®

For Stephanie Wichmann and Mary Alice Tully, my favorite vampire fans.

About the Author

Adam Woog has written many books for adults, young adults, and children. He and his wife
live in Seattle, Washington. They have a daughter who is in college.

©2011 ReferencePoint Press, Inc.

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Picture credits:
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Fortean Picture Library: 6
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Series design and book layout: Amy Stirnkorb

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Woog, Adam, 1953-

Vampires in the movies / by Adam Woog.
p. cm. -- (The vampire library series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60152-211-5 (e-book)
1. Vampire films--History and criticism--Juvenile literature. I. Title.
PN1995.9.V3W66 2010
791.43’675--dc22
2010017982
 Contents

Introduction: Blood-Sucking Stars of the Silver Screen 4

Chapter 1: Dawn of the Movie Undead 8

Chapter 2: The Vampire Evolves 22

Chapter 3: Blockbusters and Other Twists

on an Immortal Tale 35

Chapter 4: The Building Blocks of Vampire Flicks 50

Chapter 5: Breaking the Mold 63

Source Notes 76

For Further Exploration 77

Index 78
 Introduction

Blood-Sucking
Stars of the
Silver Screen
V ampires, those bloodthirsty creatures of the night,
have been staples of horror movies since the dawn
of filmmaking. Many of the older movies seem quaint to
modern viewers—corny, with poor acting and crude special
effects. But even the creakiest silent movie was an exciting
and revolutionary new form of art and entertainment in its
day. Likewise, even the cheesiest gore-fest from later years
was just a reflection of what was popular and stylish at
the time. More than a century after a vampire first stalked
across the silver screen, bloodsuckers remain some of the
most enduring figures in film—some might even say they
are immortal.

Vlad the Impaler

Legends of undead creatures who live forever, feed on the
blood of humans, and sometimes make their victims into
vampires as well have existed for thousands of years and in

4
cultures from all over the world. For example, writings from
ancient Babylon mention such creatures. But the most fa-
mous vampire legend, a direct ancestor of the most famous
movie vampire, comes from a part of eastern Europe called
Transylvania, in what is now Romania.
Ancient stories from there tell of a fifteenth-century
aristocrat called Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracul. Ac-
cording to these legends, he was a bloodthirsty and sadistic
warrior-ruler who liked to kill his enemies in several grisly
ways, including impaling them on sharpened pikes and leav-
ing the bodies to rot—hence his nickname, Vlad the Impaler.
He was a real person and really did kill countless people,
but there is no hard evidence that the ruler was a vampire. Strange as
He remained an obscure footnote to history until 1897, when It Sounds...
an Irish novelist, Bram Stoker, used his name and legend for Dracula is the most-
a book that has become synonymous with bloodcurdling portrayed monster
in film history.
shivers. This book, of course, was Dracula.

Dracula the Novel

Stoker’s book begins with Jonathan Harker, an English law-
yer, traveling to Castle Dracula in the rugged mountains of
Transylvania and Moldavia. He is carrying papers for the re-
clusive Count Dracula, who is buying property in England.
Harker is first charmed by Dracula, but soon realizes that
he is being held captive—and that his host is a vampire.
Harker manages to escape. Meanwhile, as he rushes home, a
sailing ship carrying a cargo of coffins filled with dirt crashes
on the coast of England. All of the ship’s crew is dead from
some mysterious disease, and a strange creature is seen leap-
ing from the ship to the land.
Soon after this occurs, Dracula travels to London, where
he meets Harker’s fiancée Mina Murray, her friend Lucy

5
Villagers
impaled
on sharp
wooden
stakes suffer
a gruesome
death while
the corpses
of their
neighbors
are chopped
into pieces in
preparation
for roasting.
In the middle
of it all, Vlad
the Impaler
feasts.

Westenra, and Dr. John Seward, who works in an insane

asylum. Lucy falls ill, and mysterious bite marks are found
on her neck. Puzzled, Seward consults his friend Professor

6
Abraham Van Helsing, an expert on infectious diseases, and
Van Helsing realizes that a vampire has bitten her. Lucy dies
and is buried, but soon she returns to hunt children by night
for their blood. Van Helsing enlists Seward and Harker (who Strange as
by now has returned home) to help hunt her. They manage It Sounds...
to kill Lucy by driving a wooden stake through her heart and The first known
cutting her head off. printed use of the
But the Count is not through. He attacks Mina (now Mrs. word vampire in
English appeared
Harker) and feeds his own blood to her, which makes her in 1734.
a semivampire and connects her telepathically with him.
Dracula then heads back to Transylvania. The tracking party
follows the Count to his castle, where the humans manage
to kill the vampire by stabbing him in the heart and neck. As
Dracula crumbles to dust, Mina is freed from his spell.

Perennial Favorites
Stoker’s novel was a huge success, thanks to its shivery thrills
and such potent themes as the uncertainty of life after death,
rebirth, and the temptations of evil. Terence Fisher, who di-
rected many of the most popular vampire movies ever made,
points out, “The whole idea of evil is very attractive.”1
It is not surprising, therefore, that Dracula immediately
became a hit stage play and, since the medium’s earliest
days, a perennial theme in the movies. The Internet Movie
Data Base lists over 200 entries just for films that feature
Dracula characters—and that does not count the many non-
Dracula vampire flicks. According to the same source, more
than 60 vampire movies are scheduled for release in 2010
alone. No wonder that the Guinness Book of World Records
lists Dracula as the character most frequently portrayed in
horror films. Clearly, vampires and movies are a match, you
might say, made in heaven.

7
 Chapter 1

Dawn of the
Movie Undead
M ovie monsters rose up at the motion picture era’s first
light of dawn. It was 1896, to be precise, only a year
after Bram Stoker published his now-famous book.
The two-minute movie Le manoir du diable (The Devil’s
Castle) is not really a vampire movie. It is worth mention-
ing, however, because it was the world’s first horror film.
The man who conjured it up was Georges Méliès, a French
pioneer of the film industry. In his crude film, a huge bat
turns into a devil—but a brave soldier holds up a cross and
banishes it.

The First Vampire Movies

Silent movies were immediate smash sensations with the
public, and as their popularity expanded so did their subject
matter. As far as is known, the first film that was unmis-
takably about vampires appeared in 1916: a German movie
called Nachte de Grauens (Night of Terror). It remains a tan-
talizing mystery, however. No prints exist, and little is known
about it or its American-born creator Arthur Robison.
Nachte de Grauens makes no mention of the name “Drac-
ula.” The first to do so, as far as film scholars know, was a
1921 Hungarian film, Drakula halála (The Death of Drac-

8 8 8
ula). As with the earlier film, no prints are known to exist;
apparently, only a few publicity photos survive.
Director Károly Lajthay shot Drakula halála in Austria
and Hungary. It is based only very loosely on Stoker’s novel.
The details differ depending on the source, but all agree that
the film tells the story of a woman who either visits or is
committed to an insane asylum. An inmate who claims to be
Dracula haunts her dreams there. She later marries but re-
mains plagued by visions of the vampire, unsure which parts
of her life are real and which are hallucinations. Strange as
It Sounds...
The First Classic The word vampire
In 1922, soon after the Hungarian film was shot, the first was once a slang
term for a beautiful
genuine vampire classic was released: Nosferatu. (Its full title
woman who
was Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens—or Nosferatu: entranced every man
A Symphony of Terror.) she met; the word
was used this way
The movie’s director was F.W. Murnau, one of the great
in the 1913 film
masters of an artistic style called German Expressionism. The Vampire.
Expressionism emphasizes wild emotions, deep shadows,
and bizarre set designs. The best of the Expressionist films,
including Nosferatu, are disturbing visions of madness and
horror.
The filmmakers wanted to adapt Stoker’s novel but could
not acquire the rights, so they hired writer Henrik Galeen to
write a screenplay using the same basic plot. Galeen set his
story mainly in a fictional town in Germany and invented
new names for the characters. Count Dracula became Count
Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter, and Mina
Harker became Ellen Hutter. (The screenwriter eliminated
the character of Van Helsing completely.)
Hutter travels to Count Orlok’s castle to deliver papers for
a house the Count is buying in Hutter’s town. Stopping for the

9
The first genuine night en route, the businessman meets local residents who
vampire classic, are terrified at the mention of Orlok’s name; they relate the
Nosferatu, was legend of a vampire called Nosferatu. Unafraid, Hutter con-
released in 1922. tinues to the castle and is greeted by the grotesque Count.
Done in the German
Expressionist style,
Defeated by the Pure of Heart
it presented a
As Hutter eats a late dinner, he accidentally cuts his thumb.
disturbing vision of
Orlok wildly tries to suck the blood, but the young man pulls
madness and horror
away in disgust. Later, when signing the papers, Orlok ad-
as can be seen in
actor Max Schreck’s mires a picture of Hutter’s wife—especially her lovely neck.
portrayal of the title Hutter starts to suspect that Orlok is Nosferatu, the vampire
character (pictured). that terrified the villagers.
The next day, Hutter sees Orlok piling coffins onto a coach

10 10
and leaving. Hutter flees the castle but is injured and must
recover before heading home. Meanwhile, Orlok loads his
coffins—which are filled with soil and rats—onto a ship and
sets sail for Hutter’s town. En route, the ship’s sailors sicken
and die of plague carried by the rats, while Orlok sleeps in
his coffin. After the Count docks the ship himself, the plague
devastates the countryside.
Hutter returns, and Ellen realizes that the plague is con-
nected to the Count. From a book about vampires, she learns
that the only way to kill Orlok is for a pure-hearted woman
to willingly surrender. He will lose track of time, and when
the sun rises he will die.
When Orlok breaks into her bedroom, Ellen allows him
to drink her blood, and, sated, he forgets about time. As the
light of dawn hits him, the wicked Count disappears in a
cloud of smoke. Ellen lives only long enough to be embraced
by her grieving husband.

Was Max Schreck a Real Vampire?

Nosferatu was shot in three locales: the German port city
of Wismar, a studio in Berlin, and the ruins of a thirteenth-
century structure, Orava Castle, in what is now Slovakia. The
technology was crude by today’s standards, and the single
camera was cranked by hand. Nonetheless, Murnau created
an atmosphere that is still unnerving.
The director was helped in fulfilling his vision by his per-
fectionist nature, which led him to painstakingly prepare ev-
ery shot and even use a metronome to keep the pace of the
acting flowing smoothly. For the most part, Murnau closely
followed the detailed instructions that Galeen had specified
in his screenplay. These included notes on camera position-
ing, lighting, and stage direction. The exception to this was

11
 the final scene, in which Orlok dies. Murnau rewrote this
finale himself.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Nosferatu, however,
is the performance of the actor playing Orlok, a relative un-
known named Max Schreck. Schreck is the German word
for fright, and one theory is that he was a famous actor us-
ing a pseudonym. This cannot be proven, however, since
Schreck’s makeup makes it impossible to see his real face.
This makeup shows Orlok as a terrifying demon with long
fingers and nails, a bald skull, sharp ratlike teeth, and point-
ed ears. Schreck was alleged to be a deeply strange person
when not on screen, and—judging from his portrayal of the
vampire—this is easy to believe. There were even rumors at
the time that the actor was, in fact, a real vampire.
When the eagerly anticipated movie premiered at the
Berlin Zoo in March 1922, guests were asked to wear fancy
dress, meant to evoke the film’s 1830s-era setting. Nosferatu
opened to the public later that month and was a huge hit.
However, trouble lay ahead for the filmmakers.
The changes made to Stoker’s story were not enough to
disguise Nosferatu’s origins. The novelist’s widow sued, and
the filmmakers declared bankruptcy. Florence Stoker pur-
sued the matter, and a judge ordered all copies of the film
destroyed. Fortunately for fans of classic movies, however,
five prints survived. Their quality is imperfect, but they are
good enough for the very creepy Count Orlok to still give
audiences shivers.

Dracula Goes to Hollywood

The first vampire “talkie”—that is, a movie with sound—
was Vampyr, released in 1931. Its chief creator was a distin-
guished Danish writer/director, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Many

12
 “Extraordinary
Pallor”
T he original Dracula—the one Bram Stoker invented in his
classic nineteenth-century novel—is quite unlike most of
the characters portrayed in movies. Although his appearance
grows younger as he drinks the blood of more victims, here is
how he appears to Jonathan Harker, one of the characters in
the book:

His face was a strong—a very strong—aqui-

line, with high bridge of the thin nose and
peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed
forehead, and hair growing scantily round
the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eye-
brows were very massive, almost meeting over
the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to
curl in its own profusion.

The mouth, so far as I could see it under the

heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel
looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth;
these protruded over the lips, whose remark-
able ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in
a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were
pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the
chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks
firm though thin. The general effect was one
of extraordinary pallor.

Bram Stoker, Dracula. New York: Cosimo, 2009, p. 15.

13
 film historians consider Vampyr a better film than Nosferatu
Slovakia’s
and other, more famous early versions of the Dracula story.
Orava Castle
It is a dreamlike movie based on a collection of horror sto-
(shown here
under a ries by writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. It tells the story of a
dusting of man in a remote country inn who believes he is surrounded
winter snow) by vampires—and then dreams of his own death and burial.
is one of three However, Vampyr was completely overshadowed by a film
locations in released the same year—the most famous vampire movie of
Europe where all time. This was the film that was destined to make the
the movie blood-sucking Count Dracula into an icon, fixing a perma-
Nosferatu was nent place in cinema history for the voice, manner, and face
filmed. of a particular actor. The film, of course, was Dracula.

