The horror genre has been a mainstay of the entertainment world from the beginning. In terms of motion pictures it has ebbed and flowed in cycles, striking a chord of terror with the movie-going public, inspiring hordes of imitators until the cycle burns itself out, and retreating until the time is right again.
“One of the things that intrigues me about horror is the longevity of the genre,” offers film historian and University of Southern California professor Leo Braudy. “In film, all of the other genres — from Westerns to musicals — come and go, but horror seems to have a perpetual life despite, or perhaps because of, its focus on the dead. Somehow the images of horror, the motifs, the characters and the plot structures have a greater metamorphic variety than some of the other genres. They can be refitted to new historical situations.”
One aspect of the genre that has rarely needed “refitting”, however, is the concept of the vampire. The legends predate Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although that novel is considered the one that first brought the notion to a mainstream audience. Hollywood was quick to jump on the bandwagon, beginning with the original Nosferatu (a blatant rip-off of the Stoker novel, though a well produced one) and moving on to Universal’s production of Dracula, which introduced the world to Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi and launched the big-screen vampire in a major way.
After Dracula, Universal set about launching sequel after sequel, and other studios jumped into the fray. As Stuart Fischoff, Professor of Media Psychology, offers, Dracula, like many of the Universal horror “stars,” had a certain human element to it. It was an element that would remain throughout the 1930s and ‘40s.
“What you find is that the monsters pre-1950s always had a reason for their monsterness,” he says. “They always had a side of them that was sympathetic. They murdered for life-serving or life-saving reasons. Dracula had to take blood to live. Frankenstein was misunderstood. Wolfman was tormented by his demons. In the ‘50s I think you hit all of the nuclear concerns; the effects of the radioactive fallout, and then from the 1960s and beyond the monsters are killing for no other reason than they wanted to kill. I think there was this major shift in how monsters in general and vampires in particular were seen prior to the ‘70s and subsequent to the ‘70s. I think that reflects the change in sensibility of our culture. It may well come out of the post Holocaust, second world war idea that human beings can be so awful and death can be so inexplicable, random and capricious. Then, of course, when you get into the ‘70s and ‘80s, we lived with drive-by shootings, gangs and things like that. I think that you might make the point that in earlier times vampires and their ilk were seen in the background of a just world, and that subsequently the world was chaotic, death could strike you at any moment, and life was unfair. Vampires in that era reflected that. They just killed.”
That point can’t be argued. Whether you’re talking about Christopher Lee’s take on Dracula in the numerous Hammer Films produced on the count, Robert Quarry’s Count Yorga or William Marshall’s Blacula, there wasn’t much there for the audience to identify with. As good or bad as their films may have been, those particular vampires and numerous others like them were simply evil. They killed and needed a good dusting in response.
The one exception, however, came on the 1960s Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. Actor Jonathan Frid played vampire Barnabas Collins who throughout the course of the show metamorphosed from a being of pure evil to one of great sympathy. In effect, the show’s villain ultimately became its hero.
“The romanticized vampire was implicit in the beginning,” offers Braudy, “because the vampire was always a kind of Byronic figure. The vampire myths really start long before Dracula and start to become popular in English and German fiction at the beginning of the 19th century. And the figure of Byron pretended to be himself and wrote about the solitary person on the moors with this horrible hurt inside. That just went right in to the vampire myth. So a romanticized element has always been there as a potential part of it.”
For his part, Frid — who became a major superstar during the show’s heyday — approached the character in a way that most actors attempting to garner sympathy for their vampiric role would have to.
“I love to play horror for horror’s sake,” says Frid. “Inner horror. I never thought I created fear with the fang business of Barnabas. I always felt foolish doing that part of it. The horror part I liked was ‘the lie’. There’s nothing more horrible than looking someone in the eyes who’s telling you a lie and you know it. Somehow that scares me more than anything. In terms of the theater, I liked the inner drama rather than the outward manifestation. An inner conflict or emotional confrontation is more of a drama to me. That’s why with Barnabas there were many scenes I was thrilled to do and why the show came alive so many times for me. Barnabas’ lie, that he was pretending to be something that he wasn’t, motivated me. That pretense was something the actor playing Barnabas had to remember all the time. He got the lust for blood every once in a while, but always what preyed on his mind was the lie. And of course it played right into my lie as an actor. I was lying that I was calm and comfortable in the studio, just as Barnabas was lying that he was the calm and comfortable cousin from England. He wasn’t at all. He was a sick, unbelievable creep that the world didn’t know about.”
“That lie,” interjects Braudy, “is always appealing and certainly appealing to teenagers who always feel they have that secret self inside that nobody appreciates. It’s an empowerment thing. What makes me unique, is it the dark side or something else?”
Dark Shadows writer Ron Sproat offers his own view on why Barnabas and that type of vampire appeals to the audience. “I think part of it is because Jonathan played a duality and had kind of a lost quality as well,” he says. “He said originally, and I think he was right, ‘Don’t write the evil, I’ll play it that way. I look that way.’ That’s what he said. He also said that he’d done Richard III and he was astounded by the reviews at the time, because they said he was the most evil Richard on record. He said, ‘I was playing for sympathy.’ So he suggested that we write against the evil and he would play against it, which would make it more interesting. That’s what we did and I thought it worked.”
Actor Frank Langella certainly agreed with this point of view. He essayed the role of Dracula in the broadway play of the same name, then starred in John Badham’s 1979 motion picture adaptation.
