Blood and lore

Kaleem Aftab

The director FW Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu established conventions that are still found in vampire movies. Rex Features

It’s official: vampires are cool. The record-breaking success of Twilight at the American box office let the cat out of the coffin that the bloodsuckers are not to be feared. Indeed, movies about vampires are no longer guaranteed to belong to the horror genre. It’s enough to make Bela Lugosi turn in his grave.

The first on-screen depiction of these creatures of the night was in 1915, with the director Louis Feuillade’s legendary opus Les Vampires. The 10-part serial about a flamboyant gang of Parisian criminals contains many of the mainstays of vampire folklore, most notably that the bloodsuckers operate within the highest echelons of society. They are masters of disguise, carrying out criminal activities with glee. The series also saw the first appearance of a female vampire, Irma Vep (an anagram of vampire), a seductive creature at the centre of the group who became a template for feline incarnations of the evil spirits.

It was 1922’s Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror that established many of the vampire’s monstrous conventions. FW Murnau’s unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic text Dracula contained a masterly gothic aesthetic, with dark shadows and cold castles. Max Schreck played the vampire Graf Orlok, who was evil incarnate, a savagely simple being who would lurch instinctively toward blood with barely disguised lust. He had bat ears and fangs in the middle rather than the sides of his mouth. Orlok would keep odd hours and lock up his prey. His nemesis, Hutter, finds a book of vampire lore that details salient vampire rules such as the need to sleep in the day. The key to killing Orlok is to expose him to the first rays of morning sunshine.

The more enduring image of the suave, cunning and sophisticated vampire with human qualities was created in 1931 in Tod Browning’s official adaptation of Dracula. The film gave birth to the horror genre as we know it today, and made a star out of Bela Lugosi, who had played Dracula on the stage. His creation came not from the pages of Stoker’s novel, but the exaggerated, theatrical style of the day. It was the first sound adaptation of Dracula and Browning made particular use of Lugosi’s Hungarian accent – his affected English became the trademark of vampires for a generation. Lugosi emphasised the ghoulish carnal human traits rather than an animalistic craving. A string of sequels, including Dracula’s Daughter, and Son of Dracula, followed in the 1930s as vampire films became a staple of Hollywood.

Lugosi’s performance had a particularly big influence on Christopher Lee, who appeared as Dracula in seven horror films by the production company Hammer. In 1958, Hammer and the director Terrence Fisher made a version of Dracula that shocked audiences by emphasising the physical horror. The count did not just devour his prey in the shadows; his feral eyes and fangs seem to be continually dripping with blood. Hammer horror films were all about the number of kills.

The physical side of the undead also has caught directors’ imaginations, such as in 1942’s vampire-inspired Cat People. Mario Bava and Lee Kresel’s 1960 Italian gore-fest Revenge of the Vampire contained the usual mix of secret passages, family curses and surprising deaths.

The lore around vampires continues to grow. The 1957 Mexican movie El Vampiro showed fangs and introduced other clichés such as spelling a name backwards as a pseudonym. The famed American comedians Abbott and Costello spotted that the horror genre and its characters – especially vampires – were ripe for parody and, in 1948, released Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein. The director Roman Polanski got in on the parody act with The Fearless Vampire Killers in 1967, which took its lead from Dracula’s famous slayer, Van Helsing. So did spoofs such as Mel Brook’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). But others, such as the racially charged Blacula (1972), picked up on the fact that vampires could be seen as the stereotypical outsiders: creatures on the margins of society desperate to be accepted by the in-crowd.

This hankering after a sense of belonging was the central pillar in Werner Herzog’s 1979 art-house film Nosferatu the Vampyre, which emphasises not just the lust for love but also a lust for life.

From the spoofs, it was clear that the vampire had to evolve if films were to continue to resonate with audiences. The genre began to move away from horror and towards science fiction in titles such as The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, and Rabid (1977) directed by David Cronenberg. Vampires also learned new tricks such as flying and having supernatural strength.

They also became adept at finding ingenious ways to operate in the mainstream and their link with aristocracy became increasingly benign. In films such as Queen of the Damned, vampires started to have cool jobs, such as being rock stars. Joel Schumacher made a massive effort to link vampires to society’s hip outsiders in 1986’s The Lost Boys when he hung a poster of the musician Jim Morrison in the vampires’ lair. The film also highlighted the age-old appeal of vampire hunters, the popularity of which reached its height with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), the tale of an American cheerleader destined to defend the world. In the later television series, the character Angel, a vampire with a soul, exemplified a new spin being put on vampires: that they were not all evil by nature.

The most famous vampire to cure his bloodlust was Louis in the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire in which Tom Cruise comes up against Brad Pitt. The theme of vampire against vampire was also popular in the Blade trilogy and the Underworld trilogy (the third part of which is about to be released in cinemas).

As geeks have become increasingly celebrated in society, the bloodsucking outsiders have followed suit. Indeed, in Vampire’s Kiss Nicolas Cage convinces himself that he is a vampire. Recently, the HBO drama True Blood – in which vampires campaign for their civil rights after a Japanese firm manages to manufacture synthetic blood that can be sold in stores – has turned the joke in Blacula on its head.

Twilight simply takes the next logical step in vampire evolution. Vampires, with their supernatural abilities and overpowering need for love, combined with their dorky erratic behaviour, have become the ultimate cool kids in a pop culture where everyone loves a weirdo.

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090119/ART/754792500/1007