The Vampire Lecture
So, if you read the last post, you know that there will probably be two more tonight. The first is this one, on the History of Vampires in Film & Television lecture that I went to on Friday. Later still, probably aproaching midnight, while I'm filling time waiting for NaNoWriMo to start, I'll also get a post up that deals with politics and the midterm elections, including my somewhat unusual silence on all things political lately, and on some recent religious discussion or, why I would be going to a different church if it were my decision entirely to make. Okay, so some of the recent religious discussion involved the NaNoWriMo forums where I really shouldn't let myself be drawn into arguments that don't concern me.
So, on to the lecture.
Even though, it was ostensibly about vampires on screen, he opened up with a little background on both Vlad the Impaler, and the very early literature. In particular, he said that the modern vampire came out of the same get-together that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Byron was there, and wrote a fairly detailed plan for a novel that he just called The Vampire. He didn't write it, instead going back to his poetry, but Dr. John Polidori found the notes, and wrote his own The Vampire from them. There was quite the fight over that story, but it's clearly Byron's aesthetic that created it. In many ways, the vampire became a personification of Byron's fascination with "the exotic other."
He says from that moment 3 elements defined vampires and it is only very recently that any of them have changed. First, Vampires about the exotic other. They are outsiders, appealing for their exoticness, but not like us. Second, Vampirism is really about sex, something that was almost inevitable with Byron driving the vision. And third, the exotic other is always plunged into a metropolitan center like the ones we live in.
This set-up that was created in The Vampire, was perpetuated in a lot of pulp fiction serial novels (most notably Varney the Vampire, which I was the only person at the lecture who had ever read) and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla
By the time, Dracula came along, the template was well-ensconced, but Dracula was probably the finest execution of that template.
So, there are three things that all vampires from the 1880s until the 1980s have in common, and two that continue to be held in common after that. Even so, the vampire is an enormously flexible vehicle that has been used to reflect the times. That is the central premise of the lecture.
1920s - The first of the vampires on film, or at least the first major vampire film, was 1927s Nosferatu. It was almost immediately suppressed, because of copyright issues (it was essentially Dracula with the names changed, which guess what, didn't actually make it legal), but it's considered to be the first great vampire film. It was one of many great early horror films that came out of the latter period of Weimar Germany. In it you can see some recurring themes like psychic dreams and sleepwalking, that speak a great deal to the culture they were coming from. This was a country crippled by debt and loss of income after WWI that was only just beginnig to find it's footing. You can also see the dark beginnings of the anti-semitism that allowed Hitler to rise to power a few short years later. There's a lot of rat imagery in the film, which was explicitly meant to reference the plague, and Jews, which had already been referred to as the German plague. That type of imagery was pervasive in the horror of Weimar Germany, but it never so crystallized in the form of a single, evil character, as it had done in Nosferatu.
1930s - The depression brought the horror film to America. Universal Studios in particular started releasing a steady stream of horror films. One of the most well known is 1931s Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. The switch in central theme was pretty clear, even though the main story was the same as the earlier Nosferatu. The city itself, London, became a kind of character, and it was treated as a dark, dangerous, and pervasively violent place. The sexuality was also ramped up as far as 1930s standards would allow, and in places obscured just enough that it could be filmed, but not so much that the common man didn't know what had really just happened. Our heroes are often incredibly naive, innocent even, and Dracula himself is seductive, luring them into wrong action.
The 1940s are a pretty dead spot for horror in American cinema, and as such, there were no real new vampires to rise out of that decade.
1950s - The 50's brought an even more highly sexualized vampire, first in the form of Christopher Lee's Horror of Dracula (a role that he reprised in lots of Hammer Films through the early 70s). The vampires also began to symbolize something different. At the same time as they drew on imagery of Nazi Germany, the dialogue began to shift so that the heroes spoke of the Count much as our leaders were speaking of the Soviet Union. A lot of the symbolism and imagery to come out of this was about the cold war, and what was left over seems to be about juvenile delinquency which was a hot-button issue of the decade. The decadence and irresponsibility of the young led to any number of problems.
