Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death
– John Keats
Earlier this year (May, to be precise) I read and watched a number of vampire stories. This month I went with friends to see Dracula performed as a ballet. Across that time, I was continually stunned to notice striking similarities between so many takes on the same subject matter, similarities which were all the more interesting because they weren’t present in the source material upon which these later adaptations were based.
Said source material is comprised of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (published 1871) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (published 1897). The subsequent adaptations are Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), NBC’s short-lived Dracula (2013), Emily Harris’s Carmilla (2019) and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024). What they all have in common is that – contrary to the original texts – their vampire characters are unambiguously portrayed as alluring and inviting and erotic. Well, maybe not Nosferatu exactly, but that didn’t stop a certain segment of fans for finding him so anyway.
But what really caught my attention is that all four stories centre a young woman, one who is caught between the comfort and safety of her every-day existence, and the danger and horror inflicted upon her by the vampire’s intrusion into her life… except that this isn’t how the adaptations frame it.
Instead, each film or show creates a love triangle of sorts, one between a woman who is unsatisfied with her life, the stifling societal norms and patriarchal conventions that surround her (usually represented by her fiancé or husband) and the freedom and modernity that the vampire offers her. To one extent or another, this is the case in all four of the above-mentioned adaptations, and certainly not the case in the two stories upon which they are based.
So, why exactly has there been such a dramatic shift in how vampire-related material is interpreted? One which is apparently so pervasive that it’s appeared in several otherwise unconnected variations of the same story?
The easy part of the answer is that when these stories were first published/released, anywhere between the 1800s to the early 1900s, that which the vampire symbolized was universally regarded as unambiguously bad. The vampire is sexual wantonness, unholy desire, and the societal ruin that comes with unchecked lust, positioned within a clear framework of Christian-based good versus evil.
In comparison, these are all very recent films, and it doesn’t take an expert to realize that if you skip back a few generations (to 1922’s Nosferatu, 1931’s Dracula, or of course, Le Fanu and Stoker’s original texts) the sexual component inherent in the vampiric characters might be obvious, but still described in veiled terms – and not without a heavy tone of disgust and fear. From Dracula:
“In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner… all three had 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 would kiss me with those red lips…”
And from Carmilla:
“How beautiful she looked in the moonlight! Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled. Her soft cheek was glowing against mine… the remainder of that night passed without any recurrence of what I called her infatuations. I mean her crazy talk and looks, which embarrassed, and even frightened me.”
The women targeted by vampires in those stories must be either rescued from the temptation embodied by the vampire, or reject it herself. For to submit is for her to be damned. Nothing less than her immortal soul is at stake. No matter how appealing the vampire may appear, there’s no question that it must be rejected. (And if the vampire does appear attractive, it’s only to heighten the danger they pose; the hook that snares the quarry. As Miss Marple once said: “the children of Lucifer are often beautiful.”)
Bu to go back even further, the concept of undead bloodsuckers was at least in part born out of real-life incidences of people being buried alive after falling into death-like comas. There are horrifying anecdotes of corpses “coming back to life” after they were declared dead, leading to the use of safety coffins at gravesites with strings leading down into the coffin’s interior, the implications of which don’t bear thinking about.
Combining this grim possibility with Biblical notions of evil and damnation, as well as humanity’s primal fear of death and our collective distaste of rot and decay, it’s easy to see how the concept of the vampire would manifest over time, especially in tandem with a growing awareness of diseases like anaemia and rabies, not to mention influences taken from the natural world – most obviously the vampire bat, which drinks blood for sustenance.
In Ye Olden Days, the world was a scary, disturbing, creepy place, and so explanations – no matter how fanciful or macabre – helped contain those fears, and allow people to maintain a sense of control.
But what is less discussed is the vampire’s association with venereal disease. If you’ve never considered this before, well – it’s obvious once you know. The link between undead vampires and illicit sex is pretty clear: the intimate exchange of fluids speaks for itself. But there’s a third critical element to what makes a vampire a vampire which throws the whole metaphor into stark relief. Vampires don’t just drink the blood of others to sustain themselves; crucially this exchange of blood also spreads the curse of vampirism, turning innocent people into monstrous undead versions of themselves.
Although other elements of vampiric lore can be cherrypicked at will (like an aversion to sunlight, the lack of a reflection in mirrors, a requirement to sleep each day in earth from their homeland, the occasional tendency to glitter), one simply cannot depict a vampire without bloodlust, or that vampirism is passed from person to person through the drinking and sharing of blood.
The focus on blood specifically cannot be understated. For centuries physicians believed the health and wellbeing (even the temperament) of an individual was contingent on the quality of their blood. That’s why bloodletting was a thing – if you were ill, it was because you had impure fluids in your blood that needed to be drained. Life was sustained by the heart, a muscle that pumps blood around the body. Good or bad humours were believed to be carried in the blood. Heck, royalty was meant to have superior blood to the mere plebs, and therefore healing qualities. To quote Renfield: “the blood is the life!”
So, if diseases are carried in the blood, and the vampiric exchange of blood spreads those diseases, and the vampire is regarded as sexually threatening or enticing (to the point where a victim might be unable to resist them) then you’re quite obviously looking at a metaphor for venereal disease. And this was a very real problem before the onset of modern medicine. People in those times were well aware that some diseases were spread through sexual intercourse, syphilis being the obvious one – and so their anxiety became wrapped up in the myth of the vampire.
In fact, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing spells it out in 1992’s Dracula. His introductory scene has him discuss a vampire bat during a university lecture:
“Cute little vermin. Blood and the diseases of the blood such as syphilis concern us here. The very name “venereal diseases, the diseases of Venus,” imputes to them divine origin. They involve the sex problem about which the ethics and ideals of Christian civilization are concerned. In fact, civilization and syphilization have advanced together.”
Boom. In that single scene, Van Helsing draws together the connection between blood and disease, the deadly allure of the vampire, and the Victorian fear and preoccupation with sex.
But things have changed profoundly since 1897, when this scene was set. In her book Woman’s Lore, Sarah Gregg hypothesized that as childbirth across the centuries became safer for women, the need for the goddess Lamashtu, a deity who was blamed for pregnancy complications and infant death, gradually dissolved. In a similar manner, as sex and its associated diseases became preventable and/or treatable by modern medicine, contraception and education, the use of vampires as a cautionary deterrent against promiscuous sex also disappears.
If sex is no longer as dangerous, no longer as taboo, something that can be practiced safely and without consequences (if you take the right precautions, of course) then the thing that represents it in fiction loses its edge.
And once you remove the inherent threat and associated anxiety of venereal disease from your portrayal of vampires, all you’re left with is the sex appeal. Now that the unpleasant half of the metaphor has been neutralized, we can have our cake and eat it too: the enticement and the temptation without the more drastic consequences. The concept of a vampire can shift on its axis into something quite different.
Obviously, this change didn’t happen overnight. We didn’t go straight from the rat-like Nosferatu to the sparkly Edward Cullen – the likes of Lestat and Louis, Angel and Spike, Bill Compton and Stefan Salvatore (along with many more) helped bridge that decades-long gap between them.
But for the purposes of this post, let’s look at the films and television shows I mentioned above, for the differences between them and their source material, as well as the similarities between them that exist independently of said source material, perfectly encapsulate the seismic changes that have broadly taken place within vampire fiction.
***
As mentioned, all of these adaptations are recent productions (Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula was released in 1992, while Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu was released just last year) but all of them are set in the past – specifically either London or Wisborg (a fictional German town) in the Victorian Era. Coppola’s Dracula takes place in 1897, the NBC’s in 1896, and Nosferatu a few decades earlier in 1838. Emily Harris’s Carmilla is not given a specific timeframe, though it’s interesting to note that though the original novella was published in 1872, the film seems to be set much later, and has been transposed from Austria to England, bringing it more in line with the Victorian Era’s historical context, aesthetics and cultural connotations.
It goes without saying that Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901 was a period of massive change and innovation across multiple fields. Scientific discoveries, early feminist movements, global exploration, and the impending turn of the century. Darwin! Freud! Edison! The Industrial Revolution! And inevitably, with change comes no small amount of social anxiety, which is so often encapsulated in the art and literature that’s produced at the time (particularly in the horror genre).
From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we can look back on the period and casually affix to it a number of assumptions and clichés, from the constricting corsets to the opium dens to the sexual repression (epitomized in Queen Victoria’s apocryphal advice on what a young lady should do on her honeymoon: “lie back and think of England.”) It’s a natural fit to use as a backdrop when it comes to recontextualizing vampires and their link to sexuality, for this is not only when Dracula and Carmilla were first written, but which is a time that is now perceived as a gateway between the old world and the new; the archaic and the modern.
In all four adaptations, there is a young Victorian woman at the centre of the action: Laura (played by Hannah Rae), Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), and two versions of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder and Jessica de Gouw). In all four, this woman is very blatantly – through dialogue, costuming, performance and narrative – portrayed as deeply repressed, while the vampire who targets her is emblematic of freedom and passion; representing an awakening to her “true self.” Their growing relationship does not come without danger or consequence, but it’s not depicted as inherently sinful or fatal either.
In fact, the vampire very much taps into a darkness or sexual longing that’s already within the woman in question, whether it’s presented as a past life, an interest in pursuing “unfeminine” knowledge, latent psychic powers … or, you know, just being really horny. The woman’s thirst for more autonomy and/or passion in her life, as well as her frustration at the constraints that are set around her, is treated sympathetically by the narrative, as is her attraction to the vampire, who offers her a route to a profoundly different type of existence than the one she’s currently trapped in.
For this reason, and most crucially, the vampire is framed as something the woman genuinely wants, and that going to him/her is a deliberate choice she makes of her own free will. Doylistically speaking, that the woman is endangered by a vampire’s allure has always been treated as practically an inevitability, a requirement of the story that is being told (if not just to raise the stakes), but these newer adaptations have ensured that on a Watsonian level, the woman very much wants to capitulate, and does so with her implicit consent.
Naturally, other characters are horrified by the very thought of this, but in all four of these adaptations, the female protagonist either initiates literal sex with the vampire, or allows him/her to drink her blood in a way that is very much portrayed as a sexual encounter. The consistency with which this is true across these modern adaptations, despite not happening in the source material (in which the woman is disgusted, terrified and preyed upon by the vampire) is rather eye-opening, so let’s go through them in chronological order:
Winona Ryder’s Mina is clearly a woman chafing a little against the confines of her life; looking like a prim and demure Victorian lady (the script tells us: “her schoolmistress attire is designed to prevent any sensuality from escaping”) while feigning shock and disapproval at Lucy’s more scandalous demeanour with her three suitors (“there’s more to marriage than carnal pleasure”), but also sneaking peeks at the erotic illustrations of Arabian Nights while typing.
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| The height of each woman's neckline speaks volumes. |
She expresses more disappointment than pleasure at Jonathan’s career opportunity, as it means their wedding will have to be delayed, and is clearly the more sexually forceful of the two: on his departure to Budapest, she draws him into the gazebo for a passionate kiss. He notably looks around cautiously before joining her.
On meeting Dracula, script notes tell us that she’s “unexplainably drawn,” “so angry she’s aroused,” “confused, fighting against every rule of decorum,” and “completely transfixed.” She’s described as “weakening at his proximity” and feeling “a rush of sexual adrenaline.” In her voiceover, she states: “with him, I felt more alive than I ever had. And now, without him, soon to be a bride, I feel confused and lost. Perhaps, though I try to be good, I am bad. Perhaps I am a bad, inconstant woman.”
Later, when Dracula comes to her bedroom and reveals his true self, she confesses: “I’ve wanted this to happen. I know that now. I want to be with you always.” In the scene that follows, the two of them drink each other’s blood (on a bed, with plenty of sucking noises, you get the gist) which begins the process of turning Mina into a vampire – which is not only done with her consent, but at her insistence.
The whole thing is a depiction of a woman who has been raised in a deeply conservative society, one that she’s been subconsciously pushing back against, and into which Dracula comes as a disruptive force, which sees her defying convention and breaking societal rules. It goes without saying that her scenes with Dracula are much more sexually charged than those with Jonathan: waltzing by candlelight, low-cut red evening gowns, close-ups on her lips as she drinks absinthe, which Dracula describes as an aphrodisiac – the list goes on.
It’s all clearly framed as a seduction, and though her attraction to him is based on the suggestion that she was his wife in a past life (another script note describes her as “awakening to her deep inner self”) Dracula also offers her a tantalizing route into freedom and danger and sexual excitement.
Reminder: none of this is in Bram Stoker’s novel.
As played by Jessica de Gouw, the Mina Murray of NBC’s Dracula is even more forward-thinking than her predecessor, as in this adaptation she’s a medical student training to become a surgeon. Yet as it happens, Mina faces no overt prejudice from her male peers or her teachers for pursuing a career in medicine. The show’s depictions of societal disapproval are limited to an anecdote she shares from her childhood about how adults would laugh at her insistence on becoming a doctor instead of a nurse, and the fact that her fiancé Jonathan isn’t as supportive as he otherwise could be (and even then, it’s not so bad – he never tells her he doesn’t want her to be a surgeon, just makes a few boorish statements while drunk and unaware of her presence).
This change from schoolmistress to medical student has virtually no impact on the plot or her characterization, and only seems to exist in order to contrast Jonathan’s indifferent attitude to Dracula’s intrigued one. On learning about her career aspirations, he remarks: “how extraordinary,” and then counsels Jonathan to accept his future wife’s calling in life. Aside from a few scenes that take place at medical school, Mina’s arc is based entirely around her romantic entanglements.
As with 1992’s Dracula, this show works with the premise that Mina is a reincarnation of Dracula’s wife, who also died tragically at the hands of his enemies. From the first episode, Mina feels (and attempts to resist) a strong pull towards the man she knows as Alexander Grayson, finding him strangely familiar, experiencing visions of her past life, growing uncomfortable at how quickly he inveigles himself into her life, and even having a naughty dream about him, in which he states: “[Jonathan] won’t make you happy.” As in the nineties film, Dracula appears to offer her a more modern, emancipated path in life.
The problem with this is that the show itself isn’t that well-conceived. As the costumes imply, the characters live in what is more of a facsimile of Victorian London than a realistic historically-based setting, one in which Mina is already fairly liberated. She visits the Bohemian quarter, gets drunk during a girls’ night out, wanders around by herself at night, hops in and out of other people’s carriages – all without an escort and with very little sense of decorum.
Along with her pursuit of a career, she’s also surprisingly sexually liberated – earlier on in the season, she initiates premarital sex with Jonathan, and after a series of melodramatic twists (including Jonathan sleeping with Lucy after he suspects Mina of being in love with “Alexander”) she calls off their engagement. Her final scene depicts her acknowledging her attraction to Alexander/Dracula and consummating her relationship with him. Though she’s still completely unaware that he’s a vampire, the encounter is otherwise on her terms, at her initiation, and about her enjoyment.
Naturally, this rather dilutes my hypothesis that the vampire represents Mina’s suppressed sexuality, as there’s not a lot Dracula can offer her that she doesn’t have already – which is presumably why the show leans so heavily into the past life angle, and why poor Jonathan goes through what amounts to character assassination. There has to be more of a reason why she’s so hypnotically drawn to Dracula, and as if to compensate for the fact their heroine isn’t actually all that repressed to start with, it’s rather telling that this Mina is the only female protagonist of the four who has actual sex with the vampire – not just metaphorical blood-sharing. I mean, it’s not really forbidden fruit if you can take it without judgement or consequence, so they had to go that one step further and make the subtext text.
Reminder: none of this is in Bram Stoker’s novel.
Moving onto Carmilla, we reach the adaptation that is the most blatant when it comes to plying on “this girl is horribly repressed” visuals. The film is veritably filled with motifs and imagery that contain and restrict our protagonist, trapping her within a protracted Garden of Eden in which the serpent comes as a blessed alternative to stifling boredom.
Moving the story from an Austrian schloss to the English countryside, Laura is a young woman living in isolation, with only her distant father and strict governess for company. As she is left-handed, her governess binds this arm behind her back to force her to use her right. She’s reprimanded for her ongoing transgression in looking at her father’s anatomy books, and every night has dreams that combine the erotic with the grotesque (usually involving naked men exposing their internal organs). She stares intently at insects devouring rotten fruit, and is scolded for “incessant daydreaming” and “idle chatter.” Naturally, there are several scenes of her being uncomfortably laced into a tight corset.
Because she’s too young for a husband or a fiancé, her main oppressor is governess Miss Fontaine (played by Jessica Raines, the go-to actress for disapproving prudes) who does the work of the patriarchy on its behalf. Although Miss Fontaine is not without affection towards her charge, she’s strict and controlling and perpetually disapproving, using corporal punishment and threats of damnation when Laura does not comply. There is frequent talk of the devil and how easy it is for him to corrupt young ladies that don’t follow the rules (she says on one occasion: “you keep to my rule and all will be well”) and in the worldview Miss Fontaine presents to Laura, to step outside the carefully marked lines of propriety is to invite in the devil.
Unsurprisingly, all this only makes Laura more vulnerable to temptation, and in such a restrictive environment, she has no chance against Carmilla when she appears. When the mysterious young woman is brought into the house after her carriage accident, there are close-up shots of her corset laces being carefully and deliberately cut, while Laura watches intently from the doorway.
This story is an outlier in that Laura’s would-be vampiric lover is another woman (just as the main source of her oppression is also a woman). Carmilla is red-headed and sensual and eager to listen to Laura’s thoughts and opinions. Their growing attraction to each other culminates in a scene in which the two wipe their blood on each other’s lips, which quickly escalates into a make-out session on the floor… where they’re inevitably caught by Miss Fontaine, who then takes drastic steps to remove Laura from Carmilla’s influence.
This story is an outlier in that Laura’s would-be lover is another woman (just as the main source of her oppression is also a woman), and Carmilla is presented as red-headed and sensual and eager to listen to Laura’s thoughts and opinions. It culminates in a scene in which the two girls wipe their blood on each other’s lips, which quickly escalates into a make-out session on the floor – and are inevitably caught by Miss Fontaine, who then takes drastic steps to remove Laura from Carmilla’s influence.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this adaptation is that it never explicitly identifies Carmilla as a vampire, and the novella’s final chapters in which her grave is exhumed and her body destroyed is completely excised. Instead, the frantic conferences between Miss Fontaine, the local doctor, and the household servants are clearly staged in such a way that we’re meant to infer the unspoken words of “lesbian” and “vampire” are interchangeable when it comes to the collective fear and horror they instil among those present.
As stated back when I first watched this, the film’s commitment to the metaphor leads to a rather confusing denouement. By ignoring the fact that Carmilla is quite literally a vampire, the film ends with Miss Fontaine essentially committing the cold-blooded murder of a girl who could have been a perfectly normal human being, albeit one she perceives as a threat to Laura’s purity and innocence. The act itself is not depicted onscreen, but the film concludes with Carmilla dead, restrictions reimposed, and normalcy resumed.
Only the final shot, depicting Carmilla’s reflection in the surface of the pond where Laura stands, implies that she’s had a lasting influence on the way Laura thinks, feels and perceives herself – one that was clearly not unwelcome.
Reminder: none of this is in Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella.
Finally, we come to Ellen Hutter of Nosferatu. Hoo boy, I don’t even know where to start with this one. The character is practically a walking Freudian case study. In fact, the whole story is one big psychodrama about how weird everyone is about sex, and the film ultimately has no interest in explaining itself with any clarity.
Is Ellen a rape victim who secretly, guiltily enjoyed it? Does she deliberately call Orlok back to her? Is he the personification of her depression, repressed sexuality, or otherworldly powers? Was she a victim of child molestation? Is he her escape from a constrictive life she doesn’t really want? Or is he how she perceives her own carnal desires and subsequent disgust over it?
From an early age, she’s been haunted by the spectre known as Nosferatu, who apparently came to her as a child after she prayed for: “an angel – spirit – anything.” As an adult, he sends her into trances that involve suggestive moaning and writhing, later claiming that it is all at her instigation. (It reminds me of Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful. There too a demon preys on a young woman, tormenting her by insisting that it can only come to her if she wills it).
Ellen denies this over the course of the film, and between her melancholy, her sleepwalking and her seizures, she certainly doesn’t seem to be having fun whenever he psychically reaches out to her (script notes read: “she is seized with terror,” and “her pleasure turns to pain.”)
Yet the film also suggests that she is subconsciously drawing him to her. There is a scene at the beginning of the film in which she puts a strand of her hair in a locket for Thomas to take with him on his journey to Orlok’s castle – he later takes possession of it and identifies the scent of lilacs, which grew in the garden where the two of them first encountered each other. Was this an implicit invitation from her to him?
On describing her dream to Thomas, she tells him: “it was our wedding… the scent of the lilacs was strong in the rain, and when I reached the altar, you weren’t there. Standing before me, all in black, was Death. But I was so happy, so very happy.” Then there are the script notes of her interactions with Orlok, of which I’ll quote just a few: “it is a powerful, unknown bliss,” “her body convulses erotically,” “her limbs weightless, her heart throbbing, her body growing hot, her breath accelerating,” “she’s drawn to him, aflame with desire,” “it is ecstasy for both of them,” “her breathing bursts with rapture,” and simply: “climaxing.”
So, are you getting what the film is driving at here? It’s pretty subtle.
Though married to Thomas Hutter, it’s implied that Ellen isn’t quite getting everything she wants from the relationship (“the honeymoon was yet too short,” she says as she tries to coax him back into bed) and then outright explicit (taunting him with: “you could never please me like he could”). Later still, she gives us a glimpse of her childhood and her father’s overbearing judgment of her: “Papa found me once laying…unclothed, I was… my body… my flesh… my… sin, sin, he said… He would have sent me to someplace…” [the script direction notes: “intense sexual implications are clear in her tone.”]
Across the course of the film she’s heavily medicated without her consent, tied to the bedposts to restrain her, and stuck with a large needle to demonstrate her fugue state to others. At one point the doctor says: “I recommend that she sleep in her corset; it encourages the correct posture, calms the womb and revives circulation.” A family friend says of her to his wife: “you mustn’t be swept up in her fairy ways. The entirety of the household centres upon her whims.” Later we see both of them forcibly tighten her corset lacings while she struggles on the bed (ah corsets – that old chestnut; the go-to symbol of feminine oppression).
The condescension and control exerted over her is blatant, and more than either depiction of Mina, and even more so than Laura, Ellen’s life is stifling and subjugated. A running theme throughout the film is that absolutely no one listens to her frequent warnings and premonitions about Nosferatu, even as she grows ever-more hysterical at his approach. There are suggestions that a number of things may be at work in her psyche: mental illness, depression (referred to here as “melancholy”), post-traumatic stress disorder from child abuse, or the burden of her own psychic abilities, but it seems to me that her attraction to Nosferatu is a manifestation of the guilt and shame that society as instilled in her for being out of the ordinary: a sexual, spiritual being.
In comparison to the other three adaptations, this is a much darker interpretation of a woman’s sexual desire, and it’s deliberately left unclear what’s truly going on between Ellen and Orlok (the script tells us: “she disgusts herself by how drawn she is to him,” but she later declares that: “I need no salvation; my entire life I have done no ill but heed my nature.”) On the one hand, Orlok insists that Ellen must give her consent before he can possess her; on the other, she’s under considerable duress when she dons her bridal gown and calls him to her bedroom.
How much of this encounter involves her truly giving into her desire, and how much is just a trap to lure him into her arms long enough for the sun to rise and destroy him? It’s the most complex and ambiguous of the four adaptations, and goes the furthest in recalibrating the story into an extended metaphor for a woman’s sexuality and society’s horror of such a thing.
Reminder: none of this is in the original 1922 film. Okay, that’s not strictly true. There the character of Ellen also seems to have some sort of tenuous psychic link with Nosferatu, and she does ultimately sacrifice her own life to save her husband and the town of Wisburg by offering herself up to him. But in terms of the fraught subtext that exists between these two characters between adaptations, it’s like comparing a paddling pool to the ocean.
***
About halfway through Nosferatu, Ellen asks the question: “does evil come from within, or from without?” The answer to her question is that evil used to come from without, when vampires were symbolic of external problems such as mysterious diseases of the blood, the horror of mistakenly being buried alive, and other unexplainable natural phenomena. Now, evil comes from within, turning most of these stories into complex psychosexual dramas. Now, vampires are the manifestations of the female protagonists’ suppressed desires and longing for freedom from the stifling societal rules imposed upon her.
What the adaptational Ellen, Laura and Minas have in common is that they are consistently ignored and condescended to, are denied the knowledge and experiences that could help protect and empower them, and are as much threatened by the society they live in as the vampires who prey upon them. Ironically, said vampires also provide an antidote to their inhibitions, arriving into their lives to upend all social rigours, and give them a chance to break out of their oppression.
This change has inevitably occurred as our attitudes to sex and women (and women having sex) have dramatically changed over the years, especially in comparison to the time period in which these stories were originally told: the Victorian Era, which exemplifies so much of the repression and sexual anxiety that is explored throughout these films. Very little of this criticism existed in Stoker’s Dracula or Fanu’s Carmilla, because how could it? When these books were written, the authors couldn’t look at their own society within the context of history, and so were unable to judge it as we do, as a time of ingrained repression and misogyny.
It’s interesting then, that three of these adaptations keep most of the plot-points of the books – or the 1922 film – upon which they were based intact (the exception being NBC’s Dracula). What has changed is the meaning of them. Having become more critical of their nineteenth century settings, overbearing patriarchal societies, fear of sex, and the characterization of women as largely passive and wholly virtuous, the adaptations have gone from male to female-centric, with the vampire as a not-totally-unwelcome source of upheaval in a woman’s life, who seemingly only exists (narratively speaking) to unlock and cater to her inner desires.
Oh, and I guess also murder some innocent people and drink their blood, just to establish how dangerous he/she is. Ultimately the adaptations are not allowed to stray too far from their origins, and it is telling that none of these stories have a happy ending for the female character and her vampiric lover (the exception again being NBC’s Dracula, which ended on a cliff-hanger).
This is a subject that truly fascinates me, as the evolution in how vampires have been depicted – from cautionary tales about the consequences of lust and disease, to the manifestation of a woman’s secret desires – has lead to so many of the trends, preferences, narratives and talking-points of modern fandom; a huge part of the way it operates when it comes to hyper-fixating on villains, denigrating heroes, and preferring to ship female characters in “dark romances,” to the point where a female character going dark side and hooking up with the bad guy is practically treated as a radical feminist treatise.
I can draw a straight line between it and the attitudes toward The Phantom of the Opera, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the Star Wars sequel trilogy, to name just a few, as the whole phenomena has become a melting pot of connections and analogies and interpretations and sweet, sweet fandom drama.
I definitely have more to say about it all, but until then, enjoy this contrast between the original scene in Bram Stoker’s book, in which Dracula drinks Mina’s blood, and the same scene as portrayed in 1992’s Dracula:
“On the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor. Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we all recognized the Count – in every way, even to the scar on his forehead.
With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.”
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