Danse Macabre (11 page)

Even so, no moviemaker has gotten all of this idea; probably James Whale came the closest in his stylish Bride of Frankenstein, where the monster's more existential sorrows (young Werther with bolts through his neck) are boiled down to a more mundane but emotionally powerful specific: Victor Frankenstein goes ahead and makes the female . . . but she doesn't like the original monster. Elsa Lanchester, looking like a latter-day Studio 54 disco queen, screams when he tries to touch her, and we are in perfect sympathy with the monster when he rips the whole rotten laboratory to pieces.

A fellow named Jack Pierce did Boris Karloff's makeup in the original sound version of Frankenstein, creating a face as familiar to most of us (if slightly more ugly) as the uncles and cousins in a family photograph albums—the square head, the dead-white, slightly concave brow, the scars, the bolts, the heavy eyelids. Universal Pictures copyrighted Pierce's makeup, and so when Britain's Hammer Films made their series of Frankenstein movies in the late fifties and early sixties, a different concept was used. It is probably not as inspired or as original as the Pierce makeup (in most cases the Hammer Frankenstein bears a closer resemblance to the unfortunate Gary Conway in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein), but the two have one thing in common: although in both cases the monster is horrible to look at, there is also something so sad, so miserable there that our hearts actually go out to the creature even as they are shrinking away from it in fear and disgust.*

*The greatest of the Hammer Frankenstein monsters was probably Christopher Lee, who went on to nearly eclipse Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. Lee, a great actor, is the only man to approach Karloff's interpretation of the role, although Karloff was far more fortunate in matters of script and direction. All in all, Christopher Lee fared better as a vampire.

As I've said, most directors who have tried their hands at a Frankenstein film (with the exception of those played exclusively for laughs) have sensed this dichotomy and tried to use it. Breathes there a moviegoer with soul so dead who never wished the monster would jump down from that burning windmill and stuff those torches right down the throats of those ignorant slobs so dedicated to ending its life? I doubt if there is such a moviegoer, and if there is, he must be hardhearted indeed. But I don't believe any director has caught the full pathos of the situation, and there is no Frankenstein movie that will bring tears to the eyes as readily as the final reel of King Kong, where the big ape straddles the top of the Empire State Building and tries to fight off those machinegun-equipped biplanes as if they were the prehistoric birds of his native island. Like Eastwood in Leone's spaghetti westerns, Kong is the archetype of the archetype. We see the horror of being a monster in the eyes of Boris Karloff and, later, in those of Christopher Lee; in King Kong it is spread across the ape's entire face, due to the marvelous special effects of Willis O'Brien. The result is almost a cartoon of the friendless, dying outsider. It is one of the great fusions of love and horror, innocence and terror, the emotional reality which Mary Shelley only suggests in her novel. Even so, I suspect she would have understood and agreed with Dino De Laurentiis's remark on the great attraction of that dichotomy. De Laurentiis was speaking of his own forgettable remake of King Kong, but he could have been speaking about the hapless monster itself when he said, "Nobody cry when jaws die." Well, we don't exactly cry when Frankenstein's monster dies—not the way audiences weep when Kong, that shanghaied hostage of a simpler, more romantic world, topples from his perch atop the Empire State—but we are, perhaps, disgusted at our own sense of relief.

4

Although the gathering which ultimately resulted in Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, miles from British soil, it must still qualify as one of the maddest British tea parties of all time. And in a funny way, the gathering may have been responsible not only for Frankenstein, published that same year, but for Dracula as well, a novel written by a man who would not be born for another thirty-one years. It was June of 1816, and the band of travelers—Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori—had been confined to quarters by two weeks of torrential rains. They began a joint reading of German ghost stories from a book called Fantasmagoria, and the gathering began to get decidedly weird. Things really culminated when Percy Shelley threw a kind of fit. Dr. Polidori noted in his diary: "After tea, 12 o'clock, really began to talk ghosts. Lord Byron read some verses of Coleridge's 'Christabel,' (the part about) the witch's breast; when silence ensued, Shelley, suddenly shrieking, and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. [I] Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. Shelley, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples; which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him."

Leave it to the English.

An agreement was made that each member of the party would try his or her hand at creating a new ghost story. It was Mary Shelley, whose work as a result of the gathering would alone endure, who had the most trouble in setting to work. She had no ideas at all, and several nights passed before her imagination was fired by a nightmare in which "a pale student of unhallowed arts created the awful phantom of a man." It is the creation scene presented in chapers four and five of her novel (quoted from earlier).

Percy Bysshe Shelly produced a fragment entitled "The Assassins." George Gordon Byron produced an interesting macabre tale titled "The Burial." But it is John Polidori, the good doctor, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible link to Bram Stoker and Dracula. His short story was later expanded to novel length and became a great success. It was called "The Vampyre."

In point of fact, Polidori's novel isn't very good . . . and it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to "The Burial," the short story written by his immeasurably more talented patient, Lord Byron. There is perhaps a breath of plagiarism there. We do know that Byron and Polidori argued violently shortly after the interlude at Lake Geneva, and that their friendship ended. It is not entirely beyond supposition that the similarity between the two tales was the cause. Polidori, who was twenty-one at the time he wrote "The Vampyre," came to an unhappy end. The success of the novel he developed from his story encouraged him to retire from the doctoring profession and to become a full-time writer. He had little success at writing, although he was quite good at piling up gambling debts. When he felt his reputation had become irredeemably impugned, he behaved as we would expect of an English gentleman of the day and shot himself.