14
 This version was, by the standards of the time, a big-
budget production (it cost $355,000, roughly $5 million in
today’s dollars), and this time it could legally use the Count’s
name. Universal Pictures in Hollywood had acquired the
rights to a hugely popular stage version of Dracula, so with
the permission of the Stoker estate the studio was free to
adapt the novel without disguise.
Objections arose at first, however, because the play re-
pelled many at Universal. One reader (a person who recom- Strange as
mends or rejects scripts) commented, “While this may have It Sounds...
a fantastic [run on stage] and be very engrossing for those Béla Lugosi was
buried in his
who like the weird, I cannot possibly see how it is going to Dracula cape
make a motion picture. It is blood—blood—blood—kill and when he died
everything that would cause any average human being to in 1956.

revolt. . . . Sorry but I cannot see that there is anything in

this.” Another reader added: “We all like to see ugly things
. . . we are all attracted, to a certain extent, to that which is
hideous . . . but when it passes a certain point, the attraction
dies and we suffer a feeling of repulsion and nausea.”2
Undaunted, the head of Universal, Carl Laemmle Jr., hired
screenwriter Garrett Fort and director Tod Browning for
the project. (Browning also made, among others, the clas-
sic horror picture Freaks.) For their lead actor, meanwhile,
Universal turned to an actor with long experience in playing
the Count.
His name was Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó. Born in the
town of Lugos, in what is now Romania, he later adapted
his hometown’s name as his stage name. As Béla Lugosi, the
actor moved to America, learned English, and became a star
with the stage version of Dracula. The studio was able to
hire him for a flat fee of $3,500.

15
 “I Never Drink . . . Wine”
Lugosi’s version of the blood-sucking Count was miles from
Max Schreck’s disturbing and grotesque vampire. The Hun-
garian actor’s take was smooth, seductive, and charming.
His performance was dramatically aided by recent improve-
ments in filmmaking, notably the revolutionary new tech-
nology of sound. Dracula was made during the time when
“talkies” were replacing silent movies, so audiences could
thrill to Lugosi’s exotic and hypnotic voice.
The plot of Dracula loosely follows the novel (and, to a
degree, Nosferatu). It begins with an Englishman named
Strange as Renfield journeying to Transylvania with papers for Drac-
It Sounds... ula’s purchase of a house. The Transylvanian peasants are
The 1922 version frightened of the night, warn Renfield about vampires, and
of Nosferatu was
banned in Sweden
give him a crucifix for protection. Film scholar Gregory A.
until 1972 because Waller comments, “With this young traveler we encounter
it was deemed too a land in which the terrified, pious, superstitious human be-
horrifying.
ings live in a state of constant watchfulness.”3
When the Count welcomes Renfield to his forbidding
home, they hear wolves howling in the distance, and Dracu-
la utters some now-famous lines: “Listen to them. Children
of the night. What music they make!” He then offers Ren-
field a meal, explaining that he will not join his guest. Before
Renfield begins to eat, his host utters the immortal words: “I
never drink . . . wine.”4
Dracula later attacks Renfield, beginning the process of mak-
ing him a vampire. By the time they board a ship to England,
Renfield is Dracula’s slave; by the time they dock in London, the
Englishman is the only living person on board. Browning, the
film’s director, makes an off-screen appearance here as the voice
of the harbormaster who finds Renfield in the hold. He cries,
“Why, he’s mad—look at his eyes—the man’s gone crazy.”5

16 16
Dracula Meets His End
Renfield is sent to a lunatic asylum, while the Count leaves
his coffin and moves to his new home. There he befriends
John Harker, Harker’s fiancée Mina, and their friend Lucy
Weston. Mina is a typical woman of the era, carefully pro-
tected from danger by men, in this case Harker and her fa-
ther, Dr. Seward, who runs the lunatic asylum. Lucy, on the
other hand, is far more independent—but also more vulner-
able to the charms of the Count. That night Dracula appears
as a bat, enters Lucy’s bedroom, and gorges on her blood. She
dies the next day, and doctors notice two puncture wounds
on her neck. Dracula then visits Mina as she sleeps and bites Strange as
her neck as well. It Sounds...
Meanwhile, Harker’s friend, a scientist named Abraham Béla Lugosi earned
$3,500 for his role in
Van Helsing (played by Edward Van Sloan, who had appeared Dracula—the most
with Lugosi on stage), examines Renfield. The madman is famous vampire
obsessed with eating insects, convinced that this will make movie ever made.
him stronger. He also says that his master has promised him
thousands of rats, and Van Helsing realizes that a vampire
is on the loose—namely, the Count. His secret discovered,
Dracula flees and, finding Mina, attacks her. The next morn-
ing, clearly ill, she is put to bed. Meanwhile, a newspaper
reports that a beautiful woman in white has been attacking
children in the park. This is Lucy, now transformed into a
vampire.
Van Helsing enlists Harker and Seward to help him find
the fiend, explaining that Dracula can be killed by driving a
wooden stake into his heart. When the professor tracks him
down, Dracula tries to hypnotize him but Van Helsing wards
him off with a crucifix. Meanwhile, Mina, who is slowly be-
coming a vampire, attacks Harker.
Van Helsing and Seward arrive just in time to save

17
 Harker, but Dracula takes Mina captive and retreats to his
coffin before sunrise. When the vampire killers catch up,
Mina is nearly dead, but Van Helsing is able to kill Renfield
and Dracula—at which time Mina returns to the living. She
and Harker walk away together, leaving Van Helsing and
Seward with the corpses.

Audiences Faint from Fear

Dracula had some problems in production. Most important,
all of the set-building, costumes, and special effects had to
be done on a very tight budget. Lugosi later recalled, “Every-
thing that Tod Browning wanted to do was queried [by the
studio]. Couldn’t it be done cheaper? Would it be just as ef-
fective if . . . ? That sort of thing. It was most dispiriting.”6
Another interesting production note reveals how movies
of the period anticipated the now-common practice of shoot-
ing sequels back-to-back. Universal shot a Spanish-language
version of Dracula simultaneously with the English version,
using the same sets. A different cast and crew was used,
including director George Melford, Carlos Villarías as the
Count, and Eduardo Arozamena as Van Helsing. Villarías is
generally considered the weak link in this version, unable to
match the intensity of Lugosi in the part.
The English-language version of the movie opened in New
York in 1931. Browning disliked the final version, claiming
that the studio had butchered the film he wanted to make.
Nonetheless, it was an instant hit, with 50,000 tickets sold
within 48 hours. Eager to be frightened, audiences all across
the country soon formed long lines in front of theaters.
Newspaper reports claim that a number of viewers ac-
tually fainted while watching Dracula. Browning’s biogra-
phers, David J. Skal and Elias Savada, point out that this

18
Actor Béla Lugosi (pictured in this 1931 movie poster with actress Helen
Chandler) created an enduring character in his portrayal of Count Dracula.
His charming, seductive vampire was a far cry from the grotesque and
disturbing Max Schreck character.

phenomenon might have been connected to the deeply

stressful times: America was two years into the devastating
misery of the Great Depression. They comment, “Dracula
was a uniquely frightening picture that found its audience
during a uniquely frightening year.”7
Whatever the reason, the movie’s success brought Uni-
versal’s shaky finances back to life. It also inspired a sequel.
Never mind that Van Helsing had killed the Count; Dracula
refused to die. In fact, Universal brought him back several
times, including 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter (with Lugosi and

19
 A Taste of the
Film’s Energies
T he first movie known to invoke the name of Dracula for its
main character was a now-lost 1921 Hungarian film, Draku-
la halála (The Death of Dracula). Only a few publicity stills are
known to exist, but an article by an unnamed Hungarian journal-
ist, published while the movie was being shot, provides one of the
few remaining clues about it. In his piece, the writer describes one
scene in particular:

Drakula’s wedding gives a taste of the film’s energies.

There is an immense hall, dressed in marble, with a
very, very long and dark corridor in the middle. That
is where Drakula lives his mysterious life. It is night.
The flutter and shrieks of a multitude of beasts can be
heard, and the door in the middle of the hall opens.
Beautiful women parade through it, all dressed in
dreamlike costumes, all of them being Drakula’s
wives. But now Drakula awaits his new woman, the
most beautiful and desirable of all. She will be wel-
comed with a rain of flowers.

. . . When the film is finished, this scene will con-

stitute just a small section of a four-act film. On the
screen, this scene will not last more than five min-
utes, whereas it takes a full day’s work to produce.
The viewer, sitting in the theatre, will have no idea
what extraordinary talent was required from the di-
rector to rehearse, shoot, and edit the sequences one
by one.

Quoted in Gary D. Rhodes, “Drakula halála (1921): The Cinema’s First Dracula,”
Horror Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, p. 29.

20
Gloria Holden as his daughter) and 1943’s Son of Dracula
(with Lon Chaney Jr.—already famous among horror-movie
fans for his role as the Wolf Man).
Other studios also got in on the action. One was MGM,
which produced Mark of the Vampire. The film starred Lu-
gosi, but—since the studio could not use the name Dracula—
this time he was Count Mora.

The Vampire Returns

These post-Dracula movies were part of a larger phenom-
enon: a huge wave of popularity for horror movies. It mat-
tered little that most of them were terrible—they were hits
nonetheless. However, one film, produced by Columbia
Pictures, was more interesting than most. The Return of the
Vampire brought the ancient themes of the immortal un-
dead into modern times.
The Return of the Vampire was set in London, England,
and released in 1944, while World War II raged. The movie
reflects the nightly bombings by German forces that Lon-
don was then suffering. An explosion uncovers the tomb
of a vampire named Armand Tesla (although, as played by
Lugosi again, he bears a curious resemblance to Dracula).
Once Tesla comes alive again, he plots a terrible revenge on
some old enemies.
The enthusiasm among audiences for horror movies con-
tinued well into the 1950s. Popular taste is fickle, however,
and cinematic vampires fell out of fashion during this time—
replaced, in large part, by movie monsters that emerged from
the public’s fascination with aliens (as in The Day the Earth
Stood Still) and atomic-produced monsters (like Godzilla).
Vampires remained more or less in their coffins until the late
1950s, when they made a dramatic comeback.

21
 Chapter 2

The Vampire
Evolves
T he studio that almost single-handedly brought vampire
movies back to life in the late 1950s was an English
company called Hammer Films. Hammer was already
famous for cranking out dozens of lurid horror and adventure
movies. Its output ranged from classic tales of Frankenstein
and the Mummy to originals like Slave Girls and When
Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
When Hammer added Dracula to its roster, the studio
followed its standard guidelines for making a good horror
movie. This meant living color, usually with plenty of bloody
reds, along with elaborate sets but relatively few special ef-
fects. They also followed the Hammer tradition of using
scripts and actors that varied drastically in quality.

Are Vampires Always Messy Eaters?

The first in Hammer’s series, released in 1958, was simply
called Dracula. (In the United States it was retitled Horror
of Dracula to avoid confusion with the Lugosi version.) Di-
rector Terence Fisher and screenplay writer Jimmy Sangster
used some elements of Stoker’s novel and Universal’s movie.
(A few years later, in 1962, the copyright on the novel went

22
into the public domain, which meant that studios no longer
needed permission from the Stoker estate.)
The British film censorship board—a very strict agency—
hated Sangster’s first drafts of the story. One official wrote
in an internal memo:
Strange as
The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vul- It Sounds...
gar style of Mr. Jimmy Sangster cannot quite Christopher Lee
obscure the remnants of a good horror story, played Dracula
in 10 different
though they do give one the gravest misgiv- movies—more
ings. . . . The curse of the thing is Technicolor than any other
blood: why need vampires be messier feeders actor.
than anyone else? Certainly strong cautions
will be necessary on shots of blood. And of
course, some of the stake-work is prohibitive.8

The board drew up a list of requirements before the mov-

ie could be made. The vampires could not be too revolting.
Women needed to be decently dressed. The violence had
to remain minimal. Hammer had to tone down the ver-
sion it shot for British audiences, unlike the gorier Japanese
and American versions, so English audiences missed such
touches as Dracula’s face disintegrating as he died.

