by Christopher Barr
“The Life of All Flesh
Is the Blood.”
(Leviticus, 17:14
“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.”
– Bram Stoker, Dracula
“Your body’s
dying. Pay no attention, it happens to
us all.”
– Lestat, Interview with a Vampire
Dracula Untold is not a good movie, it is a movie that drenches itself in
mythology and is subsequently sucked down to the lower murky depths of cliché
and imitation. The movie failed to respect the endless well of source
material it could easily have drawn from. Its concern, as in the case of
most all Hollywood studio productions, was to reach the broadest somnambulistic
audience possible and thus necessitate the obligatory watering down of some of
its source material.
The story surrounds a
Prince that is on the brink of war with an invading massive Turkish army from
the Ottoman Empire during the 15th century. The Sultan of Turkey is seeking a thousand young boys
from the kingdom that Prince Vlad rules over, a kingdom with little army to
defend against the Sultan’s demands.
Vlad and two of his
soldiers happen upon a cave in the mountains while searching for a Turkish
scouting party that have entered Transylvania territory. Instead of
encountering the scouting party of Turks, Vlad and his men are met with the
vicious force of an ancient sorcerer and master vampire, who quickly dispatches
of Vlad’s men and drives him out of the lair. Vlad’s escape from the
creature was a result of the sun’s beaming rays, deadly to the creature, blanketing
the mouth of the cave and preventing him from devouring Vlad along with his
ill-fated men.
The movie mildly goes
into the real Vlad the Impaler’s dark past, along with his war crimes against
the many people he was responsible for murdering. Living a life of war,
historical Vlad realized early on, in order to defeat the enemy you cannot do
it with mere swords, you must make yourself more than a man, you must make
yourself a monster. Vlad did just that by slaughtering a village of
people close to the Turkish border and ordering his men to impale their bodies
on long vertical stakes, covering a field with hundreds them.
Superstition and
sorcery were common views that weakened the resolve of most men in those parts,
at that time in its history. Vlad knew that this was the only way to ward
off attack on his kingdom of Walachia. The problem is the movie didn’t
quite portray him as the monstrosity he truly was in actual history. The
unspeakable tortures he was responsible for have no equal, even among the most
bloodthirsty tyrants of history, such as Herod, Nero, and Diocletian.
Vlad Dracul Tepes was
a monster on his own without all the vampire mythos attached to him four
centuries later by author Bram Stoker. In Dracula Untold he was more relatable, his actions were more
understandable given the plight he was forced to deal with. Sure it was
just a movie, so liberties are a reality in order to maintain a cohesive
narrative for a modern audience to absorb, but the argument could be made that the
aficionados of historical Eastern Europe, in all likelihood, wish they would
just tell a story about Vlad the Impaler without all the vampire baggage.
Regardless, the vampire is part of it and will always be.
In the movie, in order
to defend his land, Vlad made a Faustian deal with the devil of sorts. He
went back to the cave in the mountains and confronted the gangrenous master
vampire who, instead of ripping him to pieces and drinking six pints of his ‘life
force’, the creature provided Vlad with the gift of strength, speed and
ferocious power …with a catch. Vlad has three days to last without
feeding off another human before the spell/curse is lifted, returning him to
his human mortal form.
He drinks the blood of
the devilish creature from a broken cranium of a long since murdered skeletal victim
and then ‘turns’ into one of them. He awakens in the forest with no soul and with sensory
perception overload. He is able to look up and glance at the quivering
starry blanket that is the fabric of space with telescopic sight. He can
hear a spider swathe a hapless insect with webbing that sounds like an axe
splitting a tree trunk open. He hears the howls and movements of the
forests various animals and creatures, seeing them with a set of eyes that
transcends solid objects at will, allowing him to see veins and heat signatures
from all living creatures, man or beast.
With a voracious
hunger for blood, Vlad attacks the Turks with magic and an established will to
destroy his enemy with the power of the undead, drawing from the black lakes of
evil, while avoiding the looming sunrise soon to follow. He is able to
transform himself into vast legions of ravenous bats and with the celerity of a
madman with no bounds, swoops menacingly down and obliterates hundreds of
invading Turks all at once, like the smashing force of a monstrous battle
hammer.
“’The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.’…It
was true. The book was a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera
clichés, but that line was true; no one had believed in them, and how could
they fight something they couldn’t even believe in?”
– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
The vampire, a
preternatural being, has a long murderous bloodline dating all the way back to
biblical times and throughout Christian mythology. It all started with
the sacrificial lust for blood to keep evil spirits at bay. Within the
folklore of Christianity; Lilith, first wife of Adam was said to be reputedly
impatient with the first man’s sexual ineptitude. Lilith went on to
become queen of the demons and evil phantoms. She would suck the blood of
babies in their cradles and young men, robbing them of their vigor and potency
as they slept. Lilith was guilty of dismissing Hebraic belief and
breaking Mosaic Law that forbids draining and drinking the warm blood of living
things.
