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ABSTRACT
Dracula (Browning, Citation1931) introduces the general parameters of the classical screen vampire narrative of the 1930s and 1940s; a drawing-room murder mystery. In this investigative ‘drama of proof’, the murderer, already known to the audience, is a vampire who has inserted himself between a young engaged couple, seeking the woman for himself.
The classical vampire protagonist is an unreflecting figure driven by a craving for both the young woman of his desire and for human blood as sustenance. The inevitable death of the vampire represents a triumph of ‘life’, marriage understood as the basic unit by which community reproduces itself, playing out a Freudian (and romantic) opposition between the erotic instinct and the aggressive instinct or death drive. The classical screen vampire narrative does not remain static. Two key developments in the classical period are considered: non-vampires masquerading as vampires and the vampire problematizing their own relationship with vampirism.
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Notes
1. See Worland (Citation1931) for an account of the relationship between the Bureau of Motion Pictures and the Office of War Information between 1942 and 1945, and the ways in which Horror, including vampire film scripts were altered to fit government propaganda policy.
2. There are two well-known lost vampire films of the period, the 1921 Hungarian film Dracula’s Death, set in an insane asylum where one of the inmates claims to be Dracula. There is general agreement that Tod Browning 1935 talkie, Mark of the Vampire, is a remake of his now lost 1927 London After Midnight.
3. The films which don’t employ the trope demonstrate the immediate possibilities for the evolution of the vampire narrative: The Vampire Bat (1933) is a masquerade narrative where a serial killer Mad Scientist figure pretends vampirism is responsible for the local deaths; Dracula’s Daughter (1936) is the first supernatural female vampire protagonist, who seeks to have the curse of vampirism lifted by engaging a psychiatrist for the task; Son of Dracula (1943), works a variation where the vampire marries Kay (an equivalent character to Lucy Westenra); a young woman who has sought immortality and finds it in the figure of the vampire; Isle of the Dead (1945) is concerned with plague, pestilence and vampire (or, more precisely, a woman accused of vampirism) as scapegoat; while The House of Dracula (1945) gives roughly equal time to a vampire narrative, a werewolf narrative, and a Mad-scientist/Frankenstein’s monster narrative so has little time to do more than have the vampire pursue a woman who he had met some time earlier in another location.
4. Waddell (Citation2017) develops a fascinating account of post-classical vampire reproduction focussing on the metaphoric relationship between vampire blood sucking and a regress to infancy/sucking on the mother’s breast. While compelling in their own terms, Waddel’s arguments address the vampire as a human psychology (traumatized, immature etc.) and are not concerned with either the narrative issue of the relationship between community reproduction and vampire reproduction, or the figural issue of the relationship between vampire reproduction and the death drive.
5. The line is taken from a poem entitled ‘The Revel,’ attributed to Bartholomew Dowling, published in Stedman (ed.), (Citation1895). The poem had, in fact, been published some 60 years earlier, attributed to William Francis Thomson under the title ‘Indian Revelry,’ in Richardson (ed.), (Citation1835), pp. 123–25.
6. Robin Wood rightly draws a close connection between Van Helsing and Dracula in their shared ‘foreignness’ as well as various other resemblances (the logic of this ‘foreigness’ is most fully worked out in Phillips [Citation2018, particularly pp. 175–185]). However, we are much less persuaded by Wood’s general account of the structure of Dracula as a Freudian struggle between Superego (Van Helsing) and the Id (Dracula) for possession of the ego (Mina). This topography is inadequate because it fails to account for other key characters, especially Harker and Dr. Seward. Nor does it engage with key thematic issues around life, reproduction, death and temporality, instead attempting to graft to an account of the ultimate horror being the arousal of female sexuality (2015, pp. 395–97).
7. In their discussions of House of Dracula, Stacey Abbott holds the classical position – ‘Dracula feigns remorse for his existence as a vampire’ (Citation2007, 67) while Aspasia Stefanou holds the sympathetic view: ‘Dracula visits Dr Edelman to help him treat his condition.’ (Citation2013, 60).
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David Baker
David Baker teaches Screen Studies in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University. Recent publications on popular culture topics include essays on The Politics of Live-Aid, The Hunger Games in relation to transmedia and gender, Jim Jarmusch and Memphis’ musical legacy, Jean Rollin’s vampire cinema, 1950s Jukebox Musicals, David Bowie’s cover versions and Elvis Presley on screen.