The Plight of the Vampire

For most of my film-watching life I have avoided Vampire movies.  I was never ‘bitten’ by the Hammer Horrors or the Universal Studio’s offerings.

During the last ten years, however, I have seen some really engaging ‘vamps’ in films that connected and begun to explore the genre’s roots and development.   If you have never considered such movies as worth watching, please read on; I assure you there are treasures here.   Even if you are already a ‘Vamp fan’ you might find something interesting, though of course I will probably ignore you favourite movie, or seem to undervalue it.

It has been said that every age finds its own vampire themes.   I think that during the last ten years or so movies have explored ‘the plight of the vampire’; what it might be like to be a vampire.    In  Vampires are us  Margot Adler writes  “let us ponder what it would mean to live a truly long life. How would that change one’s view of everything in society?  …What does one value more and what does one value less with along human life?  Would we become bored?  Would we become less compassionate? …Would it increase of decrease  our reverence for the planet?”

But lets start with;

‘In the London Journal, of March, 1732, is a curious, and, of course, credible account of a particular case of vampyrism, which is stated to have occurred at Madreyga, in Hungary. It appears, that upon an examination of the commander-in-chief and magistrates of the place, they positively and unanimously affirmed, that, about five years before, a certain Heyduke, named Arnold Paul, had been heard to say, that, at Cassovia, on the frontiers of the Turkish Servia, he had been tormented by a vampyre, but had found a way to rid himself of the evil, by eating some of the earth out of the vampyre's grave, and rubbing himself with his blood. This precaution, however, did not prevent him from becoming a vampyre himself; for, about twenty or thirty days after his death and burial, many persons complained of having been tormented by him, and a deposition was made, that four persons had been deprived of life by his attacks. To prevent further mischief, the inhabitants having consulted their Hadagni,  took up the body, and found it (as is supposed to be usual in cases of vampyrism) fresh, and entirely free from corruption, and emitting at the mouth, nose, and ears, pure and florid blood. Proof having been thus obtained, they resorted to the accustomed remedy. A stake was driven entirely through the heart and body of Arnold Paul, at which he is reported to have cried out as dreadfully as if he had been alive. This done, they cut off his head, burned his body, and threw the ashes into his grave. The same measures were adopted with the corpses of those persons who had previously died from vampyrism, lest they should, in their turn, become agents upon others who survived them.’

So begins the ‘birth certificate’  of  Dracula in  The Vampyre;   a Tale, by John William Polidori, 1819.     Polidori did not start the vampire legend, but he transformed and focused it.   As I am sure you know, at the time - the summer of 1818 -   he was employed as Lord Byron’s doctor (and/or drug dealer).  In an act of deliberate or subconscious revenge for Byron’s cruel scorn and refusal to recognize any worth in his writings, Polidori  made his vampyre a decadent, womanizing, Byronic aristocratic figure rather than the monsterous, virtually zombie creatures of folklore.    During his long stay at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1916 with Lord Byron, Persse Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her step-sister Claire Clairmont, he had seen at first hand the way Byron used and abused the adoring teenager, Claire,  by whom he fathered a child, Allegra.     Subsequent vampire literature has always been about sex, and the Villa by Lake Geneva must have reeked of sexuality.  

The Vampyre is Byronic, but this story is surely also a critique of the parasitic aristocracy of this time.    That dimension was certainly appreciated in 19th century Ireland, a province continually ‘bled dry’ by the landowning English, an exploitation that included and exacerbated the tragic Irish famine of the 1840’s.    It is no wonder that the Irish writers Sheridan le Fanu and Bram Stoker  were the two writers to revive Polidori’s creation with their own vampiric novel  Carmelita and Dracula.

The Vampyre was one of the two eventual results of Byron’s challenge to Shelley, Mary and the young Polidori to each write a ghost story.  The other was, of course, Mary’s Frankenstein.   Are either of them actually ghost stories?    Well, the Vampyre is certainly one of the ‘undead’  and Frankenstein’s creation’s parts have all been dead, so he is a kind of revenant, but not the revenant of any one human individual.  Neither of them are classic ghosts, but both have an ambiguous connection with ‘the living’ and that is part of their fascination.     I note that in Elizabethan England suicides were buried, or reburied, in unconsecrated ground, often at a cross-roads, and their fate was sealed with a wooden stake though the heart.

 

But in 1845, long before Le Fanu and Stoker’s novels, came Varney the Vampire, a British penny dreadful series that established many of the familiar vampire tropes,  including the fangs and twin  puncture marks, the physical strength and hypnotic charisma.   

As I said earlier I was never engaged by the  blood and boobs, cheap sets and hammy performances of the Hammer franchise.   I simply did not see any of the Universal Studio’s series, which ranged from Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi through  Dracula's Daughter  (1936),  or Son of Dracula  (1943) starringLon Chaney Jr.  through to Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).      I have chosen to never allow the wan light of Twilight to fall on me.    

There have, however,  been many remarkable vampire films.   I would  include Nosferatu  (1921), and Werner Herzog's  remake Nosferatu the Vampyr (1979),  Carl Dreyer’s 1932  Vampyr,  Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Tony Scott’s  The Hunger (1983), Katherine Bigelow’s  Near Dark (1987), the French  Irma Vep by Olivier Assayas(1996),  Irma who? I hear you ask, be patient I will come back to it; the Russian Night Watch (2004) and  Day Watch (2006),  the Swedish Let the Right One In (2008) by Tomas Alfredson,  the Korean Thirst (2009) Chan-Wook Park, Michael Spierig’s  Daybreakers (2009), Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2012), the amiable American Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) by Timur Bekmambetov,  and Jim Jarmush’s 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive.

