Screening the Undead

Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television

Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer, Milly Williamson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848859241
• eBook ISBN: 9780857735430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The vampire and the zombie, the two most popular incarnations of the undead, are brought together for a forensic critical investigation in Screening the Undead. Both have a long history in popular fiction, film, television, comics and games; the vampire also remains central to popular culture today, from literary 'paranormal romance' to cult TV and movie franchises - by turns romantic, tortured, grotesque, countercultural, a goth icon or lonely outsider. The zombie can shamble or, nowadays, sprint with alarming velocity, and even dance. It frequently lends itself to metaphor and can stand in for fascism or ecological disaster, but is perhaps most frequently a harbinger and instrument of the apocalypse. Leading writers on Horror and cult media consider the sexy vampire and the grotesque zombie, as well as hybrid figures who do not fit neatly into either category. These are examined across a range of contexts, from the Swedish vampire to the Afro-American Blacula, from the lesbian vampire to the gay zombie, from the Spanish Knights Templar riding skeletal horses to dancing Japanese zombies.
Screening the Undead sheds new light on these two icons of terror - and desire - whose popular longevity has taken them 'Beyond Life'.

Part 1

THE MARK OF THE VAMPIRE – RACE, PLACE, GENDER AND IDENTITY IN THE MODERN VAMPIRE FILM

1

MANSON, DRUGS AND BLACK POWER

The Countercultural Vampire

Ian Cooper

In the early 1970s, North America offered an array of screen vampires. On television, there was the Gothic soap Dark Shadows (1966–71) and the stylish TV movies The Night Stalker (Moxey, 1972) and The Night Strangler (Curtis, 1973), which spawned the short-lived TV show Kolchak The Night Stalker (1974). Independent/exploitation filmmakers of the early 1970s produced a number of strikingly unusual contributions to the vampire mythos. This disparate collection of films includes Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (Hancock, 1971), Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (Blackburn, 1973), Ganja and Hess (Gunn, 1973), Grave of the Vampire (Hayes, 1974) and Dead of Night aka Deathdream (Clark, 1974). The focus of this chapter is a loose collection of six such films that sought to revitalise the vampire myth, melding generic Gothic traditions with contemporary social concerns. Count Yorga, Vampire (Bob Kelljan, 1970), The Velvet Vampire (Stephanie Rothman, 1971), The Return of Count Yorga (Kelljan, 1972), Blacula (William Crain, 1972), Deathmaster (Ray Danton, 1972) and Scream Blacula Scream (Kelljan, 1973) not only share some important thematic and stylistic concerns but also a number of key creative personnel. They use graphic gore and a hip irreverence, which at times borders on the reflexive, to breathe life into a fusty sub-genre that elsewhere was descending into camp and soft-core sex fantasies. This kind of vampire, savage and satirical, stylish and fiercely contemporary, would prove influential. A number of the more offbeat and unusual vampire films made since would seem to owe something to these films, their faded bite-marks visible on the angsty, alienated Martin (Romero, 1977), the undead, motel-dwelling drifters of Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987) and the gloomy strung-out blood-drinkers that populate Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995).

Three of the films were directed by Bob Kelljan and three starred Robert Quarry. The Velvet Vampire and Scream Blacula Scream were co-written by Maurice Jules while the Yorga films and Deathmaster were shot by Bill Butler (who would go on to much bigger things including The Conversation (Coppola, 1974) and Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)). Kelljan and Rothman were Roger Corman protégés (although this latter connection was far from uncommon in the independent sector at this time) and all six films were produced by the exploitation specialists, American International Pictures. To add to this blurring, both the Yorga sequel and the re-released original used the term ‘deathmaster’ in their publicity campaigns, with the trailer for The Return of Count Yorga actually containing the line ‘beware the return of the Deathmaster’.

Corman, Romero, Polanski

The influence of Corman looms large over these films, in particular his patented trick of making genre films that dealt with contemporary social issues. Tony Rayns has written of ‘the secret kinship between his [Corman’s] Gothic genre movies and the mood of the counter-culture’.¹ Corman’s LSD film, The Trip (1968), would serve to bridge the gap between his studio-bound Poe adaptations and the hippie milieu, locating the irrational and the Gothic in the modern West Coast.

