Vampires - From Villain to Anti-Hero
From Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Interview With the Vampire
Nov 9, 2009
In our last installment, Sex and Vampires, we delved into how the act of sucking blood became a metaphor for sex. This section shows how the vampire evolved from a hideous, blood-soaked monster into a tormented anti-hero.
Béla Lugosi's Dracula and the Evolution of the Vampire Into Sex Symbol
Bram Stoker's novel may have been critically acclaimed but it didn't become a literary juggernaut until director Todd Browning adapted it into a movie in 1931. This film was pivotal in changing the public image of the vampire, and a large part of that came from Béla Lugosi's performance.
Yes, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu came out 9 years earlier, and its German Expressionist atmosphere is arguably more influential, but Graf Orlok – as portrayed by Max Shreck (1879-1936) – was a throwback, more akin to Lon Chaney's grotesque Phantom of the Opera than Lugosi's dapper, deadly Count.
By the early 1930's, audiences were tired of gruesome monsters and wanted their villains to be well-dressed: "acceptable in the drawing room" was the oft-used phrase. Hungarian-born Béla Lugosi, who had played Dracula in John L. Balderston's Broadway show for 2 years, fit the bill perfectly. Intense, charismatic and good-looking, Lugosi was the polished villain, his thick Hungarian accent (he learned his lines phonetically) adding exotic menace.
If there is one performance that illustrates the vampire's deadly allure, it would be Lugosi's. This is the moment where the vampire began his long transformation into a deadly heartthrob. In the wake of Dracula's success, Lugosi received more female fan mail than even Hollywood hunk Clark Gable.
Lugosi couldn't handle that success. Already addicted to opiates due to injuries sustained in World War I, he reprised his horror persona to increasingly diminishing returns, finally whoring his considerable talents to arguably the worst director of all time, Ed (Plan 9 From Outer Space) Wood.
Christopher Lee played Dracula in 11 blood-soaked films for Hammer Studios from 1958 to 1973, treading similar ground. Although Hammer emphasized the Count's bestial side in their X-rated movies, Lee was still a mesmerizing presence with his 6'5" height and basso voice: the vampire as Alpha Male.
Like Lugosi, Lee appeared in many questionable films, but received a career revival thanks to memorable roles in the Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings trilogies.
Dark Shadows: The Vampire as Tormented Immortal
The next stage in the vampire's evolution came from the ABC show Dark Shadows. Suffering low ratings in 1967, the Gothic soap opera added a new character to stave off cancellation: Barnabas Collins, a 175-year-old vampire searching for new blood and his lost love.
Portrayed by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, Barnabas was so successful with audiences that, by the time Dark Shadows ended in 1971, he was virtually the star. After Barnabas Collins, the vampire was not only a vicious killer but an undead Romeo eternally searching for his Juliet. He can be pitied as well as feared.
How influential was Dark Shadows? Just look at Francis Ford Coppola's big-budget Bram Stoker's Dracula, released in 1992. The film opens with Transylvanian warlord Vlad Dracula (Gary Oldman) embracing undeath after he discovers his wife Elisabetha (Winona Ryder) has killed herself.
Several centuries later, he discovers Mina Murray (also Ryder), who appears to be the reincarnation of his beloved spouse. Unlike Stoker's novel, where Dracula assaults Mina and forces her to drink his blood, the last half of Coppola's Dracula plays as a love triangle. The now-married Mina is terrified of, yet attracted to, her Count, passionately sucking blood from his bared breast in a scene that plays more like romance than rape.
When she finally kills Dracula, it's more exorcism than execution: releasing him from eternal torment. It appears Mina is more in love with Dracula than with her husband Jonathan Harker.
Oldman's Dracula lives in a post-Dark Shadows world where, as the movie's tagline said, "Love Never Dies." By emphasizing the eternal love aspect of the story, he and Coppola give Dracula a romantic resonance that Stoker and Lugosi never even conceived.
Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire: Vampire as Family Man
While Barnabas Collins was establishing the tortured immortal on television, author Anne Rice was bringing the vampire mythos to its next stage. Her 1976 novel Interview With the Vampire featured a 200-year-old bloodsucker relating his life story to an incredulous journalist.
Rice's Louis was guilt-ridden over the countless lives he had taken, suffering from existential despair and bored with immortality. Far from the masterful, gleeful killers that Lee and Lugosi portrayed, Louis portrayed the immortal life as an empty night, bereft of companionship. The book appealed to oh-so-sensitive teens: so angst-ridden that it could have easily been called Confession of the Vampire.
One of Interview's more controversial elements was the sexual undercurrents between Louis and his bisexual maker. Lestat turns the suicidal Louis into a vampire simply because he's drawn to Louis' beauty. Later, Lestat turns a 6-year-old girl, offering her as a daughter for Louis so that they can truly become an immortal family: Lestat as the charismatic, ruthless Daddy, Louis the conflicted, nurturing Mom. It's the world's first homosexual marriage.
Director Neil Jordan toned down that subtext for the 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt – likely much to Cruise and Rice's relief, since Cruise has weathered many accusations of homosexuality, and Rice was preparing her return to Catholicism – but the book's many fans caught that aspect of the character, reprised when Lestat offered his own memoirs for the 1985 sequel.
(In our next chapter, we discuss the vampire's evolution from anti-hero to hero via the Dead Until Dark and Twilight series. We also start touching on the evolution of sexual activity in vampire books and movies.)
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