Vampire Forensics (4 page)

Dracula is even portrayed as a kind of infernal god. The demented Renfield, an inmate at the asylum who seeks eternal life by eating flies and spiders—“for the blood is the life,” as the Old Testament puts it—can sense when “the Master is at hand,” always referring to him (at least on the page) in the uppercase: “I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful….”

Alarmed by the gathering evil, a dedicated group of men—including Harker, the asylum director Dr. Seward, the nobleman Arthur Holmwood, and the American sportsman Quincey Morris—have gathered around Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, the canny Dutch prototype of the vampire slayer. Their mission is to protect two young ladies—Holmwood’s fiancée, Lucy Westenra, and Harker’s new bride, Mina—from Dracula’s attacks, for the count is that most dangerous figure in Victorian England: the sexual predator.

“Your girls that you all love are mine already,” Dracula gloats. “And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.” The most horrifying part of the novel might be the count’s seduction and consequent killing of Lucy, followed by her return as the “Blooper lady,” a monstrous vampire who preys on children. Holmwood, her ex-fiancé, is forced to drive a stake through her heart on what would have been their wedding night—a scene never overlooked by Freudians.

Dracula then directs his attention to Mina Harker. After one terrifying night when he fed upon her, Mina recalls that he “pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some to the—Oh, my God! My God! What have I done?”

Much has been read into this scene, too; but in the context of the story, the exchange of bodily fluids gives Dracula the power to control Mina’s thoughts and actions. Yet, Mina can read Dracula’s mind in return—a facility she uses to advantage, though it becomes a race to stop Dracula before he can completely subject Mina to his spell.

The hunters have a second mission, too: They must head off a vampire epidemic in London. When he was trapped in the count’s Transylvanian castle, Harker unwittingly helped a monster escape to London; in that city for centuries to come, Harker agonizes, might this fiend “satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless”? Dr. Van Helsing later underscores the point: “But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and souls of those we love best.”

As the race to save Mina and the city gets tighter, the suspense builds—and the story gains even more momentum. Autumn and the vampire hunters simultaneously close in and destroy one by one the coffins Dracula has scattered about the city. The count is forced to abandon London. While he boards the ship that will deliver him and his remaining coffin to a Romanian port, the hunters use the latest technology—trains, telegraphs, even a telephone—to monitor the vampire’s movements.

As the sun sinks on a winter evening outside the gates of Castle Dracula, the hunters finally catch the hunted. A battle ensues with Dracula’s gypsy carriers. With Mina looking on, Jonathan and the mortally wounded Quincey Morris attack the vampire king just as he is about to emerge from his coffin:

The dragon is slain. Mina is restored to health and sanity. The community regroups, the fallen achieve heroic status, and the threat of a vampire epidemic vanishes.

C
HILDREN OF THE
N
IGHT

Dracula, in his second death, had hardly vanished before his dust was fertilizing what would become, over time, a many-branched tree. It is not so much
Dracula
the novel as its progenies—the many stage and screen versions—that have had the greatest impact on the popular conception of the vampire.

Somehow the story is never quite the same, however. It has been dramatized, bowdlerized, and sensationalized, truncated here and expanded there. Characters have been dropped or conflated, while
Dracula
’s female leads have been interchanged with promiscuous abandon.

It all started within a few weeks of the novel’s publication, when Bram Stoker—having written the book, no doubt, with one eye on a possible stage adaptation—gave it a shot himself. Actors from the Lyceum Theatre gave a public reading of Stoker’s redacted play to secure its copyright for the future. But when stage star Henry Irving showed no interest, it was laid aside and never picked back up.

Ironically, the man who did more than anyone else to bring
Dracula
to the world had grown up just a few doors away from Stoker’s childhood home. Hamilton Deane was a stagestruck youth who had joined Henry Irving’s company in 1899, when he was only 19 years old. By his early 20s, Deane was brimming with ideas for bringing
Dracula
to the boards. It would take him nearly two decades to achieve his goal.

In 1922, German film director Friedrich Murnau made a film loosely based on
Dracula.
He called it
Nosferatu
(an old, folkloric name for the vampire), changed the main character to Count Orlock, shifted the location to Bremen, and brought in a chilling cast of rats to carry bubonic plague into the city.

Bram Stoker had died in 1912, but when his widow, Florence, got wind of Murnau’s changes, she tried to shut the production down. Royalties from
Dracula
were her main income, and she found the German film a thinly disguised pirating of the novel. So she sued.

After spending the better part of a decade embroiled in legal wrangles, Florence came close to having the negative and all prints of the film destroyed. Much like its protagonist, however,
Nosferatu
proved exceedingly difficult to kill. One print of the film escaped destruction—much to the benefit of cinematic history, for
Nosferatu
ranks among the finest vampire films ever made: Max Shreck’s creepy, cadaverous Orlock—all teeth and talons—sets a standard of excellence rarely matched by Dracula’s later interpreters.

During this protracted legal battle, Hamilton Deane won permission from Florence Stoker to mount a stage adaptation of
Dracula
. Unable to find a competent playwright, Deane wrote it himself. He condensed the sprawling novel to fit within the limitations of a three-act play on a single set. This meant dropping the Transylvanian scenes; all the action would now take place in London.