The Horror of Dracula

The script that the censors finally accepted was set in 1885.
Jonathan Harker travels to remote Germany, allegedly to be-
come a librarian at Castle Dracula. In fact, he is a vampire
hunter.
Harker has trouble from the start: He is bitten by a fe-
male vampire and starts to become a vampire himself. He
succeeds in driving a stake through the woman’s heart, but

23
 Dracula escapes. Soon after, Harker’s colleague Van Helsing
arrives, sees that Harker has become a bloodsucker, and is
forced to kill his friend with a stake through the heart.
Van Helsing returns to London and tells his story to Hark-
er’s friends Mina and Arthur, as well as Mina’s sister Lucy
Strange as (who was also Harker’s fiancée). Meanwhile, Dracula secretly
It Sounds... arrives in London and attacks Lucy and Mina, turning Lucy
In the first
one and a half into a full-fledged vampire and Mina into a half-vampire—
seasons of the that is, only partially on her way to being undead. Van
TV series Dark Helsing is forced to kill Lucy, but Dracula kidnaps Mina.
Shadows, not one
character uttered The Count returns home, with Van Helsing and Arthur
the word vampire in pursuit. They confront him in the castle and destroy him
in describing by tearing down curtains to let the sunshine in. As Dracula
the mysterious,
undead being turns to dust, Mina is released from her half-vampiric state.
known as
Barnabas The British Vampires Multiply
Collins.
For the movie’s London premiere, Hammer arranged a giant
billboard outside the theater. Above the slogan “Every night
he rises from his coffin bed silently to seek the warm flesh,
the warm blood he needs to keep himself alive!”9 was a pic-
ture of the actors playing Dracula and Mina. Mina had “real”
blood flowing from her neck and dripping from her hair.
This stunt and other forms of publicity helped ensure the
film’s success despite the disgust of many members of the
public and generally poor reviews. In fact, Dracula broke
all attendance records for that theater. The controversy con-
tinued, however: When the movie played in the city of Bir-
mingham, an advertising poster at the local blood bank had
to be quickly removed after complaints.
As had Universal, Hammer produced many more Dracula
movies after this success, as well as several vampire movies
not featuring the Count. As might be expected, the Dracula

24
sequels had progressively less in common with the original
story line. For one, they required elaborate opening scenes
to explain how the bloodsucker managed to return after be-
ing killed over and over.
The Hammer films continued to be hits throughout the
decade, but by 1970 audience interest was waning. In a bid
Strange as
to attract younger and wider audiences, the studio made the
It Sounds...
In an effort to
fifth in the series, Scars of Dracula, notably gorier. The strat- capitalize on the
egy was not a success, however, and the movie bombed. success of the 1968
Hammer then tried another approach: moving Dracula hit science fiction
movie Planet of
out of the Victorian era. The first of these “contemporary” the Apes, some
films was Dracula AD 1972. A disciple of Dracula schemes U.S. distributors
to bring his master back to life and convinces a group of changed the title of
the Spanish vampire
freewheeling hippies to join him. But Dracula barely ap- movie La Noche del
pears in the film, the hippies are played for laughs, and the Terror Ciego (Night
movie flopped. After one more attempt to rejuvenate the se- of Blind Terror) to
Revenge from
ries, Hammer returned to previous times with The Legend of Planet Ape.
the 7 Golden Vampires. When it bombed as well, Hammer
finally killed off the series.

The Stars
Hammer movies had small budgets, and saving money was
always an issue. For example, Dracula: Prince of Darkness
was filmed back-to-back with another production, Raspu-
tin: The Mad Monk. They shared sets and cast, and watch-
ing them together shows how cleverly the recycled materials
were used.
Despite the budget constraints, by all accounts working at
Hammer was great fun. The lack of money fostered an atmo-
sphere of improvisation, and the studio’s small size encour-
aged a family-like atmosphere. Besides, Hammer made up
for its low salaries by feeding the cast and crew well. Charles

25
26 26
Lloyd Pack, who played Dr. Seward in the first film, recalls OPPOSITE:
those meals: “We could hardly move afterwards and work Hammer
was very scarce in the afternoons.”10 Films helped
In all but two of Hammer’s Dracula movies, the star was bring about a
Christopher Lee. Lee’s Dracula was very different from Lu- resurgence of
gosi’s. In fact, Lee has remarked that he never looked at the vampire movies
Lugosi version when preparing his role, feeling that it would in the 1950s,
interfere with his interpretation. beginning
with the 1958
At 6 feet 5 inches (1.98m) tall, Lee towers over nearly ev-
film Horror of
ery actor he has ever appeared with. He also has a deep and
Dracula. The
commanding voice, but he did not need this to be convinc-
film’s American
ing. In fact, in Dracula: Prince of Darkness he does not speak version had
at all, using only his physical presence and an occasional hiss more gore than
to instill fear. Director Terence Fisher comments, “His per- the British
formance was superb in every respect. It is not a part that version because
is dependent on dialogue. Its interpretation depends large- of intervention
ly upon physical movement and facial expression, in other by the British
words, on a very real understanding of the art of mime.”11 film censorship
Costarring as Van Helsing is the lean-faced Peter Cushing. board.
(They also had been paired in Hammer’s Frankenstein mov-
ies, with Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein and Lee as the Monster.)
Unlike previous movie vampire hunters, Cushing portrays Van
Helsing as an athletic, physical fighter as well as an intellectual
scientist. Although they were mortal enemies onscreen, off
it Lee and Cushing were best friends. Together or separately,
Lee and Cushing (who passed away in 1994) have appeared in
hundreds of films. George Lucas, the man behind Star Wars,
paid tribute to these iconic actors by casting Lee in several
films as Count Dooku and Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in
the original Star Wars. More recently, Lee appears in the Lord
of the Rings trilogy (as Saruman the White) and supplies the
roars of the Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland (2010).

27
 International Bloodsuckers
Although Hammer dominated vampire movies during this
period, other studios also tried their hands at the legend.
Some of these films were for specialized audiences, such as
an ultra-low-budget Turkish movie in which crucifixes were
not used as weapons (Turkey was, and is, a largely Muslim
nation), or the Tagalog-language Mga manugang ni Drakula
(Son of Dracula) from the Philippines.
Spanish- and Italian-speaking audiences were espe-
cially enthusiastic, and most non-English vampire films of
this period were in those languages. Many aficionados feel
that Spanish director Amando de Ossorio created the best
of these. Ossorio devised a story line around the Knights
Templar, a real-life medieval order of monks who, in the
director’s imagining, sought eternal life by drinking human
blood.
In the first of his films, La Noche del Terror Ciego (Night
of the Blind Terror), the warriors are killed for their evil
deeds and return in the modern world as rotting corpses.
The vampires are blind—when they were killed, crows
pecked their eyes out—and must find their victims using
sharp hearing.
Another Spanish director, Jesus (Jesse) Franco, also made
several popular vampire movies, notably 1970’s El Conde
Dracula (Count Dracula). This film stars none other than
Christopher Lee—the only time the actor plays Dracula
in a movie not made by Hammer. Lee agreed to the proj-
ect because its screenplay was a fairly faithful adaptation of
Stoker’s original story. The film is also notable for the pres-
ence of an intense German performer, Klaus Kinski, as
Renfield. A few years later, Kinski would take on the vam-
pire role himself.

28
 The Hammer
Studios Style
E ngland’s Hammer Studios produced a number of very popu-
lar Dracula movies in the 1960s and the 1970s, in addition
to many other horror and adventure films. A taste of Hammer’s
trademark style—gaudy, over-the-top, slightly self-mocking—can
be had in this excerpt from the opening voiceover for The Brides
of Dracula:

Transylvania, land of dark forests, dread mountains

and black, unfathomed lakes, still the home of magic
and devilry as the nineteenth century draws to its
close. Count Dracula, monarch of all vampires, is
dead. But his disciples live on, to spread the cult and
corrupt the world.

The reality of everyday filmmaking at Hammer, however, was

much more down-to-earth. The studio’s small size and tight bud-
gets led to a friendly atmosphere on the set. That feeling can be
glimpsed in this passage from actress Barbara Shelley, the studio’s
“scream queen,” as she describes having trouble with the fangs
she needed to play a vampire in one scene:

I had to walk into a big close-up and . . . say the line,

“You don’t need Charles.” The fangs were a tremen-
dous impediment and so it came out like, “Hew gon’t
gleed Kharlz,” at which, of course, everybody just
roared with laughter, and I had to go into my dressing
room for about 20 minutes and practice very care-
fully speaking around the fangs.

Hammer Films, The Brides of Dracula. www.hammerfilms.com. Wayne Kinsey,

Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years. London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002, p. 317.

29
 Vampires Invade the Small Screen
Starting in the late 1940s, horror movies—and movies in
general—were facing a new threat: television. Curiously,
even though television audiences grew rapidly in the 1950s,
it was not until the mid-1960s that vampires infiltrated
broadcasting to any degree. The most significant of these
appearances was on Dark Shadows.
This much-loved series, which debuted in 1966, was es-
sentially a soap opera with supernatural elements. Dark
Shadows follows Victoria Winters, an orphan in search of
clues to her past. Hired by the wealthy Collins family as a
governess, she is soon entangled in the mysteries that sur-
round the family and its spooky mansion.
The program had mediocre ratings for six months—until
a vampire entered. This was Barnabas Collins, introduced as
the family’s cousin from England. Barnabas was not initially
a major character, but fans loved him. Actor Jonathan Frid
was deluged with mail, and almost overnight he became a
huge celebrity. Taking advantage of this, Dark Shadows cre-
ator Dan Curtis made Barnabas its main focus.

Obsessed Teenagers
Especially from today’s perspective, the series seems ama-
teurish and improvised. Because of their schedule, the pro-
ducers had difficulty going back to repair mistakes. As a re-
sult, viewers can see actors flub their lines or make up dia-
logue; props fall apart without warning; and the occasional
stagehand can be spotted in the background. However, fans
would not have it any other way; the mistakes and improvisa-
tions were part of the show’s appeal. A huge number of those
fans were teenagers, who were typically coming home from

30
school just as the show aired. This rabidly loyal audience was
outraged when the series was canceled in 1971. Even after
leaving the air, however, Dark Shadows refused to die, and its
impact is still felt. Director Tim Burton, writer Stephen King,
and actor Johnny Depp are just three of the many artists who
were deeply influenced by Dark Shadows. Burton comments,
“It had the weirdest vibe to it. I’m sort of intrigued about that
vibe. . . . It’s like any great fable or fairytale, it’s got a power
to it.”12 Since, together or separately, these three have helped
create some of the most successful movies ever, clearly Barn-
abas Collins has left his mark on film history.

Remaking a Classic
Several more vampire stories were produced in the 1970s.
The most significant of these—one that is startlingly differ-
ent from the lurid Hammer films or the campy Dark Shad-
ows—set out to make vampires genuinely scary again.
This was a German movie, Nosferatu the Vampyre (also
called Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht). It was a brilliant re-
make of Murnau’s pioneering film. Its director, Werner Herzog,
often told interviewers that he considered the first Nosferatu to
be the greatest movie ever made in Germany.
Christopher
Lee plays the
central character
in Dracula AD
1972, a Hammer
Films movie in
which a Dracula
disciple schemes
to bring his
master back to
life.

31
 Herzog’s remake faithfully re-created many of the original’s
most famous scenes, sometimes shot for shot. At the same
time, it deepened its explorations of the story’s themes, and
it restored details Murnau had been forced to drop because
of copyright concerns. The result, Los Angeles Times critic
Kevin Thomas notes, helped viewers understand the power
of early films, which managed to convey feelings through im-
ages and without the use of sound. Nosferatu, Thomas writes,
was “a tribute to the purity of vision of the silent cinema.”13
Kinski, the intense actor who had played Renfield in El
Conde Dracula, this time acts in the role of the vampire,
complete with ratlike teeth, bald head, and strange, long
fingernails. A gifted cast of actors support him, including
Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker and Isabelle Adjani as Lucy
Harker (a combination of the original characters of Lucy
and Mina).
The volatile Kinski was famous for his temper, but the
equally intense Herzog found a way to control the actor.
Kinski’s makeup took several grueling hours each day to ap-
ply, and the director only had to threaten him with an extra
makeup session. He comments, “If Kinski would start a tan-
trum, it would be four hours of makeup again.”14

11,000 Painted Rats

Two versions of Nosferatu the Vampyre were shot, in Ger-
man and in English, since all of the main actors were bilin-
gual. Filming took place mainly in Czechoslovakia and in
Delft, an ancient city in the Netherlands.
The authorities in Delft were apparently not pleased to
have the notoriously moody director, his temperamen-
tal star, and their crew in town. Among other things, they
refused to give Herzog permission to release 11,000 rats in

32
 Dark Shadows
Goes to the Movies
I n the 1960s the massive popularity of the television vam-
pire soap opera Dark Shadows sparked the production of
two feature films. The first, House of Dark Shadows, was more
adult and frank in content than the television show, with what
Dark Shadows expert Stuart Manning calls “a messy, corpse-
laden ending.” Although it was inexpensively shot, using the
same cast and sets as the TV series, it was one of the most
profitable movies of 1970 for its studio, MGM.
A second film, Night of Dark Shadows, was planned in
1971 after the series had been canceled. The star, Jonathan
Frid, who had played vampire Barnabas Collins for years,
was tired of the role and wary of being typecast. A new story
line was therefore devised, focusing on other characters. This
film was also a financial success. Manning writes:

Without the headaches of producing the

television series concurrently, the produc-
tion crew [was] able to achieve a far more
polished product than the previous year.
Spiritualist Hans Holzer was employed
as an advisor to the production, to give
the production some authenticity, though
. . . his actual contribution to the finished
product proved minimal.

Stuart Manning, “Dark Shadows at the Movies,” Dark Shadows Journal.

www.collinwood.net.

