Back when Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi donned cape and fangs, vampires played for keeps, but they also played by the rules.   Recent novels and movies on the subject have old Dracula spinning in his coffin...and we ask...

By JOHN NETTLES

Fully half of my adult life has been spent living in the sleepy hamlet of Athens, Georgia, a town which enjoys a peculiar diversity found in only a handful of places. On the one hand, it is a college town, home of the University of Georgia and just scads of Southern tradition. Some families have sent their sons and daughters to Athens to embrace fraternity, public drunkenness, and marginal education for generations. On the other hand, it is an arts-and-music town, the birthplace of R.E.M., the B-52's, Oscar-winning actress Kim Basinger, and ingenue horror novelist Poppy Z. Brite.

Now I have never met Poppy Brite but, small towns being what they are, I know people who know her, and on their fervent recommendation I picked up a copy of Brite's first novel, a vampire saga called Lost Souls.

I tried. Lord, how I tried. I put it down and came back to it days later. I read it hopped up on coffee in incredibly hip java-holes. I read it at home, drunk in my amazingly comfy thrift-store recliner. I gave this book everything I had, just to get to the darkly glowing promise of this local masterpiece. I failed miserably, never getting beyond page 50 or so. It wasn't the writing--Poppy can throw a sentence together. It wasn't the genre--I'm a fool for good horror.

It was her vampires. Her decadent, bisexual, dressed-all-in-black-and-impossibly-beautiful vampires. Her irrepressibly cool, jaded, sensual, can-ask-about-the-new-Cure-album-in-impeccable-French vampires. I was filled with a nameless dread; I could go no further. I ran screaming for a dog-eared copy of Salem's Lot.

Anne Rice, what have you done?! I mean, Interview With The Vampire was a novelty in 1976, and a decent read, but the franchise has gotten completely out of control. If we are to accept the current trends in fiction and film, the vampire can no longer transform into a bat or a wolf but can become an contributing editor for Details magazine at will. The rapacious, unholy creature that has stalked the nightmares of humanity since the first chapter of the Talmud has become, well, Brad Pitt.

In all fairness, the market will bear what the market will bear. Anne Rice and Poppy Brite have sold more books than I'm ever likely to, and although I could let a cocaine-addled rhesus monkey loose in a recording studio and produce a more skillful record than Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead," said tune will remain the anthem for the legions of the undead crawling the streets way after curfew on a school night.

That's fine--the pooled savings of the teeming millions who daily tuck their dyed-black mops beneath Arby's caps have created a thriving industry in the Eurotrash image of the vampire, and laissez-faire capitalism will out, so long as it is clearly understood that the Anne Rice/Poppy Brite/Vampire:The Masquerade vision is its own creature of the night, not to be confused with the classic monster presented so terrifyingly in Bram Stoker's monumental novel Dracula.

That is, until Francis Ford Coppola got into the act and dared to call his paean to the toothy beautiful people Bram Stoker's Dracula. True, his film did take a swipe at the epistolary form of the novel. True, he did manage to include all those secondary characters--Lord Godalming, Quincey Morris--who tend to vanish from the other films. And true, he did cast the first actor since Lugosi who could deliver the Count's lines in a convincing Hungarian accent. But does any of that make up for the fact that Coppola missed the point of the entire novel?

Dracula is a Gothic horror novel, not a romance. Nowhere in Stoker's book is there a love interest for Dracula, nor should there be. Nowhere does Stoker say that vampires may walk abroad in daylight, yet there's Gary Oldman, looking for all the world like Doug Henning at the prom, strolling the streets of London at rush hour. And nowhere does Stoker suggest that we are to feel even the slightest inkling of sympathy for Dracula. Dracula is, and always has been, a monster.

Universal Studios and Hammer Films garnered millions from their treatments of the Count and established Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee as legitimate icons by following Stoker's paradigm, if not to the letter than at least faithful to its spirit, the rules of the unholy road:

1.  The vampire is "undead" because it is not alive. Vampires do not become rock stars, okay? They don't frequent Starbucks. They don't wear designer originals. They sleep in dirt. They drink blood. They smell terrible.

2. The vampire is a predator. You don't want to have sex with a vampire and he or she doesn't want to have sex with you. The vampire hates you because you're alive and is only interested in the stuff you have inside your veins, which he takes in a horrible and violent fashion. Any sexual connotation drawn from this act is aberrant and pure fetish, rather like getting turned on by Jeffrey Dahmer. Stoker's Dracula is a rapist, an idea that comes out clearly in Lugosi's and especially Lee's interpretations of the character.

3.  The vampire is an abomination. The fact that you cannot see the vampire's reflection is meant to connote that the creature has no soul. I love Buffy as much as the next person, but that Angel thing just doesn't happen. The vampire is repelled by the cross because it is a symbol of the power and displeasure of God (as for that business about a cross not working if the wielder has no faith, that's crap--if it were true, then a single believer in animism, the living spirit in everything, could wipe out vampires with a tin can--the cross works because the vampire believes in it).

The entire point of the vampire is to corrupt and to consume those things that are favored by God, namely us. He could not care less about art, literature, or Siouxsie and the Banshees unless there's a hot meal in it.

In short, Bram Stoker's Dracula is not Bram Stoker's Dracula, nor are the works of Anne Rice and her imitators. This is not to say that there is no sexual fascination attached to the figure of the vampire, but it is the fascination with the tiger that persists even as the tiger closes in for the kill.

Good on you, John, for driving a stake through the tinsel hearts of the current crop of posing bloodsuckers.  Give us a vampire that's all blood and thunder and couldn't care less if his spats match! 

Article copyright © John Nettles.   Visit his website.

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