The Vampire Film

Undead Cinema

Jeffrey Weinstock

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231850032
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This introductory volume offers an elegant analysis of the enduring appeal of the cinematic vampire. From Georges Méliès' early cinematic experiments to Twilight and Let the Right One In, the history of vampires in cinema can be organised by a handful of governing principles that help make sense of this movie monster's remarkable fecundity. Among these principles are that the cinematic vampire is invariably about sex and the vexed human relationship with technology, and that the vampire is always an overdetermined body condensing what a culture considers other. This volume includes in-depth studies of films including Powell's A Fool There Was, Franco's Vampyros Lesbos, Cronenberg's Rabid, Kümel's Daughters of Darkness, and Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire.

1 VAMPIRE SEX

It’s not easy to put your finger on what’s appealing about zombies. Vampires you can understand. They’re good-looking and sophisticated and well dressed. They’re immortal. Some of them have castles. You can imagine wanting to be a vampire or at least wanting to sleep with one. Nobody wants to sleep with zombies.

– Lev Grossman (2009)

As this quotation from Time Magazine staff writer Lev Grossman makes clear in an April 2009 column on zombies, most movie monsters have very selective sexual appeal. Zombies are lousy kissers with terrible personal hygiene (but, Grossman fails to note, at least they are sincere when they tell you they like you for your brains!). Mummies might attract fans of The English Patient (1996), but sand in the sheets can be unpleasant and they’re poor conversationalists at best. The werewolf’s closeted lifestyle quickly becomes tiresome (as do all the inevitable ‘there wolf’ jokes). And blobs are poor sharers. But vampires, plain and simple, are sexy and have been throughout the history of cinema.

The limited (but rapidly growing) scholarly literature on cinematic vampires emphasises that, more so than any other movie monster, vampires are inextricably interconnected with the idea of sex. This was psychoanalyst Ernest Jones’s conclusion in his 1931 study On the Nightmare when he links the vampire to folkloric beliefs in the incubus and succubus – demons or evil spirits that engage in sexual congress with the living. Combining Rosemary Jackson’s contention that ‘the vampire myth is perhaps the highest symbolic representation of eroticism’ (1981: 120) with Robin Wood’s influential assertion that ‘monsters’ in general give shape to repressed sexual energies (1985), Richard Dyer concludes that vampirism in both film and literature ‘evoke[s] the thrill of forbidden sexuality’ (1988: 64). Focusing on the Hammer Studios vampire films of the 1970s, Ken Gelder maintains that Hammer’s lesbian vampires cemented the association between vampirism and ‘perverse’ sexual behaviour (1994: 98). And David Pirie in his excellent survey of vampire movies concisely asserts that ‘there has never been any question that the primary appeal of the films lay in their latent erotic content’ (1977: 6).

In my opinion, Dyer, Gelder and Pirie are exactly right when they connect cinematic vampirism to erotic titillation, but they are also curiously circumspect. While it is the premise of this book that vampire films inevitably engage on varying levels with certain key cultural concerns and social issues – our relationship to technology and constructions of ‘otherness’ among them – the cinematic vampire first and foremost must be recognised as a sexual entity. Indeed, ‘latent’ seems exactly the wrong word to describe the overt eroticism associated with Theda Bara’s seduction of ‘the fool’ in A Fool There Was (1915), Christopher Lee’s animalistic hunger for Lucy in her bedroom in Horror of Dracula (1958) or Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon’s role in the sheets in The Hunger (1983)! My argument here is that, more so than any other cinematic category or genre apart from pornography itself, vampire movies (which often border on and occasionally cross into porn; witness Spermula (1976), Buffy the Vampire Layer (2002), Ejacula (2008), and so forth) deal explicitly in sexual desire – the vampire is the cinema’s most potent instanciation of sexual excess and what I will term ‘hyperbolic gender’. Not only can you image ‘wanting to sleep with one’ (Grossman), my argument is that cinema has so thoroughly sexualised the vampire that it is next to impossible not to imagine the vampire sleeping with – or at least nibbling erotically on – someone.

The vampire in both literature and film embodies transgressive, tabooed sexuality – hypnotic, overwhelming, selfish and destructive. The vampiric body, itself frequently represented as fluid and transformative, courses with polymorphously perverse sexual energy that refuses to be channeled into respectable heterosexual monogamy. The vampiric attack conventionally involves an intimate physical encounter outside of marriage and the exchange of bodily fluids – the vampire’s ‘kiss’ – frequently at night in the private space of the bedroom. (And, as Dyer notes, although you don’t absolutely have to interpret the vampire’s biting someone on the neck and sucking the blood as sexual, an awful lot suggests you should! (1988: 155)). Sexualised vampiric appetite – whether heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual in orientation – always exceeds and defies cultural mores. The vampire dominates its victim and does not just seek to penetrate, but to absorb, literally to drain the life away from his or her partner. As such, the vampire clearly can be considered a manifestation of the Freudian Id – as the pleasure principle run amuck. (From this perspective, the vampire hunters of course then represent the Super-Ego attempting to put a halt to the Id’s destructive rampage. The body of the victim, which literally mediates contending tabooed and repressive forces, is cast in the role of Ego.) In short, vampirism, according to Dyer, is the alternative to following society’s restrictive sexual mandates, ‘dreaded and desired in equal measure’ (1988: 64).