33
 the streets for one scene, and he was forced to relocate else-
where for that shot. Furthermore, Herzog insisted on using
gray rats. When his producers could find only white lab rats
in that quantity, his crew painted them gray.
This attention to such details fills Nosferatu the Vampyre
with startling visuals that do not need to rely on special ef-
fects. One, for example, shows the ship carrying Dracula’s
coffin as it slowly, silently noses its way, captainless, through
the canals of Delft. As a result, critic David Denby notes,
it resembles “not a conventional horror film (there are no
shocks) but an anguished poem of death.”15
Not every critic liked the film, however. Vincent Canby of
the New York Times writes:

Mr. Herzog has done what he set out to do,

but when you come right down to it, one
wonders if it’s worth the trouble. Dracula, af-
ter all, is not Hamlet or Othello or Macbeth.
He’s not some profoundly complex character
who speaks to us in more voices than most of
us care to hear. Dracula is Santa Claus turned
mean. He’s a fairy-tale character. Though he
represents something vestigially [slightly]
scary, he’s not endlessly interesting.16

Herzog’s movie was dreamy and stark, and the Hammer

films were gaudy and fun. These were, however, by no means
the only kinds of vampire movies being produced. As the
1980s rolled in, new elements began to dominate, combin-
ing humor and romance with the thrills and chills—and also
taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated special ef-
fects. In short: The era of blockbuster films was beginning.

34 34
 Chapter 3

Blockbusters and
Other Twists on an
Immortal Tale
Strange as
It Sounds...
T he decade of the 1980s launched the current era
of vampire movies when it introduced a series of
blockbuster films. Blockbusters are crowd-pleasing movies
Twilight author
Stephenie Meyer
did not intially
think that Robert
that feature lavish special effects, sky-high budgets, big Pattinson was
thrills, and superstar actors and directors. Blockbusters the right choice
began dominating not just vampire films but Hollywood to play Edward
in the movie
movies in general, thanks to the wild successes in the 1970s version of her
of movies like Jaws, E.T., and the Indiana Jones and Star book.
Wars films.
In succeeding decades, vampire movies have continued to
evolve. For example, in the 1990s a number of films emerged
that saw the immortal dead in a new light: as sensitive, ro-
mantic, and complex characters that brought out the sympa-
thy of audiences. More recently, the trend has shifted again.
In the most popular vampire movies now, they have become
still more humanlike, more sensitive, and all-around more
attractive than ever before.
Not everyone appreciates the changes vampire movies
have gone through over the years. These critics feel that the

35 35
 earlier vampire movies were the most genuinely frightening;
they also dislike the more recent emphasis on sensitive vam-
pires who value coexistence more than a blood meal. Grady
Hendrix, writing in Slate magazine in 2009, laments that
vampires are becoming less scary. He comments:

You’ll see vampires who manage nightclubs,

build computer databases, work as private in-
vestigators, go to prep school . . . but the one
thing you won’t see them do is suck the blood
of humans. No, bloodsucking is so yesterday
. . . . Today’s vampire is a good listener. He
cares about our love lives and our problems,
which is strange because we’re supposed to be
his food.17

However, other critics argue that the blockbuster trend

helped bring vampires up to date, morphing stale, corny
monsters into something that modern audiences could un-
derstand and enjoy. Like them or hate them, blockbusters
went a long way toward keeping the immortal undead alive.
The blockbuster era for vampires arguably began with
a TV miniseries, Salem’s Lot, in 1979. Based on a Stephen
King novel, it starred actors David Soul and James Mason
and was directed by Tobe Hooper (who also directed, among
other horror films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

Vampire Humor and Action

In this story, novelist Ben Mears returns to his hometown
of Salem’s Lot. He wants to rent an old mansion, but a man
named Straker has already rented it. Straker opens an an-
tique store with his business partner Kurt Barlow. As audi-

36
ences learn, Barlow is an ancient vampire, and Straker is his
servant. Soon, people start disappearing, then they return as
vampires. Mears, his girlfriend, and others set out to destroy
them. They appear to succeed—but only at first.
Salem’s Lot was a huge hit on American TV and received
three Emmy nominations. It also played in movie the-
aters in Europe. This success helped trigger other vampire
projects in Hollywood. Among them was a 1985 horror/
comedy film, Fright Night, about a boy named Charley
Brewster (William Ragsdale) who discovers that his new
neighbor (Chris Sarandon) is a vampire. Adults do not be-
lieve the kid, of course—except for the host of a local horror-
film show, with whom Charlie is able to stop the vampire.
Two years later, Hollywood offered another successful
movie combining comedy and bloodsucking thrills. The
Lost Boys is about two brothers, Michael (Jason Patric) and
Sam (Corey Haim), who live on the California coast. Strange
things are happening, and their town is being terrorized by
gang activity and disappearances.
The disruption is coming from a band of vampires, the
Lost Boys. Their leader David (Kiefer Sutherland) persuades
Michael to join them, and the new recruit begins to become
a vampire: He sleeps all day, is sensitive to sunlight, and
creates no reflection in mirrors. Romance enters the scene
when Michael is drawn to David’s girlfriend, Star (Jami
Gertz). Meanwhile, Sam’s brother meets two vampire hunt-
ers, who say that Michael (now a half-vampire) will return
to normal if David is killed with a wooden stake. But a twist
is in store. The key to ending the terror turns out not to be
David but another vampire whose identity is eventually re-
vealed to all.

37
 Casting Edward
W hen Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Twilight, was
casting the movie, she chose Robert Pattinson for the
all-important role of Edward Cullen. In this passage, Stephenie
Meyer, the author of the Twilight books, comments on one of
Hardwicke’s choices:

Of course, I have a mental picture and, un-

fortunately, people can’t climb into my head
and pull those out to use them. But, I’m ac-
tually amazed, particularly with Rob because
Edward was a really hard one to cast. It was
tough. I didn’t really know if there was any-
one who could do it. I knew it was going to be
a version of Edward, but I didn’t know what it
was going to be.

When they told me Rob was probably the

one, I looked him up and thought, “Yeah, he
can do a version of Edward. He’s definitely
got that vampire thing going on.” And then,
when I was on set and I got to watch him go
from being Rob to shifting into being Edward,
and he actually looked like the Edward in my
head, it was a really bizarre experience. It was
kind of surreal and almost a little scary. He
really had it nailed. So, that was an amazing
thing for me. That was very positive.

Quoted in Christina Radish, “Twilight’s Author and Director Talk About

Bringing the Film to Life,” MediaBlvd Magazine, September 17, 2008. www.
mediablvd.com.

38
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Some major vampire movies of the 1980s, such as Fright
Night and The Lost Boys, appealed mainly to teen audiences
by highlighting humor and action. In the next decade, how-
ever, another trend emerged, in which stories relied more on
emotion and character. One was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Re-
leased in 1992, it was created by Francis Ford Coppola, the
gifted director of the Godfather movies. His stars were Gary
Oldman (Dracula), Winona Ryder (Mina Harker), Anthony
Hopkins (Van Helsing), Keanu Reeves (Jonathan Harker),
and Sadie Frost (Lucy Westenra).
Coppola’s film stressed the romantic and tragic nature of
Stoker’s novel as well as the horror. (In fact, advertisements
for the movie used the tagline “Love Never Dies.”) In this
imagining, Dracula makes Mina the target of his obsession,
but she is just as fully fixated on him. The movie’s visuals
back this up: The strongest images of the Count are roman-
tic and attractive, not ugly or horrifying.
The screenplay by James V. Hart is faithful to Stoker’s story
in many ways. For instance, Dracula changes shape and be-
comes younger when he feeds on blood. However, the film-
makers also altered the Count’s character to make him richer
and more sympathetic. For example, the movie starts with a
prologue set in the fifteenth century. After his beloved wife
kills herself, Dracula denounces God and swears revenge.
This gives the audience an understanding of the Count’s tragic
past. When Dracula travels to England, the young and attrac-
tive aristocrat seduces Lucy and makes her a vampire. At the
same time, he is obsessed with Mina—she looks like his long-
dead wife. Mina, meanwhile, is helplessly attracted to him.
The concluding section—in a break with the novel—finds
Dracula escaping to Transylvania, with Harker, Mina, and

39
 Van Helsing in pursuit. They wound Dracula, but Mina rush-
es to his defense. The two flee to the chapel where he once
had renounced God, and the dying vampire reverts to his
fiendish form. Wanting only peace, he asks for death. When
Mina tearfully gives this to him, she becomes human again.

Restoring “The Creature’s Nobility”

Coppola’s version of Dracula was widely praised for its lush
visual design and startling images. These effects were all
done with traditional moviemaking techniques. The direc-
tor avoided computer-generated effects, feeling that they
would detract from the emotions of the movie.
Instead, he created low-tech but striking visuals. For ex-
ample, in one scene Harker is shaving. As we watch from
behind, Dracula approaches and places a hand on Harker’s
shoulder. The audience sees the vampire’s hand but, in keep-
ing with the Dracula legend, not its reflection in the mirror.
This was achieved with a technique that has been used since
the earliest days of the movies: The actor with his back to
the camera is a double, not Keanu Reeves. The “mirror” is
really a hole in the wall, with Reeves standing on the other
side and facing the camera. Dracula is invisible in the mirror
because there is no mirror.
The movie did well with audiences, and it won three Os-
cars (all in technical categories). Not everyone liked the
film, however. Some viewers felt Coppola sentimentalized
the tale by making the vampire too human and sympathetic.
Others objected to the wooden acting of Keanu Reeves (who
had not been Coppola’s choice—his producers had insisted
because they felt Reeves would draw large groups of teenage
girls). Some critics complained that it felt flat or forced. For
example, Tom Hibbert, writing in England’s most promi-

40
Transylvania, the place most closely associated with the Dracula stories, is
situated in a mountainous, tree-covered region of Romania (pictured). At the
end of Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Dracula seeks refuge in Transylvania.

nent film magazine, Empire, comments, “He [Coppola] fails

to make his Dracula laughably lovable . . . and he fails to
make it in any way frightening; he simply manages to make
it terribly, terribly dull—an achievement in itself. . . . [The
movie is] all style, no content. . . . Has a film ever promised
so much yet delivered so little?”18
On the whole, however, critics generally liked Coppola’s
take on Dracula. Representative of them was Time maga-
zine’s critic Richard Corliss, who noted that the director had
restored dignity and depth to what was often a stale figure of
fun. Corliss writes, “Coppola brings the old spook story alive.
. . . Everyone knows that Dracula has a heart; Coppola knows

41
 that it is more than an organ to drive a stake into. To the direc-
tor, the count is a restless spirit who has been condemned for
too many years to interment in cruddy movies. This luscious
film restores the creature’s nobility and gives him peace.”19

Interview with the Vampire

Soon after the release of Coppola’s film came another big
production. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire
Chronicles, released in 1993, was directed by another gifted
filmmaker, Neil Jordan. Starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt,
it was adapted from a best-selling novel by Anne Rice.
Interview maintains Coppola’s strategy of stressing the
sensitivity and sympathy of the immortal undead, despite
the violence and sorrow they create. In this movie, some—
but not all—vampires are tortured by their inability to age or
die, and some hate having to kill.
As the movie opens, a reporter in San Francisco meets
Louis (Pitt), who claims to be a vampire. Louis then relates
his story, beginning in Louisiana in 1791. Louis is griev-
ing the deaths of his wife and child when a stylish vampire
named Lestat (Cruise) offers him the chance to be reborn—
by becoming a vampire. Louis does so and sorrowfully trav-
els through the centuries with Lestat—who proves to be vi-
cious and self-centered—and their young vampire “niece”
Claudia (Kirsten Dunst).
The shooting of the movie was done under a cloak of se-
crecy. Cruise insisted that he needed a private set because
he wanted the vampire’s makeup effects to remain a secret
until the film was released. (He spent three and a half hours
every day in the makeup chair.) Because of his concerns,
tunnels were built to hide the actors as they traveled to and
from the set.

42
 Interview with the Vampire received mixed reviews and
was nominated for two minor-category Oscars (but did not
win either). The movie was only a moderate success at the
box office; its violent images, decadent atmosphere, and
baffling sexuality offended many viewers. One was Oprah
Winfrey, who left the premiere before the end because she
hated its cruelty. Others simply found the film pretentious,
especially the odd accents that Cruise and Pitt used.

Blade
In contrast to lavishly romantic movies like Interview, anoth-
er trend in vampire movies began emerging in the 1990s. In
some ways this trend was simply a continuation of the high-
action films of the previous decade—with one difference.
These films were based on characters from comic books and
video games. Unsurprisingly, these films emphasized stylish
imagery and fast action over character or plot.
One of the most successful of these was Blade, based on
a superhero who originally appeared in a comic book called
The Tomb of Dracula. Blade is a superpowerful half-vampire
—a “daywalker” capable of withstanding sunlight. He is bent
on revenge against vampires because his mother, bitten
while pregnant, died while giving birth to him.
Released in 1998, Blade stars Wesley Snipes, rarely seen
in the movie without his sword, long black leather coat, and
dark sunglasses. (Others considered for the role include LL
Cool J and Laurence Fishburne, who went on to star in the
Matrix films.) Visually stylish, the movie used strange cam-
era angles, unusual costumes and sets, and fast-paced edit-
ing, reflecting the film industry’s increasing interest in swift
storytelling.
Reaction to Blade and its two sequels was mixed. At the

43
 Vampires
in Sweden
V ampire movies have evolved and changed over
the last decades, emphasizing at various points
powerful action, special effects, romance, graphic
gore, and other characteristics. In some recent films,
however, these traits have been put aside in favor of
an emphasis on developing relationships between
the main characters. A good example of this is a
Swedish movie, Låt den rätte komma in (Let the
Right One In), that was released in 2008.
In this movie, Oskar, a shy 12-year-old, develops
a friendship with Eli, a vampire child in modern-
day suburban Stockholm. They gradually become
friends, and the young vampire encourages Oskar to
stand up for himself against bullies. Their relation-
ship deepens, and when Oskar cuts himself to form
a blood bond with his friend, Eli cannot resist drink-
ing Oskar’s blood. Meanwhile, their close friendship
is threatened by Eli’s older companion, who kills for
the younger creature and is jealous of their bond.
Let the Right One In was a surprise hit and won
several international awards. It was so successful, in
fact, that a remake in English, Let Me In, has also
been produced.

