Dracula: A Vampire for the New Millennium and Beyond, Part 2

By: Steve Biodrowski
Date: Friday, December 22, 2000

In Part One of our interview with Leonard Wolf (Dracula: A Connessieur's Guide) and David J. Skal (V is for Vampire), we asked the scholars about the continuing appeal of Count Dracula in the 20th Century and beyond. The Vampire King clearly is not fading away in our modern era, yet his continued visibility raises another question: With familiarity comes contemptor (even worse for a monter) derision. So, can Bram Stoker's immortal creation still strike fear into our hearts in this era of Hannibal Lecter?

QUESTION:HOW WELL DOES BRAM STOKER'S NOVEL DRACULA HOLD UP AFTER THE POPULARIZATION OF ITS LEAD CHARACTER? DOES THE BOOK STILL HAVE THE POWER TO SHOCK A MODERN READER?

Leonard Wolf: I wouldn't say shock.

David J. Skal: Shock isn't the word, but it is still a very good narrative. I re-read it every few years and find it holds up pretty well.

LW: It holds up superbly. It's now I think my third time in print saying we have a great book on our hands, a masterpiece of fiction. It's flawed in a dozen different ways, but once can say that of any number of other great books. It's a book which superbly holds a reader's interest, superbly works on his or her unconscious, and to the degree that scary literature is supposed to work that way, it scares you.

QUESTION:DO THE NOVEL'S DETRACTORS HAVE A POINT?
LW: Well, let's start with the obvious thing. Stoker was a second-rate writer most of his life; I've sometimes said he was fourth- or fifth-rank. At the same time, something explosive, dynamic, remarkable happened to him, so that the forces that had been in abeyance in him while he was a second-, third-, or fourth-rate writer for some reason gathered together into his unconscious or his brain, however that works, and exploded into one great work. There are long sections of the novel that are as boring as can be. There's a middle section that's a plateau, but you could find such middle sections in Jane Austin; you could find them in Flaubert; you could find them in almost every major writer that I've ever read. Yes, he is given to cliché. He's not a character make: his characters are two-dimension; they're paper-thin. Having said all that, you have a portrait of human beings in the grip of a vast terror, and that makes for a great work.


QUESTION:WHEN YOU PUT TOGETHER NORTON'S CRITICAL EDITION (WITH FOOTNOTES AND ESSAYS) WOULD YOU HAVE BEEN TEMPTED TO EDIT MORE IF NOT FOR THE NECESSITY OF PUTTING OUT A COMPLETE EDITION?
DS: Well, it was edited down. We don't know exactly how much. It was either a false start or an actual deleted chapter that was published as a short story, 'Dracula's Guest.' It does slow down the story, and I think it's much better dramatically that we don't get those touches until he's already into Dracula's domain. The original manuscript had a lot of cut-and-paste edits. Only three-quarters of the manuscripts survives, and it's in the hands of a private collector, so it's not been generally available for scholarly examination. But it's clear that he took a lot of time with it; the story developed over a period of several years. There's no real evidence that he ever spent that kind of time or care on his many potboilers. I think it shows: they're not as interesting to read; they're often downright crude. There's one theory or rumor that's persisted for a very long time, that Stoker did have some editorial help with it. H.P. Lovecraft* once referred to an American woman whom Stoker sought out for a book doctor. We'll never know what sort of assistance he had.

LW: Well, T.S. Elliot received an enormous amount of assistance from Ezra Pound, but we still read Elliot's 'Wasteland.' We don't remember what Pound's input is.

DS: Well, even if he had help, it was the only book of his that he felt strongly enough to have gotten help. This is clearly a very important book. We do that he had in the back of his headmaybe no so far in the backthe idea that the character of Dracula would be an appropriate vehicle for his employer, the Victorian stage actor Henry Irving. He's on the record at least once, telling an interviewer; it's not just a myth. That may be why the book is also suffused with so many theatrical metaphors and references. It's probably not unfair to say that Stoker was perhaps in some ways a frustrated playwright.

LW: Well, he had spent his life in the theatre. He daily heard theatrical speech being spoken, and the man he adored more than any other human being in the world was an actor. I think you're entirely right about that; his soul was fixed on theatre, and it shows.

