At first the lilies went unnoticed , but as we talked of vampires, bats, and fangs, and seeking wolves by moonlight, the fragrance from the white, waxy trumpets next to Arlene Russo's elbow suddenly became intoxicating. It was a standard hotel flower arrangement but, by their very proximity, these lilies seemed spooky. Russo, after all, is a Dracula fanatic, and, more than any other blooms, lilies are both bridal and sepulchral. But what fascinates Russo about the toothy count may have more to do with the improbable ashen sex appeal of Christopher Lee than the monstrous doings of Vlad the Impaler. Anyway Russo, who launches Scotland's first horror magazine in Glasgow tomorrow, has never really been impressed by the theory that Dracula was inspired by the

fifteenth-century Transylvanian tyrant. Vlad might have had a thirst for blood, he might have enjoyed surrounding himself with wooden stakes which accommodated the heads of executed enemies, but he didn't possess much in the way of vampire credentials.

It's the un-dead nobleman of Bram Stoker's imagination who is the eerie light of Russo's life, and from her extensive knowledge of bite movies, only Lee comes anywhere near to evoking the right intensity of thrill and chill. But how did it begin, this ghastly cobwebbed obsession? ''Well, it goes back to childhood,'' Russo says airily. ''We're an Italian family who always come alive at night, and when I was about 10 we were all allowed to stay up late to watch Hammer's Prince of Darkness. That was it. The end scene where Dracula slips through the ice . . . I was just captivated from that moment.'' Yet this doesn't fully explain the legend's power over of her. ''I've asked all sorts of people about it - doctors, professors, people who in some way have dedicated their lives to the vampire story - and no one comes up with an adequate answer. But then, nobody asks why people like going to Westerns

or football. Does there have to be a deep answer? I don't think so.''

If pushed further, though, Russo believes the cult for immortality is the lure. ''This sums it up for me : Sleep all day/Party all night/Never grow old/It's fun to be a vampire . . . But when you think seriously about it - living to be hundreds of years old, looking eternally young, and everyone around you dying - it's not a nice life.''

Russo, who received magazine grants from Wellpark Enterprise Centre and Glasgow Opportunities, still lives in the parental home at Uddingston. She is one of four children and has a twin, a fact which suddenly, and nonsensically, sounds creepy. ''People sometimes call us the twins of evil but we're not like that at all. I think it's because everyone in the family wears black. That's very Italian, but over here it marks you out as weird, and I suppose I'm just making the most of it.'' Yet how does she square her Catholic faith with this infatuation for a blood-sucking heretic, no matter how shadowless and fictional?

There was a point when Russo worried that religion and vampire-mania might conflict. ''If I were to do something like drinking blood that would be very wrong, but I'm not remotely into that aspect of vampire-worship, and promoting it is not the purpose of my magazine. Nor would I want to meddle in black magic and attract those sorts of folk because I do believe in evil. But at the end of the day I'm not harming anyone.''

A freelance writer, Russo is also spokes-

person of the Scottish Vampire Society whose 30 or so members include medics, the odd legal fellow, and a traffic warden. ''Some feel they can't come to the launch of Bite Me, because to be openly associated with vampires might be difficult for their careers. But they've all been very supportive of the journal, which will appear quarterly and, apart from exploring the supernatural, there'll be some humour in it, although I'm not really into comedy. Why laugh when you can scream?''

Hitchcock observed that people pay good money to be scared, and he also knew knows that great horror tales have their risible moments. Two years ago Russo raised enough money to fly to Los Angeles for a four-day Dracula convention celebrating the 100th anniversary of Stoker's masterpiece. Only no sooner had she arrived than she broke her

custom-made fangs, although not in anyone's neck. ''Actually I was showing them to a Mexican fang-maker, when they just snapped and he never got round to mending them.''