Stoker's turn-of-the-century horror novel Dracula bears only a slight resemblance to Polidori's The Vampyre—the field is a narrow one, as we will point out again and again, and exclusive of any willful imitation, the family resemblance is always there-but we can be sure that Stoker was aware of Polidori's novel. One believes, after reading Dracula, that Stoker left no stone unturned as he researched the project. Is it so far-fetched to believe that he might have read Polidori's novel, have been excited by the subject matter, and determined to write a better book? I like to believe this might be so, much as I like to believe that Polidori really did crib his idea from Lord Byron. That would make Byron the literary grandfather of the legendary Count, who boasts early on to Jonathan Harker that he drove the Turks from Transylvania . . . and Byron himself died while aiding the Greek insurgents against the Turks in 1824, eight years after the gathering with the Shelleys and Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a death of which the Count himself would have greatly approved.

5

All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will—a conscious decision to do evil—and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning. The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of job, who becomes the human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.

The stories of horror which are psychological—those which explore the terrain of the human heart—almost always revolve around the freewill concept; "inside evil," if you will, the sort we have no right laying off on God the Father. This is Victor Frankenstein creating a living being out of spare parts to satisfy his own hubris, and then compounding his sin by refusing to take the responsibility for what he has done. It is Dr. Henry Jekyll, who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisy—he wants to be able to carouse and party-down without anyone, even the lowliest Whitechapel drab, knowing that he is anything but saintly Dr. Jekyll whose feet are "ever treading the upward path." Perhaps the best tale of inside evil ever written is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," where murder is committed out of pure evil, with no mitigating circumstances whatever to tincture the brew. Poe suggests we will call his narrator mad because we must always believe that such perfect, motiveless evil is mad, for the sake of our own sanity.

Novels and stories of horror which deal with "outside evil" are often harder to take seriously; they are apt to be no more than boys' adventure yarns in disguise, and in the end the nasty invaders from outer space are repelled; or at the last possible instant the Handsome Young Scientist comes up with the gimmick solution . . . as when, in Beginning of the End, Peter Graves creates a sonic gun which draws all the giant grasshoppers into Lake Michigan. And yet it is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil so effective when they are good. Many aren't, but when Lovecraft was on the money—as in "The Dunwich Horror," "The Rats in the Walls," and best of all, "The Colour Out of Space"—his stories packed an incredible wallop. The best of them make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep. After all, what is the paltry inside evil of the A-bomb when compared to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or Yog-Sothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young?

Bram Stoker's Dracula seems a remarkable achievement to me because it humanizes the outside evil concept; we grasp it in a familiar way Lovecraft never allowed, and we can feel its texture. It is an adventure story, but it never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Varney the Vampyre.

Stoker achieves the effect to a large degree by keeping the evil literally outside for most of his long story. The Count is onstage almost constantly during the first four chapters, dueling with Jonathan Harker, pressing him slowly to the wall ( "Later there will be kisses for all of you," Harker hears him tell the three weird sisters as he [Harker] lies in a semiswoon) . . . and then he disappears for most of the book's three hundred or so remaining pages.* It is one of English literature's most remarkable and engaging tricks, a trompe l'oeil that has rarely been matched. Stoker creates his fearsome, immortal monster much the way a child can create the shadow of a giant rabbit on the wall simply by wiggling his fingers in front of a light.

*The Count appears onstage another half-dozen times, most splendidly in Mina Murray Harker's bedroom. The men in her life burst into her room following the death of Renfield and are greeted with a scene worthy of Bosch: the Count clutching Mina, his face slathered with her blood. In an obscene parody of the marriage sacrament, he opens a vein in his own chest with one dirty fingernail and forces her to drink. Other glimpses of the Count are less powerful. We glimpse him once strolling along an avenue in a foppish straw hat, and once ogling a pretty girl like any run-of-the-mill dirty old man.

The Count's evil seems totally predestinate; the fact that he comes to London with its "teeming millions" does not proceed from any mortal being's evil act. Harker's ordeal at Castle Dracula is not the result of any inner sin or weakness; he winds up on the Count's doorstep because his boss asked him to go. Similarly, the death of Lucy Westenra is not a deserved death. Her encounter with Dracula in the Whitby churchyard is the moral equivalent of being struck by lightning while playing golf. There is nothing in her life to justify the end she comes to at the hands of Van Helsing and her fiancé, Arthur Holmwood—her heart burst apart by a stake, her head chopped off, her mouth stuffed with garlic.

It is not that Stoker is ignorant of inside evil or the Biblical concept of free will; in Dracula the concept is embodied by that most engaging of maniacs, Mr. Renfield, who also symbolizes the root source of vampirism—cannibalism. Renfield, who is working his way up to the big leagues the hard way (lie begins by snacking on flies, progresses to munching on spiders, then to dining on birds), invites the Count into Dr. Seward's madhouse knowing perfectly well what he is doing—but to suggest he is a large enough character to take responsibility for all the terrors that follow is to suggest the absurd. His character, though engaging, is just not strong enough to take that weight. We assume that if Dracula hadn't gotten in by using Renfield, he would have gotten in another way.

In a way it was the mores of Stoker's day which dictated that the Count's evil should come from outside, because much of the evil embodied in the Count is a perverse sexual evil. Stoker revitalized the vampire legend largely by writing a novel which fairly pants with sexual energy. The Count doesn't ever attack Jonathan Harker; in fact he is promised to the weird sisters who live in the castle with him. Harker's one brush with these voluptuous but lethal harpies is a sexual one, and it is presented in his diary in terms that were, for turn-of-the-century England, pretty graphic:

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth . . . . Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck . . . . I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a langourous ecstacy and waited—waited with beating heart.