Background: A
cultural history, and Bram Stoker's novel
"A literary work is not an object
that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each
period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence.
It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among
its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words."
Hans Robert Jauss: Towards
an Aesthetic Reception
The canonisation of Bram Stoker's 1897
novel Dracula has invited many
critical readings, its popularity many interpretations, perspectives,
reproductions and reworkings. The five filmic depictions of the novel which are
the focus of this paper span some 70 years, and thus provide an ideal
opportunity for comparison and analysis of the changing representations of the
character of the vampire Dracula. Each cinematic portrayal of Dracula
represents not only an interpretation of character, but a construction of society and social environment through his
relationship thereto. Each film is there to be read, not just as a text, but as
a reading itself offering layers of narrative and understanding.
The cultural history of the vampire
and the social perception of its image do of course also contribute
significantly to the malleable representations of Dracula through the passage
of time. The changing connotations of the growing vampire legend cannot fail to
affect cinematic (or any other) interpretations of the original Dracula text, as Bram Stoker's infamous
immortal character Count Dracula remains synonymous with /and firmly anchored
to vampire lore. The increasingly popularity of vampires and their associated
Gothic realm demonstrates the continuing fascination of Western culture with
some of the key central themes of vampire tales: (im)mortality; fear of the
dead; blood; sexuality; power; alienation. These ingredients are essential in
the supernatural vampire myth, from its origins in centuries old superstition
to its current media-devouring existence. Yet each of the five films I will be
examining draws on or emphasises different aspects of the myths to invoke
distinctive vampire characters.
The origins of the creature which
evolved into Bram Stoker's Dracula began as ancient stories of supernatural
nightflying bloodsuckers such as the lamia,
a Greek mythological monster represented as a serpent with the head and breasts
of a woman and reputed to prey on human beings and suck the blood of children.
Whilst containing some thematic characteristics familiar to us through vampire
literature and cinema (such as immortality, ambiguous sexuality, nocturnal
behaviour, invasion and sanguinary assault), these early prototypes were
generally demonic or evil spirits lacking in that defining feature of the
vampire which is the necessity of its death in a natural world in order to
achieve immortality and power.
The
literary evolution of the vampire as we know it today, although
anthropomorphised most famously by Bram Stoker, began to take shape in the
twelfth century. At this time the notion of the dead returning ('undead') in
order to exsanguinate the living was chronicled by English historian William of
Newburgh. Newburgh used the Latin term sanguisuga,
meaning bloodsucker, in his
accounts of vampires in England. The specificity of his case reports linked
tenuous past sources of vampire mythology, (such as the outbreak of fatal
epidemics within a village) to a growing body of vampire lore which included Newburgh's
own conclusion that the only permanent protection from the 'undead' was to
unearth and burn the body in the coffin from which he rose at night. Among the
cases cited by Newburgh in support of this claim was the Melrose Abbey case
in which the village's sacriligious priest returned from the dead and walked
each night through the monastery where one night a monk hit him with a
battleaxe. The priest's grave, according to Newburgh, when opened contained a
corpse with the axe wound swimming in blood. He was cremated by the brothers,
and his ashes scattered. Similarly, in Newburgh's account of vampirism at
Alnwick Castle, a man
of wicked reputation was killed and buried only to be seen after dark wandering
through the village. His return coincided with the outbreak of an epidemic of
an unnamed (and in some cases fatal) disease. Again, according to Newburgh.
when exhumed his grave gushed forth fresh blood. After his body was burned, the
epidemic ended.
William of Newburgh's contribution to
vampire lore and literature is significant particularly in its account of
exhumation and emphasis on the necessity of cremation. The opening of coffins
is a repetitive theme in the novel and the five filmic depictions thereof which
are the focus of this thesis. The burning of the body for a 'permanent'
solution implies the need for a ritualistic killing (or re-killing) to rob the
vampire of its state of immortality, and this is manifested in Bram Stoker's
novel and many other accounts as a 'stake through the heart' or being exposed
to daylight and so on.
The oddly balanced relationship between science and folklore
that is a feature of the novel Dracula
(and a balance which a seventy year period of cinematic interpretation will
demonstrate to shift reflecting changing social perceptions) is rooted in these
early accounts of William of Newburgh. On one hand we have vampire lore which
in its foundations (the existence of the 'undead') is necessarily contradictory
the laws of physics, of science. On the other hand, the rigidity of vampire law is structured in a science-like
manner of cause and effect ('to repel the vampire use the following...'), and
Bram Stoker clearly uses the characters of Dr Seward and Van Helsing
(medically, scientifically sanctioned) to add scientific credibility to his
wildly superstitious premise.
