-

sidered his finest achievement. His enormously promising future was cut

short by a California traffic accident in 1931.

Murnau's well-known hom*osexuality has generated additional con-

temporary interest in his work, some of it intelligent and informative, and

some of it bizarre. Filmmaker Stan Brakhage tried to make a case in a

highly speculative 1977 essay that Nosferatu was essentially a hom*osexual

exercise in "camp," an argument that perhaps revealed more of Brakhage's

hom*ophobia than further insight into the film. Brakhage ended his essay

with the undocumented assertion that Murnau's automobile accident de-

mise was the result of a distractingly deadly act of oral sex performed by a

Filipino houseboy. See also fellati*.

Nadja

Cinema, USA 1994. "He was like Elvis in the end . . . already dead, sur-

rounded by zombies." The person, or un-person, thus described is Dracula,

whose highly photogenic daughter Nadja (Elina Lowensohn) sets up camp

in lower Manhattan, where she fits right in with the club set. The real star of

Michael Almereyda's film is the stunning black-and-white cinematography

(which cleverly employs the toy-camera process Pixelvision to provide a

vampire's-eye view of things). Peter Fonda nearly wrecks the film with a

campy, scenery-chewing turn as Van Helsing. The film was generally over-

praised by the critics, none ofwhom noted how much of the plot was lifted

from 1936's Dracula's Daughter. Screenplay by Almereyda. With Jared

Harris, Martin Donovan, Galaxy Cruze, Susie Amis, Karl Geary and execu-

tive producer David Lynch, as a morgue attendant. (October Films) T

Near Dark

Cinema, USA 1987. Unassailably near the top of the heap of recent

vampix, Near Dark presents a terrifying vampire family of nihilistic white-

trash drifters. Director Kathryn Bigelow, who coscripted with Eric Red,

keeps the picture moving deftly and grandly blends two classic B -movie

genres: the vampire film and the road melodrama, conflating archetypal

American rootlessness with undeath. The best sequence involves a motel

shootout, each wall-penetrating bullet creating a stabbing ray of sunlight

imperiling the night-creatures within. If you've overlooked this one,

you're missing a major chapter of your vampire education. With Jenny

Wright, Adrian Pasdar, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton. (DeLauren-

tiis/Feldman-Meeker)Y

1 54 DavidJ. Skal

Night Trap

An interactive video game parodying vampire movies, Night Trap became

the focus of tremendous media attention in late 1993 when a trio of U.S.

senators decided to score easy political points by vilifying the game as a

form of "child abuse" that taught small fry to "enjoy inflicting torture."

Unwilling to be confused by facts, Senator Joseph Lieberman provided

the press with a completely fanciful description of the game's object: "to

hang women on meat hooks." The video's producer, Tom Zito, re-

sponded to the kangaroo court tactic on the op-ed page of the Washing-

ton Post, calmly pointing out that the whole point of Night Trap was to

protect women from vampire assailants, not to torture them. But isn't it

nice that vampires have found their way onto the interactive info-highway

this early in the game?

Nosferatu

A meaningless word widely believed to be a Romanian term for "vampire,"

but which in fact does not exist in Romanian or any other language. The

first mention of the word came in folklorist Emily de Laszowska Gerard's

1885 essay "Transylvanian Superstitions," which novelist Bram Stoker

consulted in his research for Dracula. After exhaustive research, I have

come to the conclusion that Gerard must have recorded a corrupted or

misunderstood version of the Romanian adjective nesuferit, from the Latin

"not to suffer." Vampires, obviously, are "insufferable," "intolerable," or

even "plaguesome," all of which are given as definitions of nesuferit in vari-

ous Romanian dictionaries. The word, however, has no supernatural con-

notations of any kind, and it is likely that Gerard simply mistook its

context, or encountered a localized coinage which somehow never came to

the attention of other folklorists or to Romanian lexicographers.

Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens

Cinema, Germany 1922. The earliest known film adaptation of Dracula

is also one of the best, and a far cry from later films inspired primarily by

the 1920s stage play rather than the original Bram STOKER novel. Directed

by F. W. Murnau, the film was unauthorized by the Stoker estate and

drew the wrath of the author's widow, who pursued a legal case against

the film for nearly a decade, trying to have the negative and every known

print destroyed (the full story of Florence Stoker's obsessive campaign

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 55

Nosferatu: Max Schreck

wakes up and smells the

coffin. (Courtesy of Forrest J

Ackerman)

against the film is thoroughly recounted in my earlier book, Hollywood

Gothic). The widow did not succeed, of course, which is why we still can

enjoy one of the classics of German Expressionist cinema.

Nosferatu enthusiastically embraced Stoker's concept of Dracula as a

physically repellent creature, exaggerating Stoker's descriptions into one

of the most hideous screen monsters of all time. As portrayed by actor

Max Schreck, Count Orlock is a nightmare amalgam of a withered

corpse and a diseased rat, with hooklike fingernails that become progres-

sively elongated as the film unreels. The main characters of Stoker's

novel are recognizable, though freely adapted to a tightened, almost

fairy-talelike narrative. Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) is a young real

estate lawyer sent to Transylvania by his peculiar employer, Knock

(Alexander Granach, in the Renfield role) to close a deal for the myste-

rious Orlock. The basics of Stoker's plot are adhered to, though the Van

Helsing role is reduced almost to inconsequence. Nosferatu has a com-

pletely different conclusion from Dracula, finishing on a tragic note as

Hutter's wife Nina sacrifices her own life by keeping the vampire at her

bedside until daylight, when he is destroyed by the sun's first rays. (This

motif was an invention of the film; in previous stories, vampires could be

inhibited, though never killed, by light.) As photographed by Fritz Arno

Wagner, the image of the monster's shadow gliding up the stairs and

1 56 DavidJ. Skal

reaching for its victim's door remains one of the most famous composi-

tions of the silent film era.

Nosferatu was conceived as a self-conscious "art" film, using the vampire

as a metaphor of the plaguelike destruction of Germany in World War I. The

film was, upon its first release, elaborately color-tinted and accompanied by a

modernist orchestral score commissioned from composer Hans Erdmann.

Following an injunction won by Stoker's widow in the mid 1920s, the nega-

tive was ordered destroyed, and the film survived in a hodgepodge of various

prints until being definitively restored by German conservator Enno Patalas

in 1984. The Patalas restoration is not yet available on video outside Europe,

but an excellent parallel version was assembled by the American archivist

David Shepard for a 1992 videodisc release with a supplemental soundtrack

of astute critical commentary by Nosferatu scholar Lokke Heiss.

The full extent of Murnau's artistic control of Nosferatu is far from

clear; there is enough circ*mstantial evidence to suggest, for instance, that

the film's overall concept owed more to production designer Albin Grau

and screenwriter Henrik Galeen than to Murnau. Modern notions about

directorial control and intention may not be applicable in the case of Nos-

feratu, which was produced by a kind of experimental artistic collective

called Prana-Film. Original publicity stories about Nosferatu scarcely men-

tion Murnau at all—Grau, instead, is the dominant voice. Murnau never

mentioned the film in a published interview, even after his later success in

Hollywood, possibly because of the legal brouhaha over the Dracula

spectable, and well before Nosferatu^ critical reputation was established,

so it is not surprising no one ever approached him for comment. But I

consider it almost a crime that no European film historian ever thought to

conduct an interview with actor Gustave von Wangenheim, who became a

prominent force in German theater and was still alive in the early 1980s.

Therefore, we are left to informed speculation about the details of Nosfer-

atu's genesis; in 1993, novelist Jim Shepard published an imaginatively

entertaining fictional account of the filming of Nosferatu in the literary

magazine TriQuarterly. Interest in Nosferatu as a central artifact of world

cinema has steadily increased over recent decades; the film is regularly re-

vived for appreciative audiences around the world, often with contempo-

rary live musical accompaniment.

With its indelibly haunting images of death—always a popular motif

during fin de siecle decades such as the present one

—

Nosferatu reminds us

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 57

that the film medium itself is a kind of technological bargaining chip

against oblivion, allowing us a comforting illusion of perpetual life and

reanimation. Paradoxically, film's central mechanism—the shadow—also

suggests the world of death. In a recent essay, Gilberto Perez comments

on the centrality of shadows to the dream-message of Nosferatu: "The im-

age in Murnau becomes charged with the emotional coloring of a shadow,

with a poignant and disquieting sense that what we watch moving on the

screen is the world's ghost." The death/rebirth fantasy of vampire myths

comes full circle in the cinema: light destroys the vampire's shadow, but in

motion -picture terms, simultaneously creates the shadows which bring

vampires to life in the first place.

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Cinema, West Germany/France 1979. The real horror ofWerner Herzog's

homage to F. W. MURNAU, filmed in two simultaneous versions, one in

English and one in German, has nothing to do with the subject matter but

with its peculiar, almost Warholian execution. The film feels slack and shape-

158 DavidJ.Skal

less, utterly without a sense of pace or proportion—just one precious "im-

pression" of the Murnau film after another. Nonetheless, there are some

effective moments—as the vampire, Klaus Kinski's predatory hovering over

his guest inspires genuine visceral revulsion, and the actor's muted line

readings manage to convey a bottomless loneliness that other interpreta-

tions of Dracula have only hinted at. Otherwise, the actors look to be

stoned. Herzog doesn't seem to have a particular purpose in mind, and the

whole thing seems like a poindess stunt. Perhaps the best thing about it are

the wonderful publicity stills, endlessly

reprinted, of Isabelle Adjani's flaw-

less beauty juxtaposed with Kinski's pestilential beastliness. Twentieth

Century-Fox probably thought they were going to cash in big time on the

late-seventies cycle of Draculamania, but they found the English-language

version unreleasable and instead distributed the dubbed German version to

art houses. With Bruno Ganz. (Twentieth Century-Fox)Y

Not of This Earth

Cinema, USA 1957. A nifty science -fictional vampire film, produced and

directed by Roger Corman from a script by Charles Griffith and Mark

Hanna, Not of This Earth stars actor Paul Birch as a kind of sinister sales

man from outer space who pumps his valise full of earth people's red elixir

in an attempt to save his dying extraterrestrial race. He wears sunglasses to

hide his pupilless, Orphan Annie eyes, a direct glimpse of which will strike

you dead. An interesting little exercise in noirish fifties paranoia, remade,

quite unnecessarily, in 1988. With Beverly Garland, Morgan Jones, William

Roerick, and Jonathan Haze. (Allied Artists)T

Novels

See Appendix C.

Omega Man, The

See IAm Legend.

Once Bitten

Cinema, USA 1985. This film is only worth mentioning because of the un-

usual context in which I first saw it. While I was visiting Havana, Cuba, to

research missing footage from the Spanish version of Dracula in 1989,

Once Bitten was playing day and night on my hotel's cable service, and I

got to view parts of the picture more than once, in English with Spanish

subtitles. This is a very stupid movie. Centuries-old supermodel Lauren

Hutton needs to suck on a male virgin, and she picks teenager Jim Carrey

for the honors. What I found most interesting was the bowdlerization of

the American dialogue in the Spanish subtitles—as I recall, a gay charac-

ter's comment about "rough trade" was translated for Cuban consump-

tion as "jQue cosa!" Rent this one at your own peril. With Karen Kopins

and Cleavon Little. Directed by Howard Storm. (The Samuel Goldwyn

Company) T

Opera

Despite its estimable blood and thunder, Dracula has yet to be the sub-

ject of a professionally produced opera, but other vampires have warbled

their dark arias quite effectively over the past century and a half. The most

successful of all vampire operas is Heinrich Marschner's Der Vatnpyr, first

presented in Leipzig in 1828, with a libretto by W. A. Wohlbruck based

on John Polidori's story "The Vampyre" (1819), which had already had

inspired several stage plays in England and on the continent (see also the-

1 60 DavidJ. Ska/

Title page of Marschner's opera Der Vampyr.

lAlWilbriifk

in Wusik goetzl

MDimBUKBBBL

ater). The pleasantly melodic Marschner opera,

which recounted the exploits of the BYRON-based

vampire Lord Ruthven, was a standard fixture of

the German repertoire for years and is credited by

musicologists as owing a distinct musical debt to

Weber, while anticipating Wagner. Wagner, in fact,

saw its premiere production during his student

days, conducted the work himself a few years later,

and may well have taken from Der Vampyr some

measure of inspiration for his own opera on the

theme of eternal life as damnation, The Flying

Dutchman.

A second 1828 opera, also called Der Vampyr

and based on the Polidori tale and its derivative

stage melodramas, was composed by Peter Josefvon Lindpainter with a li-

bretto by Casar Max Heigel, and premiered in Stuttgart six months after

the Marschner work's debut. The Lindpainter/Heigel work had a confused

story line, less musical interest and, while it had a good run for its time, has

not been considered worthy of a full-scale revival since. The Marschner

opera, however, was revived frequently through the turn of the century

and is still produced occasionally in Germany. The work received its Amer-

ican premiere in a 1980 New York production with an English libretto

by Michael Feingold. In 1992, the Marschner music was the basis for a

cleverly modernized BBC television production depicting the vampire as

Ripley, a playboy investment banker. Called The Vampyr: A Soap Opera,

the new libretto was written by Charles Hart, from a story by Janet Street-

Porter and Nigel Finch (who also directed).

Paglia, Camille

The incendiary, politically incorrect intellectual of the 1990s, Camille

Paglia regards the female vampire as a powerful role model rather than a

misogynistic slur. In the introduction to her most recent book, Vamps

and Tramps (1994), Paglia contends that "Vamps are queens of the night,

the primeval realm excluded and repressed by today's sedate middle-class

professionals in their orderly, blazing bright offices. The prostitute, seduc-

tress, and high-glamour movie star wield woman's ancient vampiric power

over men." Paglia's Sexual Personae (1990) makes frequent references

to the vampire in the context of classical art and literature. See also GAR-

LAND, Judy.

Passion of Dracula, The

Theater, USA 1977. While Frank Langella's Broadway revival of Dracula

was doing standing-room business uptown, Bob Hall and David Rich-

mond's The Passion ofDracula did its own respectable business in the more

modest venue of Greenwich Village's Cherry Lane Theatre. Christopher

Birnau cut an impressive figure as Dracula in this otherwise not particu-

larly ambitious imitation of the Deane/Balderston stage play, one of

several produced in the vampire -redolent late seventies. See also theater.

