Jan 8
seen from Philippines
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seen from United States
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two orphan vampires (1997) dir. jean rollin
WITH A KISS I DIE (2018) dir. Ronnie Khalil When Juliet Capulet (of Shakespearean fame) is plucked from death and turned into a vampire, she is forced to live all eternity without her sweet Romeo. Now, 800 years later, Juliet meets a young woman who captures her heart again and teaches her that love and loss are all a part of life, and that a life without love is no life at all. (link in title)
What a shot for an opening credit!
Once Bitten (1985, Howard Storm)
Celeste Yarnall in The Velvet Vampire (1971)
Cinematic bloodlines (1)
The novel "Dracula" gave birth to many, MANY different adaptations, with several of them forming a very particular chain of works that I will call "bloodlines". And the first one actually begins with... a theater play.
In June of 1924, twelve years after the death of Bram Stoker, Dracula was adapted to the stage in Derby, by Hamilton Deane. This play was a huge success - in June of 1927 it was moved to London, and there made so much noise that by September of the same year it crossed the Atlantic and became a Broadway fame. It is from this specific play that the iconic "Dracula outfit" comes from, this evening wear, these soirée clothes with a black cape. It is also at Broadway that one particular actor would start playing Dracula, forever changing the fate of the character: the Hungarian-descendng Bela "Lugosi" Blasko, destined to become the first "face" of Dracula.
We move on to the core of this bloodline: the 1931 "Dracula" movie by Tod Browning. The first "actual" Dracula adaptation on screen, or at least the first talking movie about Dracula, and the one that immortalized Belga Lugosi in the role of the vampire count.
This movie was a huge and lasting success, and erected Dracula as a cultural icon in the American landscape. Jean Marigny wrote that one of the reasons this Dracula worked so well at the time was due to the historical context - the mix of the Great Depression's miserable effects and the inherent xenophobia of the USA, which found themselves "embodied" somehow by Dracula, this sickly and cruel "foreigner", this diseased and malevolent "other" which brought evil into the world. From 1931 to the end of World War II, roughly, American cheap literature and pulp fiction saw a boom of Dracula copies and imitations, so many vampires with Germanic or Slavic names that all were more-or-less subtle personifications of the political threats the USA had to deal with - Bolshevism or Nazism.
Though, again by Marigny's word, this "xenophobic" and "political" reading of Dracula does echo wonderfully one of the elements that made the original novel a success - as beyong a "good versus evil" and "vice versus virtue" battle, the Dracula novel also presented the vampire as a threat coming from a far-away country on the backwards, peasant, superstitious and ancient Eastern depths of Europe, coming into the harmonious and civilized order of Britain to cause trouble and disrupt peace... Perfect to please the inherent xenophobia of Victorian England. Though, it also should be pointed out that the novel, while adhering seemingly to this inherent bias, still was quite subversive - for example by having the Count be clearly more powerful and more prepared than the protagonists, who are all somehow weak or mediocre embodiments of the Victorian society, outmatched and unarmed for quite a long time against this clearly far superior being that is the vampire...
Also, this movie solidified the idea of a younger Dracula - as unlike in the novel, Lugosi's vampire doesn't start as an old man with a long white mustache...
The 1931 Dracula led to the development of what we know today as the "Universal Horror", a series of horror movies developed by Universal Pictures and which formed the first big "cinematic family" of the horror world. In this setting, "Dracula" got a sequel: "Dracula's Daughter" in 1936, very very loosely inspired by both "Dracula's Guest" and "Carmilla" (the two most prominent depictons of a female vampire at the time). The movie is about, as you can guess, Dracula's daughter who is trying to use all the methods she can, both supernatural and scientific, to break the vampirism curse she inherite from her father... The movie is also well-known for playing with the lesbian subtext of Carmilla, reusing it on screen in a Dracula context.
The third part of the unofficial trilogy came in 1943: "Son of Dracula". This is not actually about the literal son of Dracula, unlike "Dracula's Daughter". Rather it is about count Dracula moving not into London but into New-Orleans to spread his vampirism (was it the first time Dracula was depicted arriving in America? I think it might be...). In fact the other working titles for this movies were "The Modern Dracula" and "The Return of Dracula", all much more faithful to what the movie is actually about. This picture is also notorious for being the first time the "Alucard" trick was used in vampire fiction (note that Dracula is not played here by Bela Lugosi, but rather by the other giant of horror Lon Chaney Junior)
After this initial trilogy forming a very loose story (continuity was not the main concern of Universal movie-makers), the Universal Horror entered the era any big franchise enters at one point - crossover times! With "House of Frankenstein" in 1944, and "House of Dracula" in 1945, both about events gathering under one same roof Dracula, the creature of Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, the three iconics of the Universal Horror.
Then we entered the era of parodies, and the Universal Dracula ended up with the 1948 parody "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein".
This is the end for the old "classic" Universal line. There is actually more down it, Universal didn't stop its vampire movies there, but I'll keep it for another post, because I want to conclue this post with three other movies.
Bela Lugosi is quite famously THE Dracula - and many believe that he was the only actor for Dracula in the Universal movies. Yet, as said above, he wasn't present in all of them - Son of Dracula, for example, was without him. Rather, this idea comes from the fact that, after playing Dracula on stage and on screen, Lugosi ended trapped in the role and type-casted as a vampire. He notoriously played in an unofficial trio of vampire movies which solidifed his reputation as "the vampire actor".
The first was another Tod Browning production made not so long after the original Dracula: 1935's Mark of the Vampire (or Vampires of Prague), which was strongly inspired by a silent horror movie currently lost, "London after Midnight". There, Lugosi played a "count Mora" who causes mysterious deaths in Prague with his daughter Irena. (And in this angle you could consider this movie a sort of unofficial rival to Universal's "Dracula's Daughter").
Followed in 1943 "The Return of the Vampire" by Lew Landers, which was basically trying to be an unofficial, unlicensed sequel to the Universal 1931's Dracula, even having Lugosi play the main vampire haunting London (Armand Tesla). This picture also contains a copy of Universal's Wolf Man in the person of Andréas the werewolf.
The last one is another parody in the line of the Abbott and Costello movie (in fact it was heavily inspired by it): the 1953 John Gilling's movie "Mother Riley Meets the Vampire", where the vampire is titled Van Houssen and plans to dominate the world by... building a robot army. Well... it was the 50s.
All of these lead to the treatment of Lugosi' vampire typecasting as both his legacy and his curse - to the point that when he was buried, he demanded it was in his Dracula costume...
The wait is over! Available now, the latest full colour, large format book from We Belong Dead. Over 480 pages covering the cinematic vampire from Nosferatu to the present day. Featuring cover art by Content Abnormal's own Josh Ryals and illustrated with almost 1400 photos, posters and lobby cards!
Ordering details and sample pages HERE
This Week in Vampire Cinema
This Week in Vampire Cinema
It was a crazy week, y’all. The first week back to school for students, with lots and lots to do. Understandably, I think, I didn’t watch as many movies this week as I probably should have. I was just too tired most nights to focus on a movie. But, I still managed to watch three! This Week in Vampire Cinema: Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974) Directed by Brian Clemens, starring Horst Janson…
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