“I never wanted him to strike terror from the first day of rehearsal of the play,” says Langella. “I didn’t see him as a character who went around with long fingernails and hollow eyes and fangs and all that stuff. It didn’t interest me to play him that way, because it would have just been repeating a tried and true genre, which everybody knows works. I wanted him to be somewhat vulnerable, hopefully somewhat neurotic and occasionally not sure of his territory. I wanted him to be some kind of man who had come to some relevant peace in life with his circumstances. He had to exist for blood, but he didn’t necessarily spend all his waking hours in pursuit or in some kind of horrific guise. So I wouldn’t be upset if people said I changed the character, because that’s why I wanted to do it. It would have been absolutely of no interest to me to have done it in the Hammer way with fangs and snarling and all of that stuff. I just decided to play him as a mortal man for a very long time, and slowly began to add the curse. I found it fascinating to work on him in this way instead of as a predator.”
In many ways, both Frid and Langella paved the way for other sympathetic vampires that would be offered from Hollywood in the form of movies and television shows, most notably Forever Knight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel as well as the works of Anne Rice. On the other hand, one can forget sympathy and just look at the enduring power of the vampire myth itself, whether it’s the Goth movement or the large number of films and TV shows currently in development with vampirism as a central theme. The real question, of course, is why?
“I can only speak for myself,” says former Buffy co-executive producer Marti Noxon, “but I think part of the reason that someone like Anne Rice is so popular is that she was coming up about the same time as our awareness of AIDs and blood diseases grew, and fears of sex and blood were intermingled. It probably gave her work a little more poignancy and gravity. But because the myth has been around so much longer than that, it has so much to do with our longing to escape death, and so much to do with our knowledge that that can’t happen, because the cost of this would be to be some kind of monster. At the same time, we have a desire for some kind of loophole and are also drawn to the idea of a romantic soul who finds his lifemate, or who will die trying to find the lifemate that he will be able to live with for eternity. It’s one of the genres where women and men can watch and get into it on different levels. Guys are looking at it as pure horror and most of the women look at it as a sexual and romantic metaphor. To be taken and made eternal — that’s pretty hot.”
Adds Braudy, “The vampire myth is concerned with the relationship between the undead and living, and the need for blood to survive, the sense of this past world that feeds on the present. These are all very general fears that don’t go away very quickly. Also, of all the monsters, the vampire is the most human and therefore most represents human potential. Nobody is going to become King Kong and you have to be dead to be put together to be Frankenstein. If you’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the Wolfman, you have no control over your transformation. The idea that you have a secret self inside that you call on in time of danger is really only suitable for the vampire myth.”
Tim Minear, who had served supervising producer of Angel, points out that these days vampires are viewed as noble, tortured creatures that are somehow above us. “I think that has a lot to do with Anne Rice,” he explains. “People can relate to feeling apart and sometimes above, yet somehow not part of the rest of the world. I think that’s pretty much a universal feeling, particularly for people going through adolescence. There’s something romantic about not dying. It seems like a way to give a character this huge gift, but then makes it ugly because they don’t really deserve it. It has something to do with alienation. That’s what it is for us on Angel. Here’s this guy who really wants to be a part of the world, but he can’t be yet.”
Tom Sanders, co-creator of the Internet vampire series Dark Commandos, believes that vampires express aspects of human experience which aren’t safe to express any other way. “Notions of seduction, power, dominance, submission, immortality, violence,” he muses. “These ideas produce powerful reactions in people not because they’re alien to us, but because we recognize them as elements of what it means to be human. On some level, we understand many of the drives and compulsions, whether we want to admit it or not. Vampires remain compelling, both as villains and heroes, because through them we are safe to contemplate aspects of ourselves which would otherwise be unthinkable.”
Actress Julie Benz, who plays Darla, the vampire who first turned Angel, believes part of the appeal of vampires is their ability to live without limitations. “They’re very sexual, very sensual and they have amazing freedom,” she says. “The essence of them all is very dark and sexual. They’re sexual, hungry beings. I think everybody has a dark side and vampire are living the dark side. So we seem to enjoy watching these characters live in the dark without the restraints of society.”
“Certainly the vampire legend has been infected with sex and romance,” adds Fischoff. “The whole notion of biting as penetration maintains its sexual allure. With female vampires you get a lot more of the sex connection, also the attraction men have for dangerous sex. Plus the myth of the female using sex to destroy. It has an approach and avoidance quality to it. The vampire also interacts with the idea of infection and the transmission of diseases. The connection between bloodlust and sexlust is very, very strong, so every time you get some kind of plague, whether it’s AIDs or some other sexually transmitted disease, it kind of feeds right into the notion of infection and from being bitten by the vampire.”
Joss Whedon, who has probably done more to explore the world of vampires than anyone thanks to the dual success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, has his own belief system as to why vampires endure.
“Any great fantasy has to contain your greatest wish and your darkest fear,” he suggests. “The idea of a vampire is someone who is cut off from the rest of humanity, which I think everybody feels like sometimes. He is cut off and shunned, and at the same time exalted. Of all the creatures — and we need our creatures — we’ve created, he is the most exalted. The Phantom of the Opera? Yeah, he can play the piano, but you don’t want to kiss him. The vampire is the person who sees everything, who’s above everything, who’s completely alienated from humans, but looks human, can interact with humans, can love like a human. People just relate to that. It’s a myth they want to see themselves in — to a degree. Obviously Buffy is more about Buffy than it is about vampires, but I think there’s a tinge of that there that people can’t get enough of.”
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