Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

  Lights, Camera, Fangs

  On March 15, 1922, a grainy, black-and-white silent film premiered at Berlin’s Kino Primus-Palast under the eerie title Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, or Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. A product of the German Expressionist F. W. Murnau, the movie follows a man named Thomas Hutter, who is sent to Transylvania by his employer to visit the mysterious Count Orlok at his castle in the mountains. Once he arrives, Hutter discovers the count is a vampire, and after wandering through the castle finds Orlok lying in a coffin in the castle crypt. Hutter flees the castle and makes his way back to his wife in Germany, where unbeknownst to him Orlok takes up residence as well. Ellen, Hutter’s wife, eventually stumbles across a book in her husband’s possession titled The Book of Vampires, from which she learns that to kill a vampire a woman pure of heart must let him drink her blood until he forgets how much time has passed and the sun comes up to destroy him. During this time a number of grisly murders take place in the town, but the townsfolk merely think some strange disease is plaguing their homes. Then one night Count Orlok enters Ellen’s bedchamber and begins to drink her blood, but just as stated in The Book of Vampires, because she is pure at heart the monster forgets to flee before the sun comes up, and as the cock crows he vanishes into smoke for good.

  While the numerous similarities between the film Nosferatu and the novel Dracula are hard to miss, Murnau did make some departures from the stereotypical vampire and portrayed Count Orlok as a monster with ratlike ears, a gaunt demonic face, and long taloned fingernails resembling claws. Also of importance is that Orlok’s bite does not create other vampires as Stoker’s Dracula did. Instead, Orlok’s victims die from what the townspeople believe is the plague, appealing to the traditional German belief that vampires were carriers of unknown contagions. Despite these disparities, however, it was apparent to most that Nosferatu was little more than a thinly veiled copy of Dracula. More importantly, it was readily apparent to Stoker’s widow, Florence, who sued Murnau for plagiarism and copyright infringement.

  After rulings in her favor both in 1924 and 1929, the film was ordered to be destroyed, but because so many copies had already been released for distribution, it became impossible to round them all up. As a result, copies of the terrifying film entered general circulation anyway and over the years garnered a loyal cult following with horror film aficionados and movie historians to this very day.

  Even though Murnau’s silent Count Orlok definitely raised the bar on creepiness, arguably the most well-known vampire film of the twentieth century is Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula. Optioned by Universal Pictures from Florence Stoker for the sum of $40,000, the movie script closely followed Deane and Balderston’s popular Broadway version just as it in turn mirrored the original novel. Although the film stared the Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi, who was the lead in the Broadway version as well, he was not the studio’s first choice and only won the role after Browning’s first pick, Lon Chaney, Sr., died of lung cancer in 1930.

  When the film premiered at the lavish Roxy Theatre in New York on February 12, 1931, executives at Universal Pictures had no idea what to expect, but from the first moment the lights dimmed audiences were awestruck. As the show opened in other theaters across the country, movie houses were forced to offer round-the-clock screenings just to accommodate the demand. Industry figures claim that in its first domestic release it earned $700,000 with sales of $1.2 million worldwide (Guiley 2005, 109).

  While there are many who claim the film’s success can be attributed to the chilling performance of Bela Lugosi, the actor himself was only paid $500 a week for his role and was forced to declare bankruptcy one year after the movie was released. While Lugosi went on to star in other horror films with little success, he will always be remembered for his iconic portrayal of Count Dracula, and when he died in 1956 he was buried in the vampire cape he wore during the film’s shooting.

  Given Dracula’s success, Universal Pictures continued to crank out sequels to the film, including Dracula’s Daughter in 1936, Son of Dracula in 1943, and House of Dracula in 1945. By the 1950s, the British company Hammer Films began producing vampire films in color, often starring Christopher Lee as a much more calculatingly evil Dracula and Peter Cushing as his vampire-hunting nemesis. These began a new slew of vampire movies that lasted until the 1970s and included such films as The Brides of Dracula in 1960, The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973, and the ever-campy kung-fu flick The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires in 1974.

