Vampires Through the Ages (14 page)

A major part of the novel's success lay in Stoker's spine-tingling depiction of Count Dracula, which relied on a blending of both the tragic Byronic figure popular with his Victorian audience and more primitive animalistic elements that added a heightened sense of horror to his character. Dracula could on the one hand appear a charming and cultured gentleman out for an evening at the opera, while at the same time he moved through the pages of the story like a wild beast, crawling down walls head first or commanding rats and wolves to his bidding. Yet Dracula was more than any of the vampire characters that came before him, and in a sense became the model by which later writers and moviemakers styled their vampires. He slept in coffins filled with the soil of his native land, avoided sunlight at all costs, drank the blood of beautiful women, commanded the weather, and avoided crucifixes whenever possible.

To help formulate his frightful masterpiece, Stoker drew heavily on earlier works, including Polidori's “The Vampyre” and Le Fanu's
Carmilla
. He also spent considerable effort researching Eastern European folklore and borrowed from sources such as Emily Gerard's 1885 essay “Transylvania Superstitions.” To further flesh out his arch-villain, Stoker turned to William Wilkinson's 1820
Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Various Political Observations Relating to Them
, and there found mention of the infamous tyrant Dracula, to whom he forever linked his fictional character.

Despite the standing
Dracula
enjoys today, Stoker's novel was slow to catch on with Victorian readers, who passed the work off as just another gothic adventure novel and one of many “invasion” stories flooding the market that featured creatures or other supernatural forces invading the British Isles. Even the sinister character of Count Dracula himself wouldn't gain iconic status until after Stoker's death, when the novel was adapted for the silver screen in 1931.

As time marched on and the prominence of the vampire genre grew, writers continued to transform the image and even the idea of the vampire in ways to meet the needs of each new generation of readers. While in most cases the vampire remained a bloodsucking monster that preyed upon humanity, writers in the mid-twentieth century departed from traditional storylines in order to shock their audiences in new and more interesting ways.

In 1954 Richard Matheson published the novel
I Am Legend
, which combined the horror of vampirism with the science of a post-apocalyptic world consumed by a deadly plague. The tale later inspired three separate movies: 1964's
The Last Man on Earth,
with Vincent Price; 1971's
The Omega Man,
starring Charlton Heston; and
I Am Legend
, the 2007 movie featuring Will Smith.

In 1976 Colin Wilson added yet another new spin to the old tale by casting his vampires as a race of wandering space aliens come to earth to drain humans of their life force, in the appropriately titled novel
The Space Vampires
. Then, in 1986, vampire fans were treated to another reworking when Brian Lumley created his fantastic
Necroscope
series, in which vampiric parasites known as the Wamphyri spill into our world from another universe.

Yet as far-reaching and imaginative as these other works are, one of the most influential vampire tales since
Dracula
is Anne Rice's
Interview with the Vampire
, first published in 1976. The novel opens in the New Orleans of the late 1700s, and the story is told from the perspective of the vampire Louis, who is cursed to become a blood drinker after being bitten by a vampire named Lestat. Throughout the early portions of the novel, the two vampires are close accomplices as Louis struggles with his new life as one of the undead. Lestat creates another vampire to add to their cozy little “family,” a small girl named Claudia, but further divisions arise in their relationship that threaten to tear them apart.

Eventually things come to a head when Claudia poisons Lestat, slits his throat, and dumps the body in the swamps outside the city. Louis and Claudia then flee to Europe in search of other vampires like themselves, and in time encounter the vampire Armand and his coven, the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris. Before long the two new arrivals are accused of trying to kill their maker when Lestat reappears, having survived Claudia's assassination attempt, and charges them with the crime. As punishment Louis is locked in a coffin to starve to death while Claudia is exposed to sunlight and killed. Armand then releases Louis, who in revenge destroys the coven, and the two set off for America together.

After the release of
Interview with the Vampire
, additional novels followed, many furthering the tale of the vampire Lestat, which became collectively known as the
The Vampire Chronicles
. What set Rice's vampires apart from their predecessors was their internal struggles with the guilt and loneliness that consumed their cursed state. In this regard, Rice's vampires became more human than any who came before and set the trend for future books and movies, which portrayed the creatures as tragically romantic figures at odds with themselves and the world around them. Based on the success of Rice's vampire books, in 1994 a film adaptation of
Interview with the Vampire
appeared, starring Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, and Tom Cruise.

Center Stage

About the time that vampires were finding a new lease on life in the works of nineteenth-century writers, they began making an appearance on the stage as well. Inspired by Polidori's story “The Vampyre,” a theatrical production entitled
Le Vampire
was first adapted for the Paris stage on June 13, 1820, by the French author Charles Nodier, who took the liberty when revising Polidori's work to relocate the storyline to Scotland. A few months later, the British dramatist James Planché introduced
The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles
to the world at the Lyceum Theatre in London, on August 9, 1820. This production was one of the first to feature the special effect known as the “vampire trap,” in which a trap door in the stage floor or wall quickly opened and shut, allowing the actor to appear or disappear as if by magic. Nodier's earlier work also inspired the two-act German opera
Der Vampyr
by composer Heinrich Marschner, which was first performed in Leipzig on March 29, 1828, and met with instant success. Even Alexandre Dumas, the author of such works as
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
, got in on the action with a production similarly titled
Le Vampire
in 1851.

Perhaps one of the more interesting venues in which such dramas appeared was the infamous Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which literally means “The Theatre of the Big Puppet.” First opening in Paris in 1897, the theater was located within a former church and lured in Parisian audiences with horror plays featuring particularly gory special effects and bloody climaxes. For over sixty years the theater thrilled audiences, until it was forced to close in 1962 when it found modern theatergoers too desensitized by the horrors of two world wars to be captivated by its performances any longer.

