Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  The story opens with the journey of Jonathan Harker, a young English attorney, to Count Dracula’s castle, situated in a remote reach of Transylvania. There, Harker is to help the count buy some property in London, where the nobleman hopes to move. As the castle door swings open, Harker beholds a seemingly courteous, if slightly creepy, figure:

  Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation, “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!”…I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest….

  His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

  Despite his unsettling appearance, Dracula seems at times almost cozily domestic—playing coachman and maid and cook, making the bed and setting the table, chatting all night about different subjects, eager to practice his English. In his library—apparently the only cheery room in a long-disused castle—he reclines on a couch, studying English travel guides or the London Directory, Whitaker’s Almanack, and other reference books that must have been hard to obtain in that faraway place. He is a proud old dragon, proud of his Szekely origins, believed at the time to be descendants of Attila the Hun:

  Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace, and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.

  But this Transylvanian Gemütlichkeit doesn’t last. Dracula, who has coarse hands with hairy palms and long nails “cut to a sharp point,” is simply repulsive. “As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me,” Harker writes, “I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.” Harker is trapped in the castle.

  One moonlit night Harker looks out the window and sees the count crawling down the castle wall like a human fly. On another night, wandering about in the warren of dust-shrouded rooms, he lapses into a trance and nearly falls prey to three horrifying female figures. Harker is saved by the timely entrance of Dracula, who tosses the harridans a sack containing a human infant for them to feed upon. Eventually, Harker finds his way into the crypt; it is daytime, and all the castle’s vampires are at rest in their coffins:

  There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.

  Once Dracula arrives in England, the diablerie begins in earnest. Most of the action takes place in Whitby, a Yorkshire resort on the North Sea, and London, where it centers on a lunatic asylum that happens to be next door to the old abbey that Dracula has succeeded in purchasing. The count is rarely seen, and when Harker chances to glimpse him standing among the teeming crowds near Hyde Park Corner one day, seemingly unaffected by sunlight, he looks much younger.

  For the most part, however, Count Dracula is an ominous, even insidious presence, taking the form of mist or a bat. Clearly, he has become demonic; to cover his arrival at Whitby by sea, for example, he raises a storm that hurls not only giant waves against the sands but also the Russian schooner on which he traveled—a derelict, because he left all the crew dead behind him.

  Stoker must have read in the pages of Emily Gerard about the Scholomance — the iniquitous school, said to exist in the Carpathians, where the devil himself taught magic spells, the language of animals, and all the secrets of nature. One in ten students, Gerard had written, were “detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju (dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in ‘making the weather,’ that is, in preparing the thunderbolts.”

  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 s
ave 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 sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart. It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.

  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.

  CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

  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.

  RAVENOUS HARPIES

  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.