Vampirism in Millennial Film
45
These pages of the Dracula narrative have been repeated with variations in many
vampire novels and films since. David Pirie, in The Vampire Cinema, notes that a
similar recitation by Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing in Hammer Films’ 1958 version
of the Dracula legend scripted by Jimmy Sangster, “...more or less laid down the
rules of the genre as they were to be followed by film-makers for the next two
decades (77).”
Some of the more popular alterations from Stoker find a story’s vampires
unable to walk during daylight under the risk of burning to cinders (as was the case
with Hammer’s vampires), and periodic tales where the vampire can be repelled,
burnt, or killed by silver, much as in some werewolf stories. On the other hand, socalled “revisionist” vampire plots often establish that one or more of the Stoker
talismans are actually worthless, much to the vampire’s glee and concomitant cha
grin of the text’s would-be vampire fighters. Again, Hammer was at the forefront
of this mythic heresy when it had Christopher Lee’s Dracula remove a stake from
his own heart after being impaled in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), a
plot device Lee reportedly protested at the time (Pirie 88).
While these various rules became staples of vampire films and novels, little
time was spent detailing the origin of the species in most cases. For whatever
reason, those countering the vampire’s presence did not feel the need to know how
vampirism came to exist in the first place as a necessary piece of the puzzle to fend
off the threat. When this question was expounded upon in the popular literature by
Anne Rice in her “Vampire Chronicles,” it was told by her favorite, Lestat, as he
narrated his story in The Vampire Lestat, rather than by the point-of-view of some
one attempting to counter vampirism.
Rice provides a tease early in the novel when she goes into the details of
Lestat’s transformation by Magnus, concluding with Lestat noticing the changes
that have taken place when he realizes he is no longer human: “...an immense
strength was gathering in me. Gradually my boyish sobs died away. And I com
menced to study the whiteness of my skin, the sharpness of the two evil little teeth,
and the way that my fingernails gleamed in the dark as though they’d been lac
quered (98).” Lestat goes on to observe his waste leaving him as well as his light
ness, strength, and numbness to pain. But this sequence in The Vampire Lestat only
serves to supplement Rice’s description of Lestat vampirizing Louis in Interview
with the Vampire and does not get to the core question of where vampires come
from in the first place.
That narrative is presented at great length later in The Vampire Lestat as Rice
weaves the story of Enkil and Akasha, “A story of our creation, analogous to the
Genesis of the Hebrews, the tales in Homer, the babblings of your Roman poets
Ovid and Virgil-a great gleaming morass of symbols out of which life itself is
supposed to have sprung (432).” Taking the fantasy route, Rice tells us that a demon