What is it about the likes of Dracula that has seduced film‑makers for a century? The author of a new visual history of the genre talks about its enduring appeal – and picks some of his favourite film posters
by Killian Fox“I think it’s almost infinitely flexible,” says the cultural historian Christopher Frayling, on why the myth of the vampire has gripped our imaginations for so long. It’s been around in some form or other for millennia, but the modern bloodsucker stems from reports of eastern European peasants rising from the grave in the early 18th century. Since then, according to Frayling, vampires “shape-shifted” to “lounge-lizard aristocrats seducing people” a century later. “Then, with the movies, they eventually shed their cloaks, and from the mid-20th century onwards, addicts, psychopaths, lovelorn outsiders, cult leaders, lesbian and gay icons… you name it, the vampire has become it.”
Dracula, 1931. ‘Designed by Universal’s in-house illustrator Károly Grósz, this original US poster was also used for the cover of the tie-in reissue of Bram Stoker’s novel,’ says Christopher Frayling. ‘It emphasises the Count’s irresistibly hypnotic eyes. The alternative caption was “good to the last gasp”...’
Frayling’s own imagination has been gripped since a formative viewing of Terence Fisher’s 1958 film Dracula (one of more than 270 films featuring Bram Stoker’s dreaded Count). A former head of the Royal College of Art and chair of Arts Council England, Frayling wrote a tome on vampires for Faber in the late 1970s. Now he’s back with Vampire Cinema: The First 100 Years, looking at how film-makers and marketers have lured us with the threat (or promise) of shadowy figures vying to drink our blood in the dead of night.
In the 1950s, Dracula is sexy for the first time, and sex is the way of selling it thereafterHe spent years researching it, trawling cinema archives and the internet for movie posters and other promotional material, but what prompted him to publish now was a desire to elevate one of the genre’s most influential works. “There’s been so much celebration of 1922 as year one of modernism, with James Joyce’s Ulysses published in February, and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in December, and I thought, there’s another centenary going on that nobody has noticed.”
Nosferatu, 1922. ‘This is my favourite vampire film poster, designed by Nosferatu’s producer Albin Grau for the Czechoslovakian market. I love the way the lettering is related to the image and the rats going diagonally across. And Nosferatu himself is unbelievably unattractive.’
He’s talking about Nosferatu, the first true vampire movie, itself inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, released in Germany in March 1922. Directed by FW Murnau, with Max Schreck as the Count (Orlok, not Dracula, in an attempt to skirt copyright issues), it was a strange and beguiling expressionist masterwork that treated vampires as though they were not fantasy but grisly fact. Unlike later incarnations, this vampire – bald-headed, with rat-like teeth – was anything but seductive, a fact underlined by unsavoury-looking rats and bats on the posters.
Then, with the release of Tod Browning’s Dracula in 1931, the image took a turn. “Hollywood was apprehensive about telling a gothic story straight,” says Frayling, “so they decided to market it is as a love story – ‘The strangest passion the world has ever known’ [according to the US poster] – and it was released on Valentine’s Day. The idea was that Dracula was unbelievably attractive to his victims.”
Dracula: Prince Of Darkness, 1966. ‘This was the belated sequel to 1958’s groundbreaking Dracula, and Macario Gómez Quibus’s gory Spanish poster for it was created in 1972. Actor Bela Lugosi did not have fangs in the original Hollywood film, but this time round Christopher Lee certainly did.’
When the Hammer production company picked up the baton in the 1950s, with Horror of Dracula featuring Christopher Lee, they decided the erotic element was far too implicit. “They’re really foregrounding the idea of the demon lover visiting the victim late at night,” says Frayling of the posters. “Dracula is sexy for the first time, and sex is the way of selling it thereafter.”
By the 1970s, Hammer’s white-tie-and-tails approach had become comically dated. As a new wave of horror films – The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – used scares to probe contemporary social anxieties, new breeds of vampires gradually emerged: “The bisexual disco vampire in The Hunger, redneck drifters wandering the American southwest in Near Dark, heavy metal teenagers in The Lost Boys…” By the time Francis Ford Coppola reworked Dracula in 1992, the vampire had become a much more complicated and even sympathetic figure.
La Vampire Nu, 1970. ‘Jean Rollin’s semi-pornographic vampire films had a cult following. They don’t flow very well but they have some striking, surrealistic images. This poster, illustrated by comic‑strip artist Philippe Druillet, looks like the cover of a paperback sci-fi book.’
Since then, film-makers have found ways to repackage vampires to appeal to teenage audiences, playing into adolescent worries around sex and abstinence. “Twilight has a very traditional view of masculinity and sex roles,” says Frayling. “The film-maker Joe Dante said this is the one vampire movie where parents actually encouraged children to go and see it. When that happens, something’s gone wrong. It should be a guilty pleasure.”
After 100 years of bloodsuckers on the big screen, has the endlessly flexible myth finally exhausted itself? Frayling doesn’t think so – he cites the recent BBC reboot of Dracula as “scary and nasty [with] a lot of blood and a lot of surprises”.
Let the Right One In, 2008. ‘This is my favourite of the films in the book. It’s a very touching, profound Swedish movie about a troubled boy on a Stockholm housing estate who befriends the strange girl next door. The man hanging down in the poster is being drained of blood to feed the girl.’
“There are all sorts of possibilities of how this shapeshifter will change its meaning for the future,” he adds. “For example, Nosferatu introduced the idea of the vampire as the bringer of the plague, and for audiences in 1922, who’d just recovered from the Spanish flu, this would have chimed hugely with them. Well, you don’t have to be a genius to imagine how you can rework that in 2022.”
Vampire Cinema: The First 100 Years will be published on 31 October by Reel Art Press (£39.95)
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