New Vampire Cinema

Ken Gelder

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844574414
• eBook ISBN: 9781838717292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

New Vampire Cinema lifts the coffin lid on forty contemporary vampire films, from 1992 to the present day, charting the evolution of a genre that is, rather like its subject, at once exhausted and vibrant, inauthentic and 'original', insubstantial and self-sustaining. Ken Gelder's fascinating study begins by looking at Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula and Fran Rubel Kuzui's Buffy the Vampire Slayer – films that seemed for a moment to take vampire cinema in completely opposite directions. New Vampire Cinema then examines what happened afterwards, across a remarkable range of reiterations of the vampire that take it far beyond its original Transylvanian setting: the suburbs of Sweden (Let the Right One In), the forests of North America (the Twilight films), New York City (Nadja, The Addiction), Mexico (Cronos, From Dusk Till Dawn), Japan (Blood: The Last Vampire,

INAUTHENTIC VAMPIRES

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Shadow of the Vampire

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is sometimes seen as the film that brought Francis Ford Coppola back from the dead. In June and July 1992 he had filed for personal and corporate bankruptcy; his company, Zoetrope Studios (later, American Zoetrope), had in fact also filed for bankruptcy two years earlier after debts accrued from other films, in particular the box-office disaster, One from the Heart (1982). Coppola was in the later stages of his career, an ageing director with his best work far behind him. But he invested in a made-for-television screenplay about Dracula by James V. Hart, who had previously adapted J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan for Steven Spielberg’s movie, Hook (1991) and who went on to become the new film’s co-producer. In the event, Bram Stoker’s Dracula grossed US$82 million in the USA – more than double its budget – and a total of over $200 million worldwide; its success meant that American Zoetrope ‘was healthy once more’.¹ For some commentators, however, the success of the film seemed only to confirm the fact of Coppola’s declining reputation. In a devastating essay, ‘The Fall of Francis Coppola’ (1993), Christopher Sharrett saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula as ‘the last nail in the coffin’ for a director whose career is ‘a parable about the “New Hollywood” – a hyper-commercial industry that privileges spectacle over substance and confuses artiness with a genuine sensibility’.² For Vincent Canby in the New York Times, the film was something close to a parable about Coppola himself:

One … way to interpret Dracula is to say that it’s about a man disconnected from the world on which he remains dependent. That has also appeared to be the director’s problem for some time. After Apocalypse Now, everything Mr. Coppola touched seemed a bit puny, either light of weight or more technically innovative than emotionally involving.³

The film’s three Academy Awards, for sound editing (Leslie Schatz), costume design (Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka) and make-up (Michelle Burke), only seemed to lend support to the view that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was simply about ‘look’ and technique. Other film reviewers went on to argue that, by giving itself up to the exhilaration of the spectacle, the film emptied itself of meaningful content. For David Denby, Coppola’s vampire film in fact took the director towards something close to incomprehensibility: ‘The day Francis Coppola abandoned realism for artifice has to rank among the saddest in modern film history … . His Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an unholy mess, a bombastic kitschfest of whirling, decomposing photography, writhing women, and spurting blood.’⁴ In this account, Coppola’s decline is read generically: the problem is to do with the turn from (what is conventionally understood as) the restraints and precisions of realism to the excess and spectacle – and simplicity – of fantasy. Jonathan Romney gave the same sort of reading in his New Statesman & Society film review. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he writes, is ‘exactly like a theme-park ride that you zip through too fast to look at anything’:

You can tell Coppola had fun, but now that he’s restored his box-office fortunes and earned his blood money, perhaps he could try a return to the mathematically precise (and soulful as hell) finesse of his real masterpiece, The Conversation [1974].⁵

