Vampires loom large at the South African International Film Festival. Stanley Peskin explores their appeal
THE vampiric desire expressed in the phrase ”kiss me with those red lips” has exerted a potent hold over audiences for almost a century. Whether there are any traces of vampirism to be found in the history of Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler, the Catholic ruler of medieval Walachia, the details of his life, real or apocryphal, have been subsumed into a poetry of delirium and fantasy. We have become familiar with the tales of horror we associate with the man who took the name Dracula; we touch wood and eat garlic so as not to be mutilated.
Goethe, Byron, Polidori, among many other notable fictionalists, wrote vampire stories but all lay dormant, waiting for Bram Stoker. In Dracula, published in 1897, a vampiric count leaves his native Transylvania with 50 coffins, to conquer Victorian England. He has since come to occupy considerably more territory than he originally intended.
What is the attraction of vampires, ghouls and vurdulakas? Sexual atavism? A threatening act of aggression that destroys the stability of society, with its apparently rigorous and immutable laws? An impulse towards death which both in fiction and film is lured, invoked and desired? Homo-eroticism, necrophilia, the subordination of women?
There is perhaps considerable attraction in invisibility, in being able to change into mist or a bat. If we cast no shadow and cannot be seen in mirrors, we are indeed powerful. Moreover, Dracula has complete freedom in space and time, though he sometimes complains about these privileges — for example, in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979), for which 11 000 white rats were painted grey.
Arguably, sexuality rather than supernatural terrors is the real business of vampire films. Dracula’s Daughter (1936), surely a trial run for Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), was described as ”more sensational than her unforgettable father”. And like her father, she was more fond of women than men.
Roger Vadim’s explicitly erotic Blood and Roses exploited J Sheridan le Fanu’s lesbian treatment of the vampire theme in 1872. Carmilla, who preys on the beautiful and passive Laura in her Styrian Castle, is no snob: she also feeds on the more robust peasant woman in the district.
In Polanski’s 1967 The Fearless Vampire Killers (for which the fangs were created by one Ludwig van Krankheit), Dracula’s son is sexually attracted to the professor’s assistant, played by Polanski himself.
Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974) flirted with socialism. The aristocratic Udo Keir, whose continued existence depends on the ”blood of virgins”, has his teeth removed by working-class Joe Dalessandro, whose hammer and sickle are more a metaphor for his sexual equipment than his political beliefs.
Other interesting variations on the Dracula story include Blood of the Vampire (1958) starring Donald Wolfitt, whose experience of chewing his way through Shakespeare and Ibsen proved invaluable; Blacula, which celebrated black power; and Love Bites, which proclaimed gay power. Although Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) was regarded by many critics as an Aids parable, the exchange of blood was closer to soft porn.
Advertising gambits are a source of great pleasure. When in 1931, Universal made the first sound Dracula, the film was described as ”The strangest love a woman has ever known … a livid face bent over her in the ghostly mist”.
Rank/Hammer’s version of Dracula in 1958 asked: ”Who will he bite tonight?” and ”Who will be his bride tonight?” Apparently brides and bites are interchangeable. In publicising Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1968), the same studio’s claim that ”you can’t keep a good man down” could equally apply to a Mae West film.