Dracula and Modern Popular Culture Continued ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Chapter 5: Dracula & the Supernatural Chapter 6: Dracula and the Nature of Evil ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
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Dracula and Modern Popular Culture Continued
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Chapter 5: Dracula & the Supernatural
Chapter 6: Dracula and the Nature of Evil
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"the ingenious Bram Stoker... created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their effect... best of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth." [15]
As H.P. Lovecraft notes in the above extract, Bram Stoker's Dracula is responsible for much of the modern interest in vampires. It is ironic that Jack the Ripper - who was still at large when Dracula came out - should have been consigned to the world of folklore, whilst Bram Stoker's fictional Count is thought by many to have been a bona fide vampire. When you think about it, the very idea of vampires borders on the absurd. Ghosts and even werewolves seem relatively rational compared to the idea of the dead rising from the grave to drink the blood of the living. Yet stories about vampires have been with us since the beginning of time, as Van Helsing informs us in Dracula :
"let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in Chersonese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day." [Dracula, pp.285-286]
Bram Stoker clearly drew upon traditional vampire lore for his novel, but as Royce MacGillivray has pointed out,
"Anyone who compares Stoker's portrait of Dracula with the lore that Montague Summers has collected in his two volumes on vampires will find that Dracula, a polished and eloquent gentleman as well as a wily antagonist, is untypical." [16]
So what exactly is it that makes Count Dracula such an appealing character? Christopher Lee is perhaps in a better position than anybody to answer that question. This is what he has to say on the subject:
"He offers the illusion of immortality... the subconscious wish we all have of limitless power... he is either a reincarnation or he has never died. He is a superhuman image, with erotic appeal for women... In many ways he is everything people would like to be - the anti-hero, the heroic villain." [17]
As Lee rightly says, one of the things that makes the character of the Count so appealing is that he is immortal. Clive Leatherdale suggests that even at the end of Bram Stoker's Dracula we cannot be sure that the Count is really dead, since the description of his demise is very ambiguous - especially when set against the spectacular demise of Lucy Westernra. It reads as follows:
"before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. [Dracula, p.447]
We know that Dracula can turn into dust, since Van Helsing has already informed us of the fact earlier on in the book:
"He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust - as again Johnathan saw those sister in the castle of Dracula." [ Dracula, p.286]
Leatherdale speculates whether it might not be possible that Dracula turned into dust and escaped destruction. The description is certainly inconclusive. In addition to this, his heart was pierced by a knife instead of the requisite stake. Several film adaptations have played on the possiblility of the Count escaping destruction. One notable example is John Badham's 1971 version, which has the Count float away at the end. The suggestion made by the film is that the Count will eventually return to reclaim Mina, who has decided that a passionate lover who will live forever is infinitely preferable to a mere mortal.
One of the main themes addressed by Bram Stoker's Dracula is humanity's fear of things that cannot be explained scientifically or rationally. It was written at a paradoxical time, when there were still people in the world who insisted on placing their faith in magic, despite the wondrous scientific achievements taking place around them. This is reflected in the book, which not only explores the conflict between the forces of good and evil, but also the conflict between technology and superstition. It has become a metaphor for a modern crisis. Dracula - the vampire leader - is a supernatural figure, but he is also a Renaissance nobleman who pits himself against representatives of modern law and medicine, who fight him with the latest technology. Dr. Seward's phonograph is one piece of up to date technology that the Count's enemies have at their disposal, as Mina reveals in the extract below:
- "on the table opposite him was what I knew at once from the description to be a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much interested." [Dracula, p.263]
The Count's opponents (with the exception of Van Helsing) have a burning desire to dispel all forms of illusion. One sees this in the numerous references that are made to the medical advances of the time. One such reference is Dr. Seward's work on the dynamics of the unconscious, which was, as John L. Greenway has remarked, a relatively new field at the time:
"There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and then, oh unconscious cerebration! you will have to give the wall to your conscious brother. [Dracula, p.88]
The invasion of the Count brings with it the suggestion that the characters in the book are pompous for presuming that they can explain and control everything; the implication of this being that there are mysteries in this world that mankind cannot ever fully grasp. Van Helsing remarks on the need for science to explain everything in the following passage:
"Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old," [Dracula, p.229]
The Count is eventually defeated with the weapons of ritual not science. The importance of the Host for example, is stressed throughout, as the following passage demonstrates:
"I seized some of the firewood which was by me, and holding out some of the Wafer, advanced on them towards the fire. They drew back before me... They could not approach me, whilst so armed," [Dracula, p.436]
In the years following the publication of Dracula, it became relatively common for writers to offer discourse on the hidden fears entertained by humanity, and to call for a return to ritual as the only effective means of fighting them. Dennis Wheatley is a classic example of this. Like Bram Stoker, Wheatley uses religion as a direct force for good. Horror fiction by its very nature, is largely about human apprehension. It caters to a very specific need. In bygone times, when religion held the world in its sway, the supernatural went hand in hand with the natural, but when religion entered a decline, people wanted their apprehensions explained. Neither a floundering religion nor a progressive science could wholly oblige them, so the fears ensconced themselves in the deepest recesses of the human mind, later emerging in the form of horror fiction. Stoker, Wheatley and other writers like them are essentially providing a safety valve for the unspeakable fears.
