Love bites

Vamo'we \overs turn fear into fantas\

TEXT BY LESLIE KLING^n

ince the Victorian era modern

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audiences have comt to relish vampire tales as storie of great passion, and the current fasci­nation ith all things vampiric is no different. In fact, at times it's hard to see the blood for all the sex simmering below the surface. These days one can argue that the hottest fantasies in pop culture almost always feature fangs.

Yet many first-time readers of Drac-ula who come to it fresh from vampire movies are surprised to learn that the book describes Dracula as an old man with jng fingernails, bushy eye­brows, white hair, a heavy moustache, hairy palms and bad breath—in short, not Bela jgosi. Lugosi and before him Raymond Huntley onstage in England—portrayed a different ver­sion of the Transylvanian count, one

that has since informed most modern interpretations of blood­sucking fiends. First on Broad­way and then in the 1931 Tod Browning-directed film, Lugosi transformed the vampire into a seductive creature dressed in tails and an opera cape, with glossy slicked-back hair and a distinguished manner. Although the notion of a noble­man preying on weak-willed women wasn't new to vampire stories, the walking corpse had changed to a man about town, a dangerous playboy who is a threat to the women he meets.

Subsequent portrayals—such as those by Christopher Lee (1958), Louis Jourdan (1977), Frank Langella (1979), Gary Oldman (1992) and Gerard Butler (2000)—cemented the public's view of Oracula as a charismatic, compelling and romantic figure. Jourdan and Langella seduce their victims, reserving physical attacks for their male opponents. Oldman's Dracula is shown having sex with one of his victims. Other vampire characters on film have been just as sexual. For exam­ple, Tom Cruise appeared in 1994 as Lestat, the Anne Rice-created rock-star vampire who preys only on evildoers. Lestat lives with a male adult vampire (played by Brad Pitt) and a five-year-old vampire girl (a very young Kirsten Dunst), simulta­neously projecting homosexu­ality and pedophilia. William Marshall's dignified vampire in Blacula (1972) kills ruthlessly to protect his relationship with his reincarnated wife. Catherine Deneuve's Egyptian vampire in The Hunger (1983) has bisexual relationships with younger vam­pires. Lauren Hutton's vampire countess in the comedic Once Bitten (1985) gets it on with a young Jim Carrey, and David Boreanaz's Angel and James Marsters's Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997 to 2003, and Angel. 1999 to 2004)—soul-endowed vampires who fight bad vampires—each in turn falls prey to the charms of Buffy. CBS's Moonlight (2007 to 2008) and most recently HBO's True Blood (2008 to present) contrast the sexual relationships of a roman­tic, lonely gentleman vampire and beastlike rogue vampires.

All signs point to the hot-blooded trend increasing in

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N/ampvres

(continued from pagt 104) fervor, last year's Iwilight film notwithstand­ing. (Apparently vampires were getting too heavy for Mormon mom Stephanie Meyer. the author of the books behind the film franchise, who seemed to have deliberately set out to remove all sex from the vampire mythology and replaced it with lust-free— even blood-free—romantic love, making vampires safe lor teens.) TV and film will continue to feature dangerous vampires, with True Blood renewed on HBO. The \'am-pire Diaries (described as Twilight with sex) on the CW and a sequel to Steve Niles's 30 Days of Night in development. An official sequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt's Dracula: The Un-Dead, will be published this month. Given all this well-founded interest, can a film of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's shocking .Strain trilogy be far behind?

Still the question remains: Why are people attracted to vampires? And if they existed, would they actually make good lovers? To answer the question, one must consider the facts. Technically, a vampire is a creature that ingests blood to exist. Nice ones skip humans and get by on animal or synthetic blood. Not-so-nice ones don't give a crap.

A secondary characteristic is that they're dead. Or undead, a term popularized in the 19th century (Stoker's Dracula was originally to be called The Un-Dead) to apply to vam­pires, zombies, mummies and their ilk, who find themselves in an embarrassing state between dead and alive. If you're undead, then you can't die, of course, except by very special means, and folklore has lots of suggestions for those. Also according to folklore, vampires have superpowers (the strength of 20 men, shape-shifting abilities, telepathy, supersensitive hearing, etc.).

This seems to lend itself to hot sex. The catch, however, is that—according to that same folklore (and to one Dom Augustin Calmet, writing in the 18th century)—these undead are essentially soulless. While this may be helpful to criminals, IRS agents and real players, for most would-be lovers this poses a serious handicap toward building trust and mutual affection.

In the beginning vampires weren't all bad. They were merely a fact of life, like wolves or termites. According to the Greeks, the lamia, part of the triple god­dess Hecate's entourage, were female crea­tures who seduced young men. Many of the victims appeared to have wholeheart­edly enjoyed the experience. Philostratus, among others, wrote about Apollonius's encounter with one of these girls, who drinks his friend's blood or energy or life-force—it's not quite clear—while having a very, very good time of it.

Only later did vampires get scary. In the 16th and 17th centuries people claimed numerous "official" sightings, often attested to by a cleric or military officer. Here's my version of a typical visitation: The village is having problems, maybe failing crops, dying cattle or mysterious deaths. Some-bright lad remembers that Uncle George, who stopped going to church, died a few

weeks earlier. Maybe he's a vampire, says the lad. So he and his pals troop out to the graveyard to check on Uncle George. Inside his coffin they find he has bloody lips, his nails and hair have grown out, his face is flushed, and groaning sounds are coming from his body. Maybe the body even moves. Now, having seen CSI, we know this is normal decomposition, the result of shrink­ing tissues and swelling gases. To the villag­ers, however, these are sure signs George has turned into a vampire. Fortunately, they are prepared for just this discovery, so with the help of a cleric or military officer they stick an iron or wooden stake through Uncle George's heart, stapling him to the coffin. For good measure they shove a brick into his jaws or cut off his head or stuff his mouth with garlic—or maybe all of the above. And sure enough, things get better in the village, validating the diagnosis.