Planet of the Vampires

Cinema, Italy/Spain 1965. Director Mario Bava, who proved himself a

master of traditional gothicism in Black Sunday (I960), was also responsi-

ble for this highly influential science fiction spin on the vampire theme, the

1 62 DavidJ. Skal

influence of which can be immediately perceived in the SF megahit Alien

(1979). Barry Sullivan stars as the captain of a spaceship stranded on a

planet whose disembodied inhabitants take over the bodies of dead crew

members. The film is a nonstop procession of stunning visual compositions,

thanks to cinematographer Antonio Rinaldi, many accomplished through a

clever deep-focus mixture of miniatures and live action. The costumes,

which approximate a leather-fetishist's idea of scuba gear with Dracula-

style high collars appended, are particularly stylish. Not to be missed. Script

by Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Rafael J. Salvia, Antonio Roman, and Catillo

Cosulich. English-language adaptation by lb Melchior and Louis Heyward.

With Norma Bengeli, Angel Aranda, and Eve Marandi. (Italian Interna-

tional/Castilla Coopertiva/American International)

Poe, Edgar Allan

Poe's trademark erotic obsession with dead and dying women ("The

death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical subject in the world") has

a clear resonance with classical vampirism, and Poe's influence is palpably

felt in vampire stories whenever a bereaved hero begins pining for a dead

lover. See also "Berenice"; Tale ofa Vampire.

Polish Vampire in Burbank, A

Cinema, USA 1983. It's probably significant that only a vampire movie

could be shot on Super- Eight film with a dubbed soundtrack and still earn

$500,000 on video and be offered on national cable. The sheer chutzpah

of this film makes it weirdly enjoyable to share the adventures of Dupah

(the Polish word for "ass"), a shy, reluctant bloodsucker trying to lose his

"virginity." Written, directed by, and starring Mark Pirro, with Lori Sut-

ton, Bibbi Dorsch, and Brad Waisbren. (Pirromount/Peaco*ck Films)Y

Price, Vincent

With his imposing physical presence and mock-elegant manner, the late,

great horror actor (1911-1993) would have made a most charming Count

Dracula had anyone ever offered him the part in a straight adaptation of

the Stoker novel. Price did, however, get to play a Dracula- like vampire

for laughs on an episode of television's F Troop in the 1960s, starred in

an unusual hybrid of the Frankenstein and vampire formulas in Scream

and Scream Again (1970), and donned funny fangs for the 1980 British

V IS FOR VAMPIRE

of the New York Times discussed the AIDS-

vampire nexus in a splashy Sunday feature on the occasion of the release of

Francis Ford Coppola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992):

The new blood culture is the bizarre pop byproduct of a national obses-

sion with all body fluids. It's a high-pitched, often hysterical acting out

of the subliminal fantasies, both deadly and erotic, of a country that has

awakened to the fact that the most insidious post-Cold War enemy is a

virus. AIDS, after all, actually does to the bloodstream what Commu-

nists and other radicals were once only rumored to do to the nation's

water supply. Its undiminished threat has made the connection between

sex and death, an eternal nexus of high culture, into a pop fixation, fi-

nally filtering down to the vocabulary of commercial images.

AIDS is not the first epidemic of modern times to find a reflection in

vampire literature and drama; the scourge of incurable SYPHILIS that cut a

wide swath through London in the 1890s left its shadow on the literary

conventions of Victorian vampirism: the obsession with blood contamina-

tion, the search for telltale lesions, the faith in antiscientific (read: quack)

cures, and the demonization of prostitutes. See also hom*osexuality.

Alabama's Ghost

Cinema, USA 1972. This blaxploitation flick, written and directed by

Frederic Hobbs, features a vampire rock band that hunts its prey on mo-

torcycles. With Lani Freeman, Pierre LePage, and the Turk Murphy Jazz

Band. (Ellman/Bremson International)

Alcoholism

Like creepy clockwork every Halloween, advertising agencies for major

beer, wine, and liquor companies invariably trundle out campaigns featur-

ing boozing vampires. "Welcome to our lite-mare" beckons a 1992 pro-

motion featuring a dissipated-looking Dracula and Draculette clutching

their cans of Miller and Miller Light in the window of a dank castle.

HURRY, sundown was the headline of a memorable Smirnoff's ad pushing

something called "The Vampire Gimlet." No doubt, the Bacardi Rum bat

logo has a certain subliminal significance for the seriously stewed. Just as

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 7

Halloween allows a ceremonial acknowledgment of antisocial impulses, so

too does holiday liquor advertising allow us a forbidden glimpse at the

dark side of drinking. Bloody Marys have long been a staple of vampire

humor, and characters like the eponymous antihero of Blacula (1972)

sometimes order the drink, if only to appear sociable.

The connection between vampirism and intemperate drinking predates

the modern media age by more than a century. Vampire historian Mon-

tague Summers cites the "frantic teetotal tract" Vampyre

(

"By the Wife of

a Medical Man"), published in 1858, and quotes the delirium ravings

of its central victim: "They fly—they bite—they suck my blood—I die.

That hideous 'Vampyre!' Its eyes pierce me thro'—they are red—they are

bloodshot. Tear it from my pillow. I dare not lie down. It bites—I die!

Give me brandy—brandy—more brandy."

A striking number of people creatively involved in major vampire films

and stories have histories of alcoholism, including director Tod Brown-

ing, actress Helen Chandler, producer Horace Liveright, actor Bela Lu-

gosi, and novelist Anne Rice. See also addiction; advertising.

Alucard

Dracula spelled backward. Originally the assumed name of the vampire

played by Lon Chaney, Jr., in Son of Dracula (1943), it was later

adopted by the character "Johnny Alucard" in Dracula A.D. 1972(1972).

"Lady Alucard" was the name of the female vampire portrayed by Betsy

Palmer in the stage play Countess Dracula! (1979). As the head of a

multinational corporation in the short-lived television program Dracula:

The Series, the vampire employed the name "Alexander Lucard." The use

of such an obvious pseudonym is usually evidence of the vampire's con-

tempt for the intelligence of the mortals with whom he or she must deal.

The contempt may be justified; audiences inevitably get the joke long be-

fore the slow-witted characters.

Alucarda

Cinema, Mexico 1975. Imagine the climax of Carrie if it had been set in a

convent instead of a public high school and you will have some idea of the

impressive fireworks that are to behold in this hard-to-find gem (the

American video title, if you can locate it, is Sisters of Satan). Alucarda is

the borderline-psycho ward of a Mexican nunnery, circa 1865, meaning,

8 David J. Skal

of course, that a load of hysterically repressed sexuality, much of it involv-

ing LESBIANISM, is about to go off like a powderkeg. Alucarda latches on to

Justine, a convent newcomer; they soon start poking around crypts, play-

ing with gypsy charms, and making blood vows. Soon they're spouting

blasphemy in the chapel and attending Satan in the nude. Following an

attempted exorcism, Justine dies and becomes a vampire who sleeps in a

coffin filled to overflowing with human blood. The production values and

photography are commendable; I particularly liked the stylized nun's

habits, resembling nothing so much as mummy wrappings. Screaming

continues at a fevered pitch through one grotesquely satisfying set piece

after another at ear-splitting frequencies; I had to turn down the volume

on my VCR in order not to freak the neighbors. Directed by Juan Lopez

Moctezuma; with Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, Claudio Brook, and

Adriana Roel. (Proa/Films 75/Yuma Films)

American Vampires

Nonfiction, USA 1989. Norine Dresser's entertaining overview of modern

vampire mania from a contemporary folklorist's perspective illuminates the

diverse means by which the vampire reinforces popular values—the quest

for eternal youth and sexual magnetism, the escape from ordinary respon-

sibility and social constraints, etc. "Vampires have magically bypassed the

struggles that Americans face on a daily basis," Dresser writes. American

Vampires was the first mainstream book to examine the growth of blood

fetishism as a distinct subculture in the 1980s, when, for the first time,

people who are sexually aroused by the sight or taste of human blood be-

gan to romanticize their practices with the trappings of vampire films and

stories. The book includes a lengthy discussion of the vampire image in

advertising, and many revealing anecdotes, perhaps most memorably

the story of a Florida middle school which was overtaken by vampire panic

in 1988 when twenty-five percent of the student body was kept home

by concerned parents on the day a suicidal girl was expected to return

from the grave as "Samantha the Vampire." Despite police presence, 225

sets of parents in Panama City, Florida, decided they weren't taking any

chances.

V IS FORVAMPIRE

Andy Warhol's Dracula

Cinema, Italy/France 1973. "My body can't take it anymore! The blood

of these whor*s is killing me!" Dracula has a problem. Changing sexual

mores in his homeland have depleted the supply of virgins, without whose

blood he cannot survive. In the mistaken belief that a Catholic country

like Italy will enforce chastity among its young women, the febrile count

(Udo Kier) migrates to a Mediterranean village where a family of down-

and-out aristocrats are all too eager to marry a daughter to an apparently

rich and dying degenerate. But when he nips their necks, their impurities

are revealed—Dracula suffers agonizing bouts of blood-vomiting. Warhol

superstar Joe Dallesandro is the handyman stud who services the daugh-

ters while lecturing the wheelchair-bound vampire with Marxist rants

delivered in deadpan Brooklynese. Kier plays Dracula like a young Peter

Lorre. Perhaps the most memorable sequence is the one which appears

under the opening titles, as the aged Dracula rejuvenates himself with

black hair dye, primping before a mirror like a drag queen, fangs discreetly

protruding through the lip gloss. The Andy Warhol title was concocted

for obvious marketing purposes in the United States; the title which actu-

ally appears on English-language prints of the

163

Vincent Price plays a vampire for laughs

on the 1 960s comedy series F Troop.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood

Movie Posters)

comedy The Monster Club. Price also

lent his talents to the hour-long British

documentary Vincent Price's Dracula

(1982), known in America as Drac-

ula—The Great Undead. In the late

1980s, Price was one of the few living

people I was able to find who had ever

socialized with Bram Stoker's formidable widow, Florence. While studying

art in London as a young man (before his theatrical career), Price was in-

vited for tea by Mrs. Stoker, and recounted his impressions for my book

Hollywood Gothic. See also television.

Prostitution

The image of the vampire frequently blurs with that of the prostitute

—

both, of course, are "creatures of the evening," stereotypically predatory,

and especially in Victorian times, dreaded vectors of syphilis, a then incur-

able disease, which, like AIDS (q.v.) today, powerfully fed the notion of

vampirism as a form of sexual contagion. Like the vampire, the prostitute

is often presented in art and literature as part of a misogynistic virgin/

whor* dualism. By the early twentieth century, the female vampire had

lost her supernatural trappings and was most often depicted as a semipros-

titute or golddigger, a persona most successfully exploited by the silent

film actress Theda Bara. A recent television movie about teenage prosti-

tutes was titled Children of the Night, inspired by a famous line from

the novel Dracula. See also Burne-Jones, Sir Philip.

Psychoanalysis

Today, it is almost a cliche to think of vampire stories in terms of their

heavy resonance with Freud's theories of sexual repression, displacement,

and hysteria, but aside from the instinctive, perhaps semiconscious connec-

tions made by certain filmmakers (in the work of director Tod Browning,

64 David J. Skal

for example, or in Garrett Fort's screenplay for Dracula's Daughter),

the issue was addressed only twice prior to 1960 by serious psychoanalytic

commentators: first by Ernest Jones in his 1931 study On the Nightmare,

and perhaps more influentially in terms of its impact on popular culture

criticism, by Maurice Richardson in his 1958 essay "The Psychoanalysis of

Ghost Stories," which focused particularly on Bram Stoker's Dracula.

This essay is the essential prototype of the virtual avalanche of Dracula crit-

icism that has followed, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. "The starting

point," writes Richardson, is

Freud's dictum that morbid dread always signifies repressed sexual

wishes. In vampirism they become plainly visible. Here we enter a twi-

light borderland, a sort of homicidal lunatic's brothel in a crypt, where

religious and psychopathological motives intermingle. Ambivalence is

the keynote. Death wishes all round exist side by side with the desire

for immortality. Frightful cruelty, aggression and greed is accompanied

by a madly possessive kind of love. Guilt is everywhere and deep. Be-

haviour smacks of the unconscious world of infantile sexuality with

what Freud called its polymorphous perverse tendencies. There is an

obvious fixation at the oral level, with all that sucking and biting, also a

generous allowance of anality. We are left in no doubt about the origin

of the frightful smell, compost of charnel house and cloaca, that at-

taches to the vampire.

Richardson memorably describes Dracula as "a kind of incestuous,

necrophilious, oral-anal-sad*stic all-in wrestling match. And this is what

gives the story its force."

Of course, Freud's theory of therapeutic transference is in itself a

pointed metaphor of vampirism—the absorption of essential psychic en-

ergy by a controlling (and sometimes literally mesmeric) authority figure.

I cannot count the number of times, following a media appearance or

speaking engagement, that someone has approached me to suggest that I,

or somebody, ought to write a story about a vampire psychiatrist. They

never hang around long enough for me to probe the specific source of

their suggestion, but I have little doubt that it resides in their own un-

pleasant encounters with the ample shadow-side of the modern thera-

peutic mythos.

;

Quarry, Robert

See Count Yorga, Vampire.

Queen of Blood

Cinema, USA 1966. Curtis Harrington's visually stylish exercise in low-

budget sci-fi horror has some fun moments, especially Florence Marly's

green-skinned, eyebrowless, beehive-hairdoed bloodsucker from space

(who has a pesky habit of laying eggs here, there, and everywhere). Basil

Rathbone, who hated being associated with horror movies, does not ap-

pear to be enjoying himself at all in the role of an earthbound scientist.

Queen of Blood:

Florence Marly at her

hideous, futuristic

repast. (Photofest)

1 66 David J. Skal

(He died the following year after appearing in the nadir-busting Hillbillys

in a Haunted House.) The film was written by Harrington around special-

effects footage producer Roger Corman acquired from a Soviet space film,

and completed for a reported $65,000. With John Saxon, Judi Meredith,

and Dennis Hopper. (American International)Y

Queen of the Damned

See Rice, Anne.

