St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Austin Booth
Tod Browning's 1931 film Dracula is probably the most famous version of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. Often criticized for its over resemblance to the drawing-room melodrama from which it was derived, the film has nevertheless had a tremendous and lasting impact on both film and popular culture. The film follows the journey of Renfield, a British businessman, who is visiting Count Dracula in Transylvania in order to sell the Count some London property. Slowly, Renfield realizes that he is a prisoner and that the Count is a vampire. Once in London, the Count must battle Professor Van Helsing, a doctor who specializes in ferreting out and eradicating the undead. Van Helsing and Count Dracula fight over the soul of the innocent Mina, and finally Van Helsing kills the Count by plunging a wooden stake through the vampire's heart.
Dracula was so successful that, almost single-handedly, it rescued Universal Studios from folding, giving the studio its first profit in two years. More importantly, it established talking horror movies as a popular and profitable genre. Lugosi's quintessential Dracula set the stage for the filmic and fictional vampires that followed. Certainly Lugosi's sartorial elegance has become a trademark of Count Dracula--as George Hamilton complains in Love at First Bite (1979), "How would you like to spend 400 years dressed like a head waiter?" From the 1950s forward, Lugosi's image graced a staggering number of incongruous consumer goods, including swizzle sticks, jewelry, card games, decals, transfers, tattoos, cleaning products, Halloween costumes, albums, pencil sharpeners, greeting cards, plastic and wax figurines, clothing, puzzles, wind-up toys, candy, comic books, and bath products. By the 1960s, Dracula had become such a marketable image that he could be co-opted to sell just about anything.
The late 1950s and 1960s saw a resurgence of interest in monster culture centered around television showings of classic horror movies by hosts including Vampira and Ghoulardi, the proliferation of magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the development of popular television series like The Munsters and The Addams Family, which parodied the American nuclear family. Lugosi's disdainful Count (barely even interested in his female victims) was recreated by Christopher Lee in five films, beginning with Horror of Dracula (1958); by Jack Palance in a prime-time version of Dracula (1973); and by Louis Jordan in a BBC miniseries, Count Dracula (1978). While the kitsch market bearing Dracula's image continues to spread seemingly unabated, like vampirism itself, a new vampire has emerged who bears a resemblance to Lugosi's elegant, aristocratic Dracula, and yet who is markedly sympathetic as well as erotic. Beginning with Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, novels and movies told from the vampire's point of view have become increasingly popular, as have vampire stories and films created by and for women (e.g., the films Lust for a Vampire and The Hunger, and the novels The Vampire Tapestry (1983) and A Taste of Blood Wine (1992).
The repeated adaptation of a text can serve as a guide to changes in popular understandings of psychological and social issues. Vampirism has been read as a metaphor for gender and racial "otherness"; for the simultaneous desire and fear of female sexuality, male sexuality, and/or homosexuality; for contagion of all sorts; and for the relationship between the "new" worlds of Western Europe and North America and the "old" world of Eastern Europe. Dracula itself has been variously interpreted as a parable of the oppression and resistance of marginalized groups, the power and alienation resulting from technological reproduction, the repression of sexuality and desire, the effects of industrial capitalism on the working class, and the complex interdependencies of colonialism. Of course, on one level, Dracula's popularity lies in its face-value: the fear of (and possible desire for belief in) the notion that the dead are not really dead. Like much horror and monster culture, Dracula deals in the (linked) questions of sex and death. And like most horror films, Dracula tells the story of a contest between good and evil, between the normal and the abnormal or pathological.
Dracula also follows generic conventions by installing normalcy at the end of its story, reinstating and reaffirming the good and the true after an anxious yet enjoyable period of peril. And yet, Dracula plays with the boundary between good and evil, between the normal and the pathological, in a way that goes a long way in explaining the story's popularity. Dracula blurs and transgresses the distinctions between living and dead, East and West, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, aristocratic and professional, healthy and diseased, and British and foreign before finally reinstating those terms as pairs of fixed opposites with the (apparent) death of the Count. It is Dracula's ability to appear normal, after all, to pass in the nighttime streets of London, which make him both so dangerous and fascinating. Dracula does not look like a monster--in fact, he looks like an upscale version of his victims. It is, in the end, Dracula's very adaptability, his ability to confuse epistemological and social categories, which ensures his everlasting capacity to both frighten and entertain us.
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