In a typical Wheatley novel, an evil presence is introduced into a rational environment and religion is cited as the only means of fighting it. The ritual and magical elements are reasserted, with crucifixes, miniature holy grails and the Lord's prayer. The following extract demonstrates the power of religion in Wheatley's fiction:
- "Pulling the crucifix from her bag, she threw it with all her force at his face. It hit him on the chin. As it struck him there came a blinding flash. He uttered a piercing shriek and fell backwards against the altar... For an instant the chapel and the ruins outside it were as bright as though lit by brilliant sunshine. Next second all other sounds were drowned in a crash of thunder. The floor of the chapel rocked, a part of the roof fell in." [The Satanist, pp.407-408]
In order for a supernatural creature like the vampire to come across as a real threat, it must first be set against a background of superstitious folklore and rumours, as we see occurring in Dracula. Before Bram Stoker ever introduces us to the Count, he presents us with an assortment of superstitious country folk:
"When we started,the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant... it was a charm or guard against the evil eye. [Dracula, p.15]
A context of belief is thus established within the novel, though it is kept at a distance through the presentation of the people that champion it, who are excitable and prone to exaggeration:
" 'Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going to, and what you are going to?' She.. .went down on her knees and implored me not to go." [Dracula, p.13]
It is important to note however, that as the novel progresses, the peasants are shown to be justified in their fear of the Count. When Harker is first given the crucifix on his way to the Count's castle, he dismisses it as an idolatrous trinket; later on his forced to acknowledge its power:
"Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard... as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help." [Dracula, p.40]
Van Helsing is the only educated man who believes instinctively in the reality of vampires. He is forced to operate against a background of peasant superstition. It is up to him, as a scientist, to act as a mediator between superstition and rationality. The same Van Helsing is equally at home in both of these worlds. He is a rational man, but he is given to to hysterical outbursts:
"He raised his hands over his head in a sort of mute despair,and then beat his palms together in a helpless way; finally he sat down on a chair, and putting his hands before his face, began to sob, with loud, dry sobs" [Dracula, pp.162-163]
As a scientist Van Helsing might be expected to disprove the existence of vampires; instead he helps ensure that his comrades accept that they are a reality.
It is not uncommon to find modern writers and film-makers blending the contrasting worlds of rationality and superstition in a similar way. In Stephen King's Salem's Lot for example, we are shown a small community that is vulnerable to vampires because of its isolation from the rest of the world. The town must be defended by people with a knowledge of folklore or popular culture. The isolation of Salem's Lot is discussed in the following extract from the book:
"the Lot's knowledge of the country's torment was academic. Time went on schedule here. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town." [Salem's Lot, p.33]
The town is cut off from reality, so it is able to maintain its illusions. It is also ripe to be disillusioned, though it is important to bear in mind that the town is shown to have an academic knowledge of the danger it is facing. The first hero, Matt, has a literary background, and seems to have been created purely for the purpose of helping in the fight against vampires, who are after all, creatures out of literature:
- "it was fitting when trouble came to him... it should come in this dreamlike, darkly fantastical form. A lifetime's existence had prepared him to deal in symbolic forms that sprang to light under the reading lamp." [Salem's Lot, p.375]
The second hero, Ben, also has a literary background, which is complemented by his knowledge of popular fiction. His friendship with Matt is based on a mutual belief in something that is unbelievable, but which they know to be true:
- " 'According to folklore...' Matt said suddenly. 'When the victim dies, the marks disappear.'