  On June 27, 1966, teenagers across the country began arriving home just in time to catch the new gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, which aired on the ABC network each weekday at 4 PM for one half-hour. Created by director and producer Dan Curtis, who claimed to have been inspired by a dream he had of a girl taking a long train ride to a large dark mansion, the production spanned 1,225 episodes from 1966 to 1971, and at its peak claimed over eighteen million viewers. Starting in black and white, the show made the transition to color in 1967 and was comprised of a relatively small cast of characters who played many parts.

  While Dark Shadows did not at first include a supernatural element in its storyline, it introduced a vampire character into the mix in the hopes of boosting sagging ratings one year into its run. When the 175-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, finally made his daytime debut, the show soared to new heights—until April 2, 1971, by which time a sharp rise in competing soaps and a decline in television advertising condemned Dark Shadows to the chopping block.

  In the series, a charismatic vampire named Barnabas Collins makes his entrance after being locked away in a sarcophagus on the Collinwood Estate for many years. Once he is accidentally freed by a Collins family servant who was in search of buried jewels, Barnabas masquerades as a distant family relative from England and insidiously works his way into the family’s good graces. From there the storyline twists and weaves its way into fantastic plotlines that combine time travel, ghosts, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, witches, werewolves, and sinister cults. Throughout all of this, Barnabas falls in love, is cured of his vampirism, and in time is cursed to it again.

  Like the similar tale of Varney the Vampire over one hundred years before him, Barnabas finds his character transforming over the course of the series from a run-of-the-mill bloodsucker to a star-crossed figure desperate for a cure to the curse that afflicts him. In 1991 NBC attempted to revive the series with a remake, but after only twelve episodes the show lost momentum and was canceled. Even now, at the time of the writing of this book, a film version of Dark Shadows is slated for release in 2012, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer.

  As serious traditional vampire dramas such as Dark Shadows were fizzling out on TV, lighter versions such as producer Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer were proving that viewers were still in love with the concept. Airing from March 10, 1997, until May 20, 2003, the show ran successfully for seven seasons with three Emmys and numerous other awards under its belt. Broadly based on Whedon’s campy 1992 movie of the same name, the weekly series followed the exploits of Buffy Summers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, as she battled vampires, demons, and a host of other dark minions all the while attending Sunnydale High School. Aiding her quest are an assortment of teenage friends and a Watcher, who guides and teaches the group—who call themselves the “Scooby Gang”—in the subtle art of killing vampires. Given the show’s trendiness, humor, and contemporary teenage themes, it was immensely popular and produced a host of spinoff books, comics, action figures, games, and even a second series titled Angel, making up what many fans and even some academic scholars have come to call the “Buffyverse.”

  The times, it seemed, were again a-changing, and so too was the public’s perception of the vampire motif in popular culture. Vampires were once seen by illiterate European peasants as bloated corpses feeding on the blood of the living, but modern audiences craved more from the
ir monsters and demanded that their vampires become the heroes or even the love interests of the story. One case in point was the 1998 film Blade, which featured a vampire hunter by the same name, played by Wesley Snipes, who not only hunts down vampires with a vengeance but is part vampire himself. Based on a 1970s Marvel comic book character that first appeared in The Tomb of Dracula, this gun-toting, sword-welding superhero went on to appear in several sequels to the franchise, as well as in a television series in 2006.

  Another example is the 2003 action-adventure film Underworld, in which bands of leather-clad vampires face off against packs of howling werewolves in a blood feud lasting centuries. The main character, a vampire named Selene, played by Kate Beckinsale, falls in love with a human and must in the end protect him from both sides in a sort of machine gun–blazing undead version of Romeo and Juliet.

  The final and probably the most potent manifestation of this new obsession with vampires is the Twilight Saga, which includes the 2008 teenage vampire romance film Twilight, adapted from the popular novel by author Stephenie Meyer. In the film Isabella “Bella” Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, moves to the small town of Forks, Washington, where she falls in with Edward Cullen, a 104-year-old vampire who only drinks animal blood. Eventually another vampire named James arrives and tries to kill Bella for sport, but Edward intervenes and in a climactic battle kills James.