1960s - Now the vampires become overtly sexual, but far less threatening, as sex which used to bring a certain amount of danger to the character in and of itself was no longer as threatening. The best example of 60s vampire films is The Fearless Vampire Killers directed and co-written by Roman Polanski. The vampire is not threatening in the least, but the scenes are overtly sexual, as he watches and then attacks Sharon Tate's character while she's in the bath.
1970s - This is the last decade in which the classic vampire completely holds, the shift will begin in the 80s and be pretty well solidified by the 90s. A lot of stuff went on in the 70s, that led to a lot of different kinds of vampire movies being made. Andy Warhol's Dracula used the same old story, but really brought out the idea that Dracula required virgin blood. It's a story of the aristocracy seducing the upwardly mobile bourgeois family. The girl who will become his food is the last virgin in her family, but she's saved when a lower class, common laborer, relieves her of her virginity. Despite the utter ridiculousness of the film (complete with hokey accents where the count calls her a wirgin, and the Transylvanian gardener appears to be from the Bronx, which makes an awful lot of sense), it manages to say a lot about class conflict.
Blacula, while a fairly terrible movie, was largely about the rising tide of black nationalism in America, particularly the more articulate among them.
And Vampire Lovers not only brings back the lesbian vampire, first encountered in Le Fanu's Carmilla, but highlights the idea of decadent, worldly women luring innocent young women into extraordinarily wicked ways. It's in some ways a cautionary tale against sexual deviancy.
1980s - Here's where we first start to get an inkling of the shift in the rules. The third key ingredient to a vampire story from earlier was that the exotic other gets dropped into a metropolitan center. Beginning in this decade, they become instead a subcultural force from within the metropolis. The threat is no longer exclusively from those exotic people out there, but from people within our culture. You could make a pretty decent claim that this actually started in the 70s (Blacula was clearly referencing American black nationalism, even though the character was from Africa, and while Carmilla was a stranger in the Vampire Lovers, she wasn't overtly foreign).
He talked about two films from the 80s. First, 1983's The Hunger, starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and an extraordinarily young Susan Sarandon. Again, the vampires are explicitly sexual in nature. Both Bowie and Deneuve are foreign, but their exoticism is mostly from the fact that they are a high fashion, rich couple in the club scene, rather than from their country of origin. Vampirism is a disease carried on the blood, and the vampires hang out in alternative style clubs where sexual exploration is easy to come by. It seems almost obvious to viewers from today that the story is really about AIDS, but 1983 is about 2 years too early for AIDS to really be a part of the public consciousness. Still there was already a certain fear rising out of the sexual freedom/promiscuity of the earlier two decades. Other STDs were big news, so while our modern filter makes it be about AIDS it was probably about a larger cultural fear of sexuality and the club scene.
The second film he referenced was The Lost Boys. He had two basic comments, and I pretty much agree with both. He said the biggest message of the film is, "Just Say No, to Blood." It came out at the height of Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign, and vampirism was an easy stand-in for drugs, especially given the motorcycle gang styling of Kiefer Sutherland and his family. There was also an undercurrent of the dangers of teenage sexuality, while still a little too early for it to be AIDS related, teen pregnancy was already big news, and STDs were widespread. At the same time, the ending acted to relieve all of the youth (even Kiefer) of their responsibility for the things that happened. It turns out of course, that they were all controlled by the dangerous, but innocuous looking, older man. A convenient stand in for pedophiles, perhaps.
1990s - The shift to Vampires as subcultural other from exotic other is almost entirely complete by the early 90s. Coppola's Dracula is one of the few films that still adheres pretty strictly to the old formula. It does bring up some interesting cultural points. Coppola really played with the way technology was changing the world, using new technologies to compare with the new technologies that were changing the world in the early 90s, most notably the spread of the internet.
Interview with a Vampire, fully embraced the idea of vampires as an ever-present subculture. It also brought about some important and relatively new concepts in vampire fiction. First, and now the most pervasive, was the idea of the chaste vampire (or at least one who tried to be), the vampire who hates what he has to do to survive, and rebels against it. Louis, was of course, just the first in a long string of them. The second is the vampire as sympathetic character. I would argue that in literature at least, Carmilla was sympathetic, and there are readings of Dracula that show him to be a rather sympathetic figure as well, but that's a different debate I guess. The third is that of vampires as pack creatures, always in groups, rather than solitary, and territorial. They protect their space from other vampires, other supernatural creatures, and humans.
It was argued, and the professor did concede that at the very least two of these themes were on screen two years earlier when the Canadian production, Forever Knight debuted. I would agree.
Either way for both, and all of the movies like them, the other was much less defined, probably in an effort to make these new, sympathetic vampires appeal to everyone who felt like they were other within their communities, good people often labeled as deviant or evil because of the subculture (or their sexual orientation independent of subculture) that they were a part of.
He next referenced Buffy the vampire slayer both the flim and the movie. Of course the concerns have been neatly laid out by Joss Whedon. The story is a metaphor for high school, and later for young adulthood. He mentioned that he could probably do a whole class on Buffy, and I suspect that's very possible.
Finally, for the 90s he looked at John Carpenter's Vampires, which while a horrible movie, also saw the vampire as a stand-in for illegal immigrants and the border conflict that was already starting to become big news (I would argue that it was done better by The Forsaken, which while also a fairly terrible movie, at least dealt with the theme in a more serious way. But it's 2001 so it messes with his neat decade delineation. Of course part of this could just be that I hate that movie more than almost any other I've ever watched. I could go into the reasons, but that just becomes a bitch-fest that is almost entirely unimportant).
For the 2000s he lists Queen of the Damned, Moonlight (tv), and 30 Days of Night as essentially following this same 90s pattern. But then he identifies a new wave of vampires which start in the late 2000s and move on into the 2010s. He said that the challenge is basically to figure out what from society is being reflected back at us in this new wave. He didn't give us any clues, just told us to go and figure it out for ourselves.
True Blood - he did mention that the opening scene of the series has a clear Fred Phelps reference. I haven't watched any of it yet, so I can't comment.
Being Human & Demons are both BBC productions that I haven't watched, but would really like to based on the description. Being Human is apparently the story of a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf who are roommates. Demons is the decendants of Van Helsing, carrying on his work.
Twilight - This will probably give me a good excuse to watch the movie, though I've already pulled a few things out from my vaguely remembered thoughts on the book. I definitely remember that I thought it hinted at themes that were never fully explored, but which could be interesting in the hands of a competent writer. I suspect that is even more true of the later books and films.
And finally, The Gates - which he described as Vampires meet Desperate Housewives, which was pretty much exactly my thoughts when I saw the preview. I'll have to see if I can dig the episodes so far up.
So, on to the lecture.
Even though, it was ostensibly about vampires on screen, he opened up with a little background on both Vlad the Impaler, and the very early literature. In particular, he said that the modern vampire came out of the same get-together that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Byron was there, and wrote a fairly detailed plan for a novel that he just called The Vampire. He didn't write it, instead going back to his poetry, but Dr. John Polidori found the notes, and wrote his own The Vampire from them. There was quite the fight over that story, but it's clearly Byron's aesthetic that created it. In many ways, the vampire became a personification of Byron's fascination with "the exotic other."
He says from that moment 3 elements defined vampires and it is only very recently that any of them have changed. First, Vampires about the exotic other. They are outsiders, appealing for their exoticness, but not like us. Second, Vampirism is really about sex, something that was almost inevitable with Byron driving the vision. And third, the exotic other is always plunged into a metropolitan center like the ones we live in.
This set-up that was created in The Vampire, was perpetuated in a lot of pulp fiction serial novels (most notably Varney the Vampire, which I was the only person at the lecture who had ever read) and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla
By the time, Dracula came along, the template was well-ensconced, but Dracula was probably the finest execution of that template.
So, there are three things that all vampires from the 1880s until the 1980s have in common, and two that continue to be held in common after that. Even so, the vampire is an enormously flexible vehicle that has been used to reflect the times. That is the central premise of the lecture.
1920s - The first of the vampires on film, or at least the first major vampire film, was 1927s Nosferatu. It was almost immediately suppressed, because of copyright issues (it was essentially Dracula with the names changed, which guess what, didn't actually make it legal), but it's considered to be the first great vampire film. It was one of many great early horror films that came out of the latter period of Weimar Germany. In it you can see some recurring themes like psychic dreams and sleepwalking, that speak a great deal to the culture they were coming from. This was a country crippled by debt and loss of income after WWI that was only just beginnig to find it's footing. You can also see the dark beginnings of the anti-semitism that allowed Hitler to rise to power a few short years later. There's a lot of rat imagery in the film, which was explicitly meant to reference the plague, and Jews, which had already been referred to as the German plague. That type of imagery was pervasive in the horror of Weimar Germany, but it never so crystallized in the form of a single, evil character, as it had done in Nosferatu.