In 1932 the Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer produced Vampyr,  as much an exercise in style as a narrative.   But style can terrify, and Hitchcock deemed this to be ‘the only film worth watching….twice’ and was obviously informed and influenced by its dreamy – almost surreal – images.  Dreyer made three versions of the film, each suitable for dubbing into a different language, with the mouthing following the languages spoken, English, French and German.   Sadly none of the original English prints survived, and again a restoration had to be made.

In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola produced Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Gary Oldman as the Count.   This was the first time a vampire movie impressed  me,  and did so even though it had Keanu Reeves miscast (again?).  Oldman, however, was magnificent,  and the love story shone through the horror.   I also  enjoyed Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) in which Alfie Bass, when confronted by a defensive crucifix, gloats over his hapless victim, telling him in an exaggerated Jewish accent  ‘Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!’

So my favourite vampire movies (and even ten years ago I would not have dreamt of ever writing that phrase!)  include Thirst, by the Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook,  in which a Korean  Catholic priest volunteers to test a cure for a deadly plague (shades of Ebola)  but finds that it infests him with vampirism.   He fiercely resists its effects, but when he infects his girlfriend she relishes her condition, tipping us Teresa Raquin  country - a very bloody landscape.  I think that Neil Jordan’s  Byzantium is so much better than his Interview with a Vampire.   Byzantium  stars Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as mother and daughter, two women caught in time.   This was adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini from her own stage play.   As she also scripted Tamara Drew I wonder if she always had Gemma Arteron in mind?   It is similar to the Swedish Let the Right One In as it explores the devastating consequences of becoming a vampire, dependant on human blood, unable to love ‘normal’ human beings, in fact excluded from ‘normal’ society- and its troublesome bureaucracy -  without the prospect of death to give meaning to life, and having to keep the same company for centuries.

But I also love Irma Vep, (remember, I said I would get back to it), starring the wonderful Maggie Cheung, playing herself, recruited from Hong Kong by a French film maker who is obsessed with her to play a latex clad cat burglar in his remake of the French silent classic Les Vampires.   It was written and directed by Olivier Assayas, who was himself obsessed with Maggie Chueng - who he had never met - and wrote the film for her, even though she spoke no French, and he no English.  After the movie they  lived together for some years, the fulfilment of his (and admittedly my) fantasy.   Maggie, as Maggie, as a stranger in a strange land, trying to work out what the hell is going on, is wonderful and amazingly the film works.  And Irma Vep is of course an anagram of...

And so we come to  Jim Jarmusch’s vampire movie “Only Lovers Left Alive”.   Being a Jarmusch production it is of course different to other  people’s vampire movies.    Surely someone else must have asked Tilda Swinton to play a vampire before, but maybe their script was not as good as this, by Jarmusch, or the director so attractive to the taste of this elegant actor.   She was  the (almost unrecognizable) ‘trailer-trash’  girl Penny in Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.  Here she plays opposite Tom Hiddleston, as wife and husband, married for a (very) long time.   They are called Eve and Adam, but they are not quite that old, and Eve is much older than Adam. Maybe because they are so comfortable with each other they do not need to live together, each offering the  other the freedom to find their own best place to live, in her case Tangier, in his Detroit.   She collects rare books – some of which must have become very rare since she first found them centuries ago, and he collects and plays musical instruments ancient and modern.    Eve oldest and best friend  is Kit Marlow, and Jarmusch enjoys a few 6^th form jokes about the Marlow/Shakespeare connection.    A more interesting aspect concerns their need for good quality blood,  hard to find in the polluted and disease ridden world.    But the plot is unimportant.  This is a cinematic poem, and what matters is the tone,  one of elegant,  poised beauty, reflecting the isolation and loneliness that being surrounded by short lived humans engenders.    Adam calls them (us)  zombies.   As far as Eve and Adam are concerned  their kind are the only ones (the only lovers) truly alive.    The  production design and music are immaculate, as elegant and beautiful as the leads, whose performances  are effortless.   The scripts occasional indulgences are forgivable.    Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright and Anton Yelchin’s supporting roles are all in tune with this fugue.  The cinema-photographer was Yorisk Le Saux,  who shot Tilda’s 2009 film  I am Love so immaculately.    The editing was in the  hands of  Affonso Goncalves (Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter’s Bone, two of my favourite films) and the Art Direction by Anja Fromm, who also worked on The Reader and A Dangerous Method.     Jarmusch  is responsible for the atmospheric music.

So this is not your normal vampire movie.  The closest to it might be Tony Scott’s 1983 The Hunger,  with Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and  Susan Sarandon,  but this is really a far remove from any Tony Scott movie, thank goodness.    It is as Jarmusch as you can get, and if that pleases you, so be it.  It certainly pleased me, and gives me a high point to end my little review of this rejuvenated genre, an injection of fresh blood, dry humour,  elegant insouciance and fine actors quietly enjoying themselves and pleasuring their audience. 

I will consider the important sexual politics of the genre in a later article , but at least you may find something in the above to while away an evening  - or a vampire  weekend.