Love Bites

Dracula looms ominously over his next intended victim, his mouth and eyes twisted into a feral, lustful snarl as his long-nailed fingers prepare to grasp his prey. The hands resemble the claws of a carnivorous bird, curled hooks of death. The picture is sinister, terrifying. A picture of evil. A thing of nightmares.

Actor Bela Lugosi captured his role so well in the 1931 film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that the movie has been officially recorded as one of the most culturally influential films of the century. Right from the start, the film captivated the imagination of viewers, and not in a rosy-colored way. Some audience members were so terrified that they fainted in their seats. Through the curiosity of subsequent movie-goers who wanted to see if they themselves would faint, Dracula became the first in a long line of very popular horror films to change classifications of movie drama forever.

The fascination with vampires inspired by the film has persisted into the twenty-first century. From books to movies to television shows, the mythology of vampires has come to dominate popular culture. With one significant difference: these new vampires are not horrifying creatures, but teen idols.

Dracula was a horror film. In other words, it was meant to be scary. It was meant to terrify and stun and cause nightmares for those who watched it. It kept them on the ends of their seats, screaming to the intended victims to wake up before the horrible vampire bit them and stole away their life. Now, the audience of young teens (and, in some cases, even older women) screams at the vampire on the screen to bite his love interest so that they can “be together forever.” Disturbing? I should think so.

Vampirism has always been associated with sex. Even in the 1931 film, Dracula was really only interested in biting beautiful women, coming in through their windows at night to suck their blood while they lay in bed. He lived in his castle with three beautiful, young female vampires who were completely devoted to him and, subtly implied, served as his mistresses (thinking Hugh Heffner, anyone?). One would be misinformed to think that vampirism has only recently become sensualized. But the tones of past and current understandings of the connections are much, much different.

In the 1931 film, the beautiful heroine Mina describes a horrible dream that she thinks she has had, a dream that the audience knows was actually Dracula’s first visit to her bedroom to drink some of her blood. She tells her worried fiancé about an ugly face with red eyes that came out of a thick mist and terrifyingly rested its cold lips on her neck. In the morning, she woke up weak. Drained of all life, as she tells it. Let us contrast this to a wildly popular recent book and movie series about vampires. In a scene from the first of these movies, the heroine wakes up to find a boy she knows, a vampire, in her bedroom. She is alarmed at first, but he is just so damn handsome, and eventually we see her relax and decide she feels warm and fuzzy inside when she has him to watch over her. He tells her that he just loves to watch her sleep and so he’s come over uninvited to do just that. She loves it, and so does the audience. Throughout the rest of the books/movies, this same heroine continually begs the vampire to bite her so that she can be just like him.

Now we must not overreact. Pop culture has found strange and twisted ways to represent romantic relationships before. But shouldn’t we be at least slightly worried about this particular turn of events? I look at Bela Lugosi as Dracula, face a hungry snarl and hands like white claws, bringing death, not to mention slavery to all his whims, to the bedroom of an innocent girl. This is, in a sexual interpretation, rape. I do not find this in the least bit romantic. Sexual, yes. Provocative, maybe. But healthy? Not at all. Watching Dracula, one feels afraid because they should. Life-sucking has never been good. Maybe that’s a fact we need to remember.