Rage

by Jerry Langton

  Florence set her lawyers upon Prana-Film GmbH, the company that produced Nosferatu, and obtained a cease-and-desist order. All prints of the film were ordered delivered to Florence to be destroyed, and Prana-Film, crippled by damage payments, went bankrupt before it could produce another film. Murnau, however, went on to great success, including a stint in Hollywood. His film Wings, about World War I fighter pilots, won the first-ever Oscar for best picture.

  But the European legal authorities were not completely effective in suppressing the film. Nobody knows how they got there, but prints of Nosferatu had emerged in both New York and Detroit by 1929 and drew large audiences at unauthorized exhibitions. It still plays regularly (the copyright has lapsed), mostly to audiences of film students and hardcore vampire fans.

  If you watch it now (plenty of people do; it’s regarded as a landmark film), Nosferatu is quaint at best and hilarious at worst. But at the time, it was considered absolutely horrifying. There are many recorded reports of its viewers passing out in terror. The Swedish government actually outlawed it on the grounds of “excessive horror,” and did not lift the ban until 1972.

  Murnau has a reputation as an expressionist genius, but he seems to have missed the point of Dracula when he made Nosferatu. The movie is horrifying, sure, but the vampire is a terrifying creature with no redeeming qualities. He’s a monster. Unlike the Dracula of the book, Orlok has no charm, no savoir faire. He’s about as sexy as Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  Movie audiences didn’t see a deeper, more effective—truly gothic in the Walpolian sense—representation of Dracula on screen until 1931.

  Harry Deane moved to London from Northern Ireland and supported himself by writing, acting in and producing small-scale stage plays. Aware of what had happened with Nosferatu, Deane sought Florence Stoker’s permission to make a play based on Dracula in exchange for a cut of the profits. Deane had intended to play the count himself—he had already produced and played the part of the monster in Frankenstein—but decided that Van Helsing was a better role, leaving an actor named Richard Huntley to play the vampire.

  His version of Dracula opened in 1924 in Derby and was a huge and immediate success, the like of which Deane had never seen before. It played London nonstop for three years and spawned dozens of touring companies that took it to audiences all over Britain and Ireland, raking in millions.

  One person who saw it was a vacationing American businessman named Horace Liveright. He’d made his name in publishing, drawing praise for his fight against censorship and his “discovering” talents like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker and S. J. Perelman. He was also heavily criticized, particularly in England, for what some—especially those in the privileged classes—considered overly aggressive marketing of his novels.

  He knew the play would be a huge hit in New York if he made some minor changes. The Americanization process began when he hired a young journalist named John Balderston to transform Deane’s stilted, almost Elizabethan dialogue into conversational English, and cut the lame scenes in which Dracula actually hisses at the audience. He decided to keep, however, the high-collared cape Dracula wore (Deane used his own in London) as a bit of Old World flair.

  He made one other change, too. Dissatisfied with Huntley’s frumpy portrayal of the count, Liveright scoured the New York theater scene for someone who could add charm, mystery and gravity to the role. He found him in a little play called The Red Poppy. One of the supporting characters was played by a tall, handsome man with great stage presence, a thick accent and a very distinctive way of delivering his lines. The actor’s unique enunciation came from the fact that he spoke English very poorly and had learned his lines phonetically.

  As a young man in Lugos, Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), tall Bela Blasko used his good looks and charm to win a number of roles on stage and in Hungarian silent films. After serving as an infantry lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, he returned to find that the political atmosphere at home had changed and decided to leave for his own safety.

  He fled to Germany and eventually the United States. A bit of confusion at Ellis Island led to his last name being changed from Blasko to Lugosi (Hungarian for “the man from Lugos”). He was surprised to find a large and vibrant Hungarian community in New York City and soon found work in Hungarian-language theater. Ambitious and realizing that the real money came from English-speaking productions, he did his best to learn the language and took small, often non-speaking roles, whenever he could.

