Flesh and blood
From a figure of menace and parody to a New York junkie, Dracula has had many reincarnations. But it was the 1958 film starring Christopher Lee that first made him sexy, writes Matthew Sweet

Saturday October 27, 2007
The Guardian

It's an autumn night in the 19th century. Halloween, possibly. Midnight, certainly. Old Gerda, with a reckless indulgence common to maidservants in horror films, has been persuaded to remove sheaves of frizzy garlic flowers from Lucy Holmwood's boudoir. Now the door is shut, the French windows are wide open to the garden, and Lucy is lying back on the four-poster, heaving under powder-blue chiffon, waiting for her demon lover to appear in that gaping space at the back of the shot. Nothing's there. No river of dry ice, no flapping bat prop - just brown leaves billowing, and the thrash-orchestral score kicking at us to pay attention. And suddenly - without the benefit of any effect that could be considered remotely special - there's Christopher Lee in a floor-length cape. All 6ft 4in of him, in a profession populated by tiny little Bogardes and Todds and Millses. His eyes are picked out with a key light by which Joan Crawford would have felt flattered. He strides into the room, and we all know what's coming next - the sex business with the fangs. Count Dracula needs blood - the undead have gotta live - but we know that there's more to it than that. But how do we know?

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Fifty years ago, in a cramped studio on the banks of the Thames in Berkshire, the director Terence Fisher called the shots on the Hammer version of Dracula. The original print has just been restored by the British Film Institute and is now ready to manifest itself again. Its colour palette, which always looked crude and garish on television, is now a rich mix of autumnal browns and priestly purples. Only the fake blood - which gathers inside Christopher Lee's vampire contact lenses, spurts from staked hearts and spatters inexplicably from the air - reads as improperly, unnaturally bright, like Kathleen Byron's tarty lipstick in Black Narcissus

Fisher's Dracula was shot in 25 days at a cost of £81,413. For Hammer, this was lavish. Some directors had to manage on a fifth of that. The company was still reeling from the success of The Curse of Frankenstein, a shocked-up version of the Mary Shelley story with a focus on scalpel edges, jellied brains and charnel-house comedy. Bram Stoker's Dracula was next on the slab, and the publicity dope let the audience in on the angle. The posters were in black and white, with a trickle of red ink superimposed at the corners of Christopher Lee's mouth. He was "the terrifying lover who died ... yet lived!" Every night, the tagline screamed, "he rises from his coffin-bed - silently to seek the soft flesh, the warm blood he needs to keep himself alive".

In 1958, that wasn't the obvious way to sell a vampire. It certainly wasn't obvious to the marketing department of Universal-International, which handled the film in the States. When the film opened in America, snitty letters and telegrams ping-ponged over the Atlantic. "I don't like the advertising I have seen put out by your New York office which is along the lines of the old Dracula pictures with Bela Lugosi," complained Michael Carreras, the film's executive producer. "Our Dracula is handsome and sexy ... His victims are young attractive women. The campaign in London is on horror sex lines and I would be grateful if you would re-examine." They did.

Half a century later, the link between eroticism and vampirism has been so thoroughly naturalised that it would be impossible to make the same mistake. For most readers, meeting the title character of Bram Stoker's book is usually as much of a surprise as it is for Jonathan Harker, the Victorian estate agent who gets it in the neck in the story's first strophe. In his diary, Harker notes that the Count is "a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache". He has "peculiarly arched nostrils" and a "lofty domed forehead". The diary records that Dracula's "eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion". Hammer's Lucy Holmwood wouldn't have opened her French windows for this rancid specimen; she'd have kicked him out of bed.

In 1958, Fisher, Carreras and Lee were all tussling with Dracula's image problem: how to recuperate the vampire as a figure of menace, how to reclaim him from parody. Just six years before, Bela Lugosi had come to Britain, crooked-backed and methadone-fuddled, to lurch out of his coffin twice nightly in a touring stage version of the Stoker story. His co-star was an unreliable mechanical bat. The show did respectable business, but it certainly wasn't the comeback for which Lugosi had hoped. When the run came to an end, the actor remained in the country to go through his cackle-and-grimace act as the villain of a cheap little comedy called Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Arthur Lucan was the star - a tottering music-hall turn who dragged up as an Irish washerwoman and shrieked things like, "I am a woman and I defy you to prove it!" And between hits of opioid, administered by his wife Lillian, Lugosi sent a lumbering robot to force-feed Mother Riley "liver ... with the blood running out of it" for breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea and elevenses. It'd be safe to say that nobody in the audience was aroused.

When he wore the cape for the first time, Lugosi was a looker. He was also a Hungarian and a romantic and a political revolutionary. In 1919, he'd been a founding member of the actors' union established during the brief life of Bela Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic. Though he'd been resident in America for more than a decade when Universal invited him to be fitted for a pair of vampire dentures, Lugosi's English was so poor that he learned the part phonetically. But the oddness of his inflection patterns is what made his Dracula one of the great screen performances. Lugosi sang his dialogue as if it were an aria from an Erkel Ferenc opera. When he stands in a cobweb-smothered castle and implores his Jonathan Harker to listen to the music of the "cheeldreen of the naaight", you believe that he considers wolf howls to be a species of coloratura - and that he's singing from the same score sheet. "I ... am ... Draa-cu-laaa!" he yodels. "I bid you ... wel-come!"