In the first vampire tales written in Eng­lish, by Mary Shelley's friend and Lord Byron's doctor, John Polidori (The Vampyre, 1819), and later by James Malcolm Rymer (Varney the Vampyre, 1847), the vampires are English nobles who resemble corpses. Lord Ruthven, the titular Vampyre, has a "dead gray eye" and "a deadly hue to his face." Sir Francis Varney is a "tall gaunt figure" with cadaverous features and long finger­nails. However, they have a certain attrac-

tion about them—they are nobles, after all—and their victims are impressionable young girls and society ladies. The next great vampire tale, Carmilla (1872) by )oseph Sheridan Le Fanu, doesn't fit this mold. His vampire is a woman, the Countess Mircalla Karnstein, and the story centers around a transparently lesbian love affair.

When Abraham "Bram" Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897, critical reception was mixed. The Daily Mail called the book "powerful and horrorful.... The recollection of this weird and ghostly tale will doubtless haunt us for some time to come." The liter­ary arbiter The Bookman remarked, "A sum­mary of the book would shock and disgust; but we must own that, though here and there in the course of the tale we hurried over things with repulsion, we read nearly the whole thing with rapt attention."

The book quickly found an audience among sensation seekers, and over time it became so popular that sales were said to surpass those of the Bible (an erroneous assertion, as it turns out). Dracula offered the Victorian reader steamy scenes reek­ing of sex and sexual tension while avoid­ing the outright pornographic approach of works like Autobiography of a Flea or The Romance of Lust. In 1959 British critic Maurice Richardson termed Dracula "a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-

anal-sadistic, all-in wrestling match." Later vampire scholar James Twitchell called the action "sex without genitalia, sex without confusion, sex without responsibility, sex without guilt, sex without love—better yet, sex without mention."

Whether cast in the modern romantic image or as the old, well-bred monster, the vampire always seduces, coerces, hypnotizes and compels his or her victims to succumb to the vampire's needs. For example, in Dracula Lucy Westcnra is first bitten on a bench in the moonlight and then nearly drained of blood during repeated visits to her bedroom by the vampire count. Victorian readers would not have missed the point when poor Lucy is saved from becoming a vampire by the insertion of a large wooden stake into her body by her noble fiance. As the young solicitor Jona­than Marker admits as he is attacked by three women vampires, "There was some­thing about them...some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I fell in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet [Harker's fiancee, later wife] Mina's eyes." Carmilla, mentioned earlier, has long drawn-out scenes of the titular female vampire lovingly nursing a younger woman, who slowly realizes her

caring older companion is actually the cause of her blood loss.

Later in Dracula, Mina has her own weak moment. The count engages in what can be seen only as a form of oral sex with her while Harker lies in a faint on the neighboring bed. Mina, forced to explain herself to Harker and friends, confesses, "I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that such is, when his touch is on his victim." Varney's victim suffers much the same fate: "Her bosom heaves, and her limbs tremble, yet she cannot withdraw her eyes from that marble-looking face." How convenient for these victims that they cannot resist. "The devil made me do it" or "I couldn't help myself" have always been useful excuses for indulging in illicit passions.

But do vampire-mortal connections involve sex? Or love? Or just blood drinking? When one reads the literature carefully, it's sometimes hard to tell. Some bodily fluids are certainly exchanged. Varney explicitly records gushes of blood, and the Vampyre's encounters aren't much less ani­malistic. But as vampire tales mature, the blood becomes less obvious. Fred Saber-hagen points out in his novel The Dracula Tape that Dracula contains not a single scene in which we actually see Dracula drinking blood. While that may be literally true, when Dracula calls Mina his "bounti­ful winepress," it hardly suggests a chaste relationship. The romantic 1978 BBC pro­duction of Dracula captures the love-blood ambiguity perfectly with a scene in which Dracula explains to Mina that human kissing originated as a substitute for nourishment.

What about love? Dracula's female com­panions accuse him of never loving, but he retorts, "Yes, I too can love; you your­selves can tell it from the past. Is it not so?" Certainly countless other writers imagined vampires in love, from the characters in Camilla and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's fine

Le Comte de Saint-Germain novels, to Buffy and Angel (or Buffy and Spike—she got around) and Charlaine Harrises Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton, as well as virtually every post-1931 screen Dracula (well, maybe not the Christopher Lee films). Anne Rice's Lestat has incestuous feelings about his mother and loves a handful of other women, as well as several of his male friends, over the course of a long life.

The attraction of a vampire lover appears simple. Vampires, as the stories go, are incredibly needy and can't exist without at least one human food source. This need offers potential partners an opportunity for a fulfilling relationship. It's perfectly clear to these people that their vampire lover can't live without them and in fact depends on their willingness to be intimate and provide nourishment. And what more could one ask for in a lover than someone who lives forever, never becomes sick or old, has to stay home during the day and is always ready for action at night?

For others the appeal lies in the possibility that a vampire lover can be reformed, made over into someone who doesn't bite. The powerful attraction of this idea is clear in various vampire stories. Mina has this hope for poor Count Dracula and rejoices when she sees "a look of peace" on his face in death. Film after revisionist film of Dracula lets us in on how he is not really a bad sort, in most cases just hung up on a woman. Anne Rice's vampires are filled with regret and longing for their lost mortal relation­ships, and both Angel and Spike struggle to be "good" vampires so they can pursue love with the human Buffy.

It's not surprising, then, that vampires have captured the attention of some as love objects. The once monstrous creature has been transformed in books and film into one with great possibilities as the ideal part­ner. Truly, for the vampire lover, love sucks.