- 'I know that,' Ben said. He remembered it both from Stoker's Dracula and from the Hammer films" [Salem's Lot, p.186]
The third hero, Mark, is thoroughly obsessed with the horror depicted in low culture. He is shown to have an academic knowledge of vampires as a result of this. In fact, Mark's intimate knowledge of popular horror gives him an almost scientific understanding of how to fight and destroy vampires. In this way, he is similar to the Frog brothers in The Lost Boys, whose detailed knowledge of comics and the other mediums of popular culture enable them to mobilise against the vampires in the film. The total immersion of the Frog brothers in popular horror connects knowledge with belief within The Lost Boys, and suggests that the greater the body of knowledge one has, the more equipped one is to do battle with vampires. As I have already stated, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing has to operate as a mediator between science and superstition. No mediator is required in The Lost Boys, because the Frog brothers knowledge is shown to be scientific already.
The character of the Count in Bram Stoker's Dracula shares many of the characteristics exhibited by earlier literary vampires - his flesh is cold, he is repelled by Christian symbols and he casts no reflection - but a number of things distinguish him from his predecessors. One way in which the Count was unique at the time of his conception was in his need to sleep in consecrated ground:
"their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest." [Dracula, p.288]
This was an intriguing idea on Stoker's part, as according to folklore, vampires are unable to rest in consecrated ground. Perhaps it was designed to appear sacriligeous, and so prejudice us even more against the Count. Whatever the reason, it seems to be something that is here to stay. Another way in which Dracula is different from earlier vampires is in his immunity to the sun (something that is usually ignored in movie adaptations of the book). The Count's power ceases at sunrise, but the sun does not kill him:
"His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset." [Dracula, p.287]
Bram Stoker's movement away from traditional folklore gives Dracula a disillusionary feel; we expect certain rules to be adhered to, only to find that they are not. Many recent vampire novels have followed this trend, and done away with some aspect of the traditional ideas about vampires. Folklore is now often used as a point of reference, either to be accepted or else to be adjusted or parodied. This is the certainly the case in Interview with the Vampire, which is full of examples of the traditional elements of vampire lore being manipulated. Crosses in Bram Stoker's Dracula have a magical influence over evil; in Interview with the Vampire, they are a source of reflection for the vampires and induce feelings of despair, frustration or amusement. At one point in the novel, Louis remembers his earlier experiences with Babette as a result of looking at a crucifix:
- "I turned to see she'd ripped the crucifix from the beam over her head, and she had thrust it out towards me now. And out of the dark nightmare landscape of my memory I saw Babette gazing at me as she had so many years ago, saying those words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' " [Interview with the Vampire, p.199]
Garlic in the book is similarly ineffectual against vampires. Anne Rice's attitude towards the religious weapons traditionally used for battling vampires probably stems from her desire to critique the catholic faith in her books. The characters in Interview with the Vampire are forced to put aside their catholic beliefs, as they struggle to maintain an ethical integrity against their apparently evil desires and against a world that has made them immortal outside the parameters of spiritual immortality. The vampires have to look inside themselves for the power to deliver them from despair, as Armand remarks in the following extract:
" 'This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from bitterness... Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves?' " [Interview with the Vampire, p.258]
The wooden stake is also disposed of in Interview with the Vampire, probably to ensure that the vampire's bite is the primary instrument of penetration.
Bram Stoker's Dracula features many of the elements traditionally associated with gothic novels like Matthew Lewis' The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There is a mysterious castle at the centre of a mountainous wilderness, there are virtuous heroines, and there are an abundance of gothic ruins and graveyards. Dracula himself is more than just a gothic villain, however. He is both a human criminal and a supernatural devil, and he has magical powers that can't be explained away:
"He has the strength of many... He can transform himself to wolf... he can be as bat... He can come in mist," [Dracula, p.286]
The Count champions superstition over rationality, and calls for a return to spiritual awe. Essentially he shows his opponents that their disbelief in the supernatural is a mistake. In this way he has a disillusionary function. Of course, a character as complex as the Count has a great many other roles to play in the novel besides this. He is representative of a complete alternative to human identity, for example. The alternative that the Count represents might be horrific, but it is powerful nonetheless. Through Dracula, death is transformed from the end of all things into a monstrous gateway to a new kind of existence.