1930s - The depression brought the horror film to America. Universal Studios in particular started releasing a steady stream of horror films. One of the most well known is 1931s Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. The switch in central theme was pretty clear, even though the main story was the same as the earlier Nosferatu. The city itself, London, became a kind of character, and it was treated as a dark, dangerous, and pervasively violent place. The sexuality was also ramped up as far as 1930s standards would allow, and in places obscured just enough that it could be filmed, but not so much that the common man didn't know what had really just happened. Our heroes are often incredibly naive, innocent even, and Dracula himself is seductive, luring them into wrong action.
The 1940s are a pretty dead spot for horror in American cinema, and as such, there were no real new vampires to rise out of that decade.
1950s - The 50's brought an even more highly sexualized vampire, first in the form of Christopher Lee's Horror of Dracula (a role that he reprised in lots of Hammer Films through the early 70s). The vampires also began to symbolize something different. At the same time as they drew on imagery of Nazi Germany, the dialogue began to shift so that the heroes spoke of the Count much as our leaders were speaking of the Soviet Union. A lot of the symbolism and imagery to come out of this was about the cold war, and what was left over seems to be about juvenile delinquency which was a hot-button issue of the decade. The decadence and irresponsibility of the young led to any number of problems.
1960s - Now the vampires become overtly sexual, but far less threatening, as sex which used to bring a certain amount of danger to the character in and of itself was no longer as threatening. The best example of 60s vampire films is The Fearless Vampire Killers directed and co-written by Roman Polanski. The vampire is not threatening in the least, but the scenes are overtly sexual, as he watches and then attacks Sharon Tate's character while she's in the bath.
1970s - This is the last decade in which the classic vampire completely holds, the shift will begin in the 80s and be pretty well solidified by the 90s. A lot of stuff went on in the 70s, that led to a lot of different kinds of vampire movies being made. Andy Warhol's Dracula used the same old story, but really brought out the idea that Dracula required virgin blood. It's a story of the aristocracy seducing the upwardly mobile bourgeois family. The girl who will become his food is the last virgin in her family, but she's saved when a lower class, common laborer, relieves her of her virginity. Despite the utter ridiculousness of the film (complete with hokey accents where the count calls her a wirgin, and the Transylvanian gardener appears to be from the Bronx, which makes an awful lot of sense), it manages to say a lot about class conflict.
Blacula, while a fairly terrible movie, was largely about the rising tide of black nationalism in America, particularly the more articulate among them.
And Vampire Lovers not only brings back the lesbian vampire, first encountered in Le Fanu's Carmilla, but highlights the idea of decadent, worldly women luring innocent young women into extraordinarily wicked ways. It's in some ways a cautionary tale against sexual deviancy.
1980s - Here's where we first start to get an inkling of the shift in the rules. The third key ingredient to a vampire story from earlier was that the exotic other gets dropped into a metropolitan center. Beginning in this decade, they become instead a subcultural force from within the metropolis. The threat is no longer exclusively from those exotic people out there, but from people within our culture. You could make a pretty decent claim that this actually started in the 70s (Blacula was clearly referencing American black nationalism, even though the character was from Africa, and while Carmilla was a stranger in the Vampire Lovers, she wasn't overtly foreign).
He talked about two films from the 80s. First, 1983's The Hunger, starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and an extraordinarily young Susan Sarandon. Again, the vampires are explicitly sexual in nature. Both Bowie and Deneuve are foreign, but their exoticism is mostly from the fact that they are a high fashion, rich couple in the club scene, rather than from their country of origin. Vampirism is a disease carried on the blood, and the vampires hang out in alternative style clubs where sexual exploration is easy to come by. It seems almost obvious to viewers from today that the story is really about AIDS, but 1983 is about 2 years too early for AIDS to really be a part of the public consciousness. Still there was already a certain fear rising out of the sexual freedom/promiscuity of the earlier two decades. Other STDs were big news, so while our modern filter makes it be about AIDS it was probably about a larger cultural fear of sexuality and the club scene.