Rabid

Cinema, Canada 1976. Director David Cronenberg originally wanted Cissy

Spacek to star in this high-tech horror film about a runaway plastic surgery

experiment that mutates a young woman into a vampire who drinks blood

through a fanged suction-penis in her armpit. Cronenberg's producers,

however, insisted on p*rn queen Marilyn Chambers for the role. Rabid is

a bleak, disturbing picture that foreshadows Cronenberg's larger- budget

exercises in literalized metaphor

—

The Brood ( 1979), Scanners (1980), and

Videodrome (1982). The film's overall atmosphere of tightly controlled

chaos is uniquely Cronenbergian and still effective despite the limited bud-

get. Screenplay by Cronenberg. With Frank Moore, Joe Silver, and Howard

Ryshpan. (Cinema Entertainment Enterprises/DAL Productions)T

Rape

I recently gave a lecture on vampires and other monsters at Bryn Mawr

College, the academically acclaimed and politically sensitized women's

school which had coincidentally displayed, in the student lounge just

outside the room where I was delivering my talk, an extraordinary wall

of student clippings and commentary called "Rape Culture," including

everything from fashion photography to advertising slogans to hard-core

p*rn. But conspicuously absent from the display was even a single image

of a male vampire bending over his swooning female victim, despite the

fact that vampire imagery now amounts to one of our largest—and most

ambiguous—cultural repositories of violent sex fantasy. The Bryn Mawr

students responded well to my lecture, posing many intelligent ques-

tions, but curiously made no connection whatsoever between vampire

1 68 David J. Skal

Rape: Vampire

destruction as ritual

gang-bang. From

Dracula, Prince of

Darkness. (Photofest)

culture and rape culture, despite the almost ridiculously transparent sym-

bolism of the neck-penetrating bedroom-crasher as the modern dream

essence of sexual assault. It is no coincidence that vampire imagery and

rape awareness emerged as twin popular obsessions during the sexually

traumatic 1980s and 1990s, as the AIDS epidemic and a puritan back-

lash engendered a deep distrust and general fear of sexuality.

Rape is a real evil in the world, deserving of every statutory punish-

ment, but the current cultural fixation on rape goes far beyond criminal

definitions into a twilight zone of invasion/pollution/end-of-innocence

fantasies, with a heavy patina of gothic horror. A striking feature of rape-

crisis feminism is the resurrection of Victorian cliches about female sexu-

ality and male predation integral to the nineteenth-century vampire

mystique. The model of womanhood presented by rape-crisis media

stars like Catherine MacKinnon recalls the listless virgins of Victorian

horror fiction, relentlessly

stalked by thirsty male vampires and requir-

ing around-the-clock protection by reassuring authority figures who

provide wolfsbane in the form of censorship and repressive legislation.

This stunning retreat into sexless, doll-like passivity and the elevation

of victimization to an almost sacramental state is a striking reversal of

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 69

the women's movement's traditional emphasis on empowerment and

autonomy.

Since much of the current demonization of maleness is also tacitly les-

bian, many heterosexual women these days may feel culturally stranded

between the mutually unwelcome attentions of the chauvinist Dracula

and his Sapphic daughter ("I believe in equal rights for women—but I'm

not a feminist!"). The classic swoon of the vampire's victim represents a

loss of consciousness analogous to the missing reflection in the mirror: a

refusal to acknowledge or accept personal responsibility for one's sexuality

or its consequences. A recent New Yorker cartoon by Gahan Wilson picked

up the undercurrents of date rape and responsibility transference in the

vampiric encounter: in evident compliance with Antioch College's strin-

gently authoritarian sexual consent regulations, Dracula hesitates over his

intended victim

—"May I bite your neck?" he asks warily, and perhaps a

little wearily. See also AIDS; lesbianism.

Reflecting Skin, The

Cinema, Canada 1990. An extraordinary film by Philip Ridley about an

eight-year-old boy (Jeremy Cooper) who is convinced that a reclusive

widow neighbor (Lindsay Duncan) is a vampire. The film is set in the early

1950s, when Cooper's older brother (Viggo Mortensen) returns from

military duty, not knowing he has been poisoned by exposure to radiation

from nuclear tests. He falls in love with the widow, and the boy takes his

brother's wasting symptoms and hair loss as proof positive ofvampirism. A

stylishly produced, intelligent, and altogether original meditation on the

vampire theme. (Fugitive Films/Virgin/Live Entertainment)T

Renfield

"Rats! Rats! Rats!" The character of R. M. Renfield, the vampire's zoo-

phagous henchperson in the novel DRACULA, is best known to the public

through the persona of actor Dwight Frye, who made the role his own in

the 1931 film version of Bram Stoker's book. In the novel, Renfield was a

mental patient of about sixty, given to violent outbursts; in the 1922 film

Nosferatu, the character's name was changed to "Knock" and depicted

as a crazy old real estate agent whose appearance suggested a maniacal Dr.

Caligari. In the 1924 and 1927 stage versions by Hamilton Deane and

1 70 DavidJ. Skal

Bernard Jukes (center) as Renfield in the original

Broadway production of Dracula (Courtesy of Ronald V

Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

John L. Balderston, the character was recon- ^>

ceived as a scenery-chewing "repulsive youth."

For the 1931 Universal film, the character was

conflated with that of the novel's hero, Jonathan

Harker, enabling Renfield to travel to Transyl-

vania, returning to England under Dracula's ma-

lignant influence as the vampire's servant and

protector.

Renfield is arguably the showiest part in Drac-

ula adaptations, one always coveted by actors. It

is in Renfield that we see one of the book's major

themes personified—namely the Victorian era's

anxieties about Darwin's theory of evolution and a general cultural obses-

sion with the idea of degeneration. Renfield's mad desire to eat his way up

the evolutionary ladder—starting with flies and spiders, then rats, etc.

—

was enacted on stage by the British actor Bernard Jukes (d. 1939), who

played the role thousands of times in England and America (photos of

Jukes in the role are frequently misidentified as Dwight Frye). In Roger

Vadim's unproduced adaptation of Dracula, the Renfield part was imag-

inatively reinterpreted as a woman. Film director Joe Dante {Gremlins,

The Howling) calls his production company, based at Universal, "Renfield

Productions."

Return of Dracula, The

Cinema, USA 1 958. "I hope he likes cheese sauce and asparagus," says the

Carleton, California, housewife, who has no inkling that the man upstairs

posing as a political expatriate cousin is really Count Dracula. Nonethe-

less, she enjoys the idea of feeding him: "Why don't you go up and ask

Cousin Bellac if he wants some pie?" she asks a bit later, after he starts his

rampage. Actor Francis Lederer makes a smarmy vampire king who dis-

penses with the usual politeness vampires affect in these kind of films. The

dumb host family just chalks it up to cultural differences. This must be the

first film in which Dracula gets to ride in a convertible. For the original re-

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 7

lease, the black-and-white film contained a color insert of a stake being

driven through the heart of one of Dracula's female victims. Directed by

Paul Landres. Screenplay by Pat Fielder. With Norma Eberhardt, Ray

Stricklyn, and Jimmie Baird. (United Artists)

Return of the Vampire, The

Cinema, USA 1943. Actor Bela Lugosi could not convince Universal Pic-

tures to cast him as Dracula when the studio revived the character for

three films in the mid- 1940s, choosing Lon Chaney, Jr., and John Carra-

dine instead. But Columbia Pictures did not hesitate in contracting for

Lugosi's services for The Return of the Vampire. Universal refused permis-

sion for Columbia to use the word "Dracula" in the script, but could do

nothing about the fact that Lugosi in evening dress and an opera cloak

looked just like you-know-who. As the vampire Armand Tesla, Lugosi en-

tertained wartime audiences with a story set during the London blitz

—

Nazi bombs both open his grave and send him back to it again. Actress

Nina Foch, who made her film debut in The Return of the Vampire, re-

called in 1994 that her strongest impression of Lugosi during the produc-

tion was his breath reeking of sulfur water, a popular but odiferous health

tonic. One can see why Universal may have passed the actor over—he

looks puffy and aged, though his line readings are as priceless as ever.

-w As Tesla's werewolf assis-

' tant, Andreas, Matt Willis

(looking more like a Scot-

tish terrier than a wolf)

gives some of the stiffest

line readings you'll ever

encounter in a major stu-

dio film of the period. But

The Return of Dracula: Francis

Lederer travels to America in

his ingenious mobile home.

(Photofest)

1 72 David J. Skal

Nina Foch seems to smell the sulfur as Bela Lugosi

approaches in The Return of the Vampire.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

it's still a load of campy fun. Directed by Lew

Landers from a screenplay by Griffin Jay. With

Frieda Inescort, Miles Mander, and Ottola

Nesmith. (Columbia Pictures)^

Rice, Anne

The publishing world's reigning Queen of the

Night has reached the problematic stage in

her career where she can accommodate auto-

graph requests by limiting them to "signa-

tures only," as a sign at a recent bookstore appearance warned would-be

supplicants. Anne Rice is the most successful vampire novelist in history,

her total earnings undoubtedly eclipsing even a century's worth of Drac-

ULA's profits. I will, therefore, assume that any reader of V isfor Vampire

who has gotten this far is already fully, numbingly aware of Rice's undead

oeuvre—her "Vampire Chronicles" series of novels, Interview with the

Vampire (1976), Tlie Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned

(1988), The Tale of the Body Thief'(1992) and Memnoch the Devil (1995)—

and I therefore will be excused from encapsulating their plots in detail.

Suffice it to say that, following the first book, in which he appears as a sup-

porting character, "The Vampire Chronicles" is primarily concerned with

the unlife and times of Lestat de Lioncourt, otherwise known as the Vam-

pire Lestat, following his progress from eighteenth-century France to

nineteenth-century New Orleans to twentieth-century America. One of

the first book's most

compelling and memorable characters is a child vam-

pire named Claudia, unconsciously patterned (by the author's own later

acknowledgment) after Rice's first daughter, Michele, who died of leuke-

mia at the age of six. As a woman supernaturally imprisoned in a child's

body, Claudia uncannily anticipated the rise of "the inner child" concept

as an axiom of pop psychology in the 1980s and 1990s—a seething adult

sensibility stunted and immobilized by childhood abuse. All of Rice's

vampire books, in fact, tap deftly into various Zeitgeist motifs, which no

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 173

doubt accounts for their wide popularity. The growing visibility of hom*o-

SEXUALITY in culture during the 1980s and 1990s against the grim back-

drop of the AIDS (q.v.) epidemic is consciously transformed in Rice's

novels into a kind of supernaturalized male eroticism that survives death; it

should come as no surprise that Rice has a vast and devoted gay male read-

ership—not an insignificant market in literary publishing. (Lesbians, how-

ever, seem fairly indifferent to Rice; the introduction to a recent collection

of lesbian vampire stories, Daughters of Darkness, fails to mention her

even in passing in its introductory overview.)

The third book of the series, The Queen ofthe Damned, takes on radical

feminism, arguing to spare male sexuality from a final solution as a con-

clave of politically self-assured vampires gathers in a mountain retreat to

decide the fate of the world a la Atlas Shrugged. Like Ayn Rand, Rice is,

for a woman writer, rather extraordinarily preoccupied with male sexuality

and male prerogatives and privilege. A hypothetical leftist critique of Rice

might well accuse her of collaborationist tendencies, but no such screed

has yet appeared. It may be that Rice's simple power and visibility as an

icon of the successful "woman writer" somehow protects her against fem-

inist attack. For instance, when Rice publicly defended Brett Easton Ellis'

allegedly misogynist novel American Psycho from assaults by feminist cen-

sors, not a peep was raised against her. Nor has

Rice's sideline identity as the sadomasoch*stic

p*rnographer A. N. Roquelaure (The Claiming

of Sleeping Beauty, etc.) prompted any visible

feminist debate about the political implications of

eroticized sexual domination (see also rape).

jM^k Vampires, of course, have the uncanny ability

to deflect and displace and defang all kinds of

mfm^m scary sexual issues. Take, for instance, the striking

lm preponderance of obese women drawn to horror

^^^m^^m I literature, gothic music, and Anne Rice in partic-

f / ular. Don't take my word for it: check out the

The dust jacket of Katherine Ramsland'

biography, Prism of the Night.

(Courtesy of Dutton/Penguin USA)

1991

1 74 DavidJ. Skal

marathon- length lines for Rice's next autograph signing (or any other

"gothic" event) and come to your own conclusions about displaced oral

aggression, the relationship between vampirism and eating disorders, and

the curious gratification presumably straight women (commonly, if un-

charitably, known as "fa*g hags") derive from fantastically neutered depic-

tions of male-male sex. The plunging necklines and corpse-white makeup

these women typically affect for their moment of communion with Anne

Rice says it all: "I want to be sexual, but my sexuality is dead."

All this said, Interview with the Vampire is still one hell of a good read;

while more ambitious in scope, the three (so far) follow-ups each seemed

to take about a hundred pages to get rolling, as if the author was doing

finger exercises and her publisher was too intimidated by all the money

pouring in to even bring up the subject of editing. Rice rankles a lot of

critics with the trademark against-the-grain ripeness of her prose, but by

eschewing the fashionably anorectic style of much literary fiction today,

Rice (like Stephen King) manages to attract a silent majority readership

that may well avoid fiction approved by the critical establishment because

it seems, well, vampirized of texture, emotion, and color. The results, of-

fered to readers long starved for nourishment, can prove addictive. Hu-

morist Garrison Keillor produced an extremely funny 1994 Prairie Home

Companion skit about a man on a date with a woman who can't stop talk-

ing about her passion for Anne Rice (with inspired droning patter along

the lines of: "I know people say Anne Rice, vampires, ick, but I know if

they just read her books I know they wouldn't feel that way, I've read all

her books ten times, she's the only writer I even bother to read anymore,"

etc., etc., etc.).