The complex folding together of illusion and disillusion that takes place in Bram Stoker's Dracula is something that has been emulated in much modern popular fiction and film. One good example of a writer who concerns herself with exploring illusion and disillusion is Anne Rice. Louis in Interview with the Vampire for example, is a disillusioned catholic, in stark contrast to his brother, who was completely under the spell of the church; because Louis does not believe in the ideas of his brother, he is allowed to experience the reality of vampires:
"I did not escape my brother for a moment... I though of him constantly... I drank all the time and was at home as little as possible. I lived like a man who wanted to die... And then I was attacked. It might have been anyone... But it was a vampire." [Interview with the Vampire, p.14]
His belief in vampires becomes for him a modern substitute for his lost religion. Louis has no illusions, and is therefore able to believe in anything, even vampires, as he later explains to Armand:
- " 'you ask me how I could believe I would find a meaning in the supernatural! I tell you after seeing what I have become, I could damn well believe anything... And believing thus... I can now accept the most fantastical truth of all: that there is no meaning to any of this!' " [Interview with the Vampire, p.259]
This is just one way in which Rice plays with the concepts of illusion and disillusion; there are numerous others. While searching for their origins, Claudia and Louis travel to Transylvania - this being the setting of many vampire legends - only to find themselves confronted by a mindless corpse, and once again disillusioned:
"The two huge eyes bulged from naked eye sockets... only a putrid, leathery flesh enclosed his skull... I was battling a mindless animated corpse. But no more. We had met the European Vampire, the creature of the Old World." [Interview with the Vampire, p.207]
Louis and Claudia travel to Paris, and are led to the Theatre des Vampires, where they see real vampires pretending to be actors portraying vampires. Instead of providing Louis and Claudia with the answers they crave, however, these vampires reveal that vampirisim is merely a way of behaving. This is vampirisim at its most disillusioned. The vampires at the Theatre des Vampires,
- "had made of immortality a conformist's club... And waste... that word, that value which had been all-important to me as a fledgling vampire, was spoken of often. You 'wasted' the opportunity to kill that child. You 'wasted' the opportunity to frighten that poor woman."
- [Interview with the Vampire, p.266]
The novel allows the illusion of vampirism to flourish at a representative level. There is no meaning to being a vampire, but by collapsing together acting and being, vampires can make themselves real. This fact produces a new faith within the novel based on vampirism. The substitution of vampirism for religion is one notable element that links Interview with the Vampire to Bram Stoker's Dracula. The vampires in both books live a life that is very different from the lives of humans, simply because it does not centre around the search for spiritual immortality.
DRACULA AND THE NATURE OF EVIL
Evil in Bram Stoker's Dracula is closely allied to the concept of Otherness. As Fredric Jameson has remarked, evil tends to be characterised by the fact that it differs from the norm. It is the difference that defines the evil. Yet Count Dracula is not completely bad. He is a complex blend of different archetypes; some of them bad, some of them good. The Count is a murderer and a devil, but he is also a father and a rebel. Arguably the real horror of Dracula is the way the Count brings into consciousness discarded areas of experience, which seem to be not altogether undesirable. The Count is effectively a ghost of repressed desire, and more specifically, repressed female desire. Dracula's threat to the men in the novel is his ablility to enthrall women, not any wish he might entertain to kill them. The Count sums up his intentions in the following extract:
"Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall be mine - my creatures, to do my bidding" [Dracula, p.365]
The sexual nature of the Count's power reveals one of the problems inherent in perceiving him as a threat. The fact that he hypnotises his victims with his sexual magnetism, suggests that his attacks are not purely external - his victims must in some way unconsciously desire their own victimization. In addition to this, the vampire women do not seem displeased with their existence among the undead. Certainly the resistance put up by Lucy when Arthur is driving a stake through her heart is not suggestive of someone who is unhappy with life:
"The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth clamped together till the lips were cut [Dracula, pp.258-259]
Dracula conveys a sense of erotic desire to its readers, but it also conveys a sense of fear about the consequences of the fulfillment of that desire. It is a book that seems to warn against blindly yielding to the wiles of sex.