So, there she was at the biggest event of her life, fang-less in LA. ''Still, I didn't mind too much because the Mexican fang-maker was the most stunning guy I've ever seen. He had these amazing yellow eyes. Well, okay, yellow contact lenses.'' With inimitable battiness, the LA event drew hordes of Dracula categories beyond scary blood-suckers and straightforward vamp-fans such as Russo. ''With some there's a real undercurrent of snobbery. For instance, people into Anne Rice novels won't even look at a Hammer movie. And then there are psychic vampires who try to draw energy out of anyone they meet. When I was in LA this bloke attempted to do that by staring into my eyes. At the time I didn't realise what he was about. I just thought, 'What an idiot'.''

But if LA was a high-point, Russo's

Dracula tour of Transylvania last year simply wasn't hair-raising enough. ''They threw all this history stuff at us which I found mostly boring, because I went expecting to see wolves and forests and misty landscapes with people stepping out of coffins, wearing cloaks.'' A sort of Dracula Disneyworld? ''Well, certainly something more visual. Maybe, once the magazine is up and running, I'll open my own vampire theme park.'' However, Bram Stokerland, at Transylvania's heart, induced satisfactory jitters. Independently of the tour group, Russo and some other travellers ventured into a snowy forest in the hope of wolf-spotting.

''It was about three or four in the morning and someone told us there were bears out there as well. Anyway, we found a clearing and just sat very still under a full moon for about an hour, none of us saying a word.'' But no wolves, or any other creature, loped into view, although all around that little silent band there were mysterious rustling noises in the undergrowth. ''Mind you, I think I would have died if we had seen something.'' And this, of course, is the crux of Russo's problem. Despite her desire to get, as it were, to grips with vampires, she travels to every likely fang location with the parapher-nalia to keep them at bay.

''For Transylvania I packed a lot of crucif-ixes in my hand-baggage, just in case. So, in the hotel room I'd put one cricifix by the window - because that's where they come in - another round my neck, another inside the bedside table, and then a rosary by my bed. No garlic, but I think I did quite well with what I had.'' She collects the crucifixes during visits to Italy. Her mother's family is from the south between Rome and Naples which, Russo feels, makes any talk of vampires there out of the question. ''The people are incredibly superstitious. They still believe in the evil eye, so, if I started going on about Dracula, even in a jokey way, some folk would think nothing of putting a spell on me.'' The fact that such a prospect unnerves Russo may speak volumes. But what does her mother think of this daughter's cranky preoccupation. ''Obviously she's got an Italian mentality and she doesn't

understand my keenness at all. She doesn't think it's wrong, but she'd like me to find another interest. My dad, on the other hand, always encourages me to find out more.'' He's a property developer who, it must be said, looks a little like Christopher Lee.

Although primarily a Slavic fable, the tale of the vampire is widespread over Europe and Asia, and, swirled in ancient mists, Scotland had its own legend where a beautiful woman, Baobhan Sith, preyed on young men in the wilderness after sundown. Much more recently the atmospheric coastal town of Whitby in North Yorkshire has cultivated the whimsical notion that Dracula is buried in the graveyard of its historic abbey. Apparently Bram Stoker spent time in the resort, and today that link is enough to string together a profitable line in gothic tourism.

Russo has been to Whitby's vampire balls, wearing fangs and one of her eight Bride of Dracula wedding dresses. ''My mum thinks that's very, very strange because she believes that if you're in a wedding dress before you're married you'll never get a husband. But I don't care. The dresses are beautiful, and anyway you couldn't settle down to married life and do what I'm doing, running off to vampire get-togethers. But in this world you've got to make sacrifices.'' She says all this quite - well - deadpan, but the really curious thing is that even after so many years Russo still hasn't finished reading Stoker's definitive novel. ''But that's because you can only read something once to get the maximum effect, so I don't ever want to reach the last page.''

But at tomorrow's magazine launch at the Glasgow Film Theatre, Arlene Russo will probably have a dog-eared Dracula somewhere about her person. There may even be white lilies nearby, and the fangs will be in despite the discomfort they cause her, and their hindrance to drinking and eating. Talking of which, Stoker always insisted that his Dracula was born from his own nightmares caused by consuming a bad fish supper just a few hours previously.