Sleeping with the Lights On

by Jones, Darryl

  For a writer, reader, or viewer in the first decades of the twenty-first century, monsters have become an inescapable presence in popular culture, from whom there seems to be nowhere to run. ‘We live’, to quote an influential commentator on the subject, ‘in a time of monsters.’ There have been numerous books and PhD theses written, for example, on the phenomenon of contemporary vampire culture. A whole industry has emerged in critical and scholarly commentary, in academic conferences, learned articles, and on the blogosphere, providing often highly sophisticated analyses of developments in horror almost as quickly as the culture industry can produce them. This might be seen as part of a widespread acceleration of culture, producing and responding to a bewildering new technological and political landscape. This has perhaps understandably led one 2013 book on Monster Culture in the 21st Century to propose that ‘over the past decade we have been terrorized by change’, and that consequently ‘monstrosity has transcended its status as metaphor and has indeed become a necessary condition for our existence in the twenty-first century’. Monsters, the authors suggest, have become a means of managing contemporary threats, crises, and anxieties. At the very least, I believe, they have become a means by which we can think through the contemporary situation.

  The literary critic Nina Auerbach once suggested that vampires are like immigrants, in that viewed from afar, or through the eyes of ignorance, they all look alike, but once you get close up what is most striking about them is their differences, their multiplicity. Béla Lugosi would probably consider Robert Pattinson an intolerable wimp. The zombies who worked sugar plantations and the zombies who devour human flesh at the end of civilization both understand economic exploitation, but wouldn’t agree on shared means, let alone shared meals. The King Kong of 1933 and the King Kong of 2017 may both emerge from periods of economic depression, but they have very different stories to tell. As we have seen, Hannibal Lecter and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Sawyer family don’t really move in the same social circles at all.

  Vampires

  The vampire is the iconic monster of modern horror. Vampires refuse to go away, though they may go underground for periods, and are easily the most widespread and influential of all horror monsters, capable of startling acts of reinvention. Although, as Paul Barber very convincingly argues in Vampires, Burial and Death, the origins of the vampire may well lie in the folkloric attempts of the pre-modern mind to understand the physical processes of death, it appears to be the case that in the figure of the bloodsucking undead, modernity seems to have found its great all-purpose metaphor, capable of speaking to successive generations on their own terms.

  The extraordinary popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of books and films, aimed squarely at a young teen audience, suggests a number of intersecting phenomena: adolescent sexuality, romanticism, and a sense of outsiderliness; religious sensibilities (some commentators read Twilight as emanating directly from Meyer’s Mormonism); the power of marketing, corporatization, and celebrity culture; varieties of new media (Twilight gave birth to the Fifty Shades of Grey series, which began life as online Twilight fan fiction); the sense of a kind of accelerated generational slippage and perpetual youth culture (the ‘Twi-Mom’ phenomenon, in which mothers appropriated their daughters’ cultural tastes). The success of Twilight has led to other, similar ventures, such as the Vampire Diaries young adult fiction and TV series, or the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood cycle of books and TV series, aimed at a slightly older audience (the Stackhouse novels actually predate Twilight, but the success of True Blood is clearly a response to the phenomenon). The Twilight phenomenon has defined the terms by which twenty-first-century vampires are understood. When Neil Jordan’s Byzantium, for example, was released in cinemas in 2013, around the time the Twilight series was reaching its cinematic climax, it was referred to (or virally marketed) as ‘the other Twilight’, or ‘the alternative to Twilight’.

  But vampires have not always embodied youth and its glamour: this is a distinctively modern twist, which in essence dates to the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976). This section of the chapter will look at the vampire’s history, from its beginnings in European folklore as an undead revenant (usually a peasant) returning from the grave to prey on relatives and fellow villagers, generally taken to represent a pre-modern means of understanding plague by blaming death upon the dead.

  In parts of early modern Europe, vampires were a fact of life. Periodically, the dead returned, rising from their graves to prey upon the living. The causes of infection and disease were fundamentally mysterious until the formulation of the germ theory of disease in the second half of the nineteenth century. The natural decomposition processes of the human body were poorly understood—due to the build-up of gases, for example, corpses can be astonishingly buoyant, often seemingly disinterring themselves if not buried deeply enough, or if water tables rose. Under some conditions, corpses needed to be staked into the earth to prevent this from happening. Vampires, then, were originally an imaginative means to understand pestilence and death, providing a supernatural explanation for incomprehensible natural processes. At times of plague, the sheer number of dead bodies made burial difficult—the dead seemed to be bursting out of shallow graves, poisoning water supplies, visiting the living at night, preying upon them.

