How Dracula inspired 100 years of sinister, seductive cinema

AD 1922 has been celebrated this year as “Year One of Modernism”, bookended by the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in February and T S Eliot’s The Waste Land in October. Fair enough. What has not been celebrated so much is that Joyce, in his novel, wrote of a “pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss”, with explicit reference to the novel Dracula (1897); and T S Eliot, in his poem, added: “…bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings / And crawled head downward down a blackened wall ” – another explicit nod to Bram Stoker’s masterpiece.

In March 1922, just one month after Ulysses, came the birth of vampire cinema, through one of the most productive acts of piracy in the history of the mass media: the bootleg Berlin-based film Nosferatu, directed by F W Murnau and derived without permission from the same source.

The film attracted attention well beyond Germany – the production company Prana Film spent more on publicity, largely designed by the producer Albin Grau, than on the film itself – and this alerted Stoker’s impecunious 64-year-old widow Florence, who proceeded to sue for $5,000 in compensation: after numerous appeals and complicated delaying tactics in the German courts (1922–25), she had to settle for the destruction of all the prints and negatives. Prana, conveniently, had gone out of business just two months after Nosferatu opened.

There had been “vampire” films before this: over 40 with the V-word in the title between 1896 and 1921, mainly American. But they tended to equate vampires with vamps – usually femmes fatales – or super-criminals, rather than supernatural beings who returned from the dead. The best-known was Hollywood star Theda Bara (an anagram of “Arab Death”) – real name Theodosia Goodman – who was marketed by Fox as “the vampire woman” and photographed for publicity purposes surrounded by skeletons and outsized cobwebs with lots of kohl around her eyes. But she didn’t bite anyone; she wasn’t undead.

One film even featured the word “Dracula” in its title – the Hungarian Drakula Halála / Dracula’s Death (1921, co-written by the future director Michael Curtiz), now lost – but recent research has revealed this to be about a young girl in an “insane asylum” who is being gaslighted by someone who thinks he is Count Dracula. Not a card-carrying vampire at all.

The makers of Nosferatu evidently gambled that by transposing the story of Dracula back to 1838, removing Stoker’s 1897 references to typewriters, blood transfusions, recording devices, Winchester rifles and so on, and substituting pre-industrial mentions of superstition and the occult, plus altering the names of the main characters (Dracula became Graf Orlok, Harker became Hutter, Mina became Ellen) and the locations (Whitby became Wismar, and most of the story now took place in Germany), their piracy might not be noticed.

After all, Dracula was not nearly as well-known as it is today – partly because it had never been made into a film before 1922. And the film added three new elements to vampire lore, courtesy of European folk- and fairy-tales: the idea that vampires are destroyed by exposure to the light of dawn; that they are vulnerable to a “chaste woman” who is prepared to sacrifice herself; and that they bring the plague with them, carried by coffin-rats, when they sweep into a new territory. The plague element must particularly have chimed with audiences who had recently survived the ferocious Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–20.

It still does. The Dracula industry, vampire cinema, and indeed the recognisably modern horror film had all been born. Critic Pauline Kael was to write of “this first important film of the vampire genre”, which “has more spectral atmosphere, more ingenuity and more imaginative ghoulish ghastliness than any of its successors”.

Nosferatu was prophetic in other ways, too. When the film first opened in the Marble Hall of Berlin’s Zoological Society (where else?) on March 4 1922, guests at the preview were requested to dress up in retro Biedermeier costumes – as for a festive “Nosferatu Ball” – matching the historical setting of the film: cosplay starts not with The Rocky Horror Show (musical, 1973–80; film, 1975) but here.

It has been observed that all vampire literature (and cinema) is a footnote to Dracula, just as all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. But Sheridan Le Fanu’s dreamy novella Carmilla (1872) – about the rich and strange lesbian relationship between the languid Styrian Countess Carmilla and 19-year-old Laura, the narrator – has inspired its fair share of cinematic footnotes as well: the first major film version, by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, was Vampyr – filmed between 1930 and 1931 with dialogue added later and recently restored. Watching it is still a trance-like experience, full of memorably chilling imagery.

Prints of Nosferatu, meanwhile, began to resurrect in London and New York, only to be staked, Van Helsing-style, by the forces of law and order. One of them was handed over to Universal – the studio which had legitimately purchased the film rights – in August 1930 “for purposes of destruction”. Dracula, with a Hungarian expatriate actor who had changed his name to Bela Lugosi, started filming a month later. This version transformed the predatory, folkloric vampire of the novel – and of Nosferatu – into a debonair Count in white tie and tails who seemed utterly irresistible to the female characters (and to Renfield, the Harker figure), and, it was hoped, to the paying customers as well. The posters called Dracula “the story of the strangest passion the world has ever known” and “good to the last gasp”. Lugosi rolled his Rs too much (“I am Drrraacoola”), his attempts at line readings seemed to take up much of the film’s running time, his vast Transylvanian castle staircase was infested with armadillos (for some reason) and all the interesting action took place off-screen; but the film created a rich iconography and a performance style that is alive and well nearly a century later. Dracula was a box-office sensation, and launched the whole cycle of Universal horrors.

Hammer Films revisited similar territory in 1957–58, this time in garish colour, with a period Victorian setting, décolletage for the victims, ready-made wooden stakes and Christopher Lee in red contact lenses as an explicitly sexy demon lover – a development which was duly noted by the British Board of Film Censors. “The sex element,” they tutted, “is far too prevalent.” The stage was set for the liberation of the vampire – as an addict, as the last romantic, as the embodiment of adolescent growing pains, as the return of the repressed. By the time of Francis Ford Coppola’s bigger-budget version, the misnamed Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Professor Van Helsing had become the bad guy, a spoilsport.

By then, most cinematic vampires had shed their opera cloaks, hereditary titles and period trappings. They had shape-shifted from blasphemous undead creatures to introspective outcasts (school of Anne Rice) to brooding soulmate – from Bela to Gellar (in television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997–2003), with all manner of reincarnations in between: including the vampire as rock-video bisexual (The Hunger, 1983); as redneck outlaw drifter in the American South-west (Near Dark, 1987); as heavy-metal teenager (The Lost Boys, 1987); as postgraduate student studying the abject (The Addiction, 1995); and as half-human comic-book superhero (Blade, 1998; Van Helsing, 2004; Morbius, 2022). In the abstinent Twilight series, there is even a vegetarian vampire. “Paranormal romance” and “teen vampire fiction” were, in the process, to become lucrative publisher marketing categories: the vampire as consumerist fantasy. Comedy vampires, which have been around at least since The Munsters (1964–66), are strangely touching in the mockumentary about undead roommates in a shabby-genteel mansion, What We Do in the Shadows (2019–).

No longer a furtive, guilty pleasure, the vampire has well and truly entered the cultural bloodstream, and is instantly recognisable worldwide: a myth which has proved flexible enough to accommodate changing audience anxieties – and especially the concerns of identity politics – in modern times. As George Hamilton asks in Love at First Bite (1979): “How would you like to spend a thousand years dressed like a head waiter?” It’s a centenary to cherish.

Vampire Cinema: The First One Hundred Years by Christopher Frayling is out on Monday (Reel Art Press, £39.95); Vampyres: A Literary Anthology by Christopher Frayling has been reissued by Thames & Hudson (£14.99)