Rice is the subject of an informative, though perhaps overly worshipful,

1991 biography by Katherine Ramsland, Prism of the Night. Ramsland's

book may well demonstrate some of the built-in dangers of authorized bi-

ographies, but its Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous emphasis on the details

of Rice's contracts, advances, and real estate acquisitions shows that Anne

Rice may have become herself embalmed in the vampire mystique. Her

enviable success and unimaginable earnings blur in the minds of her fans

with the vampire's traditional appeal as a symbol of power, privilege, and

transcendence—if not from literal mortality, then at least from the stag-

nant economic death-in-life that awaits more Americans than not at the

millennium.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 75

Robles, German

A foxy-faced Mexican actor, Robles became Mexico's answer to Bela Lu-

GOSI with his inspired impersonation of a caped, medallioned bloodsucker

in The Vampire (1958) and The Vampire's Coffin (1959), and related

roles in The Lurking Vampire (1960) and the vampirish camp classic

The Brainiac (1959). Evidently, he's still working. Has anyone seen him

recently?

"Room in the Tower, The"

Fiction, UK 1912. E. F. Benson's classic short story has been widely an-

thologized, and with good reason: its chilling evocation of the vampire's

primal roots in nightmares is almost without parallel in the horror genre.

A young man's recurrent, shape -shifting dream of being a house guest led

to a terrifying room in a tower leads to an unforgettable real-life encounter

with a female vampire. The story still has the power to induce gooseflesh

in broad daylight—trust me. Read it at night in an empty house at your

own peril. See also "Mrs. Amworth."

Ruthven, Lord

The seminal vampire in English literature, inspired by Lord Byron but re-

alized by Byron's physician John Polidori in his 1819 short story "The

Vampyre," Lord Ruthven (pronounced RUH-ven) is the very prototype

of Romantic male vampirism, his image of brooding seduction casting a

long shadow over nineteenth-century literature, opera, and THEATER.

When Bram Stoker penned his novel Dracula in 1897, he sought to

create a new kind ofvampire icon, more a literal than figurative lady-killer,

a repulsive creature who wasted no time with social niceties. Although

Stoker's novel has been one of the century's longest-running literary sen-

sations, Ruthven has nonetheless won out—almost all stage and film adap-

tations of Dracula have discarded Stoker's Darwinian animal and reached

back to Ruthven for their characterizations of the count. Ruthven has

more recently lent his name to the Lord Ruthven Assembly, a special in-

terest group of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts,

comprised of writers and academics with a special interest in revenant fig-

ures in literature and the arts.

"Sad Story of a Vampire, The"

Short Story, UK 1894. An evocative tale by Stanislaus Eric, Count Sten-

bock, "The Sad Story of a Vampire" might be considered a gay-pederast

counterpart to the protagonist of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire

story "Carmilla." Both are set in the literary vampireland of Styria

(where Bram Stoker, in fact, first intended to set his novel Dracula,

before settling on Transylvania). Stenbock introduces the mysterious

Count Vardalek, whose

attentions and kisses drain and destroy a beauti-

ful boy named Gabriel. The family is singularly obtuse and at no point

even questions why the count kisses the child on the mouth, feels his

pulse, somehow looks so much younger himself after spending time with

his youthful friend, etc. The story is an interesting demonstration ofhow

the denial or repression of hom*osexuality can rebound negatively as

vampire fantasy. See also lesbianism.

Sadomasochism

The sizable overlap between vampire fans and S & M aficionados is due in

no small part, I suspect, to Anne Rice's dual influence as best-selling vam-

pire author and best-selling sadomasoch*stic p*rnographer. S & M, often

romanticized by its practitioners as a renegade activity, is in reality a de-

pressingly status-quo fantasyland where real-world power imbalances are

erotically celebrated and thereby reinforced and perpetuated. But it's

probably not surprising, in this age of increasing economic disparities and

a creeping master-slave corporate ethos, that vampires and other ritual fig-

ures of domination/exploitation should be so culturally potent. See also

BLOOD FETISHISM; CLASS WARFARE.

1 78 David J. Skal

'Salem's Lot

Fiction, USA 1975. Owen Wister, the best-selling turn-of-the-century

novelist whose most famous book was The Virginian, announced about

1902 that he was writing an American vampire epic to rival Dracula.

Wister, of course, never wrote his book, and it was left to Stephen King to

finally exploit the Dracula formula in a completely American context. Like

Bram STOKER in 1897, King in 1975 introduced his undead evil into

a completely recognizable contemporary setting: in this case 'Salem's

(Jerusalem's) Lot, the postcard-perfect evocation of a classic small town in

New England. The book was adapted as a four-hour television movie in

1979, directed by Tobe Hooper and starring David Soul, James Mason,

Lance Kerwin, and Bonnie Bedelia. Paul Monash's script was fairly faithful

to the book, but opted to transform the main vampire, Barlow, from a

human-seeming antique dealer to an over-the-top NosFERATU-'mspircA

bogeyman.T

The book's cinematic ripples continued, less successfully, with Larry

Cohen's A Return to 'Salem's Lot (1987).

Satanic Rites of Dracula

Cinema, UK 1973. The Hammer series of Dracula films starring

Christopher Lee dead-ended in this strained studio attempt to prolong

the vampire's life. Peter CUSHING, as a descendant of the original vampire

hunter Abraham Van Helsing, exposes Dracula's updated identity as a

corporate tycoon dabbling in germ warfare. At the climax, tangled in a

vampire -repelling hawthorn bush, Lee sports a Christlike crown of thorns

and stigmatalike wounds—the kind of isolated, inspired detail that would

have been better used in a better picture. Directed by Alan Gibson from a

script by Dan Houghton. (Hammer/Warner Bros.)V

Scars of Dracula

Cinema, UK 1970. A one-shot attempt by Hammer Films to produce a

Dracula film with no story connection to the other Christopher Lee ve-

hicles. It seems a litrie beneath Dracula's dignity to see him flogging a ser-

vant or stabbing a victim with a knife, but Lee does what the script calls

for. Perhaps the most interesting historical point of Scars ofDracula is its

first time ever depiction of one of the most memorable scenes in Bram

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 79

Max Schreck, the original movie Dracula in Nosferatu,

seen here without his horrifying makeup.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

Stoker's novel—the sight of Dracula crawling

headfirst down the wall of his castle like a lizard

or a bat. Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Script

by John Elder. With Dennis Waterman, Jenny

Hanley, and Christopher Matthews. (Hammer/

MGM/EMI)T

Schreck, Max

German stage and screen actor, born in Berlin in

1879, Max Schreck is best known for his imper-

sonation of the unforgettably verminous Count

Orlock in F. W. Murnau's 1922 film classic

Nosferatu. Schreck—the name means "terror" in German—gave up con-

ventional business aspirations to train for the stage and was a member of

Max Reinhardt's celebrated repertory ensemble before entering films. He

continued working on stage and screen until the year of his death; his final

film was Die letzten Vier von Santa Cruz in 1936. He left a widow, the ac-

tress Fanny Normann. His name (which, despite its horror connotations,

was his real one) is occasionally appropriated, winkingly, for outlandish

characters in fantasy and horror films; most recently, Max Schreck was the

name of the slimy tycoon played by Christopher Walken in Tim Burton's

Batman Returns (1992)

Son of Dracula

Cinema, USA 1943. Lon Chaney, Sr., who died on the eve of being cast in

Universal's original Dracula, might well have made an unusual and in-

teresting vampire count, but his son Creighton, better known as Lon

Chaney, Jr., is excruciatingly miscast in this otherwise well-produced entry

in the wartime Universal horror cycle. As Count Alucard (yeah, groan;

but, hey, it was the first time) Chaney has a painted expression on his face

throughout most of the film, atmospherically photographed by George

Robinson, gifted cameraman of Universal's 1931 Spanish-language version

1 80 David J. Skal

Lon Chaney, Jr., and Louise Albritton in

Son of Dracula. (Photofest)

of Dracula, Dracula's Daughter

(1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939),

and many others. One of the eeriest se-

quences has Alucard standing in his

open coffin, which floats across a foggy

bayou toward his undead bride-to-be.

Directed by Robert Siodmak, from a

screenplay by Eric Taylor based on a

story by Curt Siodmak. With Louise

Albritton, George Irving, and Robert

Paige. ( Universal)

Stake, wooden

The classic instrument for destroying vampires is a stake, usually driven

through the heart. (A curious variation on the time-honored stake shows

up in the 1960 film Black Sunday, where a sharpened twig is used to

penetrate the vampire's eye.) On a literal level, the stake is a physical

means of pinning the vampire to its grave; on a more metaphorical

plane, the stake is an unmistakable phallic symbol which makes clear the

displaced, transformed sexuality of vampire beliefs in general. The vam-

pire, in other words, is a kind of symbolic sex itch that can be de-

stroyed/dispelled by a symbolic act of sexual penetration. If you're

having trouble with this kind of analysis, the next time you read Drac-

ula, try thinking of the band of vampire-killers as a Mad Hatter's party

of dangerously hysterical Victorian men, stalking their virginal prey with

croquet mallets and sharpened dild*s, and see if that doesn't make

things a tad more transparent.

Stoker, Bram

The world-famous author of Dracula remains a tantalizing enigma for

modern literary commentators—while Bram Stoker wrote voluminous

quantities of popular fiction (not to mention business correspondence), he

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 181

revealed almost nothing about his own personality or the thematic inten-

tions of his novels. His friend Hall Caine, himself a best-selling novelist, re-

called in 1912 the "big, breathless, impetuous hurricane of a man who was

Bram Stoker had no love of the limelight. . . . He took no vain view of his

efforts as an author." As his biographer Harry Ludlam put it, Stoker "shrank

from personal publicity as his vampire creation hid from the sun . .

Therefore, the writer has ended up a kind of blank canvas on to which crit-

ics (including this one) are tempted to project all manner of their own

obsessions.

As for the facts of Stoker's life, he was born in Dublin, Ireland, in

1847, the third of seven children, and suffered from a long, peculiar, and

possibly even hysterical paralysis which, by Stoker's account, left him com-

pletely bedridden until the age of seven (but somehow did nothing to

prevent him from developing later into an accomplished athlete). Stoker

was educated at Trinity College, was active in the Trinity

Philosophical

Society (where he sponsored the membership of his friend Oscar Wilde),

and became a devoted, public partisan of Walt Whitman, to whom he

wrote long, passionate missives: "How sweet a thing it is for a strong

healthy man with a woman's eyes and a child's wishes to feel he can speak

to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul."

Stoker's susceptibility to male charisma reached a climax in his profes-

sional association with the actor Henry Irving, who rescued him from

the life of a Dublin petty-clerk and part-time

theater critic, ensconcing him as second-in-

command of his company at the Royal Lyceum

Theatre in London. The critical moment be-

tween the men seems to have occurred in

1876 when Stoker, then twenty-eight years

old, had a hysterical fit following one of

living's intensely emotional dramatic recita-

tions. The actor likely sensed that Stoker's

rapt response to his art, coupled with his love

of the theater and general business acumen,

would be useful in helping establish his the-

Bram Stoker

1 82 DavidJ. Skal

atrical dominion over London. Stoker devoted his life to Irving for three

decades, writing melodramatic fiction as a sideline; Hall Caine later wrote

that "I say without hesitation that never have I seen, never do I expect to

see, such absorption of one man's life in the life of another . . . with living's

life, poor Bram's had really ended." The vampirelike dynamics of Stoker's

relationship with Irving have been widely commented upon as having in-

fluenced the composition of Dracula; indeed, Stoker himself revealed to a

Chicago theater critic at the turn of the century that he intended Dracula

as a composite of Irving characterizations and tried vainly to convince the

actor to play the role on stage. (One wonders whether Stoker would have

liked to appear on stage with him, and whether he would be most drawn

to the role of Renfield, Jonathan Harker, or the vampire-destroyer

Abraham—the full form of "Bram"

—

Van Helsing.) Though snubbed by

Irving as a theater vehicle, Dracula found a wide popular audience and is

the only one of Stoker's books to have remained steadily in print. But his

royalties could not really sustain him after Irving's death in 1906 and the

dissolution of the Lyceum company. Stoker died, semi-impoverished, six

years after Irving; his death certificate lists the main cause of death as "lo-

comotor ataxia," a polite medical description of tertiary syphilis. Stoker's

second biographer (and great-nephew) Daniel Farson caused some con-

sternation among Stoker's descendants with this revelation, and his specu-

lation that the infection was contracted from a prostitute.

Farson didn't, however, speculate on the putative prostitute's sex. For

a long time, even after some groundbreaking psychoanalytic criticism be-

ginning in the 1950s, critics approached Stoker's imagination with the

strictest heterosexual presumptions—odd, indeed, for a subject so thor-

oughly consumed by the theater, so enamored of Walt Whitman, and

whose life was tangled with personal and professional connections, paral-

lels, and rivalries to Oscar Wilde (see my book Hollywood Gothic for their

complete enumeration). Stoker had, by some accounts, a cold and ulti-

mately sexless marriage to Wilde's former female heartthrob, and one

must wonder about the degree to which his fascination with her over-

lapped with a fascination for Wilde himself (see Stoker, Florence).

Dracula, at the very least, evinces an explosive hatred of anything but a

theatrically decorative female sexuality; the real business in the story is by,

for, and among the men, who use women's bodies as a kind of glory-hole

graveyard wall for their essentially male-male transactions and transfusions.

(It is perhaps significant that the single, outstanding line of dialogue Stoker

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 8 3

set down in his initial working notes for Dracula was "This man is mine!")

A turning point in Dracula criticism occurred in 1984 with the publica-

tion of Christopher Craft's essay "Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender

and Inversion in Dracula" wherein the author brilliantly argued that the

surface heterosexuality of the novel was indeed but a veneer. After Drac-

ula\ publication, Wilde's friend and once-lover Robert Ross named his

London showcase for hom*osexual artists the Carfax Gallery—the only

artistic appropriation of the name "Carfax" in late Victorian London other

than one of Dracula's English haunts in Stoker's novel. Raymond Hunt-

ley, the English actor who most successfully played Dracula in England

and America, eclipsing even Bela Lugosi's total number of performances

during the 1920s, told me in 1989, with one eyebrow raised, that it was

"news to me that Bram Stoker had ever married," when I brought up the

subject of his wife Florence. Huntley died shortly afterward, before the

possible implications of his comment had dawned on me. But Huntley's

association with Dracula began only a dozen years after Stoker's death,

when the author's memory would have been still quite alive in theatrical

London. (In contemporary terms, the burly, bearded Bram is the perfect

physical embodiment of the modern hom*osexual type known as a "bear";

I don't, however, know whether London's "Uranian" circles of the 1890s

compartmentalized men quite so strictly.)

