Point Quote Comment

Words by J. Patrick Armstrong

As it is the season for monsters, mummies, zombies, witches, werewolves and a whole host of other manifestations of horror, I thought it only right to make this month’s transmission on the dark prince of the night and offer a little homage to that most ubiquitous and enduring of creatures, the vampire. But how, in such a short missive as this, does one say something original, when there have been thousands upon thousands of stories, novels, films and TV shows which have spawned a myriad of academic papers, chapters and books devoted to these mysterious and alluring beings. Indeed, as I write, one film I eagerly await, due in the UK this Christmas, is Nosferatu (Robert Eggers’ remake of F.W. Mernau’s 1922 classic), currently (bat)winging its way towards its next wave of vampire devotees, much like Dracula himself, tossed in his mouldering box of earth, emptying the crew of blood, as he makes his evil crossing to the North Yorkshire Victorian tourist hotspot of Whitby, where you can still take Dracula walks, visit the Dracula museum and buy Dracula merchandise of all kinds (although what the dark lord himself would have made of this, it’s hard to say). Indeed, ironically, the vampire and Dracula have been done to death. And yet, as is the undead’s want, they continue to rise, year in, year out, in endless protean incarnations for public consumption.

But rather than be dismissive of the vampire industry and make pseudo-academic connections between the blood and money lusts of vampires and global production companies respectively, I thought instead I’d revel in the enduring appeal of the phenomena and say just a few words about some texts and films that have featured in my vampire odyssey, starting, of course, with Dracula, which I am rereading this month, a month in which a new Bram Stoker story (“Gibbet Hill”) has been discovered in a library in Dublin.

I first borrowed Dracula when I was twelve from my local public library, driven there to seek out the original story by the late night horror double bills I was watching every Saturday night on BBC 2, often black and white 50’s giant ants or blobs, followed by Hammer’s more lurid technicolour offerings in which a suave, sinister Christopher Lee preyed upon buxom, nightie-clad young victims and did battle with a gaunt, earnest Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. Rereading the original as an adult, it’s not difficult to see how Mina Murray’s and Lucy Westenra’s repressed Victorian sexualities became the softcore pornography of the low-budget vampire films of the 1970’s.

However, this is not to the reduce the vampire to its ability to titillate (although that certainly is part of the appeal), but rather to gently probe its incredible longevity, its protean alacrity (much like the beast itself) in taking new(ish) shapes and making itself irresistible to new audiences. While Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, for example, sumptuously returned us to the gloriously gothic world of the original, it also relied heavily on the appeal of the young starlets of the time, Wynona Ryder and Sadie Frost, to bring that heaving bosom of virgin flesh and female desire as sickness and mania, the kind that can be satiated not by tightly buttoned, stiff-shirted Victorian doctors or lawyers, but centuries old bloodthirsty Eastern European tyrants who steal babies for ravenous groupies and impale captured soldiers on stakes. Stephenie Meyer and the makers of the mega-franchise Twilight (2008-12), while sanitising Victorian gothic into Pacific Coast teen romance, understood all too well how Bella’s burgeoning female desire must hold out chapter after chapter, film after film, for the most dangerous boy at school. As she says, “There was a part of him – and I didn’t know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood.” 

But while the equation of vampire + female sexual desire = success seems endlessly rebootable and will no doubt feature in this winter’s new blockbuster, there have been highly original vampire stories that have bucked the trend and achieved cult success. Brett Easton Ellis’s The Informers (1994) transposed vampirism onto a murderous, Manson-esque group of rich, drug-addled, disaffected dropouts in 1990’s LA, while John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One (2004) (arguably the most original vampire story in decades), took us to a freezing, working-class Swedish hinterland with a heart-wrenching story of poverty, alcoholism, bullying, isolation, loneliness and friendship, superbly adapted for the screen in Thomas Alfredson’s 2008 film of the same name. Lindqvist’s vampire, Eli, who has been “twelve . . . for a long time”, lives a refugee existence of squalor and hunger, with the pain of her blood lust lodged in her stomach “like an ill-tempered foetus”.

Vampires have been around for millennia and have existed in their current popular form for one hundred and twenty-seven years, since the publication of Dracula in 1897. And while his popularity may ebb and flow with the tastes and mores of literary and filmic consumption, it seems he is all set to feast again, and “satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless,” or at least a new audience of millennials and Gen Zs.