Even the legendary
Dracula
was originally intended to be adapted for the stage by its author, Bram Stoker, who held readings of the work before its publication in the hopes of attracting interest in it as a drama. Unfortunately for Stoker, he never did get a theatrical version off the ground, but more than a decade after his death an actor named Hamilton Deane and a journalist named John Balderston produced it for the stage featuring a little-known Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi in the title role. From the moment it first appeared on Broadway in 1927, American audiences flocked to its performances, which were craftily advertised to theatergoers, informing them that “… it would be wise for them to visit a specialist and have their hearts examined before subjecting them to the fearful thrills and shocks that Dracula had in store for them” (Deane 1960, 107–8).

Lights, Camera, Fangs

On March 15, 1922, a grainy, black-and-white silent film premiered at Berlin's Kino Primus-Palast under the eerie title
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
, or
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
. A product of the German Expressionist F. W. Murnau, the movie follows a man named Thomas Hutter, who is sent to Transylvania by his employer to visit the mysterious Count Orlok at his castle in the mountains. Once he arrives, Hutter discovers the count is a vampire, and after wandering through the castle finds Orlok lying in a coffin in the castle crypt. Hutter flees the castle and makes his way back to his wife in Germany, where unbeknownst to him Orlok takes up residence as well. Ellen, Hutter's wife, eventually stumbles across a book in her husband's possession titled
The Book of Vampires
, from which she learns that to kill a vampire a woman pure of heart must let him drink her blood until he forgets how much time has passed and the sun comes up to destroy him. During this time a number of grisly murders take place in the town, but the townsfolk merely think some strange disease is plaguing their homes. Then one night Count Orlok enters Ellen's bedchamber and begins to drink her blood, but just as stated in
The Book of Vampires
, because she is pure at heart the monster forgets to flee before the sun comes up, and as the cock crows he vanishes into smoke for good.

While the numerous similarities between the film
Nosferatu
and the novel
Dracula
are hard to miss, Murnau did make some departures from the stereotypical vampire and portrayed Count Orlok as a monster with ratlike ears, a gaunt demonic face, and long taloned fingernails resembling claws. Also of importance is that Orlok's bite does not create other vampires as Stoker's Dracula did. Instead, Orlok's victims die from what the townspeople believe is the plague, appealing to the traditional German belief that vampires were carriers of unknown contagions. Despite these disparities, however, it was apparent to most that
Nosferatu
was little more than a thinly veiled copy of
Dracula
. More importantly, it was readily apparent to Stoker's widow, Florence, who sued Murnau for plagiarism and copyright infringement.

After rulings in her favor both in 1924 and 1929, the film was ordered to be destroyed, but because so many copies had already been released for distribution, it became impossible to round them all up. As a result, copies of the terrifying film entered general circulation anyway and over the years garnered a loyal cult following with horror film aficionados and movie historians to this very day.

Even though Murnau's silent Count Orlok definitely raised the bar on creepiness, arguably the most well-known vampire film of the twentieth century is Tod Browning's 1931 version of
Dracula
. Optioned by Universal Pictures from Florence Stoker for the sum of $40,000, the movie script closely followed Deane and Balderston's popular Broadway version just as it in turn mirrored the original novel. Although the film stared the Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi, who was the lead in the Broadway version as well, he was not the studio's first choice and only won the role after Browning's first pick, Lon Chaney, Sr., died of lung cancer in 1930.

When the film premiered at the lavish Roxy Theatre in New York on February 12, 1931, executives at Universal Pictures had no idea what to expect, but from the first moment the lights dimmed audiences were awestruck. As the show opened in other theaters across the country, movie houses were forced to offer round-the-clock screenings just to accommodate the demand. Industry figures claim that in its first domestic release it earned $700,000 with sales of $1.2 million worldwide (Guiley 2005, 109).

While there are many who claim the film's success can be attributed to the chilling performance of Bela Lugosi, the actor himself was only paid $500 a week for his role and was forced to declare bankruptcy one year after the movie was released. While Lugosi went on to star in other horror films with little success, he will always be remembered for his iconic portrayal of Count Dracula, and when he died in 1956 he was buried in the vampire cape he wore during the film's shooting.

Given
Dracula
's success, Universal Pictures continued to crank out sequels to the film, including
Dracula's Daughter
in 1936,
Son of Dracula
in 1943, and
House of Dracula
in 1945. By the 1950s, the British company Hammer Films began producing vampire films in color, often starring Christopher Lee as a much more calculatingly evil Dracula and Peter Cushing as his vampire-hunting nemesis. These began a new slew of vampire movies that lasted until the 1970s and included such films as
The Brides of Dracula
in 1960,
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
in 1973, and the ever-campy kung-fu flick
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
in 1974.

On June 27, 1966, teenagers across the country began arriving home just in time to catch the new gothic soap opera
Dark Shadows
, which aired on the ABC network each weekday at 4 PM for one half-hour. Created by director and producer Dan Curtis, who claimed to have been inspired by a dream he had of a girl taking a long train ride to a large dark mansion, the production spanned 1,225 episodes from 1966 to 1971, and at its peak claimed over eighteen million viewers. Starting in black and white, the show made the transition to color in 1967 and was comprised of a relatively small cast of characters who played many parts.

While
Dark Shadows
did not at first include a supernatural element in its storyline, it introduced a vampire character into the mix in the hopes of boosting sagging ratings one year into its run. When the 175-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, finally made his daytime debut, the show soared to new heights—until April 2, 1971, by which time a sharp rise in competing soaps and a decline in television advertising condemned
Dark Shadows
to the chopping block.