Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ With a Problem Posed Often This Time of Year)

Stanley Hudson [played by Leslie David Baker]: “How many freakin' vampires am I supposed to care about these days?”—The Office, Season 7, Episode 6, “Costume Contest,” original air date Oct. 28, 2010, teleplay by Justin Spitzer, directed by Dean Holland

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Love at First Bite,’ With Dracula’s Big Come-On Uncharacteristically Rebuffed)

(Count Dracula, having been seized by love at first sight for flaky blond supermodel Cindy Sondheim—whom he believes is the current reincarnation of Mina Harker—sits down at her table to make his best case.)

Count Dracula [played by George Hamilton]: “I love you, and can give you eternal life.”

Cindy Sondheim [played by Susan Saint James]: “Shit! I knew it! An insurance salesman. I’ve already got Prudential.”

Dracula [haughtily]: “I am Count Dracula. I don’t sell life insurance!”

Cindy: “Well, don’t get so hostile! You walk over here and start to tell me you love me. How can you possibly love me? You don’t even know me. Maybe the only thing you know is that I don’t want to get married.”— Love at First Bite (1979), screenplay by Robert Kaufman, directed by Stan Dragoti

Dragoti knew about blond supermodels all too well: he was married, in the Seventies, to perhaps the biggest one of the time: Cheryl Tiegs.

Halloween Horror Appreciation: ‘I Am Legend,’ by Richard Matheson

I Am Legend was, of course, not the first vampire novel, nor even the first popular entertainment revolving around those other undead creatures, the zombies.

But the publication of the novel by Richard Matheson in 1954 catalyzed fears of an apocalypse gathering force in that early nuclear period. It told readers they were right to be afraid, because monsters were right outside their door. 

The premise of I Am Legend is fiendishly clever: the last man on Earth holding out against vampiredom. But the source of the horror is not a Dracula-like single powerful figure, but a horde of them, as much victims themselves as victimizers. Bacteria spread in the fallout of a cataclysmic war has led to a plague, and, consequently, a need for blood. 

It’s possible, then, to read this as a dystopian horror tale, as if George Orwell had written a horror tale. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith, Matheson’s Robert Neville becomes a rebel against the established order; and, feeling terribly alone, he latches onto someone who is seemingly like himself, a secret sharer—as Smith did to Julia and O’Brien in 1984. 

Even while it brought apocalyptic themes to vampire fiction, Matheson’s creatures bear more than a little resemblance to the zombies that populate George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead as well as the current TV series The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. He is, then, a huge part of the American cultural landscape, even if many viewers are unfamiliar with his name.

Though set in the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly 20 to 25 years after its composition, the novel alludes to the by-now-distant American past. One of the avenues named here is “Cimarron Street,” as if Southern California is reverting to its Wild West origins—one that is, literally in this case, survival of the fittest.

Matheson masterfully sets the scene in the first half of the book, revealing Neville’s all-too-necessary self-sufficiency (he makes stakes and boards up his house every night, but must take extra care with his teeth, as there are no more dentists) and loneliness (he not only mourns the death of his wife and daughter, but has taken to drink to blot out the memory of killing his wife to keep her from turning into one of the undead). Likewise, Matheson sympathetically depicts Neville’s attempt to befriend and save a stray dog. 

However, the novel weakens when Neville encounters a female for the first time in three years. I suppose that loneliness and the physical need for a woman are enough to make him put aside his normal suspicions, but a reader can guess where this is leading in no time. (I found it in interesting that this woman, Ruth, bears the same name as Matheson’s wife!) 

Moreover, Neville’s attempt to explain the scientific sources of the horror besieging him inevitably slow down the narrative, even as it thrusts horror fiction in a new direction.

Still, Matheson’s style is lean and athletic without being schlocky, and he thinks through how the quotidian nature of human life is thoroughly upended by these apocalyptic events. And in Neville, he has created an all-too-human character—not a superhero, nor even a scientist, but an ordinary man afflicted with anguish and remorse even as he comes face to face with the existential nature of the horror that confronts him daily (“How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough”).

