Undead And Well And Living In The USA

The One Nation’s Nige Burton looks at America’s fascination with the vampire

“I am Dracula. I bid you welcome!”

When Bela Lugosi uttered these immortal words in Tod Browning’s 1931 production of Dracula for Universal Pictures, the American public began its lifelong love affair with the Hollywood vampire.

Born Bela Blasko in Lugos, Hungary, the actor was already fifty when he became an unlikely heartthrob. His curious cadence and laconic lilt were nothing to do with acting – Lugosi could not speak a word of English, and all his lines were learned phonetically.

Despite achieving iconic status over the last seventy-odd years and placing its star on a pedestal as the archetypal Count Dracula, the film does not actually stand too close a scrutiny these days, either technically or as a piece of artistic cinema. Browning’s direction was slow and staged, and the performances – even Lugosi’s – are not that strong. But a legend was born none-the-less, and its success spawned a whole franchise for Universal, with spin-offs, sequels and a plethora of monstrous stablemates, although Lugosi only actually ever played the character on film once more in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948.

The star’s most famous role was also his curse, and after years of excruciating career capitulation leading to several bouts of drug rehabilitation, he died on 16th August 1956 whilst filming the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space for B-movie director and friend, Edward D Wood Jnr. He was reputedly buried in his Dracula cape, but his demise, though tragically pathetic, was not as obsessive as Hollywood propaganda would have it; he was a weary, old, drug addict who was broke, nothing more or less.

By the time of Lugosi’s death, the monster fun was over, and California’s studio backlots were turned into alien worlds as the industry’s fascination with science fiction ran into overdrive. It took British firm Hammer to revive the genre with their remake of Dracula in 1958, following on from the success of The Curse of Frankenstein a year earlier, which had catapulted Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing to stardom. But like the vampire, the film had trouble crossing running water, and for copyright reasons was released in the US as Horror of Dracula. Again, several sequels were to follow right through to the mid-seventies, at which point the world seemed to have become disenchanted with the undead, probably largely due to the decline in quality offerings. Hammer tried to keep the impetus afloat by bringing the character up to date with Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but Lee was given less and less to do, and gothic vampires in swinging London weren’t exactly a recipe for success. The Count returned to his coffin for the final time in 1973 taking the company with him. The party was over.

A few sparkling examples like The Lost Boys emerged in the eighties, but it took Joss Whedon’s iconic Buffy The Vampire Slayer to reinvent the genre in 1997, making blood sucking cool again to a whole new generation.

The phenomenon ran for seven successful seasons, spinning off into five companion seasons of Angel, with huge story arcs intertwining inextricably throughout the seven year journey. The momentum gathered from its humble beginnings could never have been imagined, let alone the effect Buffy had on both pop culture and lifestyle; it has even been studied at graduate level throughout the world. The fact is, Buffy mattered.

It struck a chord with a whole generation struggling to cope with all the complications of modern teenage life; the monsters may have been pure Hollywood, but the issues they represented very real. Kids the world over were found to be meeting their problems with the question what would Buffy do?

The fascination continues with such offerings as 30 Days Of Night and, more recently, Twilight which casts its vampires as soulful heroes Buffy style. The film treatment of Stephenie Meyer’s hugely popular novel has spawned yet another franchise, and filming for a sequel is already underway with its English star, Robert Pattinson.

So it seems the affair is back on, and the stakes are higher than ever. Vampires are big business both here and across the Atlantic – even Granada’s new blockbuster series Demons had Philip Glenister play hero Rupert Galvin (not a million miles away from Buffy’s Rupert Giles) with an American accent to make marketing the series to the States a little more palatable.

As we lap up this blood-sucking fest with abandon though, it might be worth remembering the word of advice afforded to London and Broadway theatregoers by Lugosi in his successful stage appearances as the lord of the undead himself – “when you go home tonight, don’t forget to check the wardrobe, and under the bed… after all, there are such things!”

Words Nigel Burton

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