According to Clive Leatherdale, it was a commonly held view during the Victorian period that crime was an intrinsic part of society, and that criminals were therefore suited to the society that gave rise to them. This implies that as the Count was the worst criminal imaginable, Victorian society must have been the worst society imaginable. What is interesting is that the Count's crimes are restricted to those that relate to his blood-drinking. In every other respect he is a model citizen, who always ensures that his business transactions are above board and goes out of his way to avoid drawing attention to himself. If we are to label the Count as a criminal, therefore, we must balance his crimes against the crimes committed by his opponents, who are shown to be perfectly happy to break the law in their pursuit of Dracula:
"under the circumstances it wouldn't seem so bad for us to break into an empty house... My title will make it all right with the locksmith, and with any policeman that may come along." [Dracula, p.356]
The Count's opponents have no compunctions about destroying their undead enemies, even though it could be said that doing so amounts to murder. The vampires are destroyed outside the law, but as Van Helsing explains there is no need to fear prosecution, because the bodies dissolve into dust:
"The professor says that if we can so treat the Count's body, it will soon after fall into dust In such case there would be no evidence against us," [Dracula, p.398]
In the Hammer film Dracula Prince of Darkness, we are given a number of veiled references to the criminality of killing vampires. For one thing, the staking scene is unnecessarily ferocious, thereby calling into question the righteousness of the authority figures responsible. To return to Bram Stoker's novel, however, there is a very clear moral message, and it is this - that the Count is a monster who must be destroyed, because he transgresses moral norms.
Morality also features heavily in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, though its message is somewhat different. We identify with the vampires in Interview with the Vampire, because they are no longer fundametally removed from us. Instead they are representatives of the age they were made in, as Armand informs Louis in the following:
"This is the very spirit of your age... Everyone else feels as you feel. Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century." [Interview with the Vampire, p.310]
We can empathise with Anne Rice's vampires, so they are tolerable to us, even though they still transgress moral norms. Like Mina and Lucy in Dracula, their mobility turns them into outsiders; unlike Lucy and Mina, however, they are not set free by crusaders like Van Helsing. There is nobody to slay Rice's vampires in the name of morality, so they are left to ponder their existence and ask themselves troubling existential questions. One of the main themes of Interview with the Vampire is Louis' struggle to come to terms with what he is. He is forever inquiring into the nature of evil and agonizing over the connotations of his vampirisim, as Armand points out to him:
"you die when you kill, as if you feel that you deserve to die, and you stint on nothing. But why, with this passion and this sense of justice, do you wish to call yourself the child of Satan!" [Interview with the Vampire, p.254]
At first, Louis thinks being a vampire makes him evil; later on he realises that evil is a good deal more complicated than this. What he eventually decides is that it is not the things he has done that constitute the real evil, but the things he has not done:
"That passivity in me has been the core of it all, the real evil. That weakness, that refusal to compromise a fractured and stupid morality, that awful pride. For that, I let myself become the thing I am, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I let Claudia become the vampire she became, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I stood by and let her kill Lestat, when I knew that was wrong." [Interview with the Vampire, p.332]
One of the reasons we are able to identify with vampires generally, and Anne Rice's vampires in particular, is that they represent our own power sexualized. We identify with the ability of the vampire to dominate, but we also identify with the person who is being dominated. As critics like Burton Hatlen point out, vampire fiction furnishes its readers with the opportunity to submit to the Other. The foreign Count in Dracula is a compelling force, and Rice's vampires represent a bisexuality and homosexuality that has only recently been allowed the freedom to publically flourish. Domination and power are recurring themes in vampire fiction. In Dracula there is as obvious anxiety displayed on the part of the author about foreign invasion; in Interview with the Vampire the anxiety is primarily sexual.