  These vampire epidemics afflicted Europe until as late as the eighteenth century. The much-discussed case of the Serbian vampire Arnold Paole, who died shortly after returning from military service in Turkey in 1727, only seemingly to rise from the grave and prey on his home village, was the subject of an official legal investigation. Its report, Visum et Repertum (Seen and Destroyed), concluded that Paole was indeed a vampire, and ordered that his victims be disinterred, beheaded, and burnt, and their ashes scattered into the river (a boundary of running water which vampires were believed to be unable to cross). In 1746, the Benedictine scholar Augustine Calmet published a lengthy and high-profile treatise on vampirism, which was translated into English as The Phantom World, and was commented upon by a variety of contemporary figures, including Pope Benedict XIV (whose position on the existence of vampires was equivocal). For Enlightenment figures such as Diderot and Voltaire, a belief in vampires could only arise from the superstition and credulity they saw as their mission to correct. Rousseau understood them as emblematic of the contradictions inherent in traditional judicial, military, medical, and ecclesiastical authority, and thus of orders of power undermining themselves: ‘No evidence is lacking—depositions, certificates of notables, surgeons, priests and magistrates. The proof in law is utterly complete.…Yet with all this, who actually believes in vampires?’

  Though unquestionably revenants, ‘folkloric’ vampires such as Arnold Paole and his ilk tend to be peasants or rural villagers, intensely localized in their effects. In appearance, they are often described as ruddy faced, as though bloated with blood. How did we get from these frankly unsexy undead yokels to the characteristic vampire of modern popular culture—suave, aristocratic, cultivated, pale, and desirable?

  This vampire is a distinctive product of the literary culture of Romanticism. As the critic Mario Praz identified as long ago as 1933, there is a recurring strain of ‘Dark Romanticism’ which is fascinated by the allure of supernatural and demonic creatures (Lamia, Geraldine, and other serpent-women, Life-in-Death, La Belle Dame Sans Merci) and by human transgressors and overreachers standing apart from the common concerns of humanity (Faust, Frankenstein, Napoleon). In April 1819, the New Monthly Magazine published a tale entitled The Vampyre, whose protagonist, the charismatic and seductive Lord Ruthven, returns to London from his European Grand Tour, having died in Greece and arisen as a vampire. Published anonymously, the work was assumed to be by Lord Byron (Goethe thought it among his best work), though it was in fact written by the Edinburgh physician Dr John Polidori. Polidori was present at the evening of supernatural tales told at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Ge
neva in 1816 which was the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Told as they have been from a variety of different and differing sources, the events of this evening are difficult to reconstruct with certainty, but it seems likely that Polidori based The Vampyre on the supernatural tale which Byron himself told that night (a fragment of which was subsequently published), and drew heavily on the scandalous public persona of Byron himself for Lord Ruthven.

  With Romantic writers such as Byron and Polidori, the vampire became, importantly, both sexualized and aristocratic, a demon lover, running riot across the poetry, fiction, and theatre of the nineteenth century right up to the publication of the single most important text in the history of horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in 1897. At the same time, Karl Marx habitually deployed the vampire as a metaphor for the ‘bloodsucking’ economic exploitation of capitalism (one wonders what he would have made of the Twilight phenomenon, capitalism red in fang and claw?). Marx was much given to Gothic metaphors, and when casting around in Capital (1867) for an exemplar of ‘The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour’, settles on ‘a Wallachian Boyar…in the Danubian Principalities’ (was he thinking of Vlad the Impaler?). A couple of pages earlier, Marx offers his celebrated account of bloodsucking capitalism:

  [The] capitalist…is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

  The class polarities of vampirism have been reversed. Marx’s vampiric ‘Wallachian Boyar’ exploits the labour of the very people (the Eastern European poor) who were traditionally prone to vampirism.

  What this demonstrates is that, by the mid-nineteenth century, vampirism had infected the cultural bloodstream, where it has remained ever since. (Our vampires are figures of speech, put to a variety of uses.) In popular culture, James Malcolm Rymer’s ‘penny blood’ behemoth Varney the Vampire (1845–7) found in its immortal undead protagonist the perfect vehicle for a potentially endlessly recyclable plot. Sir Francis Varney is killed many times, by almost all means imaginable, but can always be resurrected by exposure to moonlight (a favourite nineteenth-century vampiric restorative)—until, finally consumed by self-disgust, and at the demand of the publisher, Edward Lloyd, he flings himself into Vesuvius, where the moon never shines. The demands of the market can kill off seemingly indestructible monsters, but they can also bring them back at any time.

  Vampires also enjoyed a lively undeath onstage across the course of the century. Charles Nodier’s adaptation of Polidori, Le Vampire, was a huge hit on the Parisian stage in 1820, and led to a craze for vampire plays in the city. One contemporary critic wrote: ‘There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire! At the Porte-Saint-Martin we have Le Vampire; at the Vaudeville Le Vampire again; at the Varieties Les Trois Vampires ou le clair de la lune.’ Nodier’s play was immediately adapted into English by James Robinson Planché, whose play The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles opened in London’s Lyceum in August 1820, and introduced a sensational new stage device: an onstage trapdoor which allowed the actors seemingly to disappear, accompanied by a puff of smoke. This trapdoor was, and still is, called a ‘vampire’. In the 1850s, the celebrated Dublin dramatist Dion Boucicault resurrected Polidori again for productions in London (The Vampire) and New York (The Phantom).

