By Terry Sherwood
You know the requirements. Drink blood. Avoid sunlight. Heal quickly. Look good in black. Depending on the film, you then choose one of two career paths: tear people apart or become impossibly attractive and spend eternity brooding over the person you love. Neither is necessarily bad. The vampire has always been a killer and a seducer ignoring most of not all of the interpretations of the Bram stoker classic except a few rules.
The transformation of Dracula had begun long before Hollywood got hold of him. Hamilton Deane’s 1924 stage adaptation took the Count and made him more at home in the drawing room. John L. Balderston then reworked Deane’s play for Broadway in 1927, tightening the story and simplifying its characters while keeping the action in England. Bela Lugosi’s performance completed the transformation in the public imagination: Dracula was now elegant, controlled and capable of walking into polite society rather than simply lurking outside it in the cloak that would forever become part of the role that was not in the book.
That change matters because it shows how early the vampire began to acquire a fixed identity. Yet Lugosi’s Dracula was still more than the romantic vampire who would follow. The Universal film was a detective mystery and romance in Thirties style that was popular on both stage and screen. He barely needed violence. His threat came from suggestion, sexuality, control and the sense that something unknowable had entered an ordinary room. Lugosi’s real-life affair with sex symbol at the time Clara Bow is stuff of legend. Lugosi has a naked portrait of Bow formed in his home inspire of being married.
These are actor fascinations not story, so the problem was not making Dracula sophisticated; it was what happened when generations of imitators turned sophistication into another set of rules. The cape and evening clothes eventually became as restrictive as the modern vampire’s fangs, super-strength and obligatory love interest. But somewhere along the way, those two sides seem to have swallowed everything else.
The vampire used to be wonderfully difficult to pin down. It could be disease, sexual repression, addiction, loneliness, class, ageing or the fear of contamination. Sometimes it could be several of those things at once. Being bitten wasn’t just a convenient way of acquiring supernatural abilities. It could mean being trapped inside a condition you couldn’t escape.
George A. Romero’s Martin remains one of the great examples. Is Martin actually a vampire or a mixed-up kid? Romero isn’t terribly interested in giving us a neat answer. What’s frightening is Martin himself: isolated, compulsive and unable to connect with the world around him. Vampirism becomes less a collection of supernatural rules than a way into someone’s damaged inner existence.
Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction takes another route, turning the need for blood into something philosophical, physical and compulsive. Jean Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl gives us something sadder still: a creature dependent upon others and imprisoned by what she has become. These vampires don’t feel like members of a supernatural species. They feel confined.
More recent films have tried to break the mould. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night turns the vampire into a lonely, almost dreamlike outsider wandering an Iranian ghost town, while other films have pushed vampires towards the zombie feral, infectious creatures driven more by hunger than seduction. The vampire can absorb almost any kind of horror, which makes its confinement to romantic lover or killing machine more frustrating. You have the successful odd mix of Sinners and the underrated Abigail not to mention hideous horror comedies Renfield and the lovely fun of trailer park undead in Sean Cronin’s Bogieville.
Gone is the elegance, the nuance, the beast has changed into something one dimensional much like the zombie. Perhaps the last great ones were Robert Quarry in Count Yorga films Willam Marshal as Mamuwalde in Blacula and David played by Keifer Sutherland in The Lost Boys The story is those around them not the monster itself but those around them. These were creatures of their time
The next great vampire film doesn’t need a new mythology, another explanation for sunlight or a cleverer method of killing the undead. Maybe it needs fewer rules. The vampire doesn’t need reinventing. Independent film is the place for it to be something again.
Bloody Flicks 