While finishing Hollywood Gothic, I spent several frustrating months

trying to verify a story that had originated in a prominent gay Hollywood

circle; namely, that Stoker, during one of his last American tours with the

Lyceum company (during which he kept discreetly separate lodgings),

had become infatuated with the youngest son of a prominent American

theatrical family, much to the family's horror. Did the young actor re-

ciprocate the older man's attentions? If he did, were the later infant

deaths of not one but two of the actor's children and his own later pa-

ralysis related in any way to the syphilis that likely killed Stoker? Had his

legendary actress sister, in a fatally misguided effort to promote the

young man's theatrical career, unwittingly pimped her baby brother to

Dracula? The story got nuttier and nuttier as I pursued it, and I was never

able to conclusively place the men together (or, for that matter, apart).

But whether or not the story is true is almost beside the real point:

Stoker's literary imagination, epitomized in Dracula but palpable in

other works as well, is a bleeding bottomless pit of bisexual ambivalence.

The "truth" of this material is likely beyond the purview and discipline of

1 84 DavidJ. Skal

documentablc biography . . . but just think what a film director like Ken

Russell could do with it.

Stoker, Florence

The beautiful, real-life bride of Dracula was Florence Anne Lemon Bal-

combe of Clontarf, Dublin, who discouraged the romantic attentions of a

near-penniless Oscar Wilde and waited instead for a proposal from Os-

car's Trinity College friend Bram STOKER, who was simultaneously plan-

ning a professional elopement with the actor Henry Irving. Florence

seems to have been a most decorative society hostess and a distinct asset to

Stoker's social climbing (as was he to hers), but most biographical ac-

counts of her are cold and unflattering. Daniel Farson, in The Man Who

Wrote Dracula, describes her as frigid, so repulsed by sex after giving birth

to her only child that she may have driven Bram into the arms of the extra-

marital SYPHILIS that killed him. In Harry Ludlam's early book, A Biogra-

phy ofDracula: The Life Story ofBram Stoker, written in cooperation with

the Stokers' son Noel, she never emerges as more than a walk-on, her

striking absence from the narrative perhaps reflecting the quality of her re-

lationship with her only child. My own delving into Florence Stoker's life

began with her obsessive, eight-year-long legal battle to suppress and de-

stroy all prints and negatives of the 1922 German

film Nosferatu—a pla-

giarized adaptation of her husband's book, the unpredictable royalties of

which had become very nearly her only source of income. The single-

minded, take-no-prisoners ferocity of her attack on the celluloid vampire

may, in retrospect, speak volumes about the fanged she-demons Bram

Stoker perceived lurking behind demure Victorian femininity. The late Vin-

cent Price, who met Mrs. Stoker in 1935, told me she was "still quite beau-

tiful" in her old age. Good bone structure may have had something to do

with it, but given the centrality of vampires in Florence Stoker's later life,

one must wonder about more supernatural forms of preservation as well!

Subspecies

Cinema, USA/Romania 1990. The first feature film shot in Romania after

the downfall of Nikolai "Dracula" Ceaucescu was, appropriately, a vampire

picture. Subspecies is distinguished by some evocative location photography

which gives the impression of a much bigger budget, and some wonderful

NosferaTV- style slithering-shadow visuals. But the good vampire/bad

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 185

vampire dialectic has been cropping up too frequently elsewhere in recent

years to seem at all fresh. The "subspecies" themselves—unintentionally

whimsical stop-motion imps who guard a powerful "bloodstone"—seem

grafted on from some other movie. Directed by Ted Nicolaou. Script by

Jackson Barr and David Pabian. With Michael Watson, Laura Tate, and

Anders Hove. (Full Moon Entertainment/Paramount Home Video)T

Succubus

The female equivalent of the INCUBUS, a sexually draining night-demon

that is a prototype of the modern vampire. The word never fails to get a

titter out of audiences, no doubt because it starts out with a hom*ophone

for "suck."

Summers, Montague

An English scholar (1880-1947), Montague Summers was best known for

his groundbreaking book-length histories of vampires, werewolves, and

witchcraft. Although their overall reliability is a bit questionable (they

sometimes strive to impress with big chunks of untranslated Latin, etc.),

The Vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928) and The

Vampire in Europe (1929) are often reprinted

and are still frequently cited for their detailed

accounts of eighteenth-century vampire hysteria

(which he treats as fact, not superstition). Sum-

mers affected clerical robes and attitudes, but

does not seem to have ever gotten further than a

deaconship, possibly because of his membership

in the quasi-Masonic circle ofVictorian hom*osex-

uals known as the Order of Chaeronea. Summers,

therefore, provides yet another link in the histori-

cal, thematic correspondence between vampires

and hom*oSEXUALITY.

Montague Summers.

1 86 David J. Skal

Syphilis

The venereal scourge of Victorian times, syphilis was the AIDS epidemic

of its time and, like AIDS, fueled much of the era's fascination with vam-

pires and dangerous, fatal sexuality. A story like DRACULA can be read as

an almost transparent syphilis parable; its images of wanton women, con-

taminated blood, telltale skin lesions, and pseudoscientific "cures" res-

onating powerfully with widespread panic about sexual contagion, the

demonization of prostitutes, and the attendant rise of blood -purifying

quack doctors. One of Draculpfs more memorable scenes, in which the

men take turns transfusing the vampire -tainted Lucy Westenra, is a ritual

enactment of the anxiety described by Elaine Showalter in her pertinent

book Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Steele: "The pros-

titute's body was the vessel in which men discharged and mingled pollut-

ing fluids . . . hostility toward the prostitute could be generalized to apply

to all women." Lucy's transfusions are significantly followed by savage

hostility meted out by the same group of men: a sexually charged mutila-

tion by hammer, stake, and knife as overwrought as any of Jack the Rip-

per's prostitute predations. (One theory of the Ripper's crimes suggested

that the killer himself had contracted syphilis from a prostitute.) It is es-

pecially fascinating that a straightforward dramatic treatment of syphilis,

such as Ibsen's Ghosts (1891), met with public outrage over its suppos-

edly indecent subject matter, but the same theme, veiled only slightly by

penny-dreadful fantasy trappings, was considered harmless popular enter-

tainment. See also prostitution.

Tale of a Vampire

Cinema, UK/Japan 1992. All those undead overtones in Edgar Allan

Poe's stories and poems about necrophilish lady-loves are stylishly recy-

cled into a thoroughly modern melodrama with Poe himself as a vampire

in search of his reincarnated love. (Since the character finally revealed to

be Poe doesn't resemble him in the slightest, I'm not really giving away

much here.) Julian Sands turns in his usual, dependably geeky perfor-

mance; the neck-guzzling is so convincingly simulated that the film teeters

at the edge of being p*rn for the hardcore blood fetishism crowd. Instead

of a coffin, the vampire favors an ornate, gauze-draped bed. Shimako Sato

directed his feature debut, coscripting with Jane Corbett. With Suzanne

Hamilton and Kenneth Cranham. (Tsiuburaya Eizo/State Screen)T

Tale of the Body Thief, The

See Rice, Anne.

Taste the Blood of Dracula

Cinema, UK 1969. "You

—

you drink the filth!" Lines like that make Taste

the Blood ofDracula especially wonderful. A group of hypocritical Victorian

men—the kind who hold their wives and daughters to all manner of strait-

laced regulations while spending all their own spare time sniffing around

brothels—seek out increasingly kinky kicks and end up devil-worshiping,

playing games with Dracula's cape and a packet of his powdered blood, with

the results you'd expect. The most egregiously overprotected daughter gets

to ram a stake through her father's heart before it's all over, and you'll

cheer, too. Directed by Peter Sasdy; screenplay by Anthony Hickox and

188 DavidJ.Skal

John Burgess. With Geoffrey Keen, Gwen Watford, Linda Hayden, and

Peter Sallis. (Hammer/Warner Bros.)T

Television

The great technological vampire of modern times, television rests in a box

and is especially active at night, when it mesmerizes us with a baleful gaze.

Like a vampiric encounter, television is about living vicariously in a dead-

ened trance state. In his against- the -grain book, Four Arguments for the

Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander lists typical phrases used by

Americans to describe their relationships with the tube: "I feel hypno-

tized," "Television sucks my energy," "My kids look like zombies when

they're watching it." Recalling his own experiences, the former advertising

executive wrote,

Even if the program I'd been watching had been of some particular

interest, the experience felt "antilife," as though I'd been drained in

some way, or I'd been used. I came away feeling a kind of internal

deadening, as ifmy whole physical being had gone dormant, the victim

of a vague soft assault. The longer I watched, the worse I'd feel. After-

ward, there was nearly always the desire to go outdoors or go to sleep,

to recover my strength and my feelings.

In the early 1950s, as television invaded America the way Dracula

wished he could have invaded England, vampires of the bloodsucking vari-

ety began to turn up regularly on ^^ggp

the airwaves, like sprites or famil-

iars. The original television horror

movie hostess was Vampira, whose

cartoony persona kept her fans

glued to their sets. Bela Lugosi

himself appeared on You Asked for

It at the request of a California

Denholm Elliott displays his wares in the

1969 BBC adaptation of Dracula.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 89

Bob Denver on Gilligan's Island. Tiny Tim on Love, American Style

housewife—for whom newfangled television, perhaps, awakened a nostal-

gia for low-tech leeching of the Lugosi kind. Dracula itselfwas produced

as an NBC Matinee Theater episode starring John Carradine as the count.

I have already recounted my own memories of Durward

Kirby and Carol

Burnett bringing vampires into the homes of millions via The Garry Moore

Show in the introduction to this book. In the 1960s, The Munsters comedy

series featured a half-vampire family of prime-time monsters, and home-

makers with nothing better to do weekday afternoons began to eagerly con-

sume images of living death on ABC-TV's Dark Shadows. Popular sixties

series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, and F Troop found ways

to feature vampires—even Gilligan's Island's Bob Denver found an excuse

to don a cape and widow's peak.

By the 1970s, vampires were appearing everywhere: the excellent tele-

vision appendix to Stephen Jones' The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide

lists over forty entries for the seventies alone. The most influential pro-

duction of this period was probably ABC's vampire-in-Vegas-themed

The Night Stalker ( 1971 ), which broke all ratings records for a made-for-

television movie when it first aired. The Night Stalker spun off a series,

1 90 David J. Skal

Ben Cross the Dark Shadows

revival. (Photofest)

and in 1974, a second TV vampire fea-

ture. Notable tele-vampires of the eighties

and nineties include the TV movie Nick

Knight (1989) and its spin-off series For-

ever Knight (1992), the Nightmare Clas-

sics adaptation of "Carmilla" (1989), the

made-for-cable horror comedy Nightlife

(1989)—in which Ben Cross' vampire role

seems to have had something with his be-

ing cast as Barnabas Collins in NBC's ill-

fated 1990 revival of Dark Shadows—and

the BBC's clever updating of Marschner's

1827 OPERA Der Vamfyr as The Vampyr:

A Soap Opera (1992).

Theater

Since the Romantic ferment of the early 1800s, the vampire has been dear

to the heart of theatrical melodrama; John Polidori's 1819 story "The

Vampyre" inspired at least seven stage adaptations and two operas during

the 1800s. The first and most influential was Le Vampire (1820), by the

French Romantic writer Charles Nodier, which was reworked in English

by James Robinson Planche as The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles

(1820). Two Parisian burlesques of Nodier, one by Martinet and the

other by Scribe and Melesville, also appeared in 1820, creating a virtual

vampire mania on the Parisian stage. (Readers ofAnne RlCE will recognize

here the seeds of one of her most memorable settings, Le Theatre des

Vampires, wherein vampires like Lestat present themselves semi-openly to

postrevolutionary Parisian audiences as metaphors for aristocratic oppres-

sion.) Other vampire dramas and farces of this period include Les Trois

Vampires ou le clair de lune (1820) by Brazier, Gabriel and Armand;

Cadet Buiteux, vampire (1820) by Desaugiers; and George Blink's The

Vampire Bride, or the Tenant ofthe Tomb (c. 1820).

VIS FOR VAMPIRE 191

The basic Polidori/Nodier plot was adapted and revived in France and

England in 1851 by Alexandre Dumas and Dion BouciCAULT, respec-

tively; Boucicault later shortened his play and toured it to America as The

Phantom (1856). But aside from occasional revivals, new vampires were

largely absent from the stage until Hamilton Deane's 1924 stage adapta-

tion of Dracula, later rewritten for American audiences by John L.

Balderston. Dracula: The Vampire Play was an enormous transatlantic

success; adapted to the Cinema in 1931, it inaugurated the modern hor-

ror film—a vast, influential genre. The bulk ofvampire theater since has, in

fact, been Dracula-derived., in addition to the Deane/Balderston script,

there are dozens of alternate adaptations now available. One, Count Drac-

ula by Ted Tiller, enjoyed a great popularity in American regional theaters

in the 1970s. The 1977 Broadway revival of the Deane/Balderston play,

with whimsical sets by Edward Gorey and a commanding title perfor-

mance by Frank Langella, was the most successful and lucrative vampire

event ever mounted in the theater. More recent efforts, such as Charles

Busch's Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985), tend to be campy comedies.

Beginning in 1993, a Grand-Guignolesque series of kinky, in-your-face

vampire playlets were presented to overflowing midnight audiences by a

New York company called the Commedia del Sangue. See also cloaks

and capes; Countess Dracula; Dracula: A Musical Nightmare;

Dracula: A Pain in the Neck; Huntley, Raymond; Lugosi, Bela;

Opera.

To Sleep with a Vampire

See Dance of the Damned.