“Therefore I said unto
the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the
life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.”
(Leviticus, 17:14)
In the New Testament
the parable goes that Christ saved humankind by spilling his blood, before his
ultimate sacrifice on the cross. Christ saw the redemptive significance
in his blood under the symbolic guise of wine shared with his disciples during
the Last Supper. The Gospel of John emphasized the regenerative
properties of blood. During the early years of Christianity the fathers
had to redefine their interpretation of the virtues of blood, fearing a return
to human sacrifice and cannibalism.
The link between the
belief of vampires and Christianity can also be found in the Neoplatonic idea
of a life after death. This suggests that the body is a mere shell, a
material covering that rots away while the soul lives on in another world, awaiting
resurrection at the Last Judgement. Vampires in Christian phenomenology
are “souls in pain,” beings that belong to neither the world of the living nor
that of the dead. They are plagued to wander between worlds searching for
vitality and in some cases, peace from their suffering. These were
nomadic rejecters of religious faith and have thus been made to suffer an
eternity of pain.
The spread of the vampire
legend from an anecdotal character to entering a European widespread collective consciousness was a result of the Bubonic plague in the 14th century. To avoid infection the
panicky people rushed to bury the victims of the plague, and in some cases so
quick to bury them that they did not even verify that they were clinically
dead. Days later when a family vault was opened the corpses were often in
perfectly preserved shape but spotted with blood. It didn’t take the
locals too long to think that the corpses had become vampires, while in actual
reality free from extraneous belief systems, the corpses were in fact hapless
victims still alive and suffering a long and agonizing death in their coffins,
and likely wounded themselves in their bleak attempt at escaping their crypts.
The 15th century lunatic Gilles de Rais, once a
guard for Joan of Arc, spent his remaining days in southwest France torturing,
slaughtering and drinking the blood of two to three hundred children, with a
deranged alchemist attempt at finding the secret to the “philosophers’ stone”
in blood. Vlad Tepes was born the year of Joan of Arc’s death in
1431. He is the primary source of Bram Stoker’s supernatural monster but
not without the help of the 17th century
Countess Erzsebt Bathory. A woman nearly as equally sick as both Vlad the
Impaler and Gilles de Rais, kidnapped and tortured up to three hundred young
girls with the belief that their blood could cure her from aging. She
would drink their blood and bathe in it on occasion to preserve her youth as
long as possible. When she wasn’t bathing
in the blood of a thousand virgins, she would further her studies into
Black Magic while viewing the torture and unremittent beating of young girls. These girls would have spikes and needles punctured into their bodies and necks, and then were bound
in skin-tearing ropes as they roll around in the snow naked, freezing to death.
Stoker took Vlad’s gothic
surname, which translates into devil
or dragon, along with his archetypical
shadowed legend and Bathory’s use of blood to maintain everlasting youth, and
created one of the most recognizable fictional characters known to the world,
parallel to that of Batman and Superman. This story became a true turning
point in the history of vampirism in literature. John William Polidori,
also an influence of Stoker’s, is credited for the first vampire to appear in
his novel The Vampyre.
This all came about in Geneva in 1816, while held up with a couple traveling
companions; a competition was challenged by the English Romantic poet Lord
Byron, fueled by copious amounts of laudanum by candlelight along with his
companions, to see who among them can create their own tales of suspense.
Byron came up with a story about a vampire that he never finished but confided
the plot to Polidori who went on to write his tale of the un-dead vampire.
Another one of the traveling companions, Mary Shelly went on to write one of
the all-time best novels on terror ever written, Frankenstein.
“I know nothing of
God, or the Devil. I have never seen a
vision nor learned a secret that will damn or save my soul. And as far as I know, after four hundred years,
I am the oldest living vampire in the world.”
– Armand, Interview with the Vampire
The vampire has
appeared in hundreds of films, books and comic books. The vampire has been described in every incarnation from a
sexual predator to a rock star, also ranging from a grotesque bottom-feeder to
a romantic leading man. Some renditions
in film have been pretty good like in the case of Interview with the
Vampire, 30 Days of Night, Byzantium, Daybreakers, the
first Underworld movie, Night Watch and Day
Watch, and even From Dusk Till Dawn and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. Then there have been many of these vampire movies
that were not so good and ultimately forgettable like Abraham Lincoln:
Vampire Hunter, John Carpenter’s Vampires, The Twilight Saga, Van Helsing,
Vampire in Brooklyn, The Lost Boys sequels, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Dracula
2000, Kiss of the Vampire, Vamp, and Once Bitten.