  In 1872, another Dubliner, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, published the novella ‘Carmilla’ as part of his portmanteau collection In a Glass Darkly. ‘Carmilla’ has had an enormous influence on subsequent vampire culture because of its dreamlike narrative logic, its remote Central European gentry class setting, and most particularly its exploration of the homoerotics of vampirism. Laura, the young female narrator, recalls her troubling and yet exciting relationship with the vampire Carmilla:

  Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses, and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.’

  Our relationship to our monsters is a dialectical one—we are, simultaneously, irresistibly drawn to them (we can’t take our eyes off them) and revolted by them (they disgust us). More precisely, the strength of our attraction to them disgusts us, and yet the more we are repulsed by monsters, the stronger our desire for them. In Totem and Taboo, Freud describes the concept of taboo as characterized by ‘emotional ambivalence’: ‘The meaning of “taboo”, as we see it, diverges in two contrasting directions. To us it means, on the one hand, “sacred”, “consecrated”, and on the other “uncanny”, “dangerous”, “forbidden”, “unclean”.’ Taboos are powerful because they are called on to regulate potentially overwhelming desires. ‘I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence’, Laura admits. Carmilla’s bite is intensely sexual: ‘Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself.’ In Dracula, Jonathan Harker, face to face with the Count’s vampire brides, responds with the same ‘emotional ambivalence’ of desire and repulsion:

  All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they should kiss me with those red lips.

  Bleeding over boundaries, the vampire’s red, fanged mouth is an archetypal image of horror and anxiety. It is Eros and Thanatos, desire and death, consumption and abjection; it is both male and female; it penetrates and encloses; it is the vagina dentata.

  Bram Stoker’s great novel is a rich and complex work. It is, first of all, one of the major novels of Victorian London. Reading Dracula, we encounter a city of immigrants and suburbs, gentlemen’s clubs, lawyers, banks, docks, graveyards, and lunatic asylums. The novel’s zoophagous lunatic, R. M. Renfield, is an unclean eater who plans to consume his way up a chain of being, from flies to spiders to birds to cats, presumably ending with cannibalism. Once a high-ranking member of the Windham, one of London’s most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, Renfield is an insane establishmentarian Englishman, now completely in thrall to the Count, a dangerously exotic foreigner who carries with him disease, dirt, and infection which will enter the English bloodstream.

  One of the first things we discover about the Count is his unbearable stench: ‘As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, 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.’ In Castle Dracula, the Count’s lair is ‘an old, ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard’, which Harker enters through ‘a tunnel-like passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour, the odour of old earth newly turned. As I went through the passage, the smell grew closer and heavier.’ In London, Dracula hides out in the ruined chapel of Carfax Abbey, where the stench is worse still, intensified commensurate with the size of the city:

  There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh! It sickens me to think of it. Every breath exhaled by that monster seemed to have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness.…We all instinctively drew back. The whole p
lace was becoming alive with rats.…The rats were multiplying in their thousands, and we moved out.

  Dracula, as we have seen, is one of a number of reverse colonization narratives published in and around the year 1897. In this novel, the British Empire is vulnerable to invasion and infection, a permeable membrane, like skin easily punctured by the vampire’s kiss.

  But even in 1897, the real future of vampires was on the screen, not the page or the stage. In Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated 1992 adaptation of Dracula, Gary Oldman’s count—suave and debonair, rejuvenated by his contact with the modern city of London—goes to see the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematograph, up-to-the-minute technology first unveiled in 1895. In 1896, the writer Maxim Gorky responded in horror to a Cinematograph showing in Moscow, believing he had had an encounter with the undead:

  Your nerves are strained, imagination carries you to some unnaturally monotonous life, a life without colour and without sound, but full of movement, the life of ghosts, or of people, damned to the damnation of eternal silence, people who have been deprived of all the colours of life.

  Vampires and their close counterparts played an important role in early cinema. There is something spectral about the experience of cinema, as Gorky understood: to enter the cinema is to cross a boundary, a threshold into the supernatural world. ‘And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him’, reads a haunting intertitle from Nosferatu: Ein Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror), F. W. Murnau’s free, unauthorized 1922 adaptation of Dracula. The extraordinary aesthetics of German expressionist cinema, which made manifest the symbolic possibilities of shadow and shape in a world ‘without colour and without sound’, were brilliantly suited to represent the land of phantoms, out of which they seemed to have emerged (Figure 2). The artist and occultist Albin Grau was responsible for Nosferatu’s unforgettable production and set design, and in the uncanny person of Max Schreck’s Graf Orlok, the film offers a vampire utterly removed from human sympathy and concerns. With his pointed ears and fanged incisors, Orlok is a rat in (near-)human form, and a plague of rats accompanies him when he disembarks a ship in Wisborg, bringing disease to the town.