Two films from 1968 also had an important influence on this collection of films. Roman Polanski’s stylish adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) was a big commercial success and offered a hip, witty makeover of a hoary Gothic tale (in this case, of demonic possession) taking place in an all-too familiar urban setting; as one critic put it, ‘the film’s style is deliberately naturalistic, using familiar everyday locations (telephone boxes, kitchens) as its tools of terror’.² In contrast, George Romero’s ultra low-budget Night of the Living Dead (1968) refashioned elements of vampire lore, presenting undead flesh-eaters spawned (it is suggested) by science rather than supernatural blood-drinkers. Although the stark black-and-white faux-newsreel approach used by Romero is far from Polanski’s use of a luxurious brightly-lit Manhattan apartment building, both films have the same irreverent tone, a revisionist approach to their genre and a sour cynicism that would become commonplace in the horror of the 1970s.

The Dream is Over

It has been commonly observed that vampire fictions often appear at times of social upheaval. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was published in 1897, during the shift from the Victorian era of empire to the uncertainties of the twentieth century. In 1922, an unstable post-war Germany produced Nosferatu (Murnau). Hammer’s Dracula (Fisher, 1958) was a product of a 1950s Britain dealing with the humiliation of Suez. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) was published as the US was struggling to recover from the twin humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate. It’s no surprise, then, that the social upheaval and cultural changes of the late 1960s would spawn a new wave of vampires.

The term counterculture often conjures up images of Haight-Ashbury, the Beatles, paisley shirts and long-haired teens giving flowers to cops. But the flip-side to all this love and acid invokes a set of images just as, if not more, firmly imprinted on the public imagination, such as the killing of Meredith Hunter at a free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont racetrack in California, violent anti-war demonstrations and the shootings at Kent State. By 1970, John Lennon was singing that ‘the dream is over’, as the mind-expanding psychedelic Summer of Love was swiftly followed by a harsh comedown best symbolised by the Manson murders. As Joan Didion put it in an oft-repeated quote, the 1960s ‘ended abruptly on August 9th 1969’,³ the night of the first murders committed by the Family. It is perhaps no coincidence that the setting for these six films is California, the sun-bleached, acid-frazzled place where the hippie dream both began and ended. These films manage to meld traditional vampire lore and some very familiar generic tropes to a low-budget aesthetic and such zeitgeisty issues as the women’s movement and the drug culture, free love and black power, the end of the blissed-out 1960s and the coming of the cynical 1970s.

Dracula’s Soul Brother

In many ways, the Blacula films are typical blaxploitation entries, offering up a conventional genre item distinguished only by the presence of black actors in the main roles. Although Blacula was directed by William Crain, one of the few African-Americans making blaxploitation pictures, in many ways the subject of race is dealt with superficially; a play on the phrase ‘black arts’, the publicity that describes the title character as ‘Dracula’s soul brother’ and the mooted sequel title, ‘Blacula is Beautiful’, suggest the kind of word-play that also gave us Blackenstein (Levey, 1973) and Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (Crain, 1976).⁴ As one would also expect from a blaxploitation film, there is popular music (in a lengthy night-club sequence), a smattering of contemporary references (with mentions of police brutality and the Black Panthers) and some of the most eye-catching costumes seen in the genre. Indeed, there is a nice comment on this obsession with sartorial style in Scream Blacula Scream, where a newly-vamped hipster reacts badly to the discovery that he can no longer pose in front of the mirror, protesting, ‘Hey, look man, I don’t mind being a vampire and all that shit but this really ain’t hip.’ When he does accept his fate, he dons the traditional cape, but matches it to crotch-hugging flares, sunglasses and a red fedora.

But beyond the groovy sounds and outrageous fashions, the films touch on more resonant issues, such as the explicit connection made between slavery and vampirism. In the prologue to Blacula, we see how the African Prince Mamuwalde is bitten after a (somewhat credibility-stretching) journey to Transylvania in an attempt to persuade Count Dracula to join his anti-slavery campaign. Mamuwalde, dubbed Blacula by the racist Count, is brought to America by two outrageously stereotyped gay antique dealers. Harry Benshoff is very generous in noting how the portrayal of an interracial gay relationship is ‘ahead of its time’ but also suggests that the characters are in the film solely to be dispatched in an attempt to make the title character more sympathetic.⁵ In addition, I would argue that these cartoonish characters also serve to emphasise Blacula’s hyper-masculinity. He may wear evening dress, possess an unfashionable courtly manner and put the bite on a couple of flamboyant gay men, but the viewer can be reassured as to his propensity for violence. It is surely no coincidence how similar images of effeminate, pathetic and/or grotesque gays turn up in a number of films from this period when long-haired, flashily-dressed males were becoming the norm. Consider the hitchhikers in Vanishing Point (Sarafian, 1971), Ken Sinclair’s squealing Sammy in Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973), and more than one of the characters in A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971); as with Crain’s film, they all seem to act as what Robin Wood called ‘a disclaimer’.⁶