44
box office, they were international smash hits. Their runaway
financial success inspired the production of similar (and of-
ten also hit) movies based on comic book figures such as the
X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Iron Man. On the other
hand, some people disliked Blade’s reversion to the violence
of the some of the previous movies, such as Interview with
the Vampire, as well as the gore in even earlier films, notably
the Hammer productions.

Inspiring More Fast Action

More recently, two other examples of vampire movies have
extended the influence of Blade and other hyperactive,
video-game-like films. Both star British actress Kate Beck-
insale. In 2004’s Van Helsing, she is a vengeful woman whose
family was wiped out almost completely by Dracula. It co-
stars Hugh Jackman as Gabriel Van Helsing, a vigilante
monster hunter who is assigned to kill Dracula. (The name
Van Helsing, of course, is a reference to the original vam-
pire hunter in Stoker’s book and many later versions of the
famous tale.)
Beckinsale also stars in the Underworld saga, in which so-
phisticated vampires and thuggish, werewolf-like Lycans have
been battling in secret for centuries. Beckinsale is Selene, a
leather-clad vampire who discovers a Lycan plot that could
prove fatal for her entire race—but who must make hard choic-
es after falling for a human who is key to ending the war.
Although the Underworld films were generally panned by
critics as shallow, they were also praised by some for their
stylish look and carefully developed “back story” explaining
the complex relationships among the various creatures. And
they have been hugely popular; as of spring 2010, a fourth
movie is in the works.

45
 The Twilight Juggernaut
Each of these movies was a major milestone in the history of
vampire films, but the biggest milestone was yet to come: a
series of runaway hits that powerfully combine horror, fan-
tasy, and romance. The result is a cinematic vampire story
with the widest audience in history.
As its millions of rabid fans know, this is the Twilight saga.
Based on best-selling novels by Stephenie Meyer, the movies
focus on a human teenager, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart),
who moves in with her father in Forks, a small town near
the dark rain forests of Washington. Bella meets Edward
Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who is 108 years old but looks
like a teenager. Edward has mysterious powers and is part
of a family of vampires who avoid human blood, preferring
instead to hunt deer. A rival for Bella’s affections, Jacob, pro-
vides the third part of a romantic triangle.
Bella (who has an unexplainable immunity to vampire
powers) is confused at first because Edward seems to like
her but also avoids her. He is indeed powerfully attracted to
Bella but fears that he might succumb to his desire for hu-
man blood when near her. Nonetheless, their relationship
continues to deepen, and he devotes himself to protecting
her from a group of evil vampires.

Making a Movie from a Book

Some fanatical followers of Meyer’s novels were skeptical
that a movie could match them. Before the 2008 release of
the first film, Twilight, Internet chat rooms were abuzz with
speculation. How close would the story in the movie adhere
to the story told in the books? Would the actors fit the char-
acters as described in the books?
Any film adaptation is going to be different from its source

46
material, but the makers of Twilight knew they had to be ex-
tra careful to stay close to the spirit of the books. Producer
Greg Mooradian comments, “It’s very important to distin-
guish that we’re making a separate piece of art that obvi-
ously is going to remain very, very faithful to the book.”20
Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg adds, “Adapting a book is
not simply taking the book and putting it in screenplay for-
mat. You would have the longest dull movie in the world.”21
Strange as
To keep Twilight from being “the longest dull movie in
It Sounds...
the world,” some scenes were cut or altered. Other changes Director Francis
include merging some minor characters and introducing the Ford Coppola
evil vampires earlier to increase dramatic tension. The gen- decided that the laws
of physics would be
eral consensus among fans seems to be that the moviemak- suspended in his
ers did a good job. version of Dracula,
In part, Rosenberg notes, this is because Meyer was close- so shadows move
on their own, rats
ly involved in the making of the movie, offering ideas for the run along ceilings,
screenplay and casting choices. The screenwriter praises and liquid drips up
Meyer’s willingness to compromise and states, “She is incred- instead of down.
ibly collaborative, fluid and not precious about her work.”22

“Unabashedly a Romance”
When the first movie was released some critics were dis-
dainful. Others, however, felt that it succeeded artistically
because it was faithful to the book and also because it took
the emotions of young adults seriously. One of these was
Kenneth Turan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, who com-
mented, “Twilight is unabashedly a romance. All the story’s
inherent silliness aside, it is intent on conveying the magic of
meeting that one special person you’ve been waiting for.”23
To no one’s surprise, the eagerly awaited film was a phe-
nomenon. It racked up more than $7 million in ticket sales
just from opening midnight showings, and a total of $35.7

47
 million on its first full day. Again to no one’s surprise, the
movie’s ending made it clear that sequels were in the offing;
indeed, New Moon and Eclipse were released in 2009 and
2010, respectively. Furthermore, the DVD of Twilight sold
more than 9 million copies in 2009, making it the top-selling
title of the year, and the DVD of New Moon sold some 4 mil-
lion units over the weekend of its release, putting it on track
to surpass its predecessor.

Failed Vamps and True Blood

With the runaway triumph of Twilight, producers in Hol-
lywood have rushed to release other movies with vampire
themes. So far, they have been less successful (for example,
the forgettable Cirque du Freak). An exception to these flops,
however, has been television’s True Blood. Although not a
film, it deserves mention if only because of its high quality.
The show is based on another best-selling series of books,
Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mystery series. In the
fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, vampires and hu-
mans live in close proximity. The main character is a waitress
with telepathic powers, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin),
who is in love with vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer).
Thanks to its setting and story line, the series entertains and
also addresses such thorny issues as prejudice, gay rights,
and intolerance.
True Blood was created by Alan Ball, who found Harris’s
novels while browsing in a bookstore. The show’s premiere
benefited from a massive advertising campaign that included
an alternate reality game, comic books, giveaways of DVDs
of the first episode, and fake commercials for TruBlood, a
fictional drink on the show. A real-life version of the drink is
even available, as is a line of True Blood jewelry.

48
 Stephenie
Meyer’s popular
Twilight series,
featuring
the vampire
Edward Cullen
and the human
teenager Bella
Swan, has
captured the
hearts of teens.
Twilight, the
first book in the
series, was an
instant success
There are many parallels between  Twilight and True when it made
Blood, notably that Sookie and Bella are both strong-willed its movie debut
young women, and both are humans who nonetheless in 2008.
have a natural sympathy for the supernatural. Many fans
of both find True Blood more interesting as art. Stephanie
Wichmann, an expert on vampire literature and films, com-
ments, “I think looking at Twilight and True Blood side by
side is really interesting, [although] TB is so much more
sophisticated in terms of content and subtlety, lively char-
acter development, not to mention all of the links between
gay rights and vampire rights.”24
True Blood, Twilight, and other variations—both new
and old—on the basic vampire story have each contributed
their own twists to the immortal tale. The history of vam-
pire cinema thus encompasses a wide variety of styles and
storytelling. However, some common themes run through-
out many—perhaps most—movies about the immortal
dead. There are some surprising differences as well.

49
 Chapter 4

The Building
Blocks of
Vampire Flicks
A ll through the history of vampire cinema, certain
elements and themes recur. Some have remained more
or less intact over time and across the many kinds of movies
about the creatures. In other words, they arise from the dead
again and again.
On the other hand, moviemakers the world over, and
across the decades, have not hesitated to play around with
the fundamentals of silver-screen bloodsucker traditions,
inventing new twists on an old story. Whether movies re-
main true to the classic building blocks, are similar to them
in some respects, or venture off into completely new terri-
tory, only rarely are they boring.

Stakes, Decapitation, and Sunlight

Borrowing heavily from the characteristics of the ancient
vampire legends is, of course, the tried and true route for
filmmakers. In the mind of the public, these characteristics
include the vampires’ need for blood (human if possible) to

50 50
stay immortal. Garlic, holy water, and/or crosses harm them.
Sunlight tends to weaken or kill them.
Furthermore, they do not cast reflections in a mirror.
They cannot enter a house unless invited, and they are afraid
of running water. And, of course, the only sure way to kill Strange as
them is by plunging wooden stakes into their hearts and/or It Sounds...
Many (but
decapitating them. not all) movie
Within this basic framework, however, moviemakers vampires need to
have devised all kinds of variations. The method of killing, sleep near native
soil, which is why
for instance, is by no means the same, even within Stoker’s so many carry
Dracula. The novel mentions several times that a wooden coffins filled with
stake and decapitation are preferred. In the end, however, soil when they
travel.
the Count himself is killed with two knives, one to the throat
and one to the heart. Or take Blade, in which the title char-
acter relies, in large part, on his sword. The heroine of both
the movie and television series Buff y the Vampire Slayer,
meanwhile, uses a variety of superpowers that her mystical
guardians, the Watchers, have given her.
The effect of sunlight is equally varied. In the Stoker nov-
el and Coppola’s filmed version, sunlight does not kill the
Count, although it does weaken his powers. (The Murnau
version of Nosferatu is the first instance in which a vampire
will die if exposed to sunlight. This is the method that “El-
len,” as the Mina character is called in the movie, uses to
destroy the bloodsucking creature.)

From Claustrophobic to Elegant

The environments that Dracula moves in also change from
film to film. Lugosi’s castle is dark, dirty, and claustrophobic.
The Hammer films, however, supply it with expensive furni-
ture, freshly painted rooms, and lavish candelabras. Litera-
ture scholar Nina Auerbach comments:

51
The tools of the Béla Lugosi made his first entrance in a crypt
vampire hunting furnished with rats, coffins, cobwebs, and
trade vary from other inhospitable props. His hand creeps
movie to movie. In out of his battered coffin, but we never see his
Blade, released in body move. . . .
1998, the vampire
hunter’s tool of By contrast, Christopher Lee’s coffin, on which
choice is a sword DRACULA is elegantly carved on a gleaming
but he uses other surface, is, like his castle, immaculate. The
weapons in later credits roll as we admire his taste and care in
movies as can be
maintaining a coffin so handsome. . . .
seen in this scene
from Blade II,
Lee’s décor announces his allegiance to a sleek
released in 2002.
future, not a dusty past; his Castle Dracula is
a streamlined respite from the suffocating
clutter of the . . . Victorian home.25

52
 The tidiness of the Hammer sets, in fact, was the cause of
a little concern when the films were being made. There was
some discussion of scrapping them and starting fresh, but
the studio lacked the funds. The wife of set designer Bernard
Robinson was also doubtful. She recalls, “I said, ‘Bernard,
there were no cobwebs. Who did the cleaning?’ I told Ber-
nard that it didn’t seem very logical. ‘Of course it is,’ he said.
‘Magic!’”26

The Way You Look Tonight

Just as the ways in which vampires can be killed have var-
ied widely over the years, so do the ways in which they look
and act. Consider just the most famous vampire of them all:
Count Dracula. His appearance has been radically different
from movie to movie.
Unlike Stoker’s mysterious, handsome, and noble charac-
ter, for instance, Count Orlok wears no tuxedo or cloak, nor
does he bid fair maidens welcome. Instead, he preys upon in-
nocent victims like a killer plague, satisfying his unquench-
able thirst for human blood.
The two versions of Nosferatu also differ from Stoker’s
conception of how the vampire looks; they depict the
Count as a horrible, ugly creature, bald and skeletal, with
strange teeth and long fingernails. Far from being attrac-
tive or sexy, this concept of the bloodsucker is simply bi-
zarre and terrifying. On the other hand, consider the char-
acterizations created by Béla Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and
Gary Oldman. For Lugosi, Lee, and Oldman (in most of his
movie), Dracula is usually attractive, polite, aristocratic,
and mesmerizing.
Coppola’s movie is unusual in that it follows Stoker’s
depiction of Dracula as a shape-shifter (more, that is, than

53
 The Makeup
of Twilight
T urning the actors in the Twilight movies into vam-
pires presented a challenge to the production’s
makeup artists. They worked together with the film’s spe-
cial effects experts to create certain looks. For instance,
for scenes in which the creatures transform, the special
effects artists fit the actors with special teeth. Their eyes,
meanwhile, were a combination of colored contact lenses
and computerized imaging.
Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward, had to wear con-
tact lenses—golden or black, depending on the scene—
every day of filming. Makeup specialist Jeanne Van Phue
chose to make Pattinson paler than the other vampires
because she wanted each of them to have a distinctive
look. She comments, “All of the vampires are pale, but I
didn’t want them to look ghoulish. I didn’t want to con-
tour, but I didn’t want them to fade away, either.”
Van Phue said that her biggest challenge on the set
was the weather of the Pacific Northwest, where the films
were shot. She says, “We were outside all the time, and it
rained the entire time we were there. [Many] of the shots
were exterior, and trying to fix make-up in the rain with
wet face and wet brush was difficult.” She experimented
until she found the most useful product: “It [went] on
flawlessly — no smudges or streaks. And I accidentally
found out it was water resistant.”