As I have already suggested, modern fiction has started presenting vampires in a far more favourable light than they were presented in the past. One of the reasons for this is that there has been a decline in the influence of religion. The vampire appeals to us, at least partly, because of the fact that he has transgressed the barrier of death, and so offers us an alternative way to achieve immortality to the way proposed by the church. Given that we live in a world where fewer and fewer people blindly accept the teachings of religion, it is comforting to think that there is some way in which we can escape the uncertainty of death. In Dracula, immortality is described as a curse by Van Helsing:
"there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims" [Dracula, p.257]
The modern view of immortality is in stark contrast to this, as Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire demonstrates. In Interview with the Vampire, immortality is described as a gift, along with the rest of the traits of vampirism:
"I was gifted with eternal life, with heightened perception, and with the need to kill," [Interview with the Vampire, p.308]
Another reason for the modern presentation of vampires as characters we can sympathise with, is that writers have found in them a means of representing human grief - grief over the death of those we love, and grief over the missed opportunities that a life as short as ours faces us with. Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire shortly after the death of her daughter, and it is easy to read Louis' plaintive distress over the death of Claudia as expressive of her own resultant grief:
"What mattered was that I was more utterly alone in the world than I had ever been in my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less reason to live than I'd ever had, and less desire." [Interview with the Vampire, p.339]
Interestingly, the final disillusionment in the novel concerns the question of vampiric immortality, since Louis is forced to accept that there is an end to everything and everyone, even vampires:
"The magnificent paintings of the Louvre were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Like Claudia, severed from her mother, preserved for decades... like Claudia and Madeline and myself, they could all be reduced to ashes." [Interview with the Vampire, p.344]
Unlike Rice's vampires, the character of the Count in Bram Stoker's Dracula is sublimely evil. Film adaptations have tended to adhere to this conception to a greater or lesser extent. One notable exception to this is Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which supplants the novel's narrative with an insight into the tragic love of Vlad the Impaler. The male bonding between Van Helsing and his associates is played down in the film. Instead of ending with the necessary purging of the invading evil, the film concludes with Mina standing in for the Count's dead wife and delivering the blow that sets him free. Coppola's version of the story does not consistently present the Count as a sublime figure of evil. The Count does not come across as an antichrist, nor even a demon; instead we see a victim and a sentimental romantic hero. This is summed up by Fred Botting as follows:
"Dracula is less tyrannical and demonic, and more victim and sufferer" [18]
The Count's evil is explained away by the film, as the result of the untimely death of his wife and his consequent grief. It is his hatred of God for depriving him of his love in such an unfair manner that leads him to become a vampire. Without anyone to love, the Count is left to prey upon humanity, until he meets Harker, and discovers that the young lawyer's fiance is the very image of his dead wife. As the film progresses, Mina increasingly assumes the identity of Dracula's dead wife. This new vision of the story turns it into a romance. It does not affirm a set of values in a moment of sacrifice, but mourns a lost love. The Count is no longer wholly Other, and as a result, the film implies that a more humane approach to vampirism based on tolerance is preferable to the violent solution offered by Bram Stoker. Count Dracula's horror is compromised by the love theme in the film. In Bram Stoker's novel, there is an ambivalent link between sacrificial violence and diabolical play; the romanticism of Coppola's film has to a certain extent severed this link.
Of course, Francis Ford Coppola is not the first person to have deprived Count Dracula of some of his horror; what is Batman if not the Count cleansed of his evil and endowed with a social conscience? The similarities between Batman and Count Dracula are plain to see. Both move around in the shape of a bat, both are happiest at night, both dress in black and both are feared by their victims. In addition to this, Batman is psychotic in his all-consuming desire to have revenge on the criminal world for depriving him of his parents. He is addicted to crime-fighting, just as Dracula is addicted to blood-sucking. Bruce Wayne - Batman's alter-ego - makes all this explicit in the first ever Batman comic:
"I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on criminals... I must have a disguise. Criminals are a cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible... A bat! That's it!" [19]
Dracula exerted an influence over the Batman comics that went beyond the central character. The city Batman inhabited, for example, was a world of large moons, long shadows and wierd perspectives - in short, a place more akin to Transylvania than a modern city. The influence of Dracula on the Batman comics is especially apparent in a story that pitted the Caped Crusader against a character called the Monk. In this particular comic, Batman is thrust into a nightmare world of ruined castles, vampires and the supernatural. When he eventually tracks the murderous Monk to his tomb, he opens the coffin to reveal a living corpse. Batman then dispatches the Monk with a gun loaded with silver bullets. Recently a graphic novel came out that actually pitted Batman against Count Dracula, and in so doing, further emphasised the link between them.
Batman is not the only comic book character to have been influenced by Bram Stoker's Dracula. James O'Barr's creation, the Crow, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Count as well. The Crow dresses in black, paints his face a deathly white colour and inhabits a nightmarish landscape of gothic scenery. The most convincing piece of evidence for linking Dracula with the Crow, however, is that both of them have returned from the dead to prey on the living (in the Count's case, the living constitutes anyone who crosses his path; in the Crow's case, the living constitutes the thugs who murdered him and his girlfriend).