One of the novel’s late, indelible scenes finds Neville in a library, alone, reading up on the biological disaster that gave rise to the howling beasts who constantly scream for his blood. Matheson pays tribute here to literature, the ultimate—and precarious—zenith of civilization: 

“He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.”

Few greater tributes to his work were offered than by Stephen King, who cited him as the great influence on his own work. That tip of the hat is especially noteworthy when one considers that Matheson (who died in 2013) was part of a celebrated group of midcentury fiction and screenwriters who made a wide impact on horror and science fiction, including Robert Bloch (Psycho), Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison.

It was a golden age made possible by two divergent but welcoming media—pulp magazines and network TV—and Matheson made his mark with sharp-eyed observations on the sterility of midcentury American culture and the fragility of human life in the atomic age, through teleplays for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Night Stalker, and Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie thriller, Duel, as well as short stories such as “The Creeping Terror,” a biting satire on the spread of the culture of his state, California, around the country. 

Originally, I bought I Am Legend over a decade ago, in anticipation of the Will Smith adaptation about to be released. Partly because of poor reviews, I never got around to seeing the movie, nor the prior version of the novel, The Last Man on Earth, released in 1971. 

Perhaps it’s just as well: for all his own skill in writing for the large and small screen, Matheson allowed readers like me, through the magic of his own words rather than images, to create horror in their own imaginations.

This Day in Film History (Cult Horror Fave ‘The Hunger’ Opens)

Apr. 29, 1983—The Hunger may not have drawn blood at the box office—or even garnered much critical appreciation—upon its release in U.S. theaters. But the erotic horror movie opened a vein for Hollywood to tap into the emerging energies of two transatlantic cultural forces: New York’s downtown scene and London’s advertising directors.

Over time, the film became a special cult favorite for two different audiences: those transfixed by its scenes of the “goth” club life, and a gay/lesbian community that  welcomed one of the first –and certainly one of the most explicit—depictions by a major Hollywood studio of a same-sex love scene, in this case involving Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

The film was based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, but you would never know it originated from this source material just by looking at what was onscreen. (Thirty years later, Sarandon had no idea the movie was based on a novel, let alone that the latter spawned two sequels in the early 2000s.) Its characters are largely ciphers, and the plot—an 6,000-year-old (give or take a few years) Egyptian vampire having to replace her rapidly aging 300-year-old mate—is reed-thin.

Forget about selling such a story to an audience. How do you even interest studio execs in giving it the green light? Hollywood is addicted to “The Pitch,” a one-minute-tops description of a plot that can take the form of a formula (“fish out of water,” such as Beverly Hills Cop) or an improbable mash-up (going further back for inspiration, “Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman”).

I suspect that the pitch that might have worked for producer Richard Shepherd was “MTV vampire movie.” The same phrase could also apply to Grace Jones’ Vamp, or The Lost Boys, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jamie Gertz. But The Hunger got there first, so it deserves the credit—such as it is—for the style.

Such movies depend less on plot and character than on atmosphere. In the case of The Hunger, it struck me as similar to MTV (still only two years old at the time) because its director, Tony Scott, was part of a generation of British filmmakers who got their start making videos and commercials. (Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and brothers Ridley and Tony Scott made a big splash in Hollywood in the 1980s with work that set a premium on rapid cutting and moody music that often substituted for dialogue.)

Tony Scott (tapped to direct after Parker turned down the assignment) was certainly fascinated by the musical element. After discovering the group Bauhaus in a London nightclub, he ended up using their song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in the opening credits of The Hunger. 

Even Scott’s casting was designed to appeal to viewers with avant-garde musical tastes. Ann Magnuson, a performance artist and nightclub proprietor, ended up playing a victim of the male vampire John. And John himself, the cellist mate of Miriam Blaylock, was played by David Bowie. 