Christopher Lee, by comparison, is telegraphically brisk. "I am Dracula and I welcome you to my house." He has only 13 lines in the entire picture, and they are all delivered just as snappily. Where Lugosi postures and glides, Lee is rough and muscular. He descends the staircase of his castle at such a lick that he might as well have slid down the curlicued banister. He yanks his vampire bride across the marble floor of the castle with amazing ferocity. (If it had not been for the censor, who blue-pencilled the notion at the script stage, she would have been hurled by the hair.) His face-off with his nemesis, the vampire-staker Professor Van Helsing - played with razor seriousness by Peter Cushing - isn't an altercation between gentlemen, it's a bar-room brawl, resolved when Cushing slams a pair of candlesticks together and uses the cruciform shadow to drive the vampire into a killing cascade of sunbeams. Dracula falls to pieces, reduced to dust and bones. And at this moment we return to Arthur and Mina - the husband and wife whose marriage we've just seen threatened by vampiric adultery - and we're reminded what brought Dracula to their house in the first place. Soft flesh. Warm blood. Those things that the poster insisted were a vampire's principal reasons for getting out of his coffin-bed.

There's an innovation in Jimmy Sangster's screenplay that helps to conjure this new, sexualised version of Dracula into being: he sets the story in the Victorian past. Like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula took a while to be reconfigured in the popular imagination as a historical character. Lugosi's career as a vampire had been conducted almost entirely in contemporary 20th-century settings - a Hollywood version of present-day London in the 1931 Dracula, the same city in wartime in The Return of the Vampire, made in 1944. Returning the events of the story to the period of its writing turned it into a fight between Victorians and vampires. It made Dracula into the enemy of some outmoded form of sexual morality. And for an audience in the late 1950s, that was a battle worth watching. "Sex and death in equal proportions," writes Hammerologist Sinclair McKay, "and particularly barely repressed sexuality in a Victorian setting, was the real winning formula."

Spool back six years, and you'll find Terence Fisher worrying at similar themes. Right at the beginning of his career with Hammer, he made The Last Page, a sleazy little B-flick about blackmail in a bookshop in a bomb-scarred patch of Holborn. Its star was Diana Dors, who, to an audience in 1952, meant one thing: a specifically postwar kind of voracious sexuality. She was the sort of girl over whom George Orwell had fretted in his essay "Decline of the English Murder" - the sort who'd spent too much time at the Locarno with a GI on each arm, and had learned more from them than how to blow bubblegum and speak with a transatlantic twang. In The Last Page, Dors is a bookshop assistant who's full of desires that the men of postwar Britain seem unable to meet. She wants to go to clubs, and drink gin and orange, and eat big steaks with plenty of onions. So she claims that her boss has tried to rape her, and pumps him for a fat envelope of used oncers. The film suggests that, in postwar Britain, you didn't get anything nice without doing something dirty. The origins of Dors's corruption seem to lie somewhere across the Atlantic. The women in Hammer's Dracula are visited from the east, rather than the west. But one bite from Christopher Lee, and they suddenly know what it is to have a good time - and they're making eyes like Diana Dors on the prowl.

And this is the reason why Dracula keeps haunting the cinema: he'll be anything you desire. In 1974, Paul Morrissey turned him into a New York blood-junkie, in a film backed by Andy Warhol. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola turned him into a personification of fears about the exchange of bodily fluids - just at the point when Aids was all over the media. Hammer, though, gave him his most successful make-over, as a harbinger of the permissive society, which was already looming on the horizon when Christopher Lee began raiding women's bedrooms.

Hammer's most powerful influence, however, has probably been on English departments in British and American universities. Dracula studies first emerged as a serious discipline in the late 1960s, and soon established the parameters of its interest. As the critic Robert Mighall has argued in his book Mapping History's Nightmares, this kind of Freud-slaked, programmatically anti-Victorian criticism proposed that "the vampire is monstrous not because it is a supernatural being which threatens to suck the protagonists' blood and damn their souls, but because at some 'deeper level' it symbolises an erotic threat". So, Mighall contends, a book that contains no obvious allusions to sex - apart from one use of the word "voluptuous" - has been used to prove how much energy the Victorians invested in their programme to police sex into silence. And the more the book refuses to cough up an explicit coupling between its title character and the erotic impulse, the more it is used as evidence for the prissy severity of the culture that produced it. In the words of one critic, Dracula represents "the great submerged force of Victorian libido breaking out to punish the repressive society which had imprisoned it". Lee's performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires.

When those words were published in the early 1970s, Christopher Lee was having one last hurrah in the cloak and fangs. Hammer, looking for new ways to revive flagging public interest in fanged Transylvanians, had transplanted Dracula to the fag end of swinging London, where he hung out with a gang of hippie bikers - slaves of the dark side, of pot and of their taste in afghan casualwear. The provisional title for one of these pictures was Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in London. Twentieth-century London, of course. The place where he had really been born.

· There will be a special Halloween screening of Dracula at BFI IMAX on October 31, then it runs at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, from November 2 to 15. Box office: 020 7928 3232.