seeitwith.me random outbursts of cinema appreciation

WHERE DID ALL THE VAMPIRES GO? PART 1: I don’t vant to suck your blood! I just want to impale you on a giant stick and prance around with your severed head

My age is my curse. I just turned 23 a month ago. Now, more often than ever I catch myself appending “It’s just not like it was 30 years ago” or “they don’t make them like they used to” to sentences. I love old movies and old cars. But how the hell am I supposed to judge something on a basis of time. For example, I own a Mini Cooper. A real one, not one of the new BMW ones. I wanted one ever since I was a kid. I found it incredibly beautiful and was adamant that nobody could ever build such a perfect car. Because they don’t make them like they used to. When I got mine, I was ecstatic. But let me tell you something. It’s tiny and cramped. It rattles. When you go up a hill in the summer, more often than not, it will overheat. And the only way to stop it from overheating is by turning on the heating in the passenger cabin. Then it slows down to a crawl up the hill. So you’re sitting in a tiny car, with your knees at your ears, sweating like a pig doing 50 km/h on a highway with people wizzing by your side in their new Toyotas and Hyundais. They sure don’t make them like they used to. Now most cars work (well, apart from the whole Toyota recall thing). But you know what. My Mini still looks a damn bit better than a Corolla.

What does this have to do with vampires? Well, it comes out of frustration. What has happened in the last 30 years that made the vampire suck (not blood, just plain suck)? The same thing that happened to the car industry. It has changed. For better or worse, todays vampire has very little to do with the slick Lugosi Dracula and morbid Murnau Nosferatu. The vampire has gone the automobile way and become standardly pretty to as many demographics as possible while loosing the one thing that made it exciting - danger. This started out as a question in my head while I was trying to watch Twilight without digging out my eyeballs with a spoon, developed into some research and became a decision to start a post (or rather a series of posts) on Vampire cinema. I want to go over the history of film Vampires, pair it up with some of the metaphors of the vampire at different times, pick out the good and the bad films, figure out why they are one or the other and hopefully emerge with a conclusion on what the hell happened to the Vampire and why has this very cool character become a emo pansy. Let’s see where it goes.

Part 1: I don’t vant to suck your blood! I just want to impale you on a giant stick and prance around with your severed head

Ask whoever is near you at the time you are reading this to name one vampire. Chances are, if they aren’t a teenage girl (or a mother of one), they won’t mention Edward Cullen right of the bat but rather - count Dracula. And chances are that you have hear that he was modeled on the 15th century Transylvanian prince. It’s slightly more complicated than that.

Yes, the original, real-life Dracula was not a vampire. He was Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia. However, he did go down in history as a monster, considering his nickname was “Vlad the Impaler”. Murdering thousands of your countrymen was no big deal back in the fourteen hundreds. Impaling them on stakes, severing their heads and drinking their blood was slightly odd even by medieval standards. Hence the infamy. The name Dracula is his historical legacy, a name that he took on as a tribute to his fathers religious order and is translated as “son of the Devil” or “son of the dragon”. This all sounds so great. Unfortunately, the only thing Dracula the vampire shares with the ruthless ruler is his name - which was chosen at random by the author Bram Stoker from a Transylvanian history book. Too bad.

Vampires of popular western fiction are based on the ‘vampirs’ of medieval Serbia and Bulgaria. This is certainly the basis for the two books that did such a huge amount to popularize the genre in the West, John Polidori’s 1819 The Vampyre and the better known Dracula by Bram Stoker from 1897, and it is from these that Hollywood takes its cues. While Stoker’s work is better known and instantly associated with the vampire, Polidori’s work is a well of information for any trivia lover. For example, The Vampyre, aside from being the first instance of Vampire fiction in the English language has a remarkable story of how it came to be. In 1816 during the Year Without a Summer, Lord Byron and Polidori were staying at an Italian villa where hewas visited by Percy and Mary Shelly and Claire Clairmont. Because the weather was so vile they would stay indoors and tell ghost stories. Inspired by the stories Mary Shelly went on to write Frankenstein, while Polidori banged out The Vampyre in a few days. The Vampyre transformed the mythical vampire from a creature of folklore into a socialite vulture. It was also the story that started the gay vampire context as it is rumored that Byron and Polidori might have been lovers and the story has a very strong homoerotic line.

Again, when talking about Dracula, we imagine him as a sexy, mysterious aristocrat that Bram Stoker came up with. Wrong. Bram Stoker's 1897 Count Dracula was none of those things. There are many theories about how Stoker crafted Dracula's look; some have speculated that the Irish author modeled him after his personal hero, Walt Whitman. Stoker writes that Dracula had a thick mustache, a large nose and white hair that "grew scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere." He describes the Count's general look as "one of extraordinary pallor." Dracula had sharp teeth, pointy ears, squat fingers and hair in the palms of his hands. The sexy vampire was a creation of later generations thanks to Bela Lugosi. But this is where I end the first part, and will continue with Dracula on film in the next installment.