The overriding premise of this chapter is that it is next to impossible to think the cinematic vampire without thinking sex – part (if not most) of the appeal of the vampire genre is its titillating engagement with transgressive sexual desires and taboos. And the implications of this are important because vampire movies do not just reflect societal mores through their representations of eroticism; they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) code specific behaviours as acceptable and unacceptable, thus reifying and reproducing sexual stereotypes and cultural understandings of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable sexual behaviour, even as they trouble those same social expectations by raising questions – usually implicitly but sometimes even explicitly – about their presumed naturalness. But whether repressive or subversive, queer vampire movies (movies featuring excessively masculine or feminine vampires, bisexual or homosexual vampires, vampires that get off on drinking blood – vampires that foreground in various ways the arbitrariness, ‘unnaturalness’ and/or cultural constructedness of gender and sexual codes) need to be considered as a form of discourse about sexuality. They talk about sex endlessly and in so many ways. They give shape to inchoate desire even as they then carefully categorise sexual proclivities as acceptable and unacceptable. This ultimately is the dual polarity of the vampire film – and, I would add, of film in general: interpellation into the world of cinema produces spectators both as desiring subjects and subjects subject to the law. Vampire films, I suggest, offer the contradictory command ‘Here’s what you shouldn’t think about, so think about it!’

Below, I will consider representations of the vampire as embodying tabooed, excessive and ‘perverse’ sexuality. Since sex and the cinematic vampire is the topic that has received the most attention in the academic literature, I will attempt to note what has already been said while attending primarily to a variety of movies that have been (fairly or not) ignored by scholars up to this point. I will begin by considering what I will call the ‘hyperbolic gender’ of the vampire – the vampire as sexually irresistible seducer who pushes masculinity or femininity into the realm of monstrosity, thereby foregrounding the constructedness of gender itself. Here I will rapidly cover the history of vampire movies by attending both to the earliest and one of the most recent movies to be considered in this study, A Fool There Was from 1915 and Twilight released in 2008. I will then turn my attention to the topic that has received the most attention from academics – the vampire and homosexuality. While giving some attention to the films that have received the most scrutiny in this category – mainly Dracula’s Daughter (1936) – I will focus in more depth on a trio of lesbian-themed vampire movies all released in 1971: Jesús Franco’s cult classic, Vampyros Lesbos; Jean Rollin’s lushly erotic Requiem for a Vampire; and the sublime Belgian production, Daughters of Darkness. I will round things out by considering Interview With the Vampire because, in keeping with Anne Rice’s novel, it highlights in such a visible way what has been kept tightly under wraps even in the vampire genre – male homoeroticism. My conclusion is that vampire movies constitute an explicit, pervasive and conflicted cinematic discourse concerning sexuality that both reconfirms and troubles conventional sexual norms.

Strange Attractors 1: The Vamp

While ideas about vampires and cinema are both culturally specific and dynamic, one constant that stretches back to the earliest days of cinema is the connections between vampires, liberated libido and hyperbolic gender. Another way to put this is that cinematic vampires teach us what it means to be an acceptably sexual man or woman by showing us what it means to be a ‘perversely’ sexual monster. In film’s first decades, however, the vampire was not a charismatic or hypnotic male seducer, not a suave Bela Lugosi or commanding Christopher Lee stealing our women and turning them into monsters by instilling in them or – more provocatively – awakening in them their slumbering sexuality, but instead a predatory female, the belle dame sans merci, who contravened the laws of nature by actively controlling and debilitating men. This is to say that the first cinematic vampires were vamps: women who appropriated the masculine agency utilised in seduction, who refused to restrict their sexuality to procreative heterosexual monogamy sanctioned by marriage, and who ‘unmanned’ their victims by rendering them passive and dependent – women, in short, who acted like men and who transformed men into characters coded as feminine. David Pirie comments that early films used the word ‘vampire’ ‘simply as an innocuous alternative for femme fatale or vamp’ (1977: 134) and Andrea Weiss in her analysis of lesbians in film concurs, noting that in the early days of cinema, the word ‘vampire’ connoted ‘vamp’ – a ‘beautiful woman whose sexual desire, if fulfilled, would drain the life blood of man’ (1993: 96). Weiss goes on to note that cinema’s first decade of existence featured ‘at least forty films about this mortal female vampire, whom men could find sexually enticing while women could fantasize female empowerment’ (1993: 97).