  As soon as Liveright hired him for Dracula, Lugosi made the role his own. Even in rehearsals, he would often draw applause for his creepy, but compelling performances.

  Opening in 1931, Dracula was a smash hit, both critically and commercially. Lugosi, whose English had by then improved considerably, became a star almost overnight. He took the role to heart—often wearing his costume out on the town after shows—and was considered a major heartthrob.

  Talkies had just been introduced and Hollywood was desperate for dialogue-heavy scripts. A minor bidding war erupted for Balderston’s version of Dracula and Universal, headed by Carl Laemme Jr., won. Laemme Jr. loved the play, the script, everything except Lugosi. While he admitted stage audiences were enthralled by him, he felt that his accent and overall strangeness would be off-putting to most Americans.

  Instead, he would cast Lon Chaney—with whom he had worked on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera—in the title role. Lugosi didn’t give up and hung around the production, helping where he could. He even traveled to England to negotiate a deal for the motion picture rights with Florence, bringing her asking price down from $60,000 to $40,000. But Laemme wouldn’t budge, refusing to offer Lugosi even a bit part.

  Just before filming was to begin, Chaney died of cancer. Desperate, Laemme offered the part to the role of Count Dracula to John Wray, Paul Muni, Conrad Veidt, Chester Morris and William Courtenay—well-known leading men of the time—but none were interested. Finally, he offered the role to Lugosi, but cut the film’s budget in half and paid him the insultingly tiny wage—even for the era—of just $3500.

  It was a huge risk—a horror film with no comedy relief, no trick ending and an eccentric star whose command of the English language was iffy at best. And it was a risk that paid off handsomely. As soon as it was released on Valentine’s Day 1931, audiences flocked to Dracula. When the national media began to report that women were fainting in their seats at screenings, people swarmed theaters out of curiosity.

  Lugosi was the key. People loved him, especially women. After Dracula, Lugosi actually received more fan mail and even marriage proposals than reigning superstars Clark Gable and Errol Flynn.

  But Lugosi (who once said his greatest thrill was a “paycheck”) squandered his fame by taking any role, no matter how bad, and by becoming addicted to drugs. With his physical and mental health steadily declining, Lugosi became an increasingly ridiculous figure as he pulled out the old “wampire” shtick for anyone who would pay him.

  While most people these days remember his self-parody better than his original claim to fame, Lugosi had made his mark on cinematic history. He established the romantic, erotic allure of the vampire in the Western consciousness.

  But while Florence Stoker was diligent in her defense of her late husband’s copyright, she was eventually made powerless in the United States. Apparently, Stoker’s representatives didn’t completely understand the then-complicated process of U.S. copyright and Dracula was never actually registered as her property there.

  This led to a deluge of poorly made, poorly received, cliché-ridden versions of the story, bringing its cultural currency to the same level as Lugosi’s career. And Lugosi—pulling out the cape for a steadily declining level of comedy TV shows and state fairs—who was getting more pathetic and disturbing rather than scary and romantic with every passing year, certainly didn’t help.

  The story could have died of its own tattered
legacy had it not been for two major efforts. In 1958, Hammer Films (a British company and thus subject to copyright) released a new version of Dracula. Powered by the highly charged performance of Christopher Lee as Dracula, this version was a minor hit and allowed Hammer to make a series of low-budget, high-return horror films for decades. It was retitled The Horror of Dracula for U.S. audiences because the immensely popular 1931 version was still showing in a few theaters around the country.

  The story was revived successfully again in 1977 when the play re-opened on Broadway. It was a big success, with towering, broodingly handsome Frank Langella redefining the character for another generation of theater-goers. Langella then starred in a big-budget film adaptation in 1979. It was soundly praised—especially Langella’s performance—but wasn’t very successful at the box office, in large part because director John Badham was subtle and sparing in the film’s violent scenes and because the silly but much-hyped vampire-based spoof Love At First Bite was released on the same day.

  As effective as Lee and Langella were, they failed to capture a mass audience, especially among young people, the way Lugosi had. But vampires made yet another, even bigger comeback.

  In the very late 1970s, punk rock had clearly run its course. In its wake, a variety of more complex musical styles—known collectively as post-punk—emerged. A group of bands, many of them veteran punk outfits like The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, began to diversify and started performing songs about existentialist philosophy, romanticism and even gothic horror. They also developed a common look—black often anachronistic clothes, black hair and heavy makeup.

  Typical of these bands was Bauhaus. Originally a melodic punk outfit who performed in jeans and T-shirts, the members of Bauhaus sensed which way the wind was blowing, changed into an all-black uniform and released their first single in 1980: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

  Lugosi—or at least his 1931 portrayal of Dracula—quickly became iconic to this rapidly emerging subculture. As the music became more and more dreary, the people listening to it manifested their feelings of eroticism and romance by dressing in increasingly more elaborate ways, often imitating the styles of Lugosi’s Dracula or similar clichés taken from German Expressionist horror or Alice Cooper’s act—but always in variations recalling Dracula.

  The fans, already being called Goths by their peers, needed a Mecca. They got it in July 1982 when Olli Wisdom, the founder of a glam-turned-Goth band called Specimen, opened the Batcave in London’s trendy Soho district. A live-music venue and nightclub, the Batcave’s house band was Specimen, but established bands like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus played there frequently, as did newer acts like Alien Sex Fiend, Sisters of Mercy, and Dead Can Dance.

  The club’s decor was nearly totally dark and dominated by fake cobwebs, rubber bats and other items reminiscent of Dracula’s castle. In a back room, gothic horror films—including, reportedly, illegal prints of both Dracula and Nosferatu—played constantly.

  Just as the Goth movement was beginning to gain a little traction, they got a vampire movie to call their own. Tony Scott, a talented British commercial and music video director, lived in the shadow of his older brother Ridley, who became world-famous after directing the blockbuster Alien in 1979. Eventually, interest in Ridley became interest in Tony, because they had worked together for years.

  When Hollywood came calling, Tony was ready. He had read Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview With the Vampire earlier that year and thought it would make a splendid film. MGM, which already had Rice’s novel in development, had a different idea. They thought Tony’s fast-paced style would be better suited to a more modern, less clichéd take on vampires. William Strieber’s 1980 novel The Hunger was little known, but much loved by a small army of fans. It was groundbreaking for the genre because it dealt very frankly and pragmatically with the mundanity of vampire life—finding suitable victims, disposing of bodies—while retaining the gothic necessities of horror, romance and eroticism. Streiber worked hard to make the vampires in his novel sympathetic characters. They were actually the real victims, born into (or at least seduced by) a lifestyle that made them different from a mainstream culture that could never begin to understand them.

  With The Hunger, Tony Scott made a vampire epic. By combining a trio of popular young actors (David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon), sumptuous design, haute couture fashion and a cutting-edge soundtrack (including Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”), Scott created a Dracula for a new age. While The Hunger—a lavish movie released at a time when stark, spartan filmmaking was fashionable—didn’t set any records at the box office and wasn’t a critical success, it was considered required viewing by Goths. Because of their dedication, The Hunger was kept alive in theaters for years as a second-run film, drawing audiences (often in costume) for midnight showings.

  And their numbers were growing. The look was easy to copy and nearly identical-looking herds of Goths—sometimes called batcavers because of the London nightclub—were commonplace in high schools throughout Europe, North America and Australia by the middle 1980s.

  The numbers of Goths have risen and fallen, but, as a group, they have had staying power. Decades after kids started dressing up in black, they’re still doing it. It’s a testament to the movement that other fashion trends that came out of the same milieu—like New Romantics or Modern Primitives—have essentially died out.