The second film he referenced was The Lost Boys. He had two basic comments, and I pretty much agree with both. He said the biggest message of the film is, "Just Say No, to Blood." It came out at the height of Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign, and vampirism was an easy stand-in for drugs, especially given the motorcycle gang styling of Kiefer Sutherland and his family. There was also an undercurrent of the dangers of teenage sexuality, while still a little too early for it to be AIDS related, teen pregnancy was already big news, and STDs were widespread. At the same time, the ending acted to relieve all of the youth (even Kiefer) of their responsibility for the things that happened. It turns out of course, that they were all controlled by the dangerous, but innocuous looking, older man. A convenient stand in for pedophiles, perhaps.
1990s - The shift to Vampires as subcultural other from exotic other is almost entirely complete by the early 90s. Coppola's Dracula is one of the few films that still adheres pretty strictly to the old formula. It does bring up some interesting cultural points. Coppola really played with the way technology was changing the world, using new technologies to compare with the new technologies that were changing the world in the early 90s, most notably the spread of the internet.
Interview with a Vampire, fully embraced the idea of vampires as an ever-present subculture. It also brought about some important and relatively new concepts in vampire fiction. First, and now the most pervasive, was the idea of the chaste vampire (or at least one who tried to be), the vampire who hates what he has to do to survive, and rebels against it. Louis, was of course, just the first in a long string of them. The second is the vampire as sympathetic character. I would argue that in literature at least, Carmilla was sympathetic, and there are readings of Dracula that show him to be a rather sympathetic figure as well, but that's a different debate I guess. The third is that of vampires as pack creatures, always in groups, rather than solitary, and territorial. They protect their space from other vampires, other supernatural creatures, and humans.
It was argued, and the professor did concede that at the very least two of these themes were on screen two years earlier when the Canadian production, Forever Knight debuted. I would agree.
Either way for both, and all of the movies like them, the other was much less defined, probably in an effort to make these new, sympathetic vampires appeal to everyone who felt like they were other within their communities, good people often labeled as deviant or evil because of the subculture (or their sexual orientation independent of subculture) that they were a part of.
He next referenced Buffy the vampire slayer both the flim and the movie. Of course the concerns have been neatly laid out by Joss Whedon. The story is a metaphor for high school, and later for young adulthood. He mentioned that he could probably do a whole class on Buffy, and I suspect that's very possible.
Finally, for the 90s he looked at John Carpenter's Vampires, which while a horrible movie, also saw the vampire as a stand-in for illegal immigrants and the border conflict that was already starting to become big news (I would argue that it was done better by The Forsaken, which while also a fairly terrible movie, at least dealt with the theme in a more serious way. But it's 2001 so it messes with his neat decade delineation. Of course part of this could just be that I hate that movie more than almost any other I've ever watched. I could go into the reasons, but that just becomes a bitch-fest that is almost entirely unimportant).
For the 2000s he lists Queen of the Damned, Moonlight (tv), and 30 Days of Night as essentially following this same 90s pattern. But then he identifies a new wave of vampires which start in the late 2000s and move on into the 2010s. He said that the challenge is basically to figure out what from society is being reflected back at us in this new wave. He didn't give us any clues, just told us to go and figure it out for ourselves.
True Blood - he did mention that the opening scene of the series has a clear Fred Phelps reference. I haven't watched any of it yet, so I can't comment.
Being Human & Demons are both BBC productions that I haven't watched, but would really like to based on the description. Being Human is apparently the story of a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf who are roommates. Demons is the decendants of Van Helsing, carrying on his work.
Twilight - This will probably give me a good excuse to watch the movie, though I've already pulled a few things out from my vaguely remembered thoughts on the book. I definitely remember that I thought it hinted at themes that were never fully explored, but which could be interesting in the hands of a competent writer. I suspect that is even more true of the later books and films.
And finally, The Gates - which he described as Vampires meet Desperate Housewives, which was pretty much exactly my thoughts when I saw the preview. I'll have to see if I can dig the episodes so far up.