Moving onto to something slightly more academic; critics like Cranny Anne-Francis have suggested that the main horror in Dracula is sexually independent women. According to this argument, the Count is simply the means by which this evil is unleashed. This is a view that was seized upon by Hammer. Female sexuality is presented as threatening in numerous Hammer films. They were even known to take things a stage further on occasions, and contrast a weak or crippled male against a professional figure, who was distinguished by his removal from female association. The message conveyed by Hammer is that female sexuality is dangerous and must be repressed. In Dracula Prince of Darkness, one of the women, Helen, has repressed desires that errupt when the Count bites her. She is converted into a creature of sexual aggression, and it is only when she is staked that she reaches a state of grace. This is remarkably similar to the fate of Lucy in Bram Stoker's Dracula. After all, Van Helsing frequently talks about the need to set Lucy free within the novel, as the following extract suggests:
"When this now Un-dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilation of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels." [Dracula, p.257]
It has become common in recent years to underscore horror stories with suggestions of some hidden threat. James Herbert for example, used the obvious menace in his book, The Rats, as a metaphor for his fear about the contamination of the working class, and the pending destruction of its identity as a result of this and other threats. This is clearly hinted at when Harris muses about the rats in the following sequence:
"He'd had a feeling of revulsion towards the people, not as individuals, but en masse. Strangely enough, it had been slightly akin to the revulsion he'd felt towards the rats. As though they were a threat." [The Rats, p.68]
Arguably, The Rats is more about a social catastrophe than a supernatural one.
To anyone who has stuck around to the bitter end, I would just like to say a few words in conclusion. The aim of this discussion has been to attempt to catalogue and evaluate some of the numerous ways in which Bram Stoker's Dracula has been assimilated by modern popular culture. Obviously the topic is so extensive that I have barely scratched the surface. The good thing is that the research is so much fun that I may eventually get around to expanding on what I have said here. Only the other day for example, I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which surely constitutes further groundwork.
Count Dracula has entered the realms of icongraphy, and the novel in which he first appeared has turned out to be more enduring than any other gothic novel, with the possible exception of Frankenstein. The most probable reason for this is that Dracula crystalizes the main themes of gothic fiction in their most powerful form. Modern popular culture has taken the figure of Dracula and made him its own. It has also arguably made him one of the images of humanity. The Count appeals to us all, because we recognise in him a mirror reflecting the darker side of our own nature.
Dracula is a novel that is replete with imagery, and is open to any number of different interpretations. Every generation has gleaned something different from it - which is why the Universal film adaptation is so different from the Hammer version - and so it has continued to fire the imagination. One of the most recent readings and adaptations of the novel was Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which introduced a love theme into the story, and interspaced the action with references to modern society (AIDS, drug addiction, etc).
Bram Stoker's novel has not only given us a popular icon in the form of the Count, but it has also had a profound effect on modern horror literature. Modern vampire fiction especially is indebted to Dracula, but even books as far removed from the vampire mythos as William Blatty's The Exorcist borrowed from Bram Stoker. Dracula is one of the most terrifying creations of horror literature ever, and continues to enthrall readers with its imagery and power to shock. The novel is often forgotten as a subject of serious literary study, but it seems it will never be forgotten by modern popular culture.
1. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994), p.65.
2. Clive Leatherdale, 'Dracula':The Novel and the Legend (Desert Island Books, 1993), p.190.
3. Ibid, p.202.
4. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994), p.111.
5. Clive Leatherdale, 'Dracula':The Novel and the Legend (Desert Island Books, 1993), p.235.
6. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Penguin,1976).
7. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (Verso, 1988), p.92.
8. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994), p.19.
9. Carol A. Senf, " Dracula : The Unseen Face in the Mirror", 'Dracula' :The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Margaret L. Carter (UMI Research Press, 1988), p.100.
10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981).
11. Clive Leatherdale, 'Dracula': The Novel and the Legend (Desert Island Books, 1993), p.230.
12. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Volume 2: The Modern Gothic (Longman, 1996), p.1.
13. Clive Leatherdale, 'Dracula':The Novel and the Legend (Desert Island Books, 1993), p.232.
14. Carol A. Senf, "Dracula : The Unseen Face in the Mirror", 'Dracula' :The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Margaret L. Carter (UMI Research Press, 1988).
15. H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (Dover, 1973), p.78.
16. Royce MacGillivray, "Bram Stoker's Spoiled Masterpiece", The Critical Response to Bram Stoker, ed. Carol A. Senf (Greenwood Press, 1993).
- 17. Cited in Daniel Farson, "The Rise of Count Dracula", The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time, Issue 52 (1981), p.1036.
18. Fred Botting, Gothic (Routledge, 1996), p.178.
19. Bob Kane, "The Legend of Batman", Secret Origins of the Super DC Heroes, ed. Dennis O'Neil (Harmony Books, 1976), p.37.
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