Makeup411.com, “Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight.” http://

makeup411.com.

54
simply turning into a bat). Oldman’s Count is a young, hand-
some warrior in the opening scene set centuries ago, but
when the action moves to the nineteenth century he is an-
cient and eerie, with a bizarre, towering hairdo. Later, he
changes even more, appearing to Mina as young and hand-
some, while to the bolder Lucy he appears as a vicious, pow-
erful beast.
And then there is the all-important question of fangs. It
is a common belief that all vampires have them, but this is
not always the case in the movies. The first known movie to
actually show a vampire’s fangs was a 1957 Mexican movie,
El Vampiro. Since then, vampires with fangs have become
commonplace—especially as the amount of explicit violence
and gore has increased.
The way in which Dracula moves has also changed dra-
matically. Lugosi was fairly stationary, for instance (a charac-
teristic that is also true for his movie as a whole). He moved
relatively little as he acted. Christopher Lee, meanwhile, al-
ways moved with great deliberation, as befit his aristocratic
interpretation of the role. In a 1979 version, the actor playing
Dracula moves constantly. Auerbach comments, “The im-
mobility of Béla Lugosi . . . dissolves in the incessant motion
of Frank Langella, who is always touching, moving, dancing,
climbing, or riding horses. . . . Langella’s graceful hands re-
place Lugosi’s transfixing eyes.”27

How the Other Vampires Look

Of course, Dracula is not the only cinematic vampire whose
looks can be radically different from movie to movie. In the
1980s, for example, vampires tended to be seen at one of two
extremes. Some, as in Salem’s Lot, are raunchy, ugly, and re-
pulsive—more akin to mindless zombies than to intelligent,

55
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a strange hairdo and decrepit features contribute to
the ancient and eerie feel of Gary Oldman’s vampire character. As in Stoker’s
book, Oldman’s Dracula is a shape-shifter.

manipulative, charming bloodsuckers. There is nothing re-

motely romantic about them. Others, such as the villainous
Tom Cruise and weary Brad Pitt in Interview, are shown
more in the romantic mold.
More recently, the trend is to show movie vampires as
young, stylish, and extremely good-looking. They also tend
to be sexy, sometimes in a dangerous way (like Catherine De-
neuve in 1983’s The Hunger), sometimes in a nonthreatening
way (the prime example being Twilight’s Robert Pattinson).

56 56
Sympathy for the Vampire
The character of Edward, and the other vampires in the Twi-
light saga, are excellent examples of another important dif-
ference between today’s movie vampires and those of past
years. Many of the methods that vampire hunters of old
used to ward off the creatures do not work with the new
style of immortal undead. For example, holy water, sunlight,
garlic, wooden stakes, and crosses have no effect on Edward.
Furthermore, his habits are quite different, such as the fact
that he does not sleep in a coffin. (Also, Edward never has
to worry about not being seen in mirrors; his reflection ap-
pears just as those of humans do.)
Perhaps the most significant part of Edward’s character,
meanwhile, is the strength of his sympathetic, emotional,
and even heroic nature. This is in marked contrast to pre-
vious vampires, although some have inspired pity for their
tortured condition. Christopher Lee once commented about
his famous character, “Dracula is not exactly pathetic, but
there is a terrible dark sadness about him. He doesn’t want
to live, but he’s got to, he doesn’t want to go on existing as an
undead, but he has no choice.”28
For example, Stoker’s creature and the vampires in both
versions of Nosferatu are terrifying forces from some very
deep, dark place—and animal-like in their single-minded
quest for survival. So is Oldman’s Dracula, for at least part of
the movie. These vampires may evoke a degree of compassion
for their tragic fates; nonetheless, they remain largely unsym-
pathetic.
The characters in the 1977 Langella version, meanwhile,
are turned on their heads: Dracula is dashing and valiant,
Van Helsing and Seward are incompetent medical men,
Harker is unpleasant, and Lucy and Mina are far less help-

57
 less and constricted than the women of earlier versions.
Auerbach writes, “In this breathtaking if confusing movie,
Stoker’s good men are villains; Stoker’s vampire is a hero; the
women, victims no more, embrace vampirism with rapture
as the sole available escape from patriarchy [dependence on
a father figure]. W.D. Richter’s screenplay never bothers to
tell the familiar story; it retells it for its age.”29

Vampire Movies as Morality Tales

Strange as Everybody knows what vampire movies are all about, at least
It Sounds... on one level: entertaining the audience and/or scaring it out
Many vampire
movies connect of its socks. Plenty of blood and creepiness (and sometimes
vampires with sexiness or romance) are thrown in for good measure. On a
bats, but in real deeper level, though, vampire movies tell a richer and more
life vampire
bats are usually complex tale.
small, shy, and As with so many other kinds of stories—modern ones
relatively gentle. as well as those that have been told for centuries—vampire
movies are, at their cores, tales of the eternal struggle be-
tween good and evil. A vampire story, in this view, is a mo-
rality tale. The forces of good clash, usually successfully, with
the powers of evil.
In some versions of the good-versus-evil theme, the two
are clearly defined. In the immortal undead department,
the classic example of this is Dracula, with the Count, of
course, as evil’s representative. In other vampire movies, the
immortal dead are still the bad guys: Salem’s Lot, Nosferatu,
the Hammer films, Blade, and The Lost Boys are all exam-
ples. These vampires are just plain bad. Van Helsing and his
counterpart vampire killers, meanwhile, are the chief char-
acters standing for all that is positive. Van Helsing, a man
who deeply trusts the powers of science and believes in the
presence of supernatural creatures, is the only person capa-

58
 I Am Legend
I n 2007 a vampire movie called I Am Legend was re-
leased. It falls more into the category of suspense-
ful science fiction than horror. The film is based on a
1953 novel by a well-respected science fiction writer,
Richard Matheson. In turn, according to Matheson,
the novel was inspired by the Béla Lugosi version of
Dracula. The author stated, “I thought if the world was
full of vampires, it would be more frightening than just
one. And I explained vampires in biological terms.”
This movie (which stars Will Smith) was actually the
third adaptation of Matheson’s book. The first, in 1964,
was a low-budget production, The Last Man on Earth,
starring horror-film legend Vincent Price. Charl-
ton Heston later took the lead role in a more elaborate
1971 version entitled The Omega Man.
In the Will Smith film, germ warfare has turned
most of the planet’s people into vampire-like creatures,
but Robert Neville, Smith’s character, is—for unknown
reasons—immune. Neville thinks he may be the last
human left in Manhattan, and perhaps on Earth. The
film makes clear the plot’s metaphoric connections to
a real-life epidemic, that of AIDS. Neville, a scientist, is
searching for a cure to a disease that does not kill but
nonetheless destroys the health of its victims.
Lewis Beale, “A Variation on Vampire Lore That Won’t Die,” New York
Times, January 14, 2007. www.nytimes.com.

59
The central character of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is an attractive,
sensitive, and caring vampire. Kristen Stewart (Bella) and Robert Pattinson
(Edward) appear here in a scene from the 2009 movie New Moon, based on
the second book in the series.

ble of successfully fighting Dracula. Furthermore, brave Van

Helsing provides the inspiration, cool thinking, and manly
energy needed to spur others on in the face of terrible evil.
As he muses in the Lugosi film, thinking about the elderly
Seward and the relatively weak Harker, “I must be master
here or I can do nothing.”30

Shades of Gray
Unlike earlier movies, which had simpler characters, many
recent films have tried to create more complex vampires and

60
vampire hunters. They strive to show that their characters
can have elements of both evil and good at the same time.
The division between the two is not always clearly defined.
Take, for instance, tortured Dracula in Coppola’s film,
grieving Louis in Interview with the Vampire, or sensitive
Edward in Twilight. These vampires can be vicious—but
they also hate having to prey on humans, and they are often
not just attractive but genuinely likeable (these qualities are
not the same, though they overlap). Furthermore, Langella’s
vampire is stylishly heroic but also a ruthless predator.
Beyond the vampire movie genre’s symbolic figures of
good and evil, the secondary characters tend to change con-
siderably from film to film. In the various versions of Drac-
ula, for instance, Mina Harker is portrayed quite differently.
In some films she is demure and pure, willingly sacrificing
herself to save others. In others, she is a passionate and
strong-willed lover who becomes hopelessly enamored of
the dark side of existence. Harker, too, changes from movie
to movie: Sometimes he is brave and competent, sometimes
weak and unpleasant.

Religion, Death, and Resurrection

Another important aspect of many vampire movies is their
subtext of religion. This topic is closely connected to the
good-versus-evil theme that also runs through so many
films. Specifically, Christianity and Christian symbols are
often crucial elements.
Traditionally, crucifixes, rosaries, and holy water—all
associated with the Christian religion—are among the
best weapons to use in repelling the undead beings. Con-
nections between vampires and the devil are often made
explicit. And, in Coppola’s vision of Dracula, the Count

61
 becomes a vampire after he renounces God. The implication
is clear: Enlisting the aid of a higher power is a crucial part
of fighting evil.
Another example of the close link between religion and
the cinematic immortal undead is John Carpenter’s Vam-
pires. In this 1998 film a team of vampire hunters, sponsored
by the Catholic Church, sets out to prevent a centuries-old
cross from falling into the hands of a powerful vampire be-
cause it has the potential to make the creature immune to
sunlight. The group’s foul-mouthed, tough-as-nails leader,
Strange as James Crow (James Woods)—who had watched his parents
It Sounds... die at the hands of vampires—has the same initials as Jesus
Over time, Christ. And the team stays at a desert motel called the Sun
shape-shifting God.
movie vampires Another fundamental theme of Christian theology that is
have changed
into bats, rats, also integral to vampire movies is the concept of resurrec-
cats, ravens, and tion—that is, of dying and returning to life. This is, of course,
wolves. what happens to vampires. They do not die like mortals but
are “born again” as the undead, hovering between life and
death and condemned to wander forever—a concept similar
to the Christian idea of purgatory, the temporary state in
which souls are made ready for heaven. For vampires, how-
ever, this state is not temporary; the certainty of rest in the
grave, the shelter of eternal life in heaven, is closed to them.
Over the years vampire movies have consistently played
with just such notions—that is, with ways of linking the
creatures with religious themes. Vampire movies have also
experimented with other basic ideas from the legends of old,
such as the use of various weapons that can harm them or
keep them away. This evolution has provided an abundance
of new blood for the genre.

62
 Chapter 5

Breaking
the Mold
N o one would ever accuse the vampire movie genre of
being stuff y or stuck in a rut. The ancient legends of
the immortal dead have inspired countless works of art and
entertainment—including movies—that more or less stick
to the basics. But the basic story also lends itself easily to
imaginative extension, so that new variations continue
to flutter like bats around the genre’s still-beating heart.
Over the years, these variations have taken wildly different
forms, from comedy, martial arts, and romance to gay/
lesbian themes, science fiction, and the just plain strange.

Fun with Vampires

One of the most durable of these variations is the comic
vampire. The concept of making jokes about a serious or
scary subject is nothing new. In fact, it is an ancient sto-
rytelling technique, since poking fun at something terrify-
ing often makes it less frightening. Nonetheless, the first
vampire movies were usually meant to scare audiences, not
make them laugh. (Of course, modern audiences may find
them funny, but that was rarely the intent.)
By the middle of the twentieth century, however, audi-
ences needed something new. Dracula was world famous,

63
 but he and his undead friends no longer seemed frightening.
Instead, vampires were becoming figures of fun—and so the
tradition of Dracula spoofs was born.
One of the earliest of these comedies was released in 1948:
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Despite its title, the
movie also features two other familiar figures: Dracula and
the Wolf Man. In it, the classic comedy team of Bud Abbott
and Lou Costello play freight handlers who take care of the
remains of Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula as they are
being shipped to a horror museum.
After these two bumblers lose the cargo, Dracula tries to
transplant the brain of one of them into the head of the Mon-
ster. It takes an expert—the Wolf Man—to save the day. This
movie is the only one in which Béla Lugosi plays Dracula
again (although he did play vampires in three non-Dracula
films: Mark of the Vampire, The Return of the Vampire, and
Mother Riley Meets the Vampire).