Even Bowie, an artist as captivated by image as by sound, wondered about Scott’s preoccupation with the visual, which the rock ‘n’ roller felt was “nearly all of what he [Scott] was doing. He did not have great ideas about the through-line of the story. It was about moving one interesting visual against another.”

In one sense, Scott, in his rookie effort, was a throwback to another filmmaker of the Thirties. Let’s see: an émigré director with a fixation on light and frank lack of interest in narrative coherence, with cinema centered on a cool continental “Blonde Venus” with as much appeal to women and men—is that Scott with Deneuve, or Josef von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich?

Starting with the two novels often considered central to the vampire fiction, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the genre has featured a strong undercurrent of the sexual. The Hunger amplified that theme, not only through the greater freedom that filmmakers were increasingly enjoying in depicting sex and violence but also by appearing in a time when the notion of contaminated blood could not only be viewed as symbolizing transgressive intercourse but as actual fact.

Dracula was published in 1897, at a time when medicine had still devised no effective means of fighting syphilis. In 1981, the first headlines had started to appear discussing a deadly new disease mysteriously striking the gay community, and two months after the release of The Hunger, nearly 1,300 AIDS cases had been identified in New York alone, with 483 deaths. 

One Canadian academic, American studies specialist Priscilla L. Walton, in Our Cannibals, Ourselves, sees The Hunger as “one of the first post-AIDS movies.” That identification grows stronger when thinking about the milieu of the early scenes of the movie: the kind of underground nightclub where drugs and unprotected sex flourished and destroyed lives. 

Indeed, Sarandon’s character, Dr. Sarah Roberts, is a gerentologist whose ground-breaking scientific research involves monkeys and blood work. When Deneuve’s Miriam decides that the good doctor would make an ideal mate to replace Bowie’s John, the icily beautiful piano-playing blonde in the mansion effects a transfusion of blood in which Roberts, instead of curing the mysterious disease she’s investigating, finds herself experiencing similar: loss of appetite, dizziness, vomiting, and loss of color. 

Critics greeted The Hunger as coldly as the touch of Miriam’s hands. Roger Ebert, for instance, assigning it only a star and a half, called it “an agonizingly bad vampire movie.” Yet, in the very next clause, he pinpointed why its fans would embrace it, referring to its “exquisitely effective sex scene.”

Same-sex erotic scenes, in which the partners were unapologetic about their orientation, were rare at this time in Hollywood, and even in genre films. (The Vampire Lovers, an adaptation of Carmilla, had been released in 1970, but that came from Hammer Film Productions, a British studio that specialized in shock and schlock.) So, when a mainstream studio like MGM released a film with this content—and did so not with unknown actresses, but the likes of Deneuve and Sarandon—it marked a departure in how the LGBT community was depicted onscreen.

Scott would survive his critical roasting and go on to make one of the greatest—and, in its way, deeply emblematic—hits of the 1980s: Top Gun. His path to sleek, sexy, stylish cinema began, if inauspiciously, with The Hunger.

Quote of the Day (Rutina Wesley of ‘True Blood,’ on Turning Into a Vampire)

“When I was turned into a vampire [as character Tara], Anna [Paquin] couldn’t keep a straight face. When she saw my fangs, she burst out laughing. I was like, ‘Stop it! You got to be serious! I’m coming out of the grave!’”—Rutina Wesley of True Blood, quoted in “Party Lines,” New York Magazine, June 30-July 13, 2014

Bonus Quote of the Day (Eula Biss, on How Vampires Reflect ‘Our Terrible Appetites and Our Agonized Restraint’)

“Our vampires, whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we feed off of each other, that we need each other to live. Our vampires reflect both our terrible appetites and our agonized restraint. When our vampires struggle with their need for blood, they give us a way of thinking about what we ask of each other in order to live.” —Eula Biss, “Vampires and Vaccines: Giving (and Losing) Blood in the Age of Fear,” The Believer Magazine, One Hundred-Tenth Issue: Roguelike (September 2014)