Since its 1922 debut, F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” has remained the prototype for all notable vampire thrillers that aspire to be taken seriously as imaginative inducements to apprehension.
In pursuit of this aim, the figure of the vampire Nosferatu (purloined from Bram Stoker’s Dracula without respect for copyright) was not comely or disarming in the slightest. As embodied by Max Schreck, he was a wraith, at once skeletal and spidery. Emphatically repulsive, he possessed a silhouette that justified a shriek. His approach intensified the threat.
Bela Lugosi brought a full-bodied, lord-of-the-manor presence and a supremely funny, possibly Transylvanian accent to the characterization in 1931 when Universal began making horror melodramas a house specialty, entrusting “Dracula” to director Tod Browning and “Frankenstein” to James Whale. A year later, the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, working in France outside the conventional studio system, attempted a methodically nightmarish but ethereal variation on vampire lore that went by several titles while being released in German, French and English editions. A commercial failure, it never threatened the Browning-Lugosi “Dracula,” but ultimately achieved art-film esteem as “Vampyr.”
Dreyer’s flair for clever and haunting images — a gnarly rustic holding a huge scythe as he rings the bell to summon a ferry, the reflection of a walking figure on the surface of a river that has no human source walking along the riverbank, a reverse-motion silhouette of a gravedigger catching loads of dirt in his shovel rather than hurling them — remains inventively arresting. Other pictorial flourishes — a denouement that buries a vampire’s henchman under an avalanche of milled flour and a dream sequence in which a corpse appears to apprehend his own burial ceremony through a small window in the coffin — have influenced movies as recent as “Witness” and “The Vanishing.”
“Vampyr” deployed a stoutish elderly figure played by Henriette Gerard as its elusive vampire, called Marguerite Chopin, but never distinctly male or female. The mark left on a victim called Leone was more impressive, since Sybille Schmitz delivered an electrifying close-up sequence as this afflicted soul: She awakes, laments herself as one of the damned and then turns lewdly sinister before your eyes.
In various ways the three pioneering sources — “Nosferatu,” “Dracula” and “Vampyr” — seem to keep echoing down the decades. Thirty years ago, there was a curious convergence of variations on the Stoker-Lugosi traditions: the instantly popular spoof “Love at First Bite,” starring George Hamilton as a Dracula in modern day New York, and the flamboyant romantic thriller “Dracula,” which recruited Frank Langella to adapt his successful Broadway performance to the movies. Back in period, this Dracula haunted dark and fog-shrouded locations in Cornwall while seducing Kate Nelligan, whose susceptible Lucy Seward was clearly beyond salvation.
“Love at First Bite” got the jump at the box office. It opened in April of 1979 and may have set a tone that found “Dracula,” directed by John Badham from a screenplay by W.D. Richter, at a relative disadvantage three months later. However, there was plenty to be said for both Mr. Hamilton as a blithely facetious menace and Mr. Langella as an elegantly smoldering and ruthless one. They illustrated complementary approaches to the tradition that favors a Dracula women can’t resist. Surrender is not only inevitable but customarily overnight.
The farcical merits of “First Bite” were self-evident. What might not have been quite as apparent to a mass public was the high-comedy finesse of “Dracula,” whose droll and streamlined scenario was masked by opulently ominous settings and an enraptured romantic atmosphere. It was a whirlwind exercise, abetted from the outset by an adroitly surging and swirling John Williams score that remains one of his most indispensable beyond the Steven Spielberg-George Lucas orbit.
The key thematic exchange occurs early, when Miss Nelligan remarks, “I love to be frightened” and Frank Langella responds, “Do you?” The remainder of the movie is contrived to confirm the heroine as a painfully desirable hostage to vampire lust, a goner whose estrangement from the human sphere becomes genuinely lacerating.
Well, maybe not for the sort of fantasists who envision being Dracula’s favorite bride as a supremely thrilling destiny. The pornographic undercurrent in vampire fiction might have been exploited even more dreamily for this demographic in “The Hunger” a few years later, when Catherine Deneuve updated Dracula as a deluxe lesbian entrapping Susan Sarandon.
Nevertheless, John Badham and his colleagues straddled the perverse and the forlorn with considerable wit and dash while trying to rejuvenate Bram Stoker’s Victorian monster.
The novel approach at this juncture would be to retrieve the unmitigated stalking fiend introduced in “Nosferatu.” It might be bold to eliminate the deceptively attractive and mesmerizing bloodsuckers, now so familiar they lend themselves to therapeutic treatment — or, if not that, a tender and trusting solicitude. In this day and age, it would be a shock to encounter a movie vampire who didn’t enjoy the benefit of snobbish favoritism. Credulity and envy overshadow alarm and dread.
TITLE: “Vampyr”
RATING: No MPAA rating (released in 1932, decades before the advent of the film rating system; systematic ominous elements)
CREDITS: Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Screenplay by Christen Jul and Mr. Dreyer, based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla.” Photography by Rudolph Mate and Louis Nee. Art direction by Hermann Warm and Cesare Silvani. Music by Wolfgang Zeller. In German with English subtitles.
RUNNING TIME: 73 minutes, plus supplementary material
DVD EDITION: Criterion Collection
WEB SITE: www.criterionco.com
TITLE: “Dracula”
RATING: R (Sustained ominous and erotic elements; occasional graphic violence)
CREDITS: Directed by John Badham. Screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the Bram Stoker novel and the 1924 theatrical adaptation by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane. Cinematography by Gilbert Taylor. Production design by Peter Murton. Costume design by Julie Harris. Matte paintings by Albert Whitlock. Mechanical effects by Roy Arbogast. Visual consultant: Maurice Binder. Music by John Williams.
RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes, plus a commentary track with Mr. Badham
DVD EDITION: Universal Studios Home Video
WEB SITE: www.home video.universalstudios.com
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