Bram Stoker uses the link between vampirism and disease as a
way of reinforcing the 'scientific' credibility of Drs Seward and Van Helsing
in their diagnosis of Count Dracula and his victims. During the early stages of
Lucy's illness, she is examined by Dr Seward and he concludes that her symptoms
are consistent with anaemia. Anaemia, while characterised by fatigue, pallid
complexion and fainting or dizziness, is a pathological deficiency in the
oxygen-carrying component of the blood, measured in unit volume concentrations
of hemoglobin, red blood cell volume, or red blood cell number.
By Chapter 9 of Dracula Dr Seward has
tested Lucy's blood and reached the realisation that Lucy is suffering from the
loss of whole blood volume, and not just its oxygenation capacity. Dr Van
Helsing concurs, commenting "I have made careful examination, but there is
no functional cause. With you I agree that there has been much blood lost; it
has been but is not. But the conditions of her are in no way anaemic."
Although dismissing an accepted pathological condition as an explanation for
what ails Lucy, Bram Stoker has brought superstition into line with science by
convincing his sceptical doctors through orthodox medical methodology. Through
this alignment of lore and law, a new realm is opened.
The association between vampirism and disease has been
extensively examined outside of fiction also. In the quest to dig up the
origins of the persisting vampire myth, there is ongoing debate which
continually influences the public perception through media production and
consumption. A fairly recent example of this has been the hypothesised link
between vampirism and porphyria. A collection of rare diseases, the porphyrias
are disorders of porphyrin metabolism, usually hereditary, which show the
presence of large amounts of porphyrins in the blood and urine of the patient.
In porphyria sufferers, an enzyme defiency which inhibits the synthesis of heme
(also known as hematin - the deep red, nonprotein, ferrous component of
hemoglobin) is characterised by an extreme sensitivity to sunlight. It is this
symptom that is the most obvious connection to the vampire and its traditional
nocturnal existence. Whilst Count Dracula's aversion to sunlight is significant
in Bram Stoker's novel, it is perhaps even more so in a cinematic adaptation of
the novel, where darkness and horror are inextricably linked. FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) in particular utilises
shadow and light very effectively in its representation of the vampiric
creature.
In 1985, in a paper presented to the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, David Dolphin hypothesised that early reports
of vampires (such as those of William of Newburgh) may be based on sufferers of
porphyria. The injection of heme as a treatment for porphyria led Dolphin to
suggest that centuries ago porphyrics might have attemtped to drink the blood
of other human being in an attempt to alleviate their systems. Whilst there is
to date no scientific evidence to suggest that doing to would have any effect
on the disease, Dolphin's paper was widely discussed and received a lot of
media coverage (particularly from the US tabloids). The paper offended many
porphyria sufferers needless to say, and while his hypothesis was eventually
discarded it sparked off several popular television shows built on the
possibility of a porphyria patient exhibiting vampiric behaviour patterns.
Forever Knight
is one such program, featuring a thirteenth century vampire living in a modern
metropolis and working as a homicide detective, where his "severe allergy
to sunlight" and other vampiric characteristics are given medical
explanations each week by the department pathologist. Vampire films too have
quite frequently alluded to the possibility of vampirism being a genetic (read medical or scientifically sanctioned)
condition, particularly those featuring vampire families, such as The House of Dark Shadows (1970) or Interview With The Vampire (1994). The
existence of old families can often imply genetic flaws. More recently, The X-Files
has also featured a vampire episode, in which Agent Scully - medical doctor, cynic and the representative
voice of scientific reason - predictably suggested anaemia and porphyria as
possible explanations for vampiric behaviour.
The attempt to achieve credibility through scientific
realism is perhaps favoured less by Francis Ford Coppola in his 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula than it is by the
other four film makers in question. Coppola's emphasis seems to be more on
historical realism through his background on Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler and
so on, gained directly from trawling historical sources rather than indirectly
via the vampire lore entrenched in Bram Stoker's novel. Many of the superstitions
featured in the novel Dracula had the
origins in the cultural belief systems of the Slavic people of Eastern Europe,
where between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries inexplicable epidemics and
deaths in a village often resulted in exhumation of corpses and the staking and
burning of bodies. The tradition of using garlic as a protection also
originated from this area, as did the usage of the term "vampire",
taken from the Serbian "vampir".