“Pardon Me, but Your Teeth Are in My Neck”

Another vampire spoof has become a cult classic: The Fear-
less Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth Are in
My Neck. It was directed by a distinguished filmmaker, Ro-
man Polanski, whose other films include the horror clas-
sic Rosemary’s Baby and the crime drama Chinatown, both
considered among the best of their respective genres.
Polanski’s comedy tells the over-the-top story of a bungling
vampire hunter and his even dumber apprentice as they rescue
a beautiful young woman from vampiric clutches. The high
point of the movie is an elaborate ballroom scene during which
vampires discover humans in their midst because, unlike the
immortal undead, the humans are reflected in mirrors.
In later decades many more comedies saw the light of day,

64 64
including Once Bitten, best remembered now as one of Jim
Carrey’s first movies: He plays a teenager who becomes the
target of a sexy vampire (Lauren Hutton). Nicolas Cage stars
in Vampire’s Kiss (1988) as a businessman who thinks he is
becoming a vampire. This movie includes a scene in which
the notoriously wild actor eats a real live cockroach (he later
remarked, “Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it, but
I did it anyway).31
Plenty of other spoofs have risen up as well, with varying
Strange as
degrees of quality. Among them: Dracula: Dead and Loving
It Sounds...
It (by Mel Brooks, the man behind another classic monster
The word
comedy, Young Frankenstein), Eddie Murphy in Vampire in vampire never
Brooklyn, George Hamilton in Love at First Bite, and Tran- comes up in the
1987 vampire
sylvania 6-5000 with Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr.
movie Near
Dark.
Valley Girl Vamp
One of the most interesting offshoots of the classic vampire
legend began as a disappointing movie but found enduring
new life as a TV series. The movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
was a parody of vampire flicks. It was released in 1992, star-
ring Kristy Swanson in the title role. However, it was not a
success; Buffy was considered a failure artistically and at the
box office. Its creator, Joss Whedon, later blamed the fact
that the studio had changed it considerably from his initial
idea, making it much lighter and sillier.
Far more successful was Whedon’s darker and more imag-
inative adaptation of the idea for television. This show—also
called Buffy the Vampire Slayer—ran from 1997 until 2003. In
it, Buff y (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a typical South-
ern California teenager—she is a cheerleader, and she loves
to shop. As it happens, Buff y is also the latest in a dynasty of
young women chosen to battle supernatural creatures.

65
The television
series Buff y the
Vampire Slayer
began life as a
movie. Released
in 1992, the movie
did poorly but the
television series
earned a spot in
Time magazine’s
“100 Best TV
Shows of All
Time.” Pictured
here is the show’s
star, Sarah
Michelle Gellar.

Buffy mixed dark comedy with a wide variety of other

styles, from martial arts movies to musicals, and the high
quality of its production and writing made it wildly popu-
lar—and deeply influential as well. For one thing, its success
provided a taste of what was to come with the even more
popular Twilight blockbusters. Millions of the fans of the
TV series avidly followed every facet of “the Buff yverse,”

66
and they devoured huge quantities of Buff y products such
as novels, comics, action figures, and video games.
Critics liked Buffy as well. Time magazine listed it as
one of its “100 Best TV Shows of All Time.” The series won
numerous awards, including three Emmys. And Whedon,
its writer-director, went on to create more highly original
works, including Serenity, Angel, and Firefly.

The Blood Countess

Buff y was not a vampire—she just fought them. However,
many cinematic children of the night were also female. The
Brides of Dracula and Claudia (the young vampire in Inter-
view with the Vampire) are only a few examples. Another,
one that many movie buffs consider the best, is the title
character of Hammer’s Countess Dracula, starring the vet-
eran horror-film actress Ingrid Pitt.
Countess Dracula was inspired by a real person, Elizabeth
Báthory. Born in 1560, Báthory was a wealthy Transylva-
nia aristocrat—and a serial murderer known as the Blood
Countess. According to legend, she tortured and killed (or
had killed) hundreds of virgin girls. This was so that she
could drink and bathe in their blood—the countess believed
that it would keep her young. When her atrocities were dis-
covered in 1610 a trial was held; several of her servants were
beheaded, but the countess was imprisoned in her castle un-
til her death in 1614.
Báthory probably inspired the classic horror novel Car-
milla, written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu decades before
Stoker wrote Dracula. In turn, Carmilla inspired a 1971 Bel-
gian movie about an aristocratic female vampire, Daughters
of Darkness. The Carmilla character has also inspired many
other films, including Vampyr, The Blood of Roses, and a trio

67
 of Hammer movies with suitably lurid titles: The Vampire
Lovers, Lust for a Vampire, and Twins of Evil.
Themes of lesbianism or bisexuality run through many
vampire films as well. The most famous of these is The Hun-
ger. It chronicles a bizarre love triangle between a doctor,
Sarah (Susan Sarandon), and a vampire couple, Miriam and
John (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie). Miriam and
John have been married for centuries and live in an elegant
Manhattan townhouse.
Miriam does not age, but her companions (including John)
become corpse-like and half-dead after about a century. In
an effort to prevent this, John visits Sarah, who specializes
in aging disorders. However, she cannot save him, he ages
quickly, and Miriam puts him in a coffin alongside her other
undead lovers.
Miriam then seduces and vampirizes Sarah. Sarah, in turn,
kills her boyfriend and then herself. This sacrifice reverses
Miriam’s powers, and her former lovers rise up to kill her.

Rockin’ Vampires
There are countless more vampire movie variations. Con-
sider, for example, the gloriously silly Son of Dracula, a rock
musical starring singer Harry Nilsson (as the half-vampire
Count Downe, who falls in love with a human) and ex-Beatle
Ringo Starr (as his magician mentor). It flopped at the box
office and got terrible reviews; according to some reports,
Starr owns a copy but cannot bring himself to watch it.
Another musical vampire story was Queen of the Damned.
Based on a sequel to Anne Rice’s novel about Lestat, the
vampire here is resurrected as a rock star. His music awak-
ens another creature, Queen Akasha. The movie stars Stuart
Townsend and Aaliyah, an up-and-coming singer who was

68
 Mr. Vampire
C hina has a long and varied tradition of ghost and
vampire stories, and many films about them have
been produced there. Some are comedies, such as
the Geungsi Sinsang series of comedy/action/horror/
romance films from Hong Kong. The first, released in
1985 in English under the title Mr. Vampire, was so suc-
cessful that it spawned many sequels, some under the
auspices of the first movie’s writer-director Ricky Lau.
In the first film in the series, a priest is hired to re-
bury the corpse of a rich man named Yam. This is hap-
pening because a fortune teller told the dead man’s son
that it will bring good luck. When the priest and his
assistants look at it, the corpse is still almost intact and
looks alive. In fact, it rises up and becomes what the
movie calls a “hopping vampire.” (These vampires are
so named because they can “hop” on their own feet
back to their hometowns for proper burial according to
Chinese custom.)
The vampire runs amok and kills many people (his
son is the first to go). The priest and his foolish assis-
tants try to destroy it. (One thing in their favor: They
know that holding their breath will make them invisible
to vampires.) The priest leads a group of friendly vam-
pires against Yam. Yam knocks out all of the vampires,
but the priest manages to drop a ceiling lantern on him,
and the vampire is killed when he bursts into flames.

69
Although most killed in an airplane crash only weeks after filming. It was
well-known poorly received, but its soundtrack was a hit.
movie vampires A low-budget version of the vampire-music connection in
are male, female the cinema is the darkly comic rock musical Suck, released
vampires also play in 2009 and written and directed by Canadian comic/actor
a role in movies. Rob Stefaniuk. (Suck also features rockers Henry Rollins,
Claudia (pictured Moby, Iggy Pop, and Alice Cooper in cameo roles.) Stefa-
in this scene from niuk plays Joey, the leader of a struggling band called the
Interview with the Winners. The band enjoys sudden and unexpected fame
Vampire) is one
when its lead singer, Jennifer (Jessica Paré), turns into a very
example. The movie
seductive and sexy vampire.
is based on Anne
A fourth example of rockin’ vampire musicals is not ex-
Rice’s book of the
same name. actly a feature film but deserves a mention. I Kissed a Vam-
pire, a series first made available on iTunes, stars some of the
cast members from High School Musical. It is advertised as
the Web’s only vampire rock musical.

70
Deafula
No book about vampire movies would be complete without
a look at the first feature film shot entirely in American Sign
Language: Deafula. Cameraman and actor Peter Wechsberg
wrote, directed, and starred in this ultra-low-budget, black-
and-white 1975 curiosity. He plays Steve, a young deaf man
who has a rare blood disease that requires a constant supply
of fresh blood.
Steve’s father has been giving blood for years to keep his
son alive, but Steve still sometimes becomes a vampire. Two
bumbling detectives set out to track him down; meanwhile,
Steve encounters an old family friend who helps him realize
that the original Dracula is his real father.
Deafula is astonishingly bizarre. For one thing, Steve’s fam-
ily friend has a servant with tin cans where his hands should
be (which, in a world of deaf people, renders him mute). When
it was released, Deafula featured a voice-over for hearing au-
diences. Obviously, though, this was not its target audience.
The film’s producer, Gary Holstrom, recalls that deaf viewers
understood its purpose more than those who could hear:

Audience reactions were fascinating. Where

we could arrange it, extra bass speakers were
placed near the screen. Pump up that bass
and the deaf audience would scream with
excitement. They could feel the suspense via
vibration. . . . “[O]ne liners” brought the deaf
to loud laughter. The hearing folks had a dif-
ferent reaction. It was quite an experience.32

Controversy has surrounded Deafula since its release—

was it meant as a joke, or was it just really strange? It may be

71
 difficult for the public to decide for itself any time soon; the
movie is not available commercially, and only a snippet can
be seen online—although there are rumors of pirated copies.

Vampires in Cowboy Hats

Another variation combines the immortal undead with
Westerns. Perhaps the first of these was a low-budget odd-
ity from 1966, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. In it, Dracula slowly
turns a beautiful young woman into a vampire; fortunately,
her fiancé is Billy the Kid, who figures out what is going on.
Dracula is played by John Carradine, who also plays the
vampire in other later Universal productions. He is con-
sidered to have a marked physical resemblance to Stoker’s
original description of the Count. However, Carradine does
not even try to do a Romanian accent. As a result of this and
other factors, like so many other low-budget movies, Billy
the Kid vs. Dracula is funny—but not on purpose.
A less jokey and much darker combination of vampire and
Western themes—with a little biker-movie action thrown
in—is 1987’s Near Dark, a cult hit cowritten and directed
by Kathryn Bigelow (who in 2010 became the first female to
win a Best Director Oscar). It concerns a man from a small
Oklahoma town who is drawn into a wandering tribe of vam-
pires.
Then there is Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, a strange
1990 movie that combines a Western theme with vampires
and comedy. All of America’s vampires live in a small town,
where they wear sunblock to protect themselves and sur-
vive by drinking a blood substitute—but a problem arises
when the factory that produces it closes. Among the movie’s
actors are Maxwell Caulfield, David Carradine, and Bruce
Campbell.

72
 Vampires
Beneath Tokyo
J apan’s centuries-old tradition of ghost and vampire leg-
ends has resulted in a huge number of horror movies
about bloodsuckers being made there. One of the strangest
is Marebito (Spiritual Being), an intense film written and di-
rected by Takashi Shimizu and released in 2005. It is about
a cameraman named Masuoka who is obsessed with video-
taping odd events around Tokyo—especially those involving
near-death or death. He is especially fascinated by footage
of a person who committed suicide in a subway station. The
cameraman finds himself wishing he could experience the
same emotions as people who are about to die.
One day, Masuoka discovers a maze of tunnels beneath
the city, the hiding place of the suicide victim and homeless
people who are strange creatures that walk on all fours. He
learns that the tunnels are also home to vampires called De-
ros. Exploring further, he finds a mute, beautiful girl impris-
oned in a cavern. He takes her home, thinking she is human,
but she is not—she is indeed a vampire. Masuoka uses his
own blood to keep her alive, but he cannot supply enough.
So he starts “borrowing” from others, beginning with his ex-
wife.
Although the film has attained a small but loyal audience,
it was in general not received well by moviegoers or critics.
John Hartl of the Seattle Times, for instance, calls it a “gross-
out ghost story. . . . The gloppy sound effects are so over-
the-top, they invite laughter, and the bloodsucking scenes are
allowed to become absurdly repetitious.”

John Hartl, “Marebito: Keep an Eye Out for Gore,” Seattle Times, February 3,
2006. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com.