DS: It's funny: the later, and our most popular, image of Dracula, the Lugosi imagethe opera cape, the tuxedo, the slicked back hair, and the oily continental charmderives from the theatre. It was an adaptation Dracula made in the 1920s, because Stoker's Dracula really wouldn't work on the stage. Hamilton Deane, the first person to dramatize it, realized that the character of Dracula, as Stoker had written it, basically didn't interact with the other characters. To make this thing work according to the conventions of drawing room mystery-melodrama, Dracula had his act cleaned uphe had to somehow be transformed into the kind of character you'd invite into a drawing room in the first place. That didn't have anything to do with Bram Stoker. Deane drew, I think, very consciously on the traditional image of the stage magician, and of course his original production of DRACULA was full of magician's tricks: flash bombs and special effects and a trick box for Dracula to be dispatched with at the end of it. In a way, you have Dracula coming from Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre and also drawing on vaudeville stage magic. That Mephisto in evening clothes has in the 20th century, for all practical purpose, in popular culture replaced the image of the Devil. You just don't seewell, you see it so rarely, but it proves the pointthe traditional image of old Scratch, the pitchfork, the horns, the tail.

LW: Isn't there also folklore of the Devil as a gentleman?

DS: That's right; that's always been part of it. That Devil was very popular in the 19th century. In the 20th century, Dracula, the fanged aristocrat, has essentially taken over that franchise.

QUESTION:DRACULA is probably the most filmed horror novel of all time. What about it continually appeals to filmmakers over the generations?

LW: Well, it's a very filmic book. If you re-read it now, I'm very struck by the kind of directorial eye that Stoker had. There's the scene near the beginning, where the three loathly ladies surround Jonathan Harker and he peers out through his half-closed eyelids. If you read that passage very, very carefully, you could make a porno film. As the lady vampire's head moves 'lower and lower,' says Stoker, you can just hear the director saying, 'Lower and lowerbe sure you head for the groin, lady.' You just know Stoker had that operating. Any number of scenes have not just a theatrical quality, but he anticipated a filmic quality. The design of the book itself cuts back and forth in those journals, letters, and telegrams, the way a film would flashback and flash-forward; all the things filmmakers learned to do, he anticipatedleaving aside the gorgeous story.

QUESTION: ALTHOUGH FRANKENSTEIN IS OFTEN FILMED, IT SEEMS THAT DRACULA IS FILMED EVEN MORE.

LW: Dracula is also capable of changing his shape, which gives him a supernatural dimension Frankenstein doesn't have.

DS: Vampires in general are the monsters who look the most like us. They superficially resemble human beings. They're easier to dramatize. They're not misshapen, sewn-together corpses. So there's a degree of identification immediately possible with the vampire that you don't find in other characters. They all have elements of pathos, the best ones, but Dracula has many qualities that we admire. We don't pity him. He represents eternal life, eternal youth, amazing sexual power and magnetism.

LW: One other quick thing we never want to forget is that blood is the issue in vampire fiction, and blood is probably the single most symbolic object that we have ever encountered.

DS: It's the ultimate human symbol, absolutely. It can stand for anything and everything, and it has. It represents life, and of course the sight of blood represents death. It's emotions and passion; it's our connections to our past and our futureour bloodline. So it's an amazingly potent, symbolic element that immediately grabs us where we live. Anything having to do with blood draws our attention and holds our attention.

QUESTION:WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE SCENES FROM THE BOOK THAT HAVE BEEN CAPTURED ON FILM. WHEN HAS HOLLYWOOD GOTTEN IT RIGHTEVEN IF JUST A MINUTE IN ONE FILM OR TWO MINUTES IN ANOTHER?

DS: Well, that's the way it always is. People always ask me what's the definite film version of the book, and I say, 'There isn't any,' and I tell them my favorite version would be one pieced together from the best scenes out of all the others, because they never get it all; they very often don't even try. I thought the BBC television version with Louis Jordan was certainly the most careful recreation of the book, even though Jordan's appearance and performance brought in a lot of the smarmy matinee idol stuff as well. But that aside, it retained almost everything that was in the book. I think the scene that first came to Stoker, in his earliest notes, is the three women coming to Harker in the bedroom, and that's always one of the highlights of every different version. It's been done many different ways, in a stylized and balletic way in the Lugosi film, in a very overheated erotic way in the Coppola film, and with many, many other variations. That is the dream image out of which Dracula seems to have grown, so it's not surprising that considerable attention is usually given to that.

LW: I am very drawn, curiously enough, to the silent film, NOSFERATU. When Count Orlock comes toher name is either Nina or Ellen, depending on the subtitlesthey exchange looks across the areaway. It is so charged with complex implications. Clearly, he is now going to be in the role of the demon lover, making love to a woman who sends her husband awayit's got elements of French comedy in it. At the same time it's a ghoulish moment, when this guy who's not really living shows up in her bedroom and crouches at the side of her bed. You never know what they're doing, but whatever they're doing is so silent and so horrible and so Christian and so appallingI've said somewhere in my book that the silence is intensified. We know we're in a silent film, but somehow that scene takes on a terror because it's so utterly still.

DS: It is a fabulous moment. Part of the disturbing quality is coming from the fact that the heroine is inviting Nosferatu in. She is fully conscious. She is not in a trance; her mind has not been clouded by the influence of the vampire. She's wide-awake, and she throws open the windows and say, 'Here I am. Come and get me.'

LW: Of course, she's doing it to save the world.

DS: Yes, to end the horrible plague that's happening. It's a dimension that Stoker doesn't even approach in his women, who are victims.

CQUESTION:WHAT'S STILL BEGGING TO BE DONE ON FILM?

DS: At this point, almost everything of interest in the book has been approached in one way or the other. Some of them are more difficult. For instance, the famous scene of Dracula crawling headfirst down the wall of his castle was an image on many early editions of the book itself but was never dramatized until one of the Christopher Lee films in the '70s [SCARS OF DRACULA]. It's so cinematic, so dreamlike, you would have thought they would have tried to do something with it much earlier.

LW: You know, T.S. Eliot borrowed the image of Dracula going head down the wall; that's one of the images that's so petrifying to an adult reader that Eliot borrowed it and put it into 'The Wasteland.'

QUESTION: IF NOT SPECIFIC SCENES, IS THERE AN APPROCH OR INTERPRETATION THAT'S STILL WAITING TO BE DONE?

DS: That's a different question, and I think the answer is yes: to present the novel as Stoker wrote it, with the character as Stoker described him, still has not been done. It would be a fairly repulsive kind of Draculanot as repulsive as Max Scheck in Dracula, but definitely an otherworldly presence in Victorian London. I hope somebody approaches it, maybe with a very small budget and an ensemble group of actors, shoots it in black-and-white, and really avoids embellishing and embroidering the text. It's a very frightening tale exactly the way Stoker wrote it, and that is the one version we have yet to see.

QUESTION: MR WOLF, YOU INCLUDE A QUOTE IN YOUR DRACULA: A CONNESSIEURS GUIDE FROM LEFT-WING FILM CRITIC ROBIN WOOD, TO THE EFFECT THAT WE SHOULD RETIRE DRACULA. ONE ASSUMES YOU DO NOT AGREE.

LW: I think David made the important point that it's a little bit like the stones at Stonehenge. They're so imprecise that one can load them with meaning endlessly. I think what he was saying is that the Dracula imagery, as Stoker created him, is sufficiently imprecise, beyond being a mythological monster, that he will serve each successive generation, as for example he has served the epoch we living through now with AIDS. They're has been a new and sharper rethinking of the Dracula idea as A) representing new permutations and combinations of sexuality, including homosexuality, which nobody would have dreamed of suggesting long ago, and B) the new loading of meaning on blood since it is the carrier of the AIDS virus. So we have a new sense of the vampire as standing for a new human problem. Just as we have had a Dracula image implying the possibility of AIDS, I don't even want to imagine what disaster is waiting for us in the 21st Century for which Dracula will be the appropriate symbol.

You will notice that in 1973, when I was doing A Dream of Dracula and what was called The Annotated Dracula (it's now called The Essential Dracula), I blamed on Dracula the entire industrial revolution. I called it 'energy without grace, power without responsibility'so that 25 years ago, Dracula was able to carry the burden of the meanings I put on him. I blamed the Vietnam War on him. The Vietnam War was a vampiric figure. I think the human mind and the human agony is sufficiently complex so that whatever evolves, dynamic figures like Dracula, or like Faust, will be endlessly recyclable.

DS: I think what all the modern filmmakers and dramatists have been doing with it is exactly what Stoker was doing, recombining the characters, playing around with different arrangements of the relationships, and twists of the plot. One of the reasons the book stands out among Stoker's writings is that he spent so much more time on it than anything else he ever wrotealmost seven years from his first notes till publication. I don't think he was ever quite satisfied with it. So the story is never finished; the process of DRACULA is never finished. It keeps going and going, and it has every chance of going for yet another century and probably not losing any energy at that point.

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*H.P. Lovecraft did say this in one of his letters, but there is some scholarly dispute as to whether he was right. Remember that Lovecraft would have been seven years old when Dracula was first published, so he was unlikely to have any first-hand knowledge of its writing; also, the numerous cut-and-paste revisions to the text were apparently done in Stoker's own hand, indicating that he was the one revising his own work.