A century old and still fang-tastic: why we'll never fall out of love with cinema vampires

Because it was essentially a bootleg made without the permission of Stoker’s estate, the contemporary action in Nosferatu was transposed to Germany in 1838 and all names changed. Count Dracula becomes Count Orlok, Jonathan and Mina Harker become Thomas and Ellen Hutter, and Van Helsing is re-christened Professor Bulwer.

Because it was essentially a bootleg version and the author’s widow wasn’t stupid, Murnau was sued almost immediately anyway. After a three year legal battle all copies of his film were ordered destroyed. But thanks to the director’s sleight of hand (or duplicity, if you prefer) prints continued to pop up in London and New York under different titles. A good thing, too: posterity has handed down to us one of the great achievements of 20th century cinema, a masterpiece of German Expressionism and a film which is relentlessly quoted to the extent that it has formed the ur-text for virtually every vampiric outing since.

That story, and the stories behind some of the thousands of other films which followed Nosferatu, is the subject of Vampire Cinema: The First One Hundred Years, a timely new book on the genre by cultural critic Christopher Frayling.

As well as running through the more notable iterations and charting the popularity of the vampire film through various Golden Ages – in the US, the Bela Lugosi years of the 1930s; in the UK, Hammer’s decade and a half run from the late 1950s; on TV, the 1990s onwards – Frayling unveils a mouth-watering collection of publicity images. These range from posters and artwork for mainstream productions to enticements for the more lurid end of the spectrum, where the genre collides with blacksploitation flicks, kung-fu movies and, inevitably, pornography.

Vampire fans seeking these dubious cinematic pleasures can head for films such as 1972’s Blacula or its 1973 sequel Scream Blacula Scream!). They can dig out 1974 martial arts-themed flick The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires (“Hammer horror! Dragon thrills!”). Or they can seek Dracula Sucks, from 1978, which came in both soft- and hardcore versions. Even Andy Warhol tipped his hat (or more likely his platinum wig) to the vampire movie. Blood For Dracula, also known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, was released in 1974 and featured German arthouse favourite Udo Kier as the Count alongside Factory superstar Joe Dallesandro, the Little Joe of Walk On The Wild Side fame.

The use of the ordinal number in Frayling’s title suggests he sees a second century of vampire flicks looming. Is our appetite for Dracula really that strong?

“Yes, I think it will last another hundred years and possibly even longer,” he says. “It has gone through so many incarnations. If you’d asked someone in the 18th century about a vampire they’d simply have said it’s a supernatural, rather blasphemous creature who came back from the dead. So they were seen entirely in Christian terms. If you’d asked someone in the late 19th century they’d have said it was all about psychoanalysis and desire and sex. And since the mid-20th century, and in particular since the publication of Salem’s Lot by Stephen King and Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice, they’ve changed from being a sort of soul-less creature to becoming firstly a rather soulful creature, with an inner life, and finally a soulmate.”

Enter Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight, Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as star-cross’d vampire lovers in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and Stephen Moyer as 174-year-old Bill Compton in True Blood, HBO’s award-winning adaptation of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series. Each of those productions appeared withing five years of each other. Alongside those modern character types are others. The vampire as superhero, for example (find him or her in comic book-style outings such as Van Helsing, Blade and this year’s Morbius), or the vampire as housemate rather than soulmate (see What We Do In The Shadows and its subsequent TV spin-off).

The clue as to why so many readings are possible lies in the flexibility of the vampire myth. Like all successful viruses it has the ability to mutate, to adapt, to meet what Frayling calls “changing human experience.” And as it adapts, it reshapes itself around fears both societal and personal.

“Horror movies have always had this function of dealing with taboo subjects,” he says. “Desire, lesbianism, incest, drug addiction, you name it. You take a sideways step into this world of fairy tales for grown-ups and you can tell all sorts of stories that are very difficult to tell in other ways.” To that list add gender, sexual preference, racial stereotyping and even the ethics of vegetarianism. Dracula, after all, is an apex predator who bites people then discards them. “Identity politics, which are very much the way of thinking about both past literature and present culture, fit this myth very well I think.”

And redressing the blatant sexism of much of the output from the 1960s and 1970s, Frayling sees the recent history of vampire cinema and its attendant fields of literature as distaff dominated.

“Nearly all the great literary contributions to vampires in the last 30 years have been written by women,” he says. “My guess is that post-#MeToo and post-identity politics, there will be a lot of quasi-feminist vampire movies about the fear of predatory men. I think that will get beyond what Hammer did with the sexism.”

But as well as changing, there are aspects of the vampire film which appeal because they continue to resonate for the same reasons they always did. One example, as relevant to Murnau as it is to the viewer of 2022, is the vampire as bringer of illness and disease. The German director’s 1838 setting placed his story immediately after a notorious plague outbreak in Bremen, but nobody watching the film in the year of its release would have forgotten the Spanish Flu pandemic of a year or so earlier. Post-Covid, the same is true today.

“Having just gone through another pandemic my suspicion is that we’re [also] about to have quite a lot more vampire movies which explore the connections between vampirism and plague,” says Frayling. “That’s another example of keeping it up to date and reconfiguring the elements.”

Last month it was confirmed that Robert Eggers, the director behind arthouse horror hits The Witch and The Lighthouse, is planning to write and direct a remake of Nosferatu. If he does, don’t bet against Robert Pattinson donning fangs again: he appeared in The Lighthouse, and Eggers is a director who likes to cast actors familiar to him. So watch this space – at least until the sun sets and the bats takes flight.

“What are the big anxieties?” Frayling asks finally. “Think of ways the myth can be recast to carry those anxieties, and you see how rich the seam is.”

Vampire Cinema: The First One Hundred Years by Christopher Frayling is published on October 31 (Reel Art Press, £39.95)