Pirie and Weiss are undeniably right here to note the ubiquity of the vamp in early cinema, but I think the logic needs a slight adjustment. Putting aside the fact that it is hard to see how using the word ‘vampire’ to refer to a ‘predatory’ woman is ‘innocuous’, the timeline is slightly askew. It is not that early films were using the word ‘vampire’ in place of the existing word ‘vamp’ – ’vamp’ as an abbreviation for ‘vampire’ connoting a woman who intentionally attracts and exploits men was a relatively new coinage in the 1910s (the OED traces it to 1911). Rather, I think it is more accurate to say that early cinema invented the vamp. Literary history of course is filled with dark female temptresses; however, the vamp as female sexual vampire is arguably a cinematic creation that emerged during the first decade of cinema, and no one had more to do with cementing the association between vampirism and hyperbolic female sexuality than ‘the screen’s original vamp’ Theda Bara (see Genini 1996: 21–6).

Born Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in Cincinnati, Bara starred in more than forty films between 1914 and 1926, is often regarded as cinema’s first true sex symbol and, as noted above, is considered the original screen ‘vamp’. In order to capitalise on her ‘exotic’ looks and to create an air of mystery around her, she famously was photographed in Oriental-themed attire and a fictional biography was invented for her in which she was the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor who had spent her early years in the Sahara Desert under the shadow of the Sphinx before moving to France to become a stage actress. Although sometimes referred to as the ‘Serpent of the Nile’ (she played Cleopatra in the eponymous 1917 production), her femme fatal roles – including the role of a character referred to only as ‘The Vampire’ in A Fool There Was – lead to her also being nicknamed ‘The Vamp’. At the height of her popularity, Bara was making $4,000 per week for her film performances and ranked behind only silent screen stars Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in popularity (again, see Genini 1996).

According to Ronald Genini, A Fool There Was essentially introduced the term ‘vamp’ (both as a noun and as a verb) to the American pop culture vocabulary. While this is a difficult claim to substantiate, the movie – which takes as its inspiration and occasionally quotes from Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem ‘The Vampire’, which chronicles the downfall of a man seduced by a woman oblivious to or unconcerned about the consequences of her actions – undeniably cements the association between vampirism and destructive female sexuality. In the film, although she has a lover at the start (Reginald Parmalee, played by actor Victor Benoit) who acts like a lap-dog living off the scraps of her affection, The Vampire quickly sets her sights on lawyer John Schuyler (Edward José), who has been identified in the newspaper as having been named ‘Special Representative of the U.S. Government to England’ by the Secretary of State and who is about to embark on a trans-Atlantic journey sans wife and golden-haired daughter. The Vampire makes arrangements to join Schuyler aboard ship and, as she steps out of her motor coach at the docks, she is confronted by a clearly destitute former lover who calls her a ‘hell cat’ before being hauled off at her request by the police. Then, as the ship is preparing to embark, she is threatened on deck by her current lover, Parmalee, whom she is abandoning and who brandishes a gun at her. Her response is simply to laugh in his face, prompting him to commit suicide. In a particularly ghoulish gesture, the cleaned-off deck has barely had the chance to dry when she has her deck chair placed on the spot of her ex-lover’s suicide and directs that the chair of her next victim, Schuyler, be put next to hers.

A Fool There Was: ‘The Vampire’ kisses her fool

By the time the ship reaches its destination, the seduction is a fait accompli and Schuyler is under her spell; indeed, the seduction, which apart from The Vampire’s initial machinations before the ship embarks is never shown, is made to seem both effortless and magical. After the ship sets sail, when next we see Schuyler it is two months later and he is seated on the ground leaning against The Vampire who lounges in a divan in a tropical Italian setting. Schuyler appears drugged; fed cordials by The Vampire, he is unable to rise. He has abandoned both political post and his wife and daughter. Other Americans visiting the same locale, appalled by his behaviour, refuse to stay in the same hotel and his exploits find their way into ‘The Town Tattler’ section of a New York newspaper that reports that ‘A certain millionaire reformer, who was sent abroad as a special ambassadorial envoy some months ago, has fatuously fallen under the spell of a certain notorious woman of the vampire species, not wholly unconnected with the dramatic suicide of young Reginald Parmalee aboard the Cunarder “Gigantic” the day it sailed…’.

After being dismissed from his post for naughty behaviour, we next see a visibly aged Schuyler and The Vampire back in the United States where they are installed in Schuyler’s urban townhouse. Schuyler’s hair has gone completely grey, he has dark circles under his eyes, and he appears pallid, weak and off-balance. In one of the film’s most interesting sequences, Schuyler’s wife and child pull alongside Schuyler and The Vampire’s motor coach on a busy road and his daughter calls plaintively, ‘Papa, dear, I want you!’ Back at the townhouse, The Vampire berates the haggard and distraught Schuyler, chastising him, ‘Why did you act afraid and ashamed? You should have bowed and smiled, as I did.’ She then pours him a drink – this is the beginning of the end for Schuyler.

The rest of the film chronicles Schuyler’s rapid deterioration and his subsequent abandonment by The Vampire. As Schuyler drinks more and more, he neglects both his business affairs and his appearance. Six months pass and when we see Schuyler next, he is so drunk he can barely stand. His servants have abandoned him and The Vampire has taken up with another man. Nevertheless, each time an attempt is made to rescue Schuyler and return him to his wife – first by his friend and secretary, second by his wife and child – The Vampire returns and exerts her irresistible will upon his; even though she no longer wants him, she refuses to allow anyone else to claim him. In the film’s penultimate scene, the abandoned Schuyler crawls down a dark staircase in his empty townhouse, at one point peering and reaching through gaps in the banister railing as if through prison bars, and continues across his parlour where, in the midst of smashing a bottle, he is stricken and collapses. Quoting from the Kipling poem, the intertitle reads ‘Some of him lived, but the most of him died’. Then we see The Vampire hovering over Schuyler’s prostrate body, smiling and dropping flower petals on his face. The final intertitle, again quoting from the Kipling poem, reads ‘(Even as you and I.)’ and then the camera iris closes, fading out on The Vampire hovering ghoulishly over Schuyler.

The Vampire in A Fool There Was is not literally a vampire in the sense of being ‘undead’. Nonetheless, she constitutes the uncanny irruption of powerful, almost supernatural forces into the mundane life-world of her victims. She is a primal force of unleashed sexuality that holds her lovers in thrall and she embodies the essence of the vampire as a creature that lives off the life force of others. While she does not drink Schuyler’s blood, she does literally drain his vitality – at the start, he is depicted as healthy and only greying about the temples; at the end, he is decrepit and his hair has turned entirely grey. And her seductive, hypnotic power clearly anticipates the mesmeric gaze of subsequent cinematic vampire representations.

Indeed, what is most uncanny about The Vampire – in keeping with cinematic vampires in general – is that, feeding off the life force of her victims, she is in fact more alive than the living around her. In concluding by quoting Kipling’s poem, ‘The Vampire’, with the lines, ‘So some of him lived but the most of him died – (Even as you or I!)’, the import of the ‘even as you or I’ here is that we, the living, are always already partly – even mostly – dead. We are all in various ways ‘fools’ that fail to live our lives to the fullest. Kipling here arguably channels the psychoanalytic theorising of Jacques Lacan avant la lettre and, indeed, the representation of The Vampire in A Fool There Was corresponds exactly to Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian assertion that the paradox of the living dead is that they are ‘far more alive’ than the living (2002: 221). This is the irony that lurks beneath Ellis Hanson’s comment that ‘The vampire is always more appealing and exciting than the men and women who hunt it’ (1999: 191). The Vampire in A Fool There Was, without name, family or social obligation, lives for pleasure alone. She is a figure of excessive – and thus threatening – enjoyment, an uncanny surplus that transgresses social expectations and highlights the precariousness of gender codes.

Weiss suggests that The Vampire in A Fool There Was is sexually enticing to heterosexual men and offers to women a model of female empowerment. This may be, yet the clear message of the film is that women such as The Vampire are bad news. Yes, The Vampire is dark, mysterious and enticingly sexual; but she is also sadistic, selfish and hedonistic – in a word, evil. She is a drug more powerful than the alcohol to which Schuyler turns for forgetfulness and when it no longer amuses her to feed his habit, she simply abandons him. All of this is to say that, in A Fool There Was, The Vampire (every bit as much as Countess Irina von Karstein in Jesús Franco’s Female Vampire (1973) who literalises the metaphor of draining life force through sex by surviving on oral sex that kills her victims) embodies cultural anxieties about female sexuality. It thus is not difficult to see A Fool There Was – and the some forty other films of the 1910s and 1920s that feature predatory female vamps – as manifesting a conservative backlash against the ‘New Woman’ of the 1890s and feminist agitation in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Perhaps most interesting about A Fool There Was is that there is no final redemption for Schuyler or punishment for The Vampire. Schuyler does not shake off The Vampire’s baleful influence and re-embrace his wife and child, nor does The Va...