Film criticism came to Coppola’s rescue, however, offering more generous, situated readings of this lurid, breathless vampire film. For Grant Edmond in Films in Review, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is both ‘primitive and hypermodern … the most vividly sumptuous horror film to come our way since Kubrick’s The Shining’: ‘Stoker’s name may adorn the title’, he writes, ‘but the real auteur behind this work is Francis Ford Coppola, the most visionary director-for-hire in Hollywood today.’⁶ In one of the best (and most positive) essays on this film, Thomas Elsaesser agrees, describing Coppola as American cinema’s ‘most maverick of charismatic producer-director-auteurs’.⁷ Elsaesser situates Coppola in the wake of ‘New Hollywood’, but his view of this extended moment in cinema production is the complete opposite of Sharrett’s. ‘New Hollywood’ cinema from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s is generally associated with auteur-directors like Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, influenced to varying degrees by European ‘new wave’ auteurs like Godard and Truffaut. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) are often taken as ‘the last gasp’ of this innovative wave of film-making;⁸ what follows is a ‘new’ ‘New Hollywood’ that ushers in commercially savvy directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg who turn to globally distributed big-budget blockbusters linked to multimedia franchises. For Elsaesser, Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula knowingly straddles these two moments; but it also reaches back to earlier Hollywood directors like John Ford (think of the ‘Western’ horseback chase and shootout towards the end of the film) and Orson Welles. Elsaesser’s view of the film couldn’t be further away from the one that saw it as a late-career disaster. It seems instead, he writes, like

a professionally confident, shrewdly calculated and supremely self-reflexive piece of filmmaking, fully aware that it stands at the crossroads of major changes in the art and industry of Hollywood: looking back as well as forward, while staking out a ground all its own.⁹

Like Canby, Elsaesser reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a sort of parable for Coppola himself, a reflection of the Coppola ‘myth’: about a man ‘obsessed with control, and highly skilled in the devious ways of wielding it … an overreacher and a gambler, a man who takes immoderate risks, leaving a trail of destruction as likely as fabulous success and spectacular achievements’.¹⁰

It is as if Coppola and Dracula somehow reflect each other in this account, which goes on to understand the film in a peculiarly vampiric way. The ‘New Hollywood’ as Elsaesser describes it is both modern, and old. It projects a future for American cinema, but at the same time it revives old genres like the horror film, ‘minor genres and debased modes’: making ‘self-conscious use of the old mythology’.¹¹ It behaves, in other words, a bit like a vampire, or a vampire film. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a kind of symptom of all this, a ‘new’ ‘New Hollywood’ piece of cinema that simultaneously reaches back into the cinematic vaults. For Elsaesser, the film is classical (character-centred, ‘organised according to a clear cause and effect chain’), post-classical (challenging ‘character consistency’ and linear temporality) and ‘postmodern’ (camp, disorienting, pastiched) all at once: as if it can indeed live in both the past and the present. Like all cinema, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is in a certain sense immortal, able to be summoned at any time, anywhere. On the other hand, this film in turn summons the origins of cinema itself, setting an important seduction scene not (like so many vampire films) in the bedroom but in the simulated space of a London cinematograph in the year ‘1897’, the same year that Stoker’s novel was published: which makes this date a citation, rather than an actual year. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is therefore as much about cinema as it is about vampires (or Stoker’s novel). Or rather, just like Coppola/Dracula, cinema and vampires inhabit each other’s space. For Elsaesser, the audience’s encounter with this film is ‘thus an end in itself, rather than a means to an end, political, representational or otherwise’.¹² This is a film about vampires, and it is also a vampire film about cinema. ‘In this respect at least’, Elsaesser suggests, ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an authentic enactment of the myth: the true Dracula of cinema – once more risen from the grave of the (much debated) “death of cinema” and the (box-office) “death of Coppola” to haunt us all.’¹³