Four years before the publication of Alex Haley’s celebrated Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), Blacula has its African central character displaced in the ghettoes of LA after being ‘enslaved’ (as Mamuwalde himself puts it) by a racist white European. As one anonymous reviewer quoted by Benshoff put it, ‘I have … chosen to look upon the entire film as an effort by those responsible to show satirically the black man’s plight as a victim of white vampirism.’⁷ This notion of enslavement is developed and further complicated in Scream Blacula Scream, as Blacula dispatches a couple of pimps after telling them they have ‘made a slave of your sisters and you’re still slaves imitating your slavemasters’. These references to slavery seem to have been added to Blacula only when Crain and Marshall came on board. The script by Raymond Koenig and Joan Torres was originally titled Count Brown Comes to Town and the title character was plain Andrew Brown. By the time of the sequel, Afrocentrism has become an issue, as Mamuwalde visits a show of African antiquities and converses in a Nigerian dialect before telling Pam Grier’s voodoo priestess of his stated desire to go back to his homeland if she can only cure him.

Mamuwalde is portrayed in both films as a tragic figure, whether pining for his dead wife or desperately seeking to be cured. This impression is reinforced by William Marshall’s air of gloomy theatricality and the rich, resonant way this trained opera singer delivers his lines. As David Pirie writes, ‘William Marshall plays Blacula in the tradition of black nobility associated with Othello.’⁸ However, the scenes where he attacks his victims, sprouting excessive facial hair, emphasise his monstrousness and his status as an anti-hero, albeit a sympathetic one. This is not only a familiar role for a vampire to occupy, it’s also par for the course for the blaxploitation cycle (such as the drug-dealing title character of Superfly (Parks Jr, 1972)). The climactic scene in Blacula, as a grieving Mamuwalde walks into the sunshine, is clearly supposed to be tragic, but it’s entirely in keeping with the flip, ironic tone of these films that we see a prominently-placed ‘No Smoking’ sign just before the character is immolated.

As well as the issue of slavery, the trailer for the film vividly depicts another topic that was as relevant then as it is now, containing a number of scenes showing the black protagonist beating up or killing white cops. The same trailer even goes so far as to describe the title character as ‘the black avenger’. These scenes of Mamuwalde evening the score with the forces of white America would no doubt appeal to the target audience, but the emphasis placed on them is misleading, given that the closest thing the film has to a savant, Dr George Thomas (played by the splendidly-named Thalmus Rasulala), works closely with a not-unsympathetic cop. This kind of relationship is carried over to the sequel, when we discover that the white cop in charge of the case (who admits to being ‘a little prejudiced’) used to be a colleague of one of the main characters, an ex-cop turned dealer in African antiquities. That’s not, however, to deny the crowd-pleasing spectacle of Mamuwalde picking up a cop and throwing him across the room after he threatens to arrest his ‘uppity black ass’.

Dope

The subject of hard drugs also leaves its (track) mark on a number of these films, in much the same way as another blood-borne contagion, AIDS, would find its way into the vampire cinema of the 1980s. The imagery of addiction and hard drug use can be found in a number of vampire films made since the late 1960s and the emergence of a visible drug culture. There is the puking, blood-starved Count in Blood for Dracula aka Andy Warhol’s Dracula (Morrissey, 1974); pale, wasted Udo Kier resembling the junkies who inhabit earlier Warhol films; and the eponymous hero of Martin, a syringe for extracting blood held between his teeth. The film which best embodies the notion of vampire as junkie is the aforementioned, emblematically-titled The Addiction, which, as the critic Hal Hinson suggests, ‘manages to connect vampirism to AIDS, drug addiction and all sorts of worldly evils’.⁹

This drug imagery can clearly be seen in the presentation of Yorga’s brides. In the first film they silently glide around the castle in evening gowns, glassy-eyed and piranha-mouthed. By the time of the sequel, they are considerably more monstrous, straggly-haired, desiccated ghouls with ulcerated, discoloured faces. They are far from the seductive sirens seen in Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy (1970–72) and the work of Jean Rollin, although they can still turn on the charm, as in the creepy scene where the newly-vampirised Erica attempts to seduce her boyfriend while her face is still smeared with the blood of her half-eaten cat. In the Blacula films, the black vampires are also given a (fairly-unconvincing) gree...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction: Sometimes They Come Back – The Vampire and Zombie on Screen
• Part 1 The Mark of the Vampire – Race, Place, Gender and Identity in the Modern Vampire Film
• Part 2 Rewriting the Living Dead – The Zombie in Popular Culture
• Part 3 Hybrid Bloodlines
• Bibliography
• Notes