Crucially, Deane made the count presentable for the drawing room. For the first time in his long career, Dracula donned evening clothes, underscoring his new identity as a suave eastern European nobleman. Because Dracula was only seen in the evening, he never appeared without sporting this garb—which thus became inextricably linked with his name.

Deane’s most distinctive refinement of Dracula’s image was the addition of an opera cloak with a high collar. This served a variety of purposes. Not least of them was providing cover for the vampire’s vanishing act: With his back turned to the audience and cast members holding his cloak, Dracula could drop through a trap door in the stage and “disappear.” That was only one of the special effects—which also included a trick coffin—that thrilled provincial audiences across England. Despite being scorned by West End critics at its 1927 London debut,
Dracula
would enjoy huge success for many years. It was among the last plays performed at Stoker’s old Lyceum Theatre before it closed in 1939.

By then,
Dracula
had crossed the Atlantic. Rewritten once more to streamline the cast and plot even further,
Dracula
became a 1927 Broadway hit starring an immigrant Hungarian actor named Béla Lugosi. The tall, handsome, former Austro-Hungarian infantry officer with the mesmeric gaze had been born in 1882, near the border of Transylvania. Lugosi spoke barely a word of English upon his arrival in the United States after World War I, and he never lost his strong Hungarian accent. That seemed only to enhance his appeal as Count Dracula: The play ran for 261 performances in New York City before going out on tour. Then Universal Studios bought the movie rights.

The 1931 film version of
Dracula,
directed by silent-film veteran and former circus performer Tod Browning, is a curious movie to watch today. Though stagy and old-fashioned, its lack of musical accompaniment makes its long silent moments—when only the hiss and crackle of the soundtrack can be heard—chillingly effective.

And then there is Lugosi. His eyes burning, his dark hair slicked back, his attire immaculate, he stands in his cobweb-enshrouded castle and, as wolves howl outside, intones in that incomparable accent,
“Listen
to them, children of the night. What
music
they make.”

For millions of people, this was their first encounter with a vampire, and audiences everywhere ate it up. Over the next 80 years or so, countless actors would play Count Dracula—Christopher Lee (who in the 1950s was the first to sport fangs), Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman—but every portrayal invited comparisons with the image of Lugosi that was so deeply ingrained in the popular imagination. And most of them performed the role in evening clothes and cape.

The actor who forged the mold could never quite escape the clutches of the character he had fashioned. Béla Lugosi died in 1956. When he was buried in Hollywood’s Holy Cross Cemetery, graveyard to the stars, he was wearing Dracula’s cape.

R
AVENOUS
H
ARPIES

That opera cloak had an additional critical function: When the actor lifted his arms, the cape spread out into the semblance of bat wings. Wolves may have been his familiars, but Dracula preferred to take the form of a bat.

When Lucy Westenra’s increasingly anemic condition is linked to the presence of a giant bat outside her bedroom window, Morris (the American sportsman in the tale) recalls an experience on the South American pampas: “One of those big bats they call vampires had got at [the mare] in the night, and, what with his gorge and the vein left open, there wasn’t enough blood left in her to let her stand up, and I had to put a bullet through her as she lay.”

Bats have long been associated with the powers of darkness. Streaming out of their underworld caverns at twilight, their leathery wings and hideous faces have long been appropriated for depictions of devils.

A new twist was added to immemorial bat lore in the 16th century, when conquistadors returned from tropical America bearing lurid tales of bats “of such bigness,” Pietro Martyre Anghiera wrote in 1510, that they “assaulted men in the night in their sleep, and so bitten them with their venomous teeth, that they have been…compelled to flee from such places, as from ravenous harpies.”

These
vampiros,
as they came to be called, were accused of all kinds of predatory activities. By the time his
Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil
was published in the 1860s, Captain Richard Francis Burton could sum up in one sentence three centuries of loathing for vampiros: “It must be like a Vision of Judgement to awake suddenly and to find on the tip of one’s nose, in the act of drawing one’s life blood, that demonical face with deformed nose, satyrlike ears, and staring saucer eyes, backed by a body measuring two feet from wing-end to wing-end.”

If anything, that was likely a case of mistaken identity. The vampiro was long assumed to be the large, fearsome-looking monster that Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus had classified in 1758 as
Vampyrum spectrum,
or the spectral vampire bat. Similar giant bats, in the Far East as well as in tropical America, were also given names such as
Vampyrops, Vampyrodes,
or
Vampyressa
.

Because the activities of bats were cloaked by darkness, it was centuries before naturalists discovered the truth about the creatures: Of the hundreds of bat species worldwide, ranging in size from the five-foot Malay kalang to the tiny bumblebee bat of Thailand, only three were bloodsuckers, and they were all in the New World. Among the “false vampires” and “ghost bats” spread from Africa to Australasia, some are said to occasionally decapitate their victims. But the primary culprit responsible for vampire-bat legends is an unprepossessing little fellow called
Desmodus rotundus,
found from Argentina to Mexico.

Measuring little more than a foot from wingtip to wingtip,
Desmodus
generally settles on the necks of livestock for a midnight meal. But it is a stalker, too, quietly alighting near slumbering humans and stealing up to an exposed toe or nose. Its bite, at most a slight tingle, rarely disturbs a sleeper, and from the tiny puncture, a long tongue laps up the blood. Although only rarely a killer,
Desmodus
can weaken horses and cattle by repeated bloodlettings. It can also carry rabies—though that would not be discovered until the 1920s.