Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 4, 1993 TAG: 9301040008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HUGH A. MULLIGAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Long
TIME HAS BEEN ON DRACULA'S SIDE
HE'S BACK. In fact, Dracula never left. The novel was never out of print and there have been more than 3,000 movies and spinoffs. Although he'd never been to Transylvania, Irish novelist Bram Stoker conferred immortality on a character he claimed came to him in a nightmare after a late dinner of deviled crab and demon rum.If Bram Stoker could lift the lid on his crematory urn and flit about like his classic creature of the night, Count Dracula, he would be mystified to find that his sanguinary saga of the restless undead has never been undeader.
Consider:
Francis Ford Coppola's exotic and erotic resurrection of the old neck nipper, which gives the author posthumous credit on movie marquees around the world as "Bram Stoker's Dracula," already is well on the way to recouping its $45 million production costs.
Penguin has issued a new paperback edition of the novel, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1897.
Film clubs and art houses are reviving "Nosferatu," the 1922 silent film made in Berlin that Stoker's widow won a court order to destroy as a copyright ripoff, but like the count keeps turning up.
And actor Frank Langella, in patent leather shoes with matching smile and hair-do, is about to bat swoop across the land with yet another revival of the play which first crept from the crypt 70 years ago.
Stoker gave the last word to fiction's most famous frequent flyer with, "You think you have left me without a place to rest. My revenge has just begun. I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side."
Well, Dracula's first centennial is still four years away, but in the estimate of Ray Carney, professor of film at Boston University, there already have been nearly 3,000 movie remakes and spinoffs.
The gothic film genre Stoker inspired has a haunting history. Bela Lugosi's 1931 chiller saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy, but doomed the Transylvania-born actor to a career of climbing in and out of coffins on stage and screen, in vaudeville and even Las Vegas lounges, culminating in his wake and burial in Dracula's red satin lined cape.
Christopher Lee, who affixed blood-red contact lenses and jumbo lateral incisors in a dozen technicolored screamers that won Hammer Films boss Michael Carreras a knighthood for reviving the British film industry, still can't bury the role. A few years back his car blew a tire and spun into a ravine north of Milan. The actor crawled bleeding from the wreckage only to encounter a terrified farmer who shrieked "e lui" - it's him - then fainted.
The phantom in the opera cape has haunted the Italian landscape since the 1957 "The Vampire of Notre Dame" spawned the first of many spaghetti spookers. He has been reincarnated in more than 100 foreign films, including the Mexican "El Vampiro," the Swedish "Vampyr," the Turkish "Drakula Istambulda" and the Japanese "Lake of Death."
There have been numerous spoofs, like George Hamilton's hip "Love at First Bite," Gene Wilder's "Young Frankenstein" repelling vampires with the Star of David, TV's "The Munsters," featuring a senile Yiddish Dracula who nags his grandson to "drink your soup before it coagulates."
Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killer or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck" was Sharon Tate's last film before she was butchered in the Charles Manson blood bath.
Orson Welles, Roger Vadim, Andy Warhol, Abbott & Costello all took blood cultures from the undead Dracula, whose film credits are rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes.
Other variations include "`The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula," "Blacula," starring Shakespearean actor William Marshall as a Caribbean count, "Deafula" for the hearing impaired, a Western version called "Billy the Kid Meets Dracula," countless Countess Draculas, as well as several brides and lesbian sisters, plus the inevitable porn versions.
The novelist, who devoted his life to the theater, had no intimation of conferring immortality on a character that a veritable Hollywood Who's Who's of Horror could sink their teeth into: Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff, Sir Donald Wolfit, John Carradine, Victor Jory, Vincent Price, Jack Palance, Louis Jordan, Terence Stamp, David Niven, and now Gary Oldman in the Coppola film.
Bram Stoker never got near Transylvania. He was an Irishman, a Dubliner with the unlikely first name of Abraham, who heard no mention of vampires or werewolves in the ghost stories his mother told him during a sickly childhood. But she did conjure up banshees, pookhas and other specters of the restless dead, along with some real horrors from the cholera epidemic she had witnessed growing up in the west of Ireland.
"Bram had the native knack of telling a ghost story of the kind you hear even now in rural Ireland, where they still pile stones on the graves to keep the dead from roaming," points out Dracula expert Raymond McNally, a professor of Russian literature at Boston College who teaches a course on "Terrorism From Dracula to Stalin."
McNally has written a half-dozen Dracula books with his colleague Radu Florescu, a descendent of Vlad Tepes, the 15th-century Transylvania warlord who was called "Dracula," son of the devil, for his penchant for impaling his enemies by the thousands.
Stoker once claimed his Dracula plot came to him in a nightmare after dining late on some deviled crab washed down with the demon rum.
McNally and others who have dug into his sources are convinced he spent years digesting the ingredients of his best seller. After graduating from Trinity College, Stoker labored as a minor Irish civil servant until the actor Henry Irving came to Dublin as Captain Absolute in Sheridan's "The Rivals." Already stage struck, Bram sang the actor's praises as unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Express, then went to London to manage the Lyceum Theater, which Irving had just taken over.
Night after night in the dressing room, they swapped grisly tales, and the young Irishman was soon attending seances held by the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn."
Settling in London's Chelsea section, Stoker and his young bride shared their zest for matters macabre with arty neighbors Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
"Bram didn't go along when Rossetti dug up his wife's coffin in High Gate cemetery to retrieve some unpublished poems," McNally relates, "but his best friend, Hall Caine, to whom he dedicated `Dracula,' filled him in on the details of building a bonfire to keep away bacteria and unearthing a classic pre-Raphaelite beauty whose body had not corrupted. Even her hair seemed to have grown longer."
McNally is certain that "Rossetti's wife is Lucy Westenra," the Count's thirst-quenching "little wine press" in the novel.
Stoker had occasion to meet the famous Orientalist Sir Richard Burton and was impressed not only by the vampire tales he translated from the "Arabian Nights" and Hindu sources, but also by "his prominent canine teeth."
In the Beefsteak Room adjoining the Lyceum, he dined several times with Arminius Vambery, a Hungaraian expert on Slavic folk legends who rates a mention in the novel as "my friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth."
Between shows the novelist buried himself in the British Museum studying maps, travel guides and peasant superstitions of Transylvania so that he could say like Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, the novel's vampire immunologist who prescribes garlic and consecrated hosts as a repellant, "I have studied over and over again all the papers relating to this monster."
McNally regards Van Helsing as a Stoker substitute: "Same first name. He even looks like him, a big man, red headed. Bram did seven years of solid research. Everything is correct, even the train times from Yorkshire, Munich, Budapest. He arranged all the tours for Irving's company and loved timetables."
Stoker slaved 27 years for the domineering, demanding Sir Henry. McNally sees "something of their relationship in the character of Renfield, Dracula's spider-swallowing slave. Like most writers, Bram threw nothing away. Harker, his hero, was the name of Irving's set designer."
The novelist's imagination no doubt also was fueled by Jack the Ripper's murderous rambles through East London about that time.
"Dracula" was an immediate best seller in England and America, but Stoker, as McNally notes sadly, "never made any big money. He died in 1912 in virtual poverty. It was the movies that made Dracula immortal."