Guest Blog - “If it doesn’t look like a vampire, or sound like a vampire, can it still be a vampire?” – TMtV 20th anniversary

We’ve come to the end of the 20th anniversary celebration and, last but not least, I’d like to welcome Simon Bacon to TMtV. We met through vampire groups on Facebook, becoming firm pals, and have had many discussions regarding our toothsome friends. An author and editor, I have corresponded over his vampire monograms and have been lucky enough to be included in several of the academic volumes he has edited.

In discussing the mutability of the vampire the much cited vampire scholar Nina Auerbach writes “we all know Dracula, or think we do… .” Although she was using Stoker’s Count as an example of how even the most “recognizable” of the undead doesn’t remain a fixed character in the popular imagination, it is just as true for what constitutes a vampire. Indeed, in many people’s minds Count Dracula is synonymous with the idea of the vampire with the implication that they must all drink blood, can transform into a bat (and possibly a wolf), are very sexy, wear evening dress with greased back, black hair and speak with a broad Eastern European accent—it should be noted that this is predicated far more on Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula, than Stoker’s 1897 novel (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula about to enjoy a night-time snack with Lucy (Frances Dade) in Dracula, directed by Tod Browning. Universal Pictures, 1931.

However, the cinematic vampire, although providing what some see as the quintessential representation of the King of the Vampires (Count Dracula), seems to be continuously unsure about what a vampire looks like or what makes it one. What follows is an idiosyncratic selection of (and some of my favourite) films that have a very non-canonical view of what a vampire is.

Two of the earliest representations of vampires on film aren’t really vampires as we’d think of them now. They were from the early 20th century and both represented the “dark” side of society. The first features what was then known as a “Vamp,” that was a more sexually malevolent form of the New Woman from the end of the 19th Century and who asserted their independence by preying on wealthy men for their money. Theda Bara was one of the most well known of these and A Fool There Was (1915) the best surviving example of her playing her vampy best. In many ways her credentials as a vampire were more explicit in the marketing around the film and of Bara herself so that there was little to distinguish between her on- and off-screen personas. Apart from being called “The Vampire” in the films titles there is nothing else in the film that would really mark her out as one of the undead (see figure 2).

Figure 2. A triumphant Theda Bera (The Vampire) enjoys the sight of her latest victim who has lost his wealth and his family because of her in A Fool There Was, directed by Frank Powell. Fox Film Corporation, 1915.

Similarly the French serial Les vampires takes another yet equally oblique turn in what constitutes a vampire. Here, the titular “vampires” are in fact a gang of crooks led by the Grand Vampire that prey on the people of Paris and who think nothing of murder, kidnapping, and terrorism to get what they want. Although the film is well known for a sequence featuring a dancer dressed as a bat (see figure 3), once again there is little to connect the film to actual vampires apart from their metaphorical “feeding” on the wealth of their “prey.”

Figure 3. Marta Koutiloff, played by Stacia Napierkowska, dancing as a vampire bat in the ballet “The Vampires” in Les vampires, directed by Louis Feuillade. Gaumont, 1915.

Back in Hollywood, vampires became one of the pantheon of classic monsters in the 1930s, though even within that there were no strict borders between the various forms of creatures that could be called undead which could range from someone brought back from the dead (by whatever means), to a ghost, a ghoul, a zombie...or even a mummy. As mentioned above Lugosi’s performance solidified the idea of what Dracula was, and consequently, vampires, but even here the Count himself wasn’t sure of what exactly made him a vampire. In House of Dracula (1945), the second film starring John Carradine as the Count, sees the vampire looking for a cure for his vampirism (in reality he wants to sink his fangs into the pretty nurse assisting Dr Edelmann who he seeks help from). What is of interest here is that the doctor takes blood samples from Dracula and under the microscope we see vampiric blood cells attacking human blood cells marking out vampirism as a disease of the blood (see figure 4).

Figure 4. Dracula’s blood under the microscope showing the black tendrils in it is the true vampire as it attacks human blood cells, in House of Dracula, directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal Pictures, 1945.

We could argue it is Dracula’s blood that is the vampire, not the Count himself. This is a curious idea that has been picked up since in a few screen narratives such as Dark Shadows (1966-71) and the Dracula (2013-14) series by Cole Haddon. The importance of blood, and what we might call the medicalisation of the vampire, is also seen in The Return of Dr X (1939), featuring a rare turn in horror films for Humphrey Bogart. Here at least the “vampire” in question needs fresh human blood, though rather disappointingly for its undead credentials it’s not from biting a beautiful young woman in the neck, but rather transfusing her blood into his own body (the reverse of Stoker’s use of transfusions where they are to combat vampirism rather than promoting it). Here, Bogart as the eponymous Dr X (Maurice Xavier) is brought back from the dead using synthetic blood, however, this no longer works and he needs a special type (type one) of fresh human blood to stay alive. His vampy credentials highlighted by his pale white skin and greased back, black hair--his monstrosity emphasized by a bride of Frankenstein white streak running through it (see figure 5).

Figure 5. Humphrey Bogart as the suitably deathly pale Dr X, in The Return of Dr X, directed by Vincent Sherman. Warner Brothers, 1939.

Post-WWII and the rise of science fiction on film only increased the complications of identifying vampires—even Dracula is affected by the appearance of aliens as seen in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) where humans are brought back from the dead as zombies and one of these “zombies” is non-other than Bela Lugosi in full Dracula costume. In some ways this was exampled earlier by the science-gone-mad idea in Dr X, but the involvement of aliens would only exacerbate the problematic nature of vampire identity. A good one to start with is The Thing from Another World (1951) where the “Thing” is a Frankenstein’s monster style alien (see figure 6) that has been cut from beneath the Arctic ice where its ship had crashed an unknown time ago.

Figure 6. “The Thing,” played by James Arness, as a vegetal vampire from outer space, in The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby. Winchester Pictures Corporation, 1951.

Once defrosted the creature is driven by a need for human blood, and it exhibits a kind of immortality as parts of it, when cut off, regrow when fed blood. Perhaps more strikingly the creature is in fact a plant of some kind—this correlates to other vegetal aliens that crave human essence such as the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956/1978), and The Queen of Blood (1966). While the creature cannot change its shape in this film—other than its severed parts being able to take on their own lives—later adaptions of the story, The Thing (1982/2011), make such transformations explicit to how it survives and multiplies. Indeed, just as the first “Thing” required human blood to live, the later “Things” require human lives to thrive—oddly echoing the BBC Dracula mini-series from 2020 in which the Count requires blood as “lives” to sustain himself.

Something of this is repeated in Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985) where alien vampires, whose spaceship hides in the tail of Halley’s Comet, awaken to feed on human essence each time it returns to the vicinity of the planet Earth (every 74.7 years). The aliens themselves are huge bat-like creatures but can possess the bodies of humans and consume/suck-out soul/lifeforce by putting their mouths over that of their victims (see figure 7).

Figure 7. A guard (John Keegan) having the lifeforce sucked out of him by an unseen Space Girl (Mathilda May) in Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper. London-Cannon Films, 1985.

These are then “sent” back up to the mother ship for the rest of the colony to feed on. An earlier example of a similar kind of vampiric possession as a means of survival was seen in Planet of the Vampires (1965) where the survivors of an alien race are trapped on a barren planet after its sun has burnt out. Using the distress signal of a crashed space ship they attract 2 other ships and then inhabit the bodies of the humanoids piloting them. Of note here is that their vampirism is purely predicated on the possession of humanoid bodies (see figure 8), which although deadly to the hosts—if they’re not already dead—does not provide any kind of sustenance to them (such vampiric possession, though often non-deadly is a more recent feature of vampire narratives such as The Vampire Diaries (2009-17) and The Originals (2013-18).

Figure 8. A deadly game of “guess whose body is possessed by a vampire” featuring Wes Wescant (Ángel Aranda), Sanya (Norma Bengell), and Captain Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan), in Planet of the Vampires, directed by Mario Bava. Italian International Film, 1965.

Returning to Lifeforce, and its idea of feeding off of human essence and “draining” their victims, this is not a million miles away from psychic vampires, most recently and famously seen in the figure of Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows (2019-24) where he purposely bores people to death and/or annoys them to distraction so that he can feed on their emotional energy (see figure 9). This has returned such forms of untypical vampirism back into the popular imagination—it’s actually something that has a longer history in literary vampires seen in The House of the Vampire (1907) by George Sylvester Viereck and “The Transfer” (1911) by Algernon Blackwood.

Figure 9. Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) as the person in the office that everyone tries to avoid, in What We Do in the Shadows, created by Jemaine Clement. FX Productions, 2019-24.

To sum up this rather eclectic list of some of my favourite vampire films, and to mangle and repurpose a well known phrase about ducks, “if it doesn’t walk like a vampire, or quack like a vampire, it doesn’t mean it’s not a vampire!”

Bio: Simon Bacon has authored/edited/co-edited 40+ books on vampires, monsters and gothic horror in popular culture and his Amazon Author page can be found here (US) and here (UK).