73
 And still another example of this mix-and-match approach
to vampire/Western themes is From Dusk till Dawn (1996),
which stars two moviemakers in unusual roles: Quentin
Tarantino and George Clooney. As expected from Taran-
tino, the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and
Kill Bill, this movie is ultraviolent and cartoonish but with
Strange as energy and wit to spare. Tarantino and Clooney play broth-
It Sounds... ers and bank robbers on the run in Mexico.
Not all movie At a desert bar they get into a fight, during which a beauti-
vampires must
avoid sunlight; ful vampire bites one of them. The surviving people trapped
the vampires in the bar must band together to live through the night when
in Twilight the dead (including the robber) return as vampires.
and Blade are
just a few of From Dusk till Dawn aroused strong emotions from crit-
the undead ics and audiences alike—they loved it or hated it, with most
characters who of them in the latter category. Janet Maslin of the New York
can walk in the
daytime. Times, for instance, found it “promising” but asserts that
its violence is too extreme to be taken seriously. She writes,
“The latter part of From Dusk Till Dawn is so relentless that
it’s as if a spigot has been turned on and then broken. . . . The
film loses its clever edge when its action heats up so grue-
somely and exploitatively that there’s no time for talk.”33

Looking for Cures

Other vampire movies weave horror with medical or scien-
tific themes. One example is Korean director Park Chan-
wook’s Thirst, a disturbing film about a priest who volun-
teers to help develop a vaccine for a deadly virus. When the
experiment goes wrong he nearly dies, then recovers with
a transfusion. Unfortunately, he is accidentally given the
blood of a vampire.
Park, one of South Korea’s top directors, has stated that
he was intrigued by the idea of combining, in one person, an

74
evil vampire and a selfless priest. He comments, “Between
these two identities, there is a huge ethical gap. . . . You have
the moral height of being this noble priest, and the moral
downfall to where you become a vampire.”34
Another movie with a medical theme is 2010’s Daybreak-
ers. It stars Ethan Hawke and was written and directed by
Strange as
Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig. The movie is set in the
It Sounds...
In the 1978
near future, when a disease has turned most humans into movie Martin,
vampires. They are multiplying, and without enough blood the title
they turn wild and blindly attack the uninfected humans. As character, who
may or may
the human population nears extinction, survivors are cap- not be a real
tured and “farmed” for their blood. Hawke plays a vampire vampire, uses
scientist working to find a synthetic substitute. a hypodermic
needle instead
of hypnotism
Into the Future to control his
As of early 2010 a number of new cinematic bloodsuckers victims, and uses
razors instead of
are on the way. For instance, Sigourney Weaver is sched- fangs.
uled to play the queen of the vampires in the horror comedy
Vamps, in which two “vampirettes” (Alicia Silverstone and
Krysten Ritter) put their immortality at risk by falling in love
with human boys.
Tim Burton, meanwhile, is set to produce a version of the
best-selling novel Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and he
and Johnny Depp are reportedly working on an adaptation
of Dark Shadows. Furthermore, movies mimicking the suc-
cess of Twilight are in the works. All told, with a century of
rich and varied history behind them, vampire movies seem
to be in no danger of fading to black.

75
 Source Notes

Introduction: Blood-Sucking Stars 13. Kevin Thomas, “New ‘Nosferatu’ a Trib-

of the Silver Screen ute to Murnau,” Los Angeles Times, Oc-
1. Quoted in Wayne Kinsey, Hammer tober 29, 1979.
Films: The Bray Studio Years. London: 14. Quoted in “Werner Herzog on Nosfer-
Reynolds & Hearn, 2002, p. 101. atu.” www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk.
15. David Denby, “In Praise of Older Wom-
Chapter 1: Dawn of the Movie en,” New York Magazine, October 22,
Undead 1979. http://books.google.com.
2. Quoted in David J. Skal and Elias Savada, 16. Vincent Canby, “Nosferatu,” New York
Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Times, October 1, 1979. http://movies.
Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Ma- nytimes.com.
cabre. New York: Anchor, 1995, p. 137.
3. Gregory A. Waller, “Tod Browning’s
Chapter 3: Blockbusters and Other
Dracula,” in Dracula: Bram Stoker, ed.
Twists on an Immortal Tale
17. Grady Hendrix, “Vampires Suck,” Slate,
Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New
July 28, 2009. www.slate.com.
York: Norton, 1997, p. 383.
18. Tom Hibbert, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,”
4. Quoted in Imbd.com, “Memorable
Empire. www.empireonline.com.
Quotes,” Dracula. www.imdb.com.
19. Richard Corliss, “A Vampire with Heart,”
5. Quoted in Skal and Savada, Dark Car-
Time, November 23, 1992. www.time.
nival, p. 153.
com.
6. Quoted in Skal and Savada, Dark Carni- 20. Quoted in Larry Carroll, “‘Twilight’
val, p. 150. Tuesday: How Faithful Will the Movie
7. Skal and Savada, Dark Carnival, p. 157. Be to the Book?” MTV Movies: News,
June 17, 2008. www.mtv.com.
Chapter 2: The Vampire Evolves 21. Quoted in Marian Liu, “Screenwriter
8. Quoted in Kinsey, Hammer Films, p. 94. Embraces, Adapts ‘Twilight’ Universe,”
9. Quoted in Kinsey, Hammer Films, p. Seattle Times, March 19, 2010.
126. 22. Quoted in Liu, “Screenwriter Embraces,
10. Quoted in Kinsey, Hammer Films, p. 104. Adapts ‘Twilight’ Universe.”
11. Quoted in Kinsey, Hammer Films, p. 104. 23. Kenneth Turan, “You Wanna Neck?”
12. Quoted in Matt McDaniel, “Johnny Los Angeles Times, November 21, 2008.
Depp and Tim Burton to Vamp It Up in http://articles.latimes.com.
‘Dark Shadows,’” Yahoo! Movies. http:// 24. Stephanie Wichmann, e-mail to author,
movies.yahoo.com. April 18, 2010.

76 76
Chapter 4: The Building Blocks of Chapter 5: Breaking the Mold
Vampire Flicks 31. Quoted in Erin Free, “Vampire’s Kiss,”
25. Nina Auerbach, “Vampires in the Light,” Filmink (Australia), January 26, 2009.
in Dracula: Bram Stoker, eds. Nina Au- www.filmink.com.
erbach and David J. Skal. New York: 32. Quoted in Mike White, “Deafula.”
Norton, 1997, pp. 391–93. Cashiers du Cinemart, no. 13. www.
26. Quoted in Kinsey, Hammer Films, p. 99. impossiblefunky.com.
27. Auerbach, “Vampires in the Light,” p. 33. Janet Maslin, “From Dusk till Dawn,”
399. New York Times, January 19, 1996.
28. Quoted in Kinsey, Hammer Films, p. 104. http://movies.nytimes.com.
29. Auerbach, “Vampires in the Light,” p. 398. 34. Quoted in Joe Ituchi, “Director Park
30. Quoted in Nina Auerbach, Our Vam- Chan-Wook Talks Thirst.” Rotten Toma-
pires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of toes Interviews, July 30, 2009. www.
Chicago Press, 1997, p. 78. rottentomatoes.com.

For Further Exploration

Books monstrous.com). This site has lots of infor-
DK Publishing, The Vampire Book. New mation on Vlad the Impaler, vampire leg-
York: DK, 2009. ends, and much more.

Joshua Gee, Encyclopedia Horrifica. New A Short History of Vampire Movies (www.
York: Scholastic, 2007. mrmovietimes.com/movie-news/a-short-his
tory-of-vampire-movies-part-i-the-1920s).
Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Vampires. New York: A MovieTimes.com site with excellent de-
Checkmark, 2008. tails, especially on some of the more obscure
films.
Kris Hirschmann, Vampires in Literature.
San Diego, CA: ReferencePoint Press, 2010. StephenieMeyer.com (www.stepheniemeyer.
com/twilight.html). The official Web site of
the writer behind the Twilight series phe-
Web Sites nomenon.
How Vampires Work (http://science.how
stuff works.com/vampire.htm). An excellent Vampire Filmography (www.wsu.edu/~
primer, with some especially good informa- delahoyd/vampirefilms.html). A professor
tion on very early vampire myths. of English at Washington State University
maintains this page on his Web site. It lists a
Monstrous Vampires (http://vampires. great many vampire movies.

77
 Index
Note: Boldface page numbers refer to Cruise, Tom, 42, 43
illustrations. Cushing, Peter, 27

A D
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 64 Dark Shadows (television series), 24, 30–31,
Abraham Van Helsing (Dracula), 7, 17–18, 33
24, 27, 39–40, 58, 60 Daybreakers, 75
action trend, 36–37, 39, 43, 45 Deafula, 71–72
American Sign Language vampire movie, Dracula
71–72 continuing popularity of, 7
Auerbach, Nina, 51–52 in Hammer Films series, 22–25, 26, 27,
29, 31
B in original Dracula (1931), 16–18
Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows), 24, 30 in recent movies, 39–42, 53, 55, 56, 57–58
Báthory, Elizabeth, 67 in Stoker novel, 5–7, 13, 51
bats, 58 Dracula (1931), 15–19, 19
Bella Swan (Twilight), 46 Dracula (1958), 22–25, 26
Ben Mears (Salem’s Lot), 36–37 Dracula (Stoker), 5–7, 13, 51
Bill Compton (True Blood), 48 Dracula AD 1972, 25
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, 72 Dracula’s Daughter, 19, 21
bisexuality, 68 Drakula halála (The Death of Dracula),
Blade and sequels, 43, 45, 51, 52 8–9, 20
Blaskó, Béla Ferenc Dezső. See Lugosi, Béla Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 12
blockbuster trend, 35–37
Blood Countess, 67 E
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 39–42, 47, 51 early talkies, 12, 14–19, 19, 21
Brides of Dracula, The, 29 Edward Cullen (Twilight), 35, 38, 46, 57
Browning, Tod, 15, 18
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 51, 65–67, 66 F
Burton, Tim, 31 Fearless Vampire Killers, The, 64
Fisher, Terence, 7, 22, 27
C foreign-language vampire movies
Carmilla (Le Fanu), 67–68 Chinese, 69
child vampires, 44 German, 8, 9–12, 10, 14, 16, 31–32, 34,
Christianity, 61–62 57
comedy trend, 63–67 Hungarian, 8–9, 20
Conde Dracula, El (Count Dracula), 28 Japanese, 73
Coppola, Francis Ford, 39–42, 47 Mexican, 55
Countess Dracula, 67 Spanish, 18, 25, 28

78 78
 Swedish, 44 female, 45, 67–68
Tagalog, 28 as heroes, 43, 44, 57–58
Turkish, 28 as villains, 12, 53, 57, 58
Fort, Garrett, 15 increasing complexity of, 57, 60, 61
Frid, Jonathan, 30, 33 physical appearance of, 13, 53–55
Fright Night, 37 as romantic, 39, 46, 47, 56
From Dusk till Dawn, 74 as sympathetic, 35–36, 40, 42, 57
future releases, 7, 75 setting, 20, 41, 52–53
weapons used by hunters, 51, 52, 57, 61
G Kinski, Klaus, 28, 32
Galeen, Henrik, 9 Kurt Barlow (Salem’s Lot), 36–37

H L
Hammer Films, 22–25, 26, 27–28, 29, 31, Lajthay, Károly, 9
34, 53 Langella, Frank, 55
Herzog, Werner, 31–32, 34 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 14, 67–68
horror genre (non-vampire), 8, 21, 22 Lee, Christopher, 23, 27, 28, 31, 53, 55
Horror of Dracula. See Dracula (1958) Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, The, 25
House of Dark Shadows, 33 legends, 4–5
Hunger, The, 68 lesbianism, 68
Lost Boys, The, 37
I Lucy (Dracula), 5–6, 17–18, 24
I Am Legend, 59 Lugosi, Béla, 15–16, 17, 19, 53, 55, 64
I Kissed a Vampire, 70
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire M
Chronicles, 42–43, 70 Marebito (Spiritual Being), 73
Mark of the Vampire, 21
J Matheson, Richard, 59
John Seward (Dracula), 6–7, 17–18 medical/scientific trend, 74–75
Jonathan Harker (Dracula), 5–7, 9, 17–18, Meyer, Stephenie, 35, 38, 46, 47
23–24, 39–40 Mina Murray Harker (Dracula), 5–7, 9,
17–18, 24, 39–40, 61
K morality tales, 58, 60
key elements of vampire movies Mr. Vampire series, 69
basic/common, 50–51, 74 Murnau, F.W., 9, 11–12
fright level, 10, 12, 16, 35–36, 43, 45 mysteries, 48–49
gore level, 22–24, 27
portrayal of secondary characters, 57– N
58, 60–61 Nachte de Grauens (Night of Terror), 8
portrayal of vampires Near Dark, 72
bonds with non-vampires, 44 Night of Dark Shadows, 33

79 79
Noche del Terror Ciego (Night of the Blind silent movies, 8–12, 10, 14, 16, 20
Terror), 25, 28 Son of Dracula (1943), 21
Nosferatu, 9–12, 14, 57 Son of Dracula (1974), 68
Nosferatu the Vampyre, 31–32, 34, 57 Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood), 48
Stoker, Bram, 5–7, 13, 51
O Straker (Salem’s Lot), 36–37
Oldman, Gary, 39, 57 Suck, 70
Once Bitten, 65 Sundown, 72
Orlok (Nosferatu), 9–12 suspenseful science fiction, 59
Ossorio, Amando de, 28
T
P television, 24, 30–31, 33, 36–37, 51, 65–67,
Pattinson, Robert, 35, 38, 49, 54, 60 66
Polanski, Roman, 64 Thirst, 74–75
True Blood, 48–49
Q Twilight series, 35, 38, 46–49, 49, 54, 60
Queen of the Damned, 68, 70
U
R Underworld, 45
Reeves, Keanu, 39, 40
religious themes, 61–62 V
Renfield (Dracula), 16–17, 18 vampire, history of the word, 7, 9
Return of the Vampire, The, 21 Vampire’s Kiss, 65
rock musicals, 68, 70 Vampires, 62
romantic trend, 39, 46–48, 56 Vampyr, 12, 14
Van Helsing, 45
S Victoria Winters (Dark Shadows), 30
Salem’s Lot, 36–37 Vlad the Impaler/Tepes/Dracul, 5
Sangster, Jimmy, 22, 23
Scars of Dracula, 25 W
Schreck, Max, 12 Westerns, 72, 74
shape-shifting, 39, 55, 62 Whedon, Joss, 65–67

80