It is, of course, just as accurate to say that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an inauthentic enactment of the myth. Authenticity is a kind of special effect in Coppola’s film, one among others. It is often noted, for example, that it made little use of computer-generated animation in order to keep faith with its ties to the origins of cinema. Coppola’s son Roman, in charge of visual effects, is said to have browsed specialist shops for ‘old FX paraphernalia’, using a series of ‘naïve’ processes to recreate ‘early-cinema morph effects’:¹⁴ double or multiple exposure, the superimposition of images (like the imprint of the map that appears on Jonathan Harker’s [Keanu Reeves] face as he travels by train to Transylvania), the use of miniatures (like the train itself in one scene), reverse shooting (when Lucy [Sadie Frost] climbs into the coffin, for example), the use of old camera equipment, and so on. In her book, Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen (2009), Dianne F. Sadoff suggests that ‘the film’s extravagant visual and special effects identify morph aesthetics, so named in the early 1990s, as central to picturing the vampire’s power’.¹⁵ Here again, it is as if the vampire owes as much to cinema in the 1990s as it does to cinema a century before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sequence of scenes in the London cinematograph in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is self-consciously citational as far as the early history of cinema is concerned. By this time, Dracula (Gary Oldman) has arrived in England. The sequence begins during daylight as he bursts out of his box of earth in Carfax Abbey, a young(ish) man. ‘Contrary to some beliefs’, says his nemesis Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), who provides a number of voiceover moments in the film, ‘the vampire, like any other night creature, can move about by day, though it is not his natural time and his powers are weak’. A series of grainy newspaper headlines follow, each dated 7 July 1897, followed by a London street scene that begins in grainy black and white but is quickly colourised. Dracula, now finely dressed in a grey suit and top hat (with blue sunglasses), walks along the crowded street in the quirky fast-motion manner of early cinema, the whirr of an old Pathé camera adding to the authenticity effect. Off screen, a hawker is shouting, ‘See the amazing cinematograph, a wonder of modern civilization, the latest sensation …’. Suddenly Dracula recognises Mina (Winona Ryder) from across the street, and stops to gaze at her; Mina seems to ‘feel’ his gaze and stops to look at him in turn. In the midst of the crowd – there is even a street ‘idler’, an Edgar Allan Poe-like ‘man of the crowd’ who blends in even as he is positioned to one side – these two figures are made to stand out, to seem exceptional. A woman behind Dracula underscores the point, unable to stop staring at the vampire. Soon, Mina and Dracula meet. ‘I am only looking for the cinematograph’, he tells her, mimicking the hawker, ‘I understand it is a wonder of the civilized world.’ Mina is unconvinced: ‘If you seek culture’, she tells him, ‘then visit a museum.’ Someone walks by with a poster advertising Henry Irving as Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre. Bram Stoker was the Lyceum’s manager at this time and a close friend of Irving’s, who may also have been a model for the character of Dracula;¹⁶ in which case, the scene self-reflexively puts Stoker, Dracula, theatre, the origins of cinema and Coppola’s film into a sort of mutually citational loop.

Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): Mina and Dracula in the cinematograph

The sequence resumes inside the cinematograph as an audience of men watch a black-and-white erotic film, the first example of early cinema that we see. A man entertains two scantily clad women who sit on his lap, but is then surprised to be holding his wife, who he callously pushes away. The ‘morph aesthetics’ of the scene slides from fantasy (arousing) to realism (disappointing). ‘Astounding’, Dracula says to Mina, knowing which side he is on. ‘There are no limits to science.’ Mina is naturally unimpressed (‘How can you call this science?’), maintaining a critical, gendered distance. The film on the cinematograph screen changes to what looks like a darker impression of the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) where, in this case, the train never seems to get to the station. Mina’s seduction begins in front of this film: she is indifferent to it and yet literally carried away by it as Dracula draws her to another part of the cinematograph. It is as if she has also been transported back in time – another screen shows the silhouetted battle scene where Dracula’s army fights the Turks in ‘1462’, played out in the preface to Coppola’s film. Or rather, it is as if cinema itself has provided the illusion of transportation, reaching back in time even as it stays in exactly the same place. This is also the moment during which Mina recognises Dracula for what he is (‘I know you!’); which is another way of saying it is the moment during which she recognises she is in a vampire movie.

In his important essay, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’ (1995), Tom Gunning looks at the received notion that early cinema audiences must have panicked at the spectacle of a train coming towards them in the Lumière brothers’ film. Although Mina actually pays no attention to that piece of cinema (and the audience around her also seems unperturbed), nevertheless it heralds her breathless surrender to Dracula and her entry into his world – which, for the moment, is a little space in a corner of the cinematograph that, as a wolf appears and draws their interest, also already seems to recognise the vampire film genre for what it is or, at least, for where it came from. Gunning’s account of early silent cinema sees it as ‘a series of visual shocks’, a ‘cinema of instants, rather than developing situations’. The ‘scenography’ of this pre-classical ‘cinema of attractions’, as he calls it, brings with it ‘an undisguised awareness of (and delight in) film’s illusionistic capabilities’.¹⁷ For Gunning, this kind of early cinema ‘persists’ in modern film as an ‘underground current flowing beneath narrative logic and diegetic realism’.¹⁸ But in Bram Stoker’s Dracula that underground current becomes a veritable flood that drenches the film from top to bottom. It is as if the new and the old in cinema cannot be properly distinguished any more.

The ‘narrative logic’ of this film is in many respects conventional and familiar; it is argua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Inauthentic Vampires
• 2. Our Vampires, Our Neighbours
• 3. Citational Vampires
• 4. Vampires in the Americas
• 5. Diminishing Vampires
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright