ARTicles vol. 7 i.2a: From Bloodthirsty Demon to, Well…

In an age when Dracula battles Batman, it’s easy to forget that there was a real Dracula: Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476). His more famous name meant “son of the dragon” or “son of the demon.” Which interpretation his subjects took corresponded to their relationship with his pikes.

Prince Vlad III had a penchant for impaling. This brutal ruler ordered the execution of over 100,000 subjects to protect his crown. The ruthlessness that made him a demon to his subjects made him a dragon to the Turks, who had just conquered Constantinople and threatened to sweep through Southeast Europe. Vlad was a Machiavellian military genius. Harried across his homeland by the larger Turkish army, he led night raids on the enemy camp. Forced to retreat, he scorched his own country to guarantee that the Turks would gain nothing by defeating him. Prince Vlad died in a skirmish against Turkish forces. According to legend, he disguised himself as a Turk to enjoy seeing his foes routed; his own soldiers, mistaking him for an enemy, killed him.

Despite all the blood he shed, there’s no evidence that the historical Dracula actually drank it. We owe this peccadillo to Irishman Bram Stoker, who named his blockbuster novel Dracula (1897). Drawing on the Romantic tradition of Gothic horror, Stoker crafted the most enduring vampire tale in the Western canon.

One key to the triumph of Dracula was the erotic nature of Stoker’s vampires, veiled just thickly enough not to outrage Victorian England. The bites of the vampires are called “kisses.” A trio of beautiful female vampires attacks one of Stoker’s protagonists, who waits in “languorous ecstasy” as one presses her fangs against his neck. Lucy, an Englishwoman turned vampire, writhes in orgasmic death throes as her fiancé pounds a wooden stake into her heart.

Erotic vampirism, however, was no innovation. The political undertones of Stoker’s Dracula were. The end of the 19th century was a time of imperial anxiety in England. Abroad, Germany and the United States were rising, British foreign influence was shrinking, and unrest stirred in the colonies. The morality of imperialism also faced growing scrutiny back home. With the Empire under siege, a fear of reverse colonization – that the “uncivilized” colonies might rise up and conquer the “civilized” motherland – erupted. It’s no accident that Dracula comes from Transylvania: Southeast Europe had been a foreign policy problem for years leading up to Stoker’s novel. Count Dracula goes to England on a quest to colonize the country one person at a time by turning its citizens into vampires.

Stoker’s Irish origins also allow readings of Dracula as an allegory for Anglo-Irish relations. Interestingly, this works from both perspectives: Either with the Irish as Dracula invading English soil (the potato famine had caused many Irish immigrats to seek industrial work in Britain), or with the English as Dracula, the self-appointed colonial master able to rewrite the identity of any target he chooses.

Once Dracula was written, the Count’s evolution was out of Stoker’s hands. The first two silver screen bloodsuckers inspired by his novel were Count Orlok in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) and the Transylvanian terror himself in Dracula (1931). Max Schreck’s Orlok looks like a living corpse; subsequent visions of vampires as physically monstrous are indebted to Nosferatu, as is the tradition of sunlight incinerating them. Bela Lugosi, in contrast, recreated the Count as an elegant aristocrat capable of passing for normal. His Hungarian-accented vampire in tux and cape became the most famous incarnation of Dracula.

Another type that has recently become popular is the reluctant vampire, typified by characters like Angel from Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Louis from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and Mick St. John from CBS’s series Moonlight. A vampire renaissance may be starting soon as Twilight, the first of Stephanie Meyer’s wildly successful vampire novels, comes to the silver screen this December.

Through the myth of Dracula, Vlad the Impaler’s taste for blood has been remembered, but his gruesome method of spilling it is forgotten.

Beck Holden is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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