  While critics gave the film mixed reviews, teenagers and even some adults went wild over the movie, which grossed an amazing $392 million worldwide, as well as spawning fan clubs, movie merchandise, and several sequels also based on Meyer’s novels, including New Moon in 2009, Eclipse in 2010, and Breaking Dawn, Part 1 in 2011. (Breaking Dawn, Part 2, the final movie in the Twilight Saga series, will be released in late 2012.)

  By examining these and other works, we can find, within human history, literature, and even within the still relatively new medium of film, the ever-changing progression of humanity’s view of the vampire. Yet not until the Victorian period of the 1800s did writers create the truly powerful and seductive blood drinkers we know and love today. From bloodthirsty menace to superhero and lover, the vampire has come a long way in the imagination of the public. But as is often the case, truth can be stranger than fiction, and as we will see in the next few chapters, real vampires are often much different from the ones we dream up.

  [contents]

  Listen to them … children of the night. What music they make!

  —Dracula, 1931

  7

  Children

  of the Night

  On November 25, 1996, the bludgeoned bodies of forty-nine-year-old Richard Wendorf and his wife, Ruth, age fifty-four, were discovered in their rural home in East Eustis, Florida. Police officials arriving on the scene speculated that intruders must have entered the home through an attached garage, and after stumbling upon Mr. Wendorf dozing on the couch, beat him to death with a blunt object. Mrs. Wendorf, upon hearing the commotion, rushed to her husband’s aid and was in turn killed with the same murder weapon. Panicking, the intruders then fled, taking the couple’s credit cards and their 1994 Ford Explorer.

  Yet despite the obvious modus operandi of the murderers, two key facts lent the crime a sinister aspect: the first was a cryptic letter V burned onto the chest of Mr. Wendorf with a cigarette, and the second was that the Wendorf’s teenage daughter Heather was missing.

  Four days later and over six hundred miles across the country, five disheveled teenagers, including Heather Wendorf, were apprehended in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, driving the Wendorfs’ stolen Explorer. The arrest made headlines across the nation, and not for obvious reasons such as the youth of the offenders or the heinousness of their crime, but for the startling claim they made to authorities that they were a clan of modern vampires. During the investigation that followed, sixteen-year-old Rod Ferrell, the self-proclaimed leader of the “clan,” claimed that he was a five-hundred-year-old vampire with no soul, who preferred to be known by his vampire name “Vasego.” While he initially blamed the murders on a rival vampire group, he soon changed his story and confessed to beating the Wendorfs to death with a crowbar he found in their garage. Following the murder, he and another clan member named Scott Anderson burned the V into Mr. Wendorf’s chest as a sort of macabre calling card.

  Days before the murders, the teenagers had left their homes in Murray, Kentucky, and drove to Eustis, Florida, at the behest of the Wendorf’s daughter Heather, who planned to run away with the group to New Orleans. Heather had been friends with Ferrell years before, when he lived in Eustis for a short time with his mother. After he moved to Murray, the two remained in touch, during which time, according to Ferrell, Heather constantly complained that her parents were abusive. When the teens arrived, Heather joined several of the female members at a nearby cemetery for a blood-drinking initiation ritual while Ferrell and Anderson went to her home to collect her things. Once there, Ferrell made up his mind to murder the Wendorfs in their home and leave his vampire mark on the body of Mr. Wendorf. Heather would later testify that she did not know of Ferrell’s murderous intentions that night and that afterwards she was terrified to leave the group, fearing she would be their next victim.

  On February 12, 1998, Ferrell pleaded guilty to the premeditated murders of Richard and Ruth Wendorf and was sentenced to death in the Florida state prison electric chair, making him the youngest inmate on death row until his sentence was later commuted to life without parole. Scott Anderson, his accomplice, was sentenced to life without parole, while the remaining teenagers received sentences of up to ten years. The only exception was Heather Wendorf, who was never charged in the case and who went on to cooperate with author Aphrodite Jones on her book, The Embrace: A True Vampire Story, about the sensational crime.

  The Beginnings of a Movement

  While stories of bloodthirsty teenage vampire clans roaming the countryside were few and far between in the 1990s, the “Vampire Cult Murders,” as they came to be called, did succeed in drawing attention to an underground movement taking shape in America and Europe of modern-day vampires. As with the vampire myth itself, the origins of the movement are shrouded in mystery, but some twentieth-century authors gave reports of its presence in London in the 1930s.

  Elliott O’Donnell, an Irish writer, ghost hunter, and spiritualist, mentions one such group in his 1935 book Strange Cults and Secret Societies of Modern London, in which he describes witnessing a vampire gathering in the basement of an old building, the floors and walls of which the cult had painted blood red. During the ceremony, a group of women dressed in long red gowns with red fingernails filed in. After eating an unknown flower, which O’Donnell’s host claimed was from the Balkans, the women fell into a deep trance. Hours later when they reemerged from their meditative states, each claimed that they had entered the bedrooms of the cult’s enemies in their astral forms and drained their victims of blood.

  Unfortunately, there is little proof that such nefarious groups existed at the time, and O’Donnell was a rather colorful character with a reputation for never letting a few pesky facts get in the way of a good story. But if nothing else, then such tales do show us that the idea of, or at least fear of, such groups prevailed. This was, after all, a few short years after the premiere of Tod Browning’s 1931 movie Dracula. Blend that with a twist of new-age spiritualism, and it’s no wonder Londoners were seeing vampires lurking in every dark alley.

  The first legitimate stirrings of a vampire movement seemed not to have begun until the 1970s as an offshoot of the rising interest in neo-Paganism and the desire by many disillusioned with traditional religious structures to explore alternative forms of spiritualism. Though none of these groups saw themselves as vampires and would have abhorred the negative label, some did incorporate the use of human blood in their magical rituals and ceremonies, giving power and precedence to its consumption. For instance, one magical grimoire or book of spell
s claims that writing the name of an enemy in animal’s blood on a piece of parchment and then burning it with a black candle will bring about the death, illness, or sorrow of the spell’s target.

  Interestingly enough, some love spells also depend on the use of blood to perform, and require the magician to prick the middle finger of his or her right hand and use it to write the name of the intended lovers on a plain white piece of paper in the form of a circle. Three additional circles are then formed around the names, and the paper is buried outside at exactly nine o’clock at night (González-Wippler, 164).

  In addition to this popularization of alternative spiritual structures was a new and exciting wave of vampire fiction hitting the shelves, such as the works of Anne Rice, who cast her vampire protagonists in a more seductive and compelling light, making them more human than before. Latching on to the craze was a revival in vampire movies during the 1980s and 1990s that helped fuel the romantic appeal of the vampire myth. Now, vampire enthusiasts didn’t just want to be scared by vampires—they wanted to be vampires. No longer as isolated by their interests, vampire enthusiasts began to form loose networks or groups around self-published newsletters and magazines devoted to vampirism and blood play, with names such as Necropolis, VAMPS, and Crimson.

  Nightclubs started featuring vampire nights, and a new wave of vampire-styled musical groups burst onto the scene, creating a unique underground movement unlike anything seen before. Some groups were directly inspired by the works of Anne Rice, including the gothic industrial band Lestat, whose first release, Theatre of the Vampires, debuted in 1990. Many other groups caught the dark wave also and either featured band members who openly claimed to be vampires, like Vlad’s Dark Theater, or whose lyrics resonated vampire-styled themes, such as Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy, Rob Zombie, and Type O Negative. Even some mainstream artists belted out vampire-inspired tunes, as with Sting’s song “Moon over Bourbon Street,” about a vampire cruising the streets of New Orleans.