Among the best
is Let the Right One In and the American remake Let Me
In, Nosferatu and it’s 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampire,
Dracula (1931), Near Dark, Only Lovers Left Alive, Salem’s
Lot, Horror of Dracula, Shadow of the Vampire, Fright Night and it’s
Colin Farrell remake, The Lost Boys, Blade and Blade
2. Television has had the always enjoyable and incredibly
layered Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spin-off series Angel as
well as a pretty good run with True Blood and the recently
aired The Strain.
As for books Bram
Stoker’s Dracula is the quintessential book on the
mythological creature. Anne Rice has The Vampire Chronicles which has been received well among the great seductive lore in the canon, but I Am Legend is one of the great celebrated vampire stories in book form ever written. The Historian was quite fascinating as well as Let
the Right One In along with Salem’s Lot
“The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in
the morning sun. This, too, drove the
vampires away. Why? Was there a logical answer, something he
could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?”
– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
What makes the great
stories so resonating and long lasting is they are about us, not vampires at
all. Richard Matheson’s I am Legend novel is about the
last man on earth that is forced to barricade himself up in his house of desolation
from bloodthirsty vampires. But it’s actually about loneliness, loss and addiction;
it is a philosophical journey inward while everything outward has gone to
hell. The films Let Me In and Only Lovers Left
Alive are about living and adapting oneself to a seemingly alien
world, with the former focusing on developing the strength to survive in an
often unforgivable world.
Dracula Untold chose the spectacle route and inundated its canvas with CGI
effects to such an extent that the performances became smothered and
plastic. The basic premise of good vs. evil vs. evil again could have
been interesting with more detail put on character development and less on
spectacle. The sad state here is the market for a big movie like this is designed
around an international audience. As a result the concept and the
dialogue must be able to translate into many languages. Audiences from
all over the world must be able to follow the basic story and have a
rudimentary understanding of what the characters are saying to each other. The
Lord of the Rings Trilogy was able to avoid this trap where movies
like Van Helsing have not.
“The vampires have
always been metaphors for me. They’ve
always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very
deeply.”
– Anne Rice
A little movie
like Only Lovers Left Alive can build their characters within
the mythology of vampires and still maintain quality and great story. The
problem with a lot of the bad ones is they want all mythology and as a
consequence they fail critically time and time again.
Dracula Untold ends tragic for the character but creepily victorious for
the audience because he becomes what they want him to become, Dracula the
vampire. He loses everything, his wife and son, he loses the respect and
allegiance of his people and army, and certainly worse than all those combined;
he loses his soul to wander the earth as a creature that drinks the blood of
his unsuspecting victims for eternity. We cheer for him in a similar way
that we did when Tony Stark became Iron Man and Bruce Wayne became
Batman. The only glaring difference is Iron Man and Batman fight for
what’s good; avoiding unnecessary killing at all costs, Dracula survives
because of killing.
Dracula is a tragic
character; there is no doubt about that, certainly a treacherous creature but
never the less tragic as a result. His curse has condemned him to a life
of solitude, a life without love and a life shaded in a nocturnal
existence. His humanity is peeled away from him only to be filled by a
murderous fiend. Dracula Untold turned him into a
superhero of sorts and stripped away all the heartbreak that Bram Stoker
stitched so tightly to the core of his fable. Nosferatu’s Count
Orlok is a ghoulish figure, a hairless rat of sorts that hides just behind the
slice of a shadow. Like Dracula, he too has condemned himself to the
stone walls of his castle, only coming out of the shadows when absolutely
necessary. These stories are in-depth allegories that investigate the
human condition using the metaphor of the vampire.
Like so many
contemporary stories, Dracula Untold has no interest in the
human condition or imparting a cautionary tale on what could happen if one
disconnects oneself from the tribe. Unlike its predecessors, this film’s
tragic narrative doesn’t lie within the story rather it comes from the
uninspired society that it’s disseminating itself to. The tragedy is us,
the audience desiring Dracula to be a hero and be cool doing it. It’s likely when people saw a
screening of Nosferatu back in the early twenties; they all
didn’t leave the theatre wanting to be a vampire. I’d hope they left the
theatre feeling a sense of gratitude for who they have in their lives coupled
with being absolutely freaked out by what they just watched. Which is a
good thing because that’s what vampires of the night hopefully do for us; they make
us want to connect with living, breathing people and hang on.
“Do not wake yet, I
beg you. Why will you not believe
me? Sleep …sleep forever. May your breast heave while pursuing the
chimerical hope of happiness – that I allow you; but do not open your eyes.
Ah! Do not open your eyes.”
– Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror
