It opened its wings like this and hovered above me screeching AAAAAAHAHAHA Now you are vampire! And it was Peter The vampire is perhaps the most universally recognizable character in all of cinema. The most famous interpretation comes largely from Bela Lugosi's Dracula in 1931, where we got the classic accent and widow's peak.
The high collar and cape came from the vampire in theater, and the sharp canines were popularized by Christopher Lee's Horror of Dracula, known as Just Dracula in the UK, in 1958. And it's a combination of these features that leads us to the image of the vampire we're most familiar with. It's the vampire that shows up in cereal boxes, Geico commercials, and Sesame Street. Greetings, I am the Count. But in reality, the design of the vampire varies drastically depending on the movie.
Count Orlok in Nosferatu looks like an evil monster, but Edward Cullen in Twilight is basically a perfect version of a human. Each vampire is actually carefully engineered to serve a certain purpose in each movie, and many scholars have studied the meaning of different vampires over time. Hey, my name's Stanley Stepanek. I teach at the University of Virginia.
I'm an associate professor currently. So I've taught a number of things. I've taught Russian, I'm currently teaching a film course, Russian film, Eastern European film.
But my big course is called Dracula, and it's about vampires and a bunch of other things. There's been a fair amount of research on the vampire in academia, which makes sense considering Dracula is the second most popular character in cinematic history behind only Sherlock Holmes. And that's not including the majority of vampire films that don't even have a Dracula-esque character. One of the reasons why the vampire is so popular amongst filmmakers is its versatility as a creature. Since the beginning of the vampire on screen, directors have always made creative changes to their vampires to suit their particular movie.
For example, the vampire is called Count Orlok, not Count Dracula in the original, and it comes from the Dutch, which means war. So obviously there's some connection there with war and the loss of human life, in particular young men for Germany during World War I and the rest of it. So war is obvious there, and it's also a clear symbol of foreign intervention or fear of immigrants, Jewish immigration maybe, or Jewish influence.
and we know the unfortunate tradition of that and you have this thing that, especially in that case, which is human-like, but it's like it's so foul-looking and it spreads disease that then it really reiterates the negative connotations about being Jewish. Much of the design of Count Orlok is anti-semitic. He has many features also present in Jewish caricatures, including the association between Jewish people and rats. The filmmakers changed or exaggerated some designs of the original Dracula to make the creature more relevant to the fears of In short, filmmakers always customize their vampires to represent something different.
Nosferatu was a way to symbolize German fears at the time that largely included anti-Semitism. But the vampire can do much more than that. Since vampires aren't technically human, directors have historically used them to show behavior that would be too weird or controversial if it were done by actual humans.
In the 1930s, homosexuality was essentially banned on the big screen in America by a series of moral guidelines called the Hays Code, but the vampire found a way to work around that. Starting with Dracula in 1931, vampires quickly switched from disgusting monsters of Count Orlok to sex symbols like Bela Lugosi, showing just how easily the vampire can change and how the vampire can mean something sexual. Some of the images that that we have in Western culture of things that are horrific. are also basically sexual.
Basically, vampirism is just sex from the neck up. You're penetrating a passive person. It's just, it really is a very sexual sort of monster.
Throughout the filming of Dracula's Daughter in 1936, Universal Pictures was well aware of the lesbian implications of a female vampire gazing at and biting a partially nude woman. They changed the script to make Lily clothed and had the camera cut away, but even with these changes, the homosexuality is pretty obvious. The vampire allowed a depiction of...
of lesbianism decades before humans could do it themselves, even though it isn't explicit and Zaleska is also interested in guys in the film. With vampires, controversial topics are much easier to discuss. When you compare movies about the same topic that came out around the same time, vampires offer enough removal from actual humans that they can go much further with the topic.
Philadelphia is about a homosexual suing a company for wrongly terminating him because he has AIDS. As the first mainstream big budget movie focusing on a homosexual, the movie approaches the subject very carefully. Andrew Beckett is written very sympathetically, always nice, and the camera shows it.
Nearly every scene gives us a shot from his perspective with close-ups, and we even get home footage to show how ordinary he is. In contrast, the bad guys are filmed speaking almost exclusively in racist and homophobic slurs, often shot from far away, often shot from behind. Beckett doesn't ex- He doesn't express his sexuality much, he never kisses his partner, and the one scene showing two men sharing a bed together was cut for the theatrical release. In many ways, it has to water down so many aspects of homosexuality to show it as completely normal. You've survived what I assume to be your first gay party intact.
Now, I'm not trying to say that Philadelphia should have pushed more boundaries, because then it might not have done well during the time that it came out. What I am saying is, a vampire movie could do much more. Interview with the Vampire came out one year later and there's an incredible difference in how far it goes in portraying homosexuality on screen.
It goes further. Yeah, yeah. It shows you like, you know, where they almost kiss and stuff and gets really, really, you know, sexually tense in a number of scenes.
So, for example, near the end, whenever Armand is, you know, with Louis in that art gallery and Louis draws him really close. I mean, they're like, you know, they're this close. And then Lestat and the way he's connected to Louis and then they get this daughter, you know. I mean, it's representing two gay guys that have essentially adopted a child. Back in the early 90s, I can remember that being a controversial thing to discuss.
But they liked it, right? And again, it makes it like, oh, it's two vampires, though, right? It's like right there, but not officially saying it. When it's vampires, you can hide your meaning in a symbol. Then the movie can have more nuanced characters and discussions.
The movie doesn't need to have to give us any lectures about homosexuality like Philadelphia does. Interview with the Vampire marks the first piece of work with a first-person perspective of the vampire. and it focuses more on the relationship between vampires over time.
Not to mention the biting scenes are extremely erotic, more erotic than a movie like Philadelphia was capable of doing with real people. But maybe my favorite example of using a vampire to be ahead of the times is Death Dream, originally titled Dead of Night, a lesser-known movie about a soldier who dies in Vietnam and returns home as a creature like a vampire. The director cleverly uses the vampire to show what it was like for a veteran to return home after combat as a totally different person, a shadow of their former self.
like zombie like looking corpse thing that is like near dead and but he before he looks normal but he wears his sunglasses on and he acts weird out in public and his way of responding is very dead like whenever his ex-girlfriend or the girl he used to date is talking to him you know that's that one particular scene that's really telling where she says you know i hope you're not you're not mad or anything he says i'm not mad or anything. It's a really dead response, as if he's sort of symbolizing that plight of the Vietnam vet, who's like emotionally dead. As he fights his friends and family, his actions directly mirror how Vietnam veterans were rejected by society and the media when they came back from war. It's a powerful message, and the director created a very human-like, but emotionally stunted kind of vampire to show his message. It's not much different from a movie like Rambo, but with a vampire, Death Dream came out eight years before Rambo, and just one year after the Vietnam War.
In many ways, vampire movies are ahead of the times. The vampire was also ahead of its time in race relations. The first black horror movie was Blackula, and it was a box office hit.
In the movie, Dracula strips Prince Momawaldi of his power when he tries to abolish the slave trade, cursing him as a vampire. The movie becomes a quest for Blackula to regain his power and identity, and he partially does so by fighting off white policemen attacking a black community. Here we see a movie in 1972 already showing the issues of racial profiling and the fantasy of black Americans to fight back, making it way ahead of its time. The thing that makes that film... Boundary breaking, right, is that you get a vampire, but he likes it, right?
So you can get some white people watching that, and then they identify with what's going on with Mimawade and how that relates to racial relations, right? Whereas if you showed, you know, a bunch of, you know, African Americans attacking the police, then you may, you're probably gonna have some white people watching that. people would be like, I don't like that.
Same thing happens today whenever Black Lives Matter talks about police intervention and black community stuff like that. But when you got that vampire in there, it sort of bridges that gap and brings people together in a different way. And so the modern vampire carries all these past iterations of the vampire with it. This may seem silly to even talk about, but even a kid's show on Disney Channel uses the symbol of vampires to talk about human issues. I mean it's obvious right there what that shows doing it's basically symbolizing a different culture or a different race through a character that's fun so that kids you know can understand it better.
No I've always thought they were the greatest metaphor for the outsider in all of us I felt like an outsider growing up a misfit I think a lot of people did or do it sometime in their life feel like outsiders outcasts And the vampire is a great way to talk about that. He's a larger-than-life mythic hero who looks human and can talk to you like a human being, but is actually a monster. He's immortal.
He's outside of life. And I think that's a great metaphor for human beings. The show has episodes where neighbors come to terms with the odd vampire stereotypes this family follows. Using a vampire makes it simple for kids to understand, and it's not controversial. It would be a little trickier to address black or Asian stereotypes to a little kid in a TV series.
But a fake creature is a lot easier. It's actually a great example of why more complicated ideas like homosexuality, race relations, and the effects of War are more easily discussed using a vampire instead of a human. I'll go for one more example that's a bit out there. Why did Twilight do so well? It's definitely not the writing.
The book copies a very common storyline in tons of female young adult literature. A story of an attractive bad boy with a bad background who is dangerous in some way. Whether it's from drugs or abuse, and he meets a girl who changes him.
Typically it's through some very average girl. that he becomes a better person because of love, right? And that's the idea that love can change the world. And there's this guy out there that's going to pick me, right?
No one else notices me. And this guy's going to pick me and he's totally awesome. But I'm the one that's going to lead to that. totally awesome because he's going to be in love with me.
Twilight follows this storyline extremely closely, as have dozens of novels before it, but making the bad boy a vampire is actually kind of creative. That creature is perfect for that fantasy. They're usually attractive, at least in some modern movies. They don't age. and they can't be killed.
But at the same time, vampires are dangerous. They could hurt you, and they're extremely strong. So that movie and novel craft a vampire that works as a bad boy, and young girls identify with the girl.
It's a fantasy for young girls that's always been around, but the vampire gives it a new spin and allows the fantasy to be explored a little deeper, because at the end of the day, the bad boy fantasy isn't real. That's not how real life works, so using a fake creature instead of a human lets you go further with the fantasy, just like you can with other complicated issues. As a great sum-up of vampires over time, the comedy What We Do in the Shadows helps us understand the power of the vampire as a symbol overall. The vampires in the movie are all from different time periods and influences.
Peter's terrifying monster portrayal echoes Count Orlok in Nosferatu. Vladislav seems influenced by Vladislav in Dracula. See me. See.
See me. And Nick has similarities to Edward from Twilight, even admitting it himself. The movie Twilight, have you seen it? No.
Okay, I'm the main guy in Twilight. As a mockumentary, we follow around these vampires in their everyday lives. And in a weird way, the format- and style actually teaches us a lot about vampires in media. We get documentaries when we think about it. It's worthy of a documentary, so make it about a serious good product and therefore you'll learn about the nature of the product by studying the series.
This film is really doing something quite special. It's saying you can learn just as much by studying something lousy. When you're a vampire you become very sexy. This movie shows us what it would really be like if vampires existed.
It wouldn't be epic like in all these other movies. It would actually be ridiculous. They would have to find a place to live, they would have to clean their flat, and biting someone wouldn't always be dramatic and theatrical. Sometimes it would just be silly. What We Do in the Shadows shows how every other vampire movie artificially creates a vampire to suit their own meaning.
By showing us every vampire in film history in one movie, we realize just how different they all are. And it's true, some vampires look disgusting to show fears of disease and antisemitism. Some are basically perfect versions of humans, and there's everything in between, and the traits of the vampire always mean something.
It represents, now, really human problems in a way that makes it accessible, because it's fun. Vampires are fun. And it makes it indirect so that it's kind of safer to discuss it, you know, when you're talking about a vampire that symbolizes racial identity, instead of talking about those issues directly.
And that little bit of distance from actual humans lets the vampire really push boundaries and be ahead of its time. So the next time you watch a vampire movie, maybe you can see a powerful message based on what they do or don't do. Vampires don't do dishes. And maybe you'll learn about vampires in a new and different way, which is what these videos are supposed to be all about. I like this stuff better because students like this stuff more, you know, it encapsulates more information so it sure enough stays.
So this is where things are going but academia just doesn't want to shift yet. It's starting to but it really needs to... You know. Yeah, cool.
Okay. One of the most important novels for the vampire is I Am Legend. The original book has the first scientific vampire, one that's not supernatural but caused by an actual disease. It's a big influence for Night of the Living Dead, a movie that paved the way for the modern zombie. So yes, that means the zombies we see today partially originate from vampires.
You can listen to this book today using Audible, and I really recommend you check it out. The original book is so much better than the Will Smith movie version in 2007. Go to audible.com slash now you see it to get a 30-day trial and your first audiobook for free. Or text now you see it to 500-500 to get started.
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I Am Legend definitely works. So go to audible.com slash now you see it for the free trial and any audiobook for free. Or text now you see it to 500-500 to get started.
Thanks for watching.