  There’s a strong reason for Goth’s longevity. Traditionally, the Goth crowd has attracted the least popular kids, those who are most alienated and fit in the worst. They are generally those who don’t succeed athletically, academically or in other social circles.

  An extensive study in Scotland published in the British Medical Journal in 2004 indicated that teenagers who identified themselves as Goths were more than twice as likely as other teens to self-harm and to entertain suicidal thoughts. Interestingly, in almost every case, the child in question showed a greater propensity for these and other signs of depression, before they identified themselves as Goths. It’s as if the Goths attracted the most depressed kids in the community and eased their angst a little.

  For many of these alienated, unpopular kids, inclusion into the Goth subculture can be a godsend. Goths tend to be very welcoming of new recruits and offer a more-or-less supportive community for those who don’t already have one.

  I ran this by three Goths who agreed to talk with me at a Queen Street coffee shop. Swansong, a tall, thin guy of about 30, was squiring around two women about 10 years his junior. Hellwind is short and stocky, while Ravenesque is short and obese. In a subculture—or at least a fashion statement—based on eroticism, almost all of the Goths I’ve met do not exactly present as the current mainstream ideal of sleek and sexy.

  These three are all wearing nothing but black and white, though other Goths around also experiment with dark purple and, occasionally, blood red.

  Swansong admits that the established hypothesis was true for him. “I had no friends, none at all, not even in my family,” he said. “Then I started hanging around with the Goths at my school, dressing like them, and I had dozens of friends . . . all ages . . . girls too . . . even if they mostly didn’t go to my school.” And his new appearance served as an entree into a larger world. “I went on a trip [to a distant town] with my parents and ran into some Goth kids in the parking lot of a grocery store, and we immediately started talking, hanging out—that never would have happened if I weren’t a Goth.”

  Like that other successful fashion movement from the same era, punk (which was initially conceived in Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren’s London boutique), the Goth look is designed as much to anger those outside the movement as it is to please those within it. “People notice me now,” he says. “They don’t all like me, but they never would have anyway—this way, at least, I get a reaction.”

  Swansong says he has lots of pleasant (or at least fulfilling) memories of being a Goth, but adds that the consensus in hi
s community is that the golden days of Goth are long over. Two things, he said, have combined to keep Goths away from the clubs: the Internet and the murders. “The murders especially,” pipes in Hellwind. “They blame them on us because we’re different.”

  The Internet is a problem, they explain to me, because Goths are generally shy people who are difficult to coax out of their shells, not to mention their homes. And it’s a lot easier for them to make friends semi-anonymously on forums and in chat rooms than it is to actually go out into clubs and face the possible disaster of rejection. Since Goths recruit from those who already feel rejected from mainstream society, not fitting in at a Goth club would be a profound disappointment. It’s hard to imagine how bad it would feel to be rejected by a group of people who got together because they all felt rejected.

  Hellwind points out that all the clubs serve alcohol, which means those under 19 aren’t permitted. “And they’re way more strict about it these days,” she says. “When I was young, it was no problem getting into clubs—now they card everyone who looks under 30.”

  I take a quick scan around the Goths in the neighborhood and notice that the median age appears to be around 30, maybe higher. I ask about this and my tablemates tell me that there are lots of young Goths, but they’re at home typing away, not coming out to clubs. Making matters worse, the people at the clubs generally feel disdain for the younger, plugged-in Goths.

  “They’re not real Goths,” Swansong says, but in our conversation, he has said the same thing about basically every person or group mentioned except those at our table. “And the Internet, it makes them crazy . . . violent.”

  The perception that Goths were violent first emerged in 1999 after the Columbine High School massacre, when two teenagers killed 12 fellow students, a teacher and themselves. After the media found that one of the participants had dyed black hair and wore eye makeup in a ninth-grade yearbook photo, the killers were widely described as Goths. Even Diane Sawyer dropped the G-word on national TV.