"Transfer, The"

Short story, UK 1912. Algernon Blackwood's imaginatively original story

features not one but two "vampires"—the first, a psychic sponge named

Mr. Frene:

... a man who drooped alone, but grew vital in a crowd . . . He vam-

pired, unknowingly, no doubt, everyone with whom he came in con-

tact; left them exhausted, tired, listless ... he took your ideas, your

strength, your very words, and later used them for his own benefit and

aggrandizement. Not evilly, of course; the man was good enough; but

Dorothy Peterson and Terrence Neill

the original Broadway production of

Daniel Day Lewis in Chris Bond's stag*

adaptation of Dracula.

*P5^s^^"

Christopher Birnau in The

La Commedia del Sangue:

Shaunte Dawn Steele and Troy Ac

>: Tina Colui

David Wurst and Bonnie Mcleod in Ohio

Iniversity's 1971 production of Dr

(Courtesy of Ohio University Archi

1 94 DavidJ. Skal

you felt he was dangerous owing to the facile way he absorbed into

himself all loose vitality that was to be had. His eyes and voice and

presence devitalized you. Life, it seemed, not highly organized enough

to resist, must shrink from his too near approach and hide away for fear

of being appropriated, for fear, that is, of—death.

Mr. Frene's rival vampire and comeuppance is a barren patch of earth

in an old rose garden, itself hungry for vitality. When Mr. Frene strays too

close, the starved earth devours him and is transformed into a lush and

verdant plot, "very strong, full-fed, and bursting thick with life." Black-

wood's story resonates by its identification of the vampire with identifiably

predatory aspects ofhuman psychology and the larger, devouring image of

nature and its cruel and inescapable interdependencies.

Transylvania

Its name meaning "across the forest," Transylvania is now one of the ma-

jor regions of Romania, formerly of Hungary. Bram Stoker, in research-

ing his novel Dracula, apparently drew upon folklorist Emily Gerard's

1888 book The Land Beyond the Forest in selecting Transylvania as the

home of his vampire warlord (see also Nosferatu). (During Stoker's

time, Transylvania was a Hungarian province; Dracula, in fact, refers to

himself at one point as a Szekeley, even though the name "Dracula" is Ro-

manian in origin—see Vlad THE IMPALER.) At some point in Dracula' s

composition, Stoker switched the name of Dracula's homeland from his

earlier choice, Styria—an old region of Austria that had previously been

the setting of Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" and Stenbock's "Sad

Story of a Vampire." The word "Transylvania" is certainly the better

choice: the region's name connotes the sense of a journey, transition, or

initiation involving a descent into, or encounter with, wildness. In the past

century, of course, Transylvania has become a pop culture dumping

ground for just about every monster under the sun—not just vampires,

but just as frequently Frankensteins, mummies, werewolves, etc. The lo-

cale is, nowadays, typically evoked for comedy, as in the movie spoof titles

Transylvania Twist (1989) and Transylvania 6-5000 (1985).

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 95

Twins of Evil

Cinema, UK 1971. Hammer's final installment of its three-part exploration

of the "Carmilla" story, previously including The Vampire Lovers (1970)

and Lust for A Vampire (1970) . This film continues Hammer's exploita-

tion of LESBIANISM as a profitable horror formula and mixes vampire con-

ventions with the trappings of Puritan witch hysteria. Peter Cusheng is

memorable as the hypocritical witch-finder, Gustav Weil, whose pious fa-

naticism thinly covers his own, nonsupernatural

form of bloodlust. John

Hough directed Anthony Tudor's screenplay. With Madeleine and Mary

Collinson (as the twins), Kathleen Byron, and Dennis Price. (Hammer/

Universal)T

Uncle Was a Vampire

Cinema, Italy 1959. I am mentioning this film for two reasons: first, it

features actor Christopher Lee in a DRACULA-parodying role; and second,

because there is nothing else to fill out this alphabetical listing. The ori-

ginal title of this film was Hard Times for Vampires, which pretty much

sums up the letter U—and the film itself. Directed by "Steno" (Stefano

Venzina) from a script by Edoardo Anton, Dino Verde, and Alessandro

Continenza. With Renato Rascel as the nephew. (Maxima Film/Cei Incom/

Montflour Film)

Valley of the Zombies

Cinema, USA 1946. The most interesting thing about this cheapie is the

presence of actor Ian Keith as a vampire named Ormand Murks, who takes

the blood of his victims—and then thoughtfully replaces it with embalm-

ing fluid. Keith lost out at the eleventh hour to Bela Lugosi for the role of

Dracula not once but twice—in both Tod Browning's 1931 film as well

as the 1948 comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Keith,

well known for his Shakespearean stage roles, here demonstrates some

eye-popping histrionics (aided by shameless under- the -chin lighting). If

you squint, you might get a murky approximation of the Dracula-that-

almost-was. Anticlimactically, it takes but a normal bullet to dispatch him.

Directed by Philip Ford. Screenplay by D. McGowan and Stuart Mac-

Gowan. With Robert Livingston, Adrian Booth, and Thomas Jackson.

(Republic Pictures)

Vamp

Cinema, USA 1986. Amazonian disco diva Grace Jones embodies vora-

cious, phallic femininity that nerdy college guys find both scary and hot

—

all the hotter because of the scariness. A trio of frat brothers go to the big

city looking for a stripper to bring back for a campus party. They find

Jones instead, a zillion-year-old Egyptian vampire who has party ideas all

her own. For a formula teen comedy, this is pretty passable. Directed by

Richard Wenk, from his own screenplay based on a story by Donald P.

Borchers. With Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, and Gedde

Watanabe. (Balcor Films/New World Pictures)T

200 David J. Skal

Maila Nurmi reprised her "Vampira"

characterization in Plan Nine from

Outer Space (1959), the celebrated

"worst movie of all time."

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/

Hollywood Movie Posters).

Vampira

The original television horror host-

ess, Vampira slinked her way into

cult-camp legend with her Charles

Addams-inspired persona and pat-

ter that struck a morbid chord for

Southern California audiences in

1954. Vampira was played by actress/model Maila Nurmi (niece of the

famed Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi), a wasp-waisted beauty who provided

corny commentary during commercial breaks in grade-Z (as opposed to

B) horror movies, a formula later widely imitated by television stations

across the country. Vampira's fame got a grim boost following the death

of her friend James Dean—scandal magazines absurdly painted her as

Dean's "Black Madonna," who dabbled in witchcraft and hexes and some-

how contributed to Dean's untimely demise. But Vampira's greatest pub-

lic exposure was to come from a most unlikely place: her mute appearance

in a film by Edward D. Wood, Jr., Plan Ninefrom Outer Space (1959), a

movie so dreadful that it has achieved a paradoxical pop culture immortal-

ity. Famed for her reclusiveness, Vampira came out of retirement in the

1980s for a legal battle with TV horror hostess Elvira over alleged in-

fringement, pointing out similarities between the characters. Rather than

accept a settlement that would have relinquished all rights to the Vampira

character, Nurmi dropped her suit. In the 1988 film Midnight, Lynn

Redgrave played a television personality based loosely on Vampira; the

character (played by Lisa Marie) was directiy resurrected by filmmaker Tim

Burton for his 1994 extravaganza Ed Wood. See also television.

Vampire

The word vampire (or vampyre) entered the English language in 1732, ac-

cording to The Oxford English Dictionary, perhaps derived from the Turkish

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 20

word for witch, uber, and transformed in Slavic languages as upior, upir,

upyr, and, penultimately, vampyr and vampir. Matthew Bunson, author of

The Vampire Encyclopedia, suggests that another source may have been

the Lithuanian wempti—"to drink."

Vampire, The

Cinema, Mexico 1957. A lovingly wonderful fifties update on the Universal-

style vampires of the thirties and forties, right down to the widow's peak,

cape, and hypnotic medallion sported by Mexican actor German Robles as

Count Lavud, whose corny bat transformations, accomplished with the

simplest reverse -angle editing, are indescribably delightful in their low-tech

inventiveness (and bring to mind all the opportunities for childish wonder

and belief-suspension that make movies so attractive in the first place). Fer-

nando Mendez directed. Screenplay by H. Rodriquez and Ramon Obon.

With Ariadna Welter, Abel Salazar, and July Danery. Rosario Solano's cob-

web-sensitive cinematography deserves special commendation. The film

was followed within a year by an equally entertaining sequel, The Vampire's

Coffin. (Salazar/Cinematografica ABSA/American International)

Vampire and the Ballerina, The

Cinema, Italy 1960. You won't believe the "rehearsals" that transpire

when a troupe of showgirls are billeted in a vampire's castle, surely the

nuttiest fantasy on dance training outside of Dario Argento's Suspiria

(1977). We never see the actual performance, just the jazzercise warmups

—

but the dead remain cool to the come-ons. There's a nifty sex-reversal of

Bela LUGOSl's classic staircase bit when the visitors encounter an undead

countess, and the climactic sunrise vampire meltdown is heavily influenced

by Horror of Dracula (1958). The film contains some truly insane mo-

ments (such as a vampire who apparently infects a female victim just so he

can have someone to stake), and the papier-mache mask of the main villain

is one of the most unconvincing vampire visages ever devised for human

consumption. All in all, a film that expects you to be in, well, the proper

mood. It also amounts to a kind of deja-vu bookend for The Playgirls

and the Vampire, which also featured two of its lead performers. Directed

by Renato Polselli. Script by Polselli and Ernesto Gastaldi. With Walter

Brandi, Maria Luisa Rolando, and Helene Remy. (ACIF Consorzio/

United Artists)

202 DavidJ. Skal

Vampire at Midnight

Cinema, USA 1987. It had to happen—psychobabble goes gothic! Imag-

ine a vampire shrink insisting he is "empowering" his victims to "break

through limits" and insisting on their "capacity to change." The ambience

is, ahem, drop-dead chic—instead of coffins, we get high-tech sculptural

black pallets surrounded by incense burners and bubble lights. This stuff is

smart and funny, and speaks volumes about the malignant undercurrents

of pop psychology and therapeutic predation. Directed by Gregory Mc-

Clatchy. Screenplay by Dulany Ross Clements. With Jason Williams, Gus-

tav Vintas, and Lesley Milne. (Key Video/Skouras International)

Vampire Bat, The

Cinema, USA 1933. The low- budget outfit Majestic Pictures filmed this

little charmer on the Universal backlot, and ifyou listen carefully, you will

hear at least three soundtrack bites from UniversaPs Dracula and

Frankenstein—a wolf, dogs, carriage sounds, etc. Dwight Frye, Dracula's

memorable Mr. Renfield, here pushes the Renfield bit over the top as

Herman Gleib, a village halfwit scapegoated by the locals for the actual

blood -crimes of Dr. Otto van Niemann (Lionel Atwill). Fay Wray is the

female lead, though she doesn't display anywhere the lung-power she

brought to bear on King Kong and Mystery

of the Wax Museum. And while you listen

to the burgomeister (Lionel Belmore) wax

rhapsodic

on vampire lore, ponder the fact

that Belmore himself once had a wonder-

fully direct connection to the most famous

vampire promulgator of all time—while a

member of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre

company, Belmore had his paychecks signed

by none other than Irving's devoted man-

ager, Dracula's creator, Bram STOKER. With

Melvyn Douglas and Maude Eburne. Di-

rected by Frank Strayer. (Majestic Pictures)T

The Vampire Bat: Advertising art for the 1933 filn

LIONEL /

ATWILL /

fAYWRAYV

MtlVIN DOUGLM

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 203

Vampire Circus

Cinema, UK 1971. The Circus of Nights comes to town, but the townsfolk

are incredibly stupid—they keep coming back night after night to watch

circus performers turning literally into (acro)bats and were-panthers, but

somehow never connect this to the blood plague that is destroying their

village. Vampire Circus nonetheless conjures evocative metaphors of vam-

pirism as a dark carnival, alternately a kingdom of terror and a realm of

gaudy fascination. Directed by Robert Young. Screenplay by Judson Kin-

berg from a story by George Baxt and Wilbur Stark. With Adrienne Corri,

Laurence Payne, and Thorley Walters. (Hammer Films)T

Vampire Hunter D

Cinema, Japan 1985. Futuristic horror with all manner of graphic grue-

someness, and a mysterious vampire bounty hunter in the impassive, Clint

Eastwood mold. Definitely worth a look, especially ifyou haven't been ex-

posed to the stylized charms of Japanese animation. This ain't Count

Duckula. Directed by Tayoo Ashida. (Epic/Sony/Streamline Pictures)

Vampire in Brooklyn

Cinema, USA 1995. The less said about this the better. Released within a

few weeks of another lame spoof, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Vam-

pire in Brooklyn demonstrates that some ideas ought to stay buried. Di-

rected by Wes Craven from a screenplay by Charles Murphy, Michael

Lucker, and Chris Parker. With Angela Bassett, Allen Payne, Kadeem

Hardison, and Zakes Mokae. (Paramount) T

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom

Theater, USA 1 985. Vampires are known for longevity, as playwright/per-

former Charles Busch proved with this cult comedy classic, which ran for

years off-Broadway. Two rival succubi of antiquity (one originally played

by Busch) set up shop in Hollywood, chewing necks and scenery in the

best drac-queen tradition. La Condesa, the elder succubus, shows off

Busch's peerless flair for bitchery in a characteristic speech:

Now you've really gone too far. You imagine yourself quite the cunning

vixen. You have delusions that you can conquer me. Hollywood is my

204 DavidJ. Skal

town. For centuries, you have been an albatross around my neck. . . .

did I chose revenge? No. And why? because I am a great lady. I conduct

myself with dignity and grandeur whilst you roll in the gutter. You've

got as much glamour as a common street whor*, and now, madame,

you have gone too far. I am the queen of the vampires and I shall never,

never, relinquish my hold on Hollywood!

" 'Impersonator' is too feeble a word for Mr. Busch," the New York

Times opined, "the female roles he creates are hilarious vamps, but also

high comic characters . . . the audience laughs at the first line and goes

right on laughing at every line to the end, and even at some of the

silences." See also hom*osexuality; lesbianism; theater.

Vampire Lovers, The

Cinema, UK 1970. The first of three adaptations of "Carmilla," The

Vampire Lovers marked a landmark move by Hammer Films from sexual

insinuation into overt eroticism. Polish-born beauty Ingrid Pitt is particu-

larly striking as a topless, deathless lesbian-vamp. The New York Times

took note of the film's unblinking Sapphism: "Sure, she entices and de-

stroys a couple of guys, but only because they're in her way en route to

those gorgeous girls. Miss Pitt, specifically, is a luscious brunette, who is

exposed in a nude scene and prowls about the rest of the time in a di-

aphanous shift that leaves little to the imagination. And her willing victims

... are just as nobly endowed. Vampirism, which has become a silly busi-

ness on the screen, is, at least, easy on the eyes in this case." Directed

by Roy Ward Baker. Screenplay by Tudor Gates. With Madeleine Smith,

Peter Cushing, Pippa Steele, George Cole, and Dawn Addams. (Hammer

Films) See also Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan; lesbianism.

Vampirella

A buxom, scantily clad comic-book character, created in 1969 by Forrest J

Ackerman, best known as founding editor of Famous Monsters ofFilmland

magazine. Inspired by the French comic character Barbarella, Vampirella

is a denizen of the dying planet Drakulon, where blood, rather than water,

is the basic element. Vampy's exploits on the blood-planet earth formed

the basis for the longest-running vampire comic book in history, with 112

issues in its original series (which ended in 1983). In the 1990s, Vam-

pirella continues to thrive in reprints and new graphic adventures. The

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 205

runner-up for vampire comic longevity is Marvel's Tomb ofDracula series,

which had a 70-issue run from 1972 to 1979.

Vampire's Kiss

Cinema, USA 1989. A landmark film for two reasons: first, the lead actor

(Nicolas Cage) eats a live water bug on camera, carrying the quest for Ren-

FlELDesque realism to dizzying new heights; and, second, for being the first

film to deal with vampirism as a kind of metaphor for sexual harassment at

the office. Cage plays Peter Loew, a creepy literary agent who gets creepier

when he begins to believe that he's been bitten by a you-know-what. This

gives him the permission he needs to behave abominably toward his secre-

tary (Maria Conchita Alonso), the first move in a self-destructive binge that

ends with his sleeping under an overturned sofa and having his heart

spiked. Cage's performance here can make you itch, which may or may not

be a compliment. Directed by Robert Bierman. Screenplay by Joseph Min-

ion. With Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley (as the vampire's shrink), Kasi

Lemmons, and Bob Lujan. (Hemdale Pictures)T

Vampiri, I

Cinema, Italy 1 956. Director Mario Bava, best known for Black Sunday,

got his teeth wet on vampires while serving as cameraman for this moody

spin on the Erzebet Bathory legend; the nominal director, Riccardo

Freda, walked off the set in midproduction and Bava ended up directing as

well as lensing. Bava's black-and-white CinemaScope compositions are of-

ten quite beautiful and evocative of earlier classics; one setting in particu-

lar, a hallway full of billowing curtains, immediately brings to mind Paul

Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927). Screenplay by Piero Regnoli and

Rik Sjostrom. With Gianna Maria Canale, Antoine Balpetre, Paul Miller,

and Carlo D'Angelo. (Titanus/Athena Cinematografica)

Vampyr

Cinema, France/Germany 1931-1932. I'm not sure that Carl Theodor

Dreyer's Vampyr is quite the cinematic masterpiece many people believe it to

be—although it is, without question, one of the most evocatively dreamlike

films ever made. Vampyr was financed by a rich German baron, Nicolas de

Gunzberg, who also acted in the film as David Gray, a young man pulled into

the ambiguous vampire realm. The film's most famous sequence features

Gunzberg watching his own funeral (the camera assuming his place in the

206 David J. Ska I

Vampyr: Two frame enlargements from

Carl Theodor Dreyer's moody meditation

on the vampire theme.

(Courtesy of Scott MacQueen)

coffin) and the sudden, unsettling ap-

pearance of an ancient female vampire

who peers down at him, and us. The

film was shot silent, with a sparse dia-

logue track added later in French,

German, and English. J. Sheridan Le

Fanu's "Carmilla" is often cited as

Vampyr1

s source of inspiration, but

other than the fact that both works

deal with vampires, the connection is,

to say the least, obscure. Dreyer had

previously received high critical praise

for The Passion ofJoan ofArc (1928),

but Vampyr (like NOSFERATU at the

time of its first American release) was

roundly

snubbed. New York Times critic

C. Hooper Trask was typical in his dis-

missal of the film, which he called "pe-

culiarly irritating" and "one of the worst

pictures I have ever attended," though

admitting that "there were some scenes that gripped with a brutal directness."

Trask attributed this not to Dreyer but to the actors, whom, he speculated,

grew into their roles over the uncommonly lengthy production period—over

one year. Although the release date of Vampyr is usually given as 1932, I

found an illustrated review of the picture in a Portuguese film magazine dated

January 1931, suggesting a much earlier production than is generally sup-

posed. Screenplay by Dreyer and Christen Jul. With Julian West (Gunzberg),

Maurice Schutz, Sybille Schmitz, and Rena Mandel. (Tobis-Klangfilm)Y

'Vampyre, The"

Short story, UK 1819. John Polidori's elaboration of Lord Byron's 1816

fragment of a horror story (part of the informal literary competition be-

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 207

tween Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys which ultimately produced

Frankenstein) is, with "Carmilla" and Dracula, one of the most influ-

ential pieces of vampire literature in English. In many ways it overshad-

ows Dracula, as evidenced by the modern tendency to dramatize Bram

Stoker's novel by recasting Dracula's repellent monster in a seductive,

Byronic mode. It's interesting that both "The Vampyre" and Dracula

were written by authors who had tangled professional relationships with

flamboyant, demanding (and, by extension, draining) men: in Stoker's

case, it was the actor Henry Irving; in Polidori's case, it was George

Gordon, Lord Byron, whom Polidori served as physician, traveling com-

panion, and amanuensis. Recent films and books about the Byron/

Shelley/Polidori menage have imaginatively explored the hom*oerotic

currents of domination and submission in Polidori's and Byron's rela-

tionship; in the film Haunted Summer (1988) Polidori is depicted

frankly as Byron's compliant boy-toy. (See also my entries on Bram

Stoker and hom*osexuality for some further speculation on why major

works of vampire literature—from Polidori to Anne Rice—so often have

male-male ambivalence, tension, and rivalry at their cores.) Polidori, in

any event, did write "The Vampyre" after a nasty falling-out with Byron,

and it is tempting to read the tale as his conscious attempt to further

skewer the Byron mystique—Byron's former lover Lady Caroline Lamb

had already done the deed in her 1816 novel Glenarvon.

Polidori's vampire was the rakish Lord Ruthven, a name taken direcdy

from the Lamb novel (her character's full name was Ruthven Glenarvon).

Polidori's original character name, however, was "Lord Strongmore." In

the memorable opening lines of the story, in which Polidori introduces

the first Byronic vampire to a hungry world, he also seems to intuit the

vampire's perennial function as a sociocultural vacuum pump, a bottom-

less metaphor capable of drinking all the attention we care to feed it:

It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a Lon-

don winter, there appeared at the various parties of leaders of the ton a

nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He

gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein.

Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention,

that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where

thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could

not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye,

208 DavidJ. Skal

which, fixing upon the object's face, did not seem to penetrate, and at

one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart, but

fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it

could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every

house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to

violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at

having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention.

Polidori introduces a young gentleman named Aubrey, who accepts

an invitation from Ruthven to tour with him abroad, but is appalled

at Ruthven's licentious ways, in particular his predilection for ruining

women. Continuing his travels alone in Greece, Aubrey meets and falls in

love with a peasant girl named Ianthe, who introduces him to vampire folk-

tales and is summarily killed by a vampire herself. Aubrey falls into a fevered

delirium, waking to find Ruthven once more at his side. They reconcile and

continue their tour, but are attacked by highwaymen and Ruthven is mor-

tally wounded. His dying wish is that Aubrey not tell anyone of his death for

a year. Aubrey swears, and Ruthven dies, but his body disappears after being

laid "in the first cold ray of the moon" at Ruthven's request. When Aubrey

returns to England, he is horrified to discover that his beloved sister is en-

gaged—to Lord Ruthven, who has somehow returned from the dead. Para-

lyzed into inaction by his solemn oath, Aubrey begins to lose his mind and

cannot prevent the vampiric conquering of his sibling. On his deathbed he

breaks his oath and tells his story, but it is too late

—"Lord Ruthven had dis-

appeared, and Aubrey's sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!"

Polidori's story was first published in The New Monthly Magazine under

Byron's name and, even after the ensuing controversy and revelation of the

true writer, was widely believed to be Byron's work (even Goethe was taken

in by the hoax). Highly successful theatrical and operatic adaptations were

mounted throughout Europe (see also opera; theater). Polidori didn't

live to see much of the theatrical activity generated by his story; he died in

1821 at the age of twenty-five, possibly a suicide. But "The Vampyre" has

lived on, the cornerstone of a vast and deathless literary and theatrical genre.

Vampyr, Der

See opera.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 209

Van Helsing, Abraham

The fictional nemesis of Dracula, created by Bram Stoker in his 1897

novel, Abraham Van Helsing is a Dutch medical specialist in obscure dis-

eases who leads a successful battle against the vampire count after setting

conventional, rationalist medicine on its head with his packets ofwolfbane,

crucifixes, garlic wreaths, wooden stakes, etc. On one level, Van Helsing

represents a kind of reactionary patriarchal authority, just the kind of moral

force many Victorians felt would help stop the rising tide of hom*osexual-

ity (as represented by Stoker's college friend Oscar Wilde), prostitution,

SYPHILIS, women's independence, and other scary, disruptive cultural devel-

opments. On another level Van Helsing represents the modern tussle be-

tween science and superstition, rationality and religion, etc.

It has been suggested that Stoker patterned Van Helsing after the

Hungarian scholar Arminius Vambery, an authority on orientalia and ex-

otic lore who had been the guest of Stoker and Henry Irving at the

Lyceum Theatre's Beefsteak Club (and is at one point directly referred to

by Van Helsing as "my friend Arminius"). Frankly, I think this is a bit of a

stretch; the similarity of "Vambery" and "Van Helsing" is, after all, quite

slight, compared to the obvious and exact correspondence between

Stoker's full first name—Abraham—and that of Van Helsing, who cer-

tainly acts as Stoker's authorial mouthpiece in the novel. Since Stoker in-

tended Dracula as a possible staged role for Irving, one of the most

important players in Stoker's life, it would be more than interesting to

know the extent to which Stoker may have projected himself into the Van

Helsing persona. The first actor to play Van Helsing was the Lyceum per-

former Tom Reynolds, in Stoker's 1897 staged reading of the book;

Hamilton Deane followed in his own 1924 adaptation of the novel; the

American version of the stage play gave steady employment to Edward

Van Sloan in 1927;

film is Blood for Dracula,

and the original Italian title was Dracula ccrca sangue di vergine e . . .

mori di sete. Directed by Paul Morrissey, from his screenplay. With Arno

Juer-ging, Maxime McKendry, Milena Vucotic, Vittorio De Sica, and, in

an unbilled cameo, Roman Polanski. (CC Champion/Yanne-Rassam/

Bryanston) See also class warfare.

* Anemia

Literally, "without blood." Anemia

comprises a wide range of blood dis-

orders, including an overall loss of

blood, a deficiency of red blood cells,

and a lack of hemoglobin. It is a

Udo Kier in Andy Warhol's Dracula.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/

Hollywood Movie Posters)

1 David J. Ska I

cliche of vampire fiction that anemia is the first diagnosis of traditional

medical authority, which usually contributes to the death of the patient,

who then is resurrected as a vampire. Chastened by metaphysical negli-

gence, the doctors involved characteristically undergo a conversion to a

more fluid worldview. The distrust of modern medicine and the shaking

up of scientific certitude is a persistent subtext of vampire stories. See also

BLOOD.

Anemia

Cinema, Italy 1986. Alberto Abruzzese's comedy/allegory about a leader

of Italy's Communist party who becomes a vampire was dismissed by Va-

riety as "a cerebral in-joke without a punchline. . . . Though filled with

potentially amusing ideas, [the] film is of doubtful comprehension outside

Italy, and there only appreciable by a narrow circle of souls on the same

wavelength." Abruzzese scripted as well as directed. With Hanns Zischler,

Gioia Maria Scola, and Gerard Landry. (RAI-TV Channel 3).

Anno Dracula

Fiction, UK 1992. Kim Newman's delirious pastiche of the Dracula legend

presents an alternate Victorian universe in which Vlad Tepes has con-

quered England, married Queen Victoria, and affixed the head of Abra-

ham Van Helsing to a pike outside Buckingham Palace. Dr. Jack Seward,

Van Helsing's former cohort, is now Jack the Ripper; the whor*s of

Whitechapel are more than metaphorical vampires here. Vampirism is a

kind of reverse imperialism, with the "warm" population reduced to sec-

ond-class citizenship. Oscar Wilde has converted, Gilbert and Sullivan are

penning vampire operettas, and Bram Stoker's social-climbing wife hosts

vampire salons in Chelsea. The London Times called Anno Dracula "a

tour de force which succeeds brilliantly on several different levels—as a

minutely detailed social history which cleverly pastiches the conventions of

the 19th-century novel, as a Victorian Who's Who, and as a full-blooded

flesh-ripping yarn in its own right." Anno Dracula is an enormously satis-

fying read for vampire addicts. This devotee would ordinarily have gulped

it down in a single sitting, but I chose instead to spread the task over sev-

eral nights to prolong the pleasure. See also ARMADILLO.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 1 1

Anti-Semitism

This is a persistent subtext of vampire stories, no doubt an offshoot of the

ugly Christian blood-libel of Jews as a race requiring the blood of gentile

babies in its rituals. Although it is rarely commented upon, a long literary

tradition of villainous Semitic stereotypes informed Bram Stoker's 1897

conception of Dracula, originally presented as a horrific, hook-nosed

Shylock from Transylvania (and a close cousin of another mesmeric Jew-

ish predator of the literary 1890s—George Du Maurier's "filthy black He-

brew," Svengali).

The Shylock- Dracula nexus was explored only once on the screen, in

Max Schreck's beak-faced impersonation of Dracula in Nosferatu

(1922). In a more ironic vein, comedian Lenny Bruce conflated Dracula

and Jewishness in a series of movie-monster comedy routines in the late

1950s. More recently, Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan stirred out-

rage and controversy when he refused to disavow the "essential truth" of

an associate's public description of Jews as "bloodsuckers." See also Ewers,

Hans Heinz.

Armadillo

This burrowing, bony-plated, nocturnal mammal indigenous to South

and Central America and the southwestern United States became part of

Hollywood vampire lore through the efforts of film director Tod Brown-

ing, who employed Dasypi novemcincti as bit players in not one but two

famous vampire pictures: London After Midnight (1927) and Drac-

ula (1931). For totally obscure reasons, Browning seems to have felt that

the peculiar, armored animals would lend an eerie ambience to deserted

houses and castles (they echo, in a sense, the medieval suits of armor that

decorate the gothic tradition); but their appearance in Dracula heralding

Bela Lugosi's descent down the crumbling staircase is usually regarded as

nothing more than camp in its highest Hollywood form. Oddly, Brown-

ing was not the first filmmaker to relate the armadillo to the vampire; a

record exists of a lost silent film called Vampire Bat and Armadillo

(1914), though this was most likely some kind of documentary curiosity.

In his immensely clever 1992 pastiche, Anno Dracula, novelist Kim

Newman describes the latest inhabitants of Buckingham Palace, following

Dracula's subjugation of England: "... an armadillo wriggled by her feet,

its rear parts clogged with its own dirt. Vlad Tepes had raided Regent's

1 2 David J. Skal

Park Zoo and had exotic species roaming loose in the Palace. This poor

dentate was merely one of his more harmless pets." Costume designer

Eiko Ishioka's armor for Vlad the Impaler in Bram Stoker's Dracula

(1992) was intended to be wolflike, but succeeded mostly in making actor

Gary Oldman himself look remarkably like an armadillo.

The next step in the ongoing dance of the armadillo and the vampire is

obvious, and is given here gratis to any filmmaker or novelist who might

like to make use of it: a little genetic engineering could result in a vampire

with no need for a coffin of any kind, just a shady place to roll up into a

light-proof ball.

The Arrival

Cinema, USA 1990. An undistinguished addition to the vampire-from-

outer-space subgenre, better examples of which include Lifeforce

(1985), Not of This Earth (1957, remade 1988). It is nowhere near as

bad, however, as Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). Directed by

David Schmoeller. Screenplay by Daniel Ljoka. With John Saxon, Joseph

Culp, and Michael J. Pollard. (Del Mar Entertainment)

Astral Body

An ethereal counterpart to the physical human form described in many oc-

cult traditions, the astral body is believed to contain the spirit-self and

physically separates itself from the heavy body in the course of such phe-

nomena as astral projection (the out-of-body experience), bilocation, re-

mote viewing, etc. In certain explanations of vampirism, the corpse itself

does not reanimate, but instead sends forth an astral double which carries

blood back to the grave to replenish the vampire's physical body. In this

way, the incorporeal vampire can pass through doors, keyholes, and in

general pull off the shape-shifting tricks that are the vampire's stock in

trade. However, the theory does not explain how blood itself is demateri-

alized at the site of the attack and later reconstituted in the grave. A con-

fusing sequence in John Badham's film version of Dracula (1979) seems

to toy with the idea of an astral double. The vampire Mina Van Helsing

exists in two forms: one hideous and zombielike, and one plump and pink

and pretty. But since they are both killed independendy by physical means

(one by a stake and one by surgical removal of her heart), it is difficult to

know what, exactly, Badham was getting at.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 13

Atom Age Vampire

Cinema, Italy 1961. Mario Bava, the director of the vampire classic

Black Sunday (1960), is often erroneously credited as producer ofAnton

Guilio Majano's spin on the theme of an obsessed doctor attempting to

restore a disfigured woman's face. The cure, of course, involves the Erze-

bet BATHORY-style sacrifice of other young women. In this case, the cov-

eted substance is not

he reprised the role in the 1931 film version as well as

in Dracula's Daughter in 1936. Other memorable screen Van Helsings

have included Peter Cushing (the record holder), Frank Finlay (in the

BBC miniseries COUNT DRACULA, opposite Louis Tourdan), Laurence

Olivier (opposite Frank Langella in the 1979 film), and most recently,

Anthony Hopkins in the 1992 Coppola film Bram Stoker^s Dracula. In

recent years, the role ofVan Helsing in stage productions has increasingly

been the focus of nontraditional casting choices and has been successfully

interpreted by women and minority performers.

2 1 DavidJ. Skal

Edward Van Sloan as the master vampire hunter

Abraham Van Helsing in Dracula's Daughter.

Van Sloan, Edward

A San Francisco-born character actor

(1882-1964), Edward Van Sloan is

best known for his interpretation of the

Van Helsing role in Dracula, begin-

ning with the 1927 Broadway play and

reprised in the 1931 film version—both

opposite vampire arch-actor Bela Lu-

gosi. Van Sloan was selected for the

part by the publisher-producer Horace

Liveright, who had seen him play a

psychiatrist in a New York production

of Hans WerfePs drama Schweiger. Van

Sloan had little hope for a long run in Dracula. "I had been in five plays,

none of which had lasted more than three weeks." He went into Dracula,

"figuring it would at least buy cakes and ale" for a fortnight. Instead he

played Van Helsing on stage for nearly two years, before repeating the

role in Tod Browning's classic film. Van Sloan appeared in several other

macabre films in the 1930s and 1940s—usually in professorial or medical

parts—including Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), and re-

turned to the Van Helsing role in 1936 for Dracula's Daughter.

Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood

Fiction, UK 1847. An absurdly long (850 pages; the author was paid by

the typeset line), crudely written "penny dreadful" novel by James Mal-

colm Rymer which nonetheless found a wide Victorian readership and

stabilized the conventions of literary vampirism for future horror writers

—

most notably Bram Stoker. Lord Francis Varney is a bloodsucker in the

Lord Ruthven mold, who is regularly roused from death by the power

of moonlight to further his feasting at the throats of virtuous virgins. The

following celebrated passage is typical of the campy prose style that per-

meates the book:

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 2 1 1

The figure turns half-round, and the light falls upon the face. It is per-

fectly white—perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the

lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful

eyes is the teeth—the fearful-looking teeth—projecting like those of

some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. It ap-

proaches the bed with a strange, gliding movement. It clashes together

the long nails that literally appear to hang from the finger ends. No

sound comes from its lips. Is she going mad—that young and beautiful

girl exposed to so much terror?

Apparently in order to increase the verbiage, Rymer's vampire pauses at

regular intervals on his way to his inevitable bed-supper, hypnotically fasci-

nating his victim with dead, yet glittering, eyes. "The figure has paused

again, and half on the bed and half out of it that young girl lies trembling.

Her long hair streams across the entire width of the bed. As she has slowly

moved along she has left it streaming across the pillows. The pause lasted

about a minute—oh, what an age of agony." And finally:

With a sudden rush that could not be

foreseen—with a strange howling cry

that was enough to waken terror in

every breast, the figure seized the long

tresses of her hair, and twining them

round his bony hands he held her to

the bed. Then she screamed—Heaven

granted her then power to scream.

Shriek followed shriek in rapid succes-

sion. The bed-clothes fell in a heap by

the side of the bed—she was dragged

by her long silken hair completely on

to it again. Her beautifully rounded

limbs quivered with the agony of her

Varney the Vampyre: Illustration from

James Malcolm Rymer's penny-dreadful

extravaganza.

2 1 2 David J. Skal

soul. The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form

with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. He drags her head

to the bed's edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in

his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth—

gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has

swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

After 209 weekly installments (later published in book form), Lord

Varney decided he was "tired and disgusted with a life of horror," and

flung himself into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius, where no moonbeam

could resuscitate him. But one question remains. Why, given the story's

over-the-top theatricality, hasn't anyone tried to reanimate Varney as a

scenery-chewing, blood-and-thunder melodrama a la Sweeney Todd?.

Vlad the Impaler

The sobriquet given to the Wallachian warlord Vlad Tepes (1431-1476),

also known as Dracula, means "Son

of the Devil" or "Son of the Dragon"

in Romanian. (Tepes' father had been

called Dracul.) Vlad's nickname de-

rives from his favorite method of dis-

patching his enemies—by impalement

on wooden stakes. On one atrocious

occasion, 20,000 Turkish captives

were exterminated in this manner and

displayed in a mile-long semicircle

outside Dracula's capital city, Tirgov-

iste, to ward off oncoming enemy

troops. (It worked.) By all accounts,

Vlad reveled in the death agony of

his victims and often dined in the

shadow of their writhing, rotting

Vlad the Impaler, from a

sixteenth-century woodcut.

V IS FOR VAMPIRE 2 1 3

bodies. Other victims were boiled, or hacked apart "like cabbages," ac-

cording to one account.

While ruthless, sad*stic, and undoubtedly psychopathic, Vlad Tepes is

nonetheless a hero of Romanian history, who successfully protected the

country against foreign incursions. Sometime in the early 1890s, Bram

Stoker came cross a reference to the Voivode (Prince) Dracula in William

Wilkinson's 1820 book Account ofthe Principalities ofWallachia and Mol-

davia and decided to use the name for the vampire villain of a novel he

had begun to outline (his original choice had been "Count Wampyr").

Thus, Vlad the Impaler did not inspire Stoker to write Dracula (as is often

assumed), but provided historical verisimilitude to a story Stoker had al-

ready conceived. Other than an account of Vlad dipping bread in the

blood of a victim, and the coincidence of the wooden stake motif, there is

no historical correspondence between the bloody voivode and traditional

vampire FOLKLORE. The life and times of Vlad the Impaler have been ex-

tensively documented by historians Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T.

McNally in two books, In Search ofDracula (1972) and Dracula: Prince

ofMany Faces (1989).

Werewolf

In European folklore, the images of the vampire and werewolf often

blur, but in the twentieth century they have evolved into discrete entities.

Some of this had to do with the migration of Dracula from page to

stage; in Bram Stoker's novel, Count Dracula transforms himself into

a bat or a wolf with equal ease, but when the effect was attempted in

British and American stage versions of Dracula during the 1920s, the

clumsy results provoked wolf-howls of audience laughter; thereafter, bats

became the animal transformation of choice. Werewolves have tended to

attach themselves more to the Jekyll/Hyde formula than to the vampire

tradition.

Whitby

If you're planning a vampire holiday, I have no better destination for you

than the English seaside town of Whitby, North Yorkshire. It was in

Whitby, while on vacation in 1890, that Bram STOKER began taking notes

for the novel that was to become DRACULA. Not only did he do research in

the Whitby library (where he discovered, in a book, Vlad Dracula the Im-

paler—the source

blood but the secretion of a hitherto unknown gland

located somewhere in the victim's upper torso, easily accessible to the glan-

dularly challenged scientist and his scalpel (before making his midnight

rounds, the doc turns into a reptilelike monstrosity, the result of exposure

to various gland extracts). The disfigured woman is a blond stripper (her

opening exotic dance sequence is sometimes cut for television) who par-

tially hides her scars with a Veronica Lake hairdo. There is, in the English-

language version, a bizarrely inappropriate upbeat jazz accompaniment

to the scene in which the dancer first sees her injuries. Atom Age Vampire

is still campily entertaining; it would make a most interesting double bill

with Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1959), from which it borrows

heavily. The film's original Italian title was Seddok, Verede di Satana.

Screenplay by Majano, Piero Monviso, Gino de Sanctis, Alberto Befilac-

qua, and John Hart. With Alberto Lupo, Susanne Loret, Sergio Fantoni,

Roberto Berta, and Franca Paridi Strahl. (Topaz Films) See also Bathory,

Erzebet.

Attack of the Giant Leeches

Cinema, USA 1959. Roger Corman and his

brother Gene produced this low-budget

item that posited a link between the use of

nuclear energy at Cape Canaveral and the

appearance of mutated blood-drinkers in a

Susanne Loret and Alberto Lupo

in Atom Age Vampire.

(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/

Hollywood Movie Posters)

1 4 DavidJ. Skal

Florida swamp. Illicit white-trash sex dooms leads inexorably to abduction

by the leeches, who store their victims in a damp cave to drain at leisure.

The film contains only a few watchable minutes, primarily the grotesque

shots of plastic-suited "leeches" finishing off their victims to the accompa-

niment of rippling, rubbery sound effects. The credits strive, most unsuc-

cessfully, to imitate Saul Bass' impressive title graphics for films like Psycho,

Vertigo, etc. Otherwise, forget it. Directed by Bernard Kowalski. With Ken

Clark, Yvette Vickers, and Gene Roth. Also known as The Giant Leeches and,

in the UK, as Demons ofthe Swamp. (American- International Pictures)T

"Aurelia"

Short story, Germany 1819-20. A tale by E. T. A. Hoffman, written in re-

sponse to the immense popularity of John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (a

story originally attributed to Lord Byron). Hoffman employs a discussion

of "The Vampyre" as a way of introducing his own story to top it—the

tale of a young woman, Aurelia, who, having been driven mad by her

mother, shuns ordinary food and begins to feast on corpses. See also

GHOUL.

Autoexec.bat

The punchline to a riddle for computer wonks: What do you get when

you cross Lee Iaccoca with a vampire?

Autovampirism

The drinking of one's own blood, for sexual pleasure or as an adjunct to

self-mutilation. See also blood fetishism.

Baby Blood

Cinema, France 1990. A woman's uterus is invaded by a shape-changing

parasite, which requires male blood to be born. Guess how it gets it? Vam-

pire and science fiction themes are stirred together in a dark comedy

directed by Alain Robak. With Emmannuelle Escourrou, Jean-Francois

Gallotte, and Christian Sininger. (Partners Productions/EX07 Productions)

V is for Vampire the A to Z guide to everything undead (Skal, David J) - Inglês (2024)