The area itself is one that is vital part of the Dracula tradition. Eastern
Europe, specifically Transylvania (part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in
1830, later on a part of Hungary, and since the end of World War I a part of
Roumania) is synonymous with vampires and with Dracula, and in Bram Stoker's
novel is significant in its evocation of mystery, magic and danger, and its
connotations of journey, ethnography and ancient mythology.
In 1732, a report of a vampire attack in Belgrade was picked
up by two British periodicals (the London
Journal and the Gentleman's Magazine).
This sparked a fresh interest in vampire mythology. In 1765, the French
naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc coined the term 'vampire bats' (referring to American
bats of the family Desmodontidae which
feed on the blood of mammals and birds) because of their nocturnal nature and
ability to suck the victim's blood without awakening them. Legends of this sort
eventually inspired the first piece of vampire fiction in English, a short
story (first published in 1819) by Dr John William Polidori. Polidori, (a
respected physician, an Italian immigrant and the travelling companion of the
acclaimed poet and writer George Gordon, Lord Byron) published "The Vampyre" in The New Monthly Magazine, where
initially Byron was incorrectly credited for the work. It was in fact at
Byron's suggestion that a group of his friends write ghost stories during a
holiday in Switzerland: from this proposition came Polidori's story - the foundation of modern vampire fiction - as
well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
It has been suggested that Polidori's vampire idea was partially inspired by
Byron's poem "The Giaour".
The poem, written by Byron in Greece, describes a cultural death in Athens
after Turkish occupation, but reads in part:
But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
The vampire in Polidori's short story, the aristocratic
vampire Lord Ruthven, is said to be modelled on his friend Lord Byron. In The Vampyre Ruthven travels the world luring,
killing and exsanguinating women. Through this story are woven some of the
vital central threads that make up the modern tapestry of vampire lore - themes
which were picked up on in numerous other creative works of the nineteenth
century, including the key novel, Bram Stoker's Dracula. The idea of travel, of journeying both literally and
figuratively for example was a feature of The
Vampyre, in which the central protagonist Aubrey travelled to Greece.
Whilst Polidori had not been to Greece, he had travelled through continental
Europe with Byron, who had toured Greece. Jonathan Harker of course, in Dracula, made the journey to
Transylvania. And Count Dracula like Lord Ruthven was in the privileged
position to travel the world free of political or economic restraint. The
international travel of the vampire character is a feature that goes to the
heart of the mystery, the immortality and the power of the creature whose
origins are ancient and enigmatic. Bram Stoker's description of the vampire's
roots, through Dr Van Helsing, reads:
"For, let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men
have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he is flourish in Germany all over, in
France, in India, even in the Chersones; and in China… He have follow the wake
of the beserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the
Magyar."
It is an international journey through mythology,
superstition and the development of science, a temporal evolution of truth, fantasy
and fiction that culminates in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the birth of the quintessential vampire villain and a new
era in vampire literature which soon came to include the media of film and
television. Dracula embodies the
predator, reveals the psychosexual, creates the archetypes, and in its thematic
richness inspires an endless world of fiction. The name 'Dracula' (meaning
devil and bearing the associated connotations of immortality, evil and so on) was
taken from Vlad Dracula, a real life prince of the ancient kingdom of Wallachia
in Transylvania. The motifs entrenched (immortality, bloodlust, travel,
nocturnal existence, garlic and stakes through the heart), embellished (the
ability of the vampire to turn into a bat) or invented (vampires that have no
reflection and need to be invited into a building) by Bram Stoker have survived
over a hundred years to be as popular as ever, and perhaps more inviting of
reproduction, reworking and re-interpretation than any modern literary classic.
For me, five cinematic adaptations stand out as being appropriate for
comparison and analysis:
Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror
(1922) – FW Murnau
Dracula
(1931) – Tod Browning
Horror of Dracula (1958) – Terence Fisher
Dracula (1979) – John Badham
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) – Francis
Ford Coppola
Each of these adaptation purports to be a representation of
the novel itself (aside from minor changes made in Murnau's film for legal
reasons), as opposed to the hundreds of other films loosely based on characters
or themes inspired by Stoker. Yet within the seventy year period, each
filmmaker has composed a strikingly different version of the novel Dracula. It is my intention to analyse
these differences both as interpretations of Stoker's deep and richly textured
work, and also as unique creations of the individual director.
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