The Livingand the Undead

Slaying Vampires,ExterminatingZombies

gr

eg

or

y a

. wa

ll

er

“Fascinating studies of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century horror narratives. . . . A book which frequently displays great subtlety and insight.”

— Library Journal

“Highly recommended as a source book for those interested in the horror genre. In addition, Waller’s book provides a critical abundance of empirical data for any scholar concerned with genre studies, history, adaptation, narrativity, and intertextuality.”

— Wide Angle

“A fascinating account of the changing trends in vampire fi ction. . . . People truly interested in horror literature and fi lms will fi nd Waller’s book invaluable.”

— West Coast Review of Books

With a legacy stretching back into legend and folklore, the vampire in all its guises haunts the fi lm and fi ction of the twentieth century and remains the most enduring of all the monstrous threats that roam the landscapes of horror. In The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller shows why this creature continues to fascinate us and why every generation reshapes the story of the violent confrontation between the living and the undead to fi t new times. Examining a broad range of novels, stories, plays, fi lms, and made-for-television movies, Waller focuses upon a series of interrelated texts: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); several fi lm adaptations of Stoker’s novel; F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922); Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954); Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975); Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979); and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979). All of these works, Waller argues, speak to our understanding and fear of evil and chaos, of desire and egotism, of slavish dependence and masterful control. This paperback edition of The Living and the Undead features a new preface in which Waller positions his analysis in relation to the explosion of vampire and zombie fi lms, fi ction, and criticism in the past twenty-fi ve years.

GREGORY A. WALLER is professor and chair of the department of communication and culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896 –1930 and other works.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESSUrbana, Chicago, and Springfi eldwww.press.uillinois.edu

Cover design by Erin New. Cover photo: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979 West Germany/France), courtesy 20th Century Fox /Photofest, © 20th Century Fox.

Waller

Film / Cultural Studies

The Living and the U

ndead

Illinois

ISBN 978-0-252-07772-2

the LIVING and the UNDEAD

the LIVINGand

the UNDEADSlaying Vampires,

Exterminating Zombies

GREGORY A. WALLER

University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

To my parents

First Illinois paperback, 2010© 1986, 2010 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.

Manufactured in the United States of AmericaP 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

The Library of Congress cataloged the cloth edition as follows:Waller, Gregory A. (Gregory Albert), 1950–

The living and the undead.Bibliography: p.Includes index.

I. Vampire films—History and criticism. I. Title.pn1995.9.v323 1985

791.43'09'09375 84-24027isbn 0-252-1208-9 (alk. paper)

Paperback isbn 978-0-252-07772-2

Contents

PREFACE vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

INTRODUCTION1. Stories of the Living and the Undead 3

PART ONE: The Moral Community and the King-Vampire2. Into the Twentieth Century 29

PART TWO: Dracula Retold3. Dracula: The Vampire Play (1927), Dracula (1931),

and Dracula (1979) 774. Horror of Dracula, Hammer’s Dracula Films,

El Conde Dracula 1135. Dracula (1973) and Count Dracula (1977) 146

PART THREE: The Sacrifice of the Pure-Hearted Seer6. Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror and Nosferatu

the Vampyre 177

PART FOUR: Legions of the Undead7. The Invasion of America 2338. Land of the Living Dead 272

CONCLUSION9. Resolution, Violence, Survival 331

APPENDIX: Précis of Dracula: The Vampire Play 361

INDEX 363

vi

Preface

The Living and the Undead had its origins not in a lifetime of fandom or in early memories of glimpsing monsters on a black-and-white screen. This book was born in the classroom, when, apropos of films like Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922) and Dracula (1931), I began to ask undergraduates in my courses on film and popular genres: how do you kill a vampire? It didn’t strike me then how different a question this was than asking students: which characters garnered your sympathy and became objects of identification? Or, how did you experience the decidedly mixed and potentially quite disturbing or transgressive pleasures of vampire stories? Affect and identification, in fact, rarely figure in The Living and the Undead, though these topics became a central concern in much subsequent writing about horror, including Linda Williams’s work on “body genres,” Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Cynthia A. Freeland’s The Naked and the Undead (2000), and Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representation (2005).

Still, almost everyone in these classes knew the answer to my ostensibly more straightforward and oddly “factual” question, or at least they knew an answer. Students were ready to debate the finer points of weaponry, techniques, and strategies, even quick to distinguish between means of protection (cross, garlic) and means of eradication (sunlight, wooden stakes), between targeting the head or the heart. No one pointed out the oddness or perversity of deeming it heroic when one of the living (almost always a man) drove a stake into the heart of a distinctly human-looking vampire who might well be a peacefully sleeping beautiful young woman

vii

Preface

or mature man of aristocratic mien. This quite striking instance of common knowledge seemed to me all the more worth thinking about precisely because knowing how to kill a vampire was utterly useless information, not to be taken seriously or to make its way onto an SAT exam. Only for fictional characters and paranoid psychopaths could such arcane knowledge ever come in handy.

I wasn’t curious then about precisely how generations of students came to acquire vampire lore or what they actually thought about the movies, books, television programs, fanzines, games, and comics that delivered this information. In other words, I never considered an ethnographic approach to the reception of vampire stories and, more broadly, to horror as a popular genre—a methodology that would come to generate valuable scholarship on fan cultures. Students’ matter-of-fact familiarity with vampire lore led me instead back to the stories themselves, which very often offered spectacular moments of bloody violence as well as scenes of instruction regarding what Professor Van Helsing in Dracula so memorably calls the “wild work” of destroying the undead. This dirty, necessary labor seemed to me as essential to the story as the seductive, ravenous, or calculatedly malevolent work undertaken by the vampire looking to satisfy a thirst, capture a consort, or expand a dominion.

Part of the impetus behind The Living and the Undead was that despite all of the attention that Count Dracula and his kindred had attracted—with good reason and interesting results, as Ken Gelder ably demonstrates in Reading the Vampire (1994)—the vampire’s human enablers, victims, and adversaries had been given short shrift by commentators in and out of the academy. For these were unmistakably stories not only about monsters but also about killing monsters, rarely a simple or unambiguous task. From this starting point, more questions emerged: how and when and why to undertake this potentially gruesome and dangerous responsibility? Who to entrust with wielding the stake? What did this violence signify? Was it the climactic, entirely justifiable act in a passionate play of survival? Was it the last, decidedly primitive recourse after other, more ostensibly modern strategies failed? Was it a fruitlessly homicidal or even pathologically genocidal gesture? An excuse for sadism? A testament to age-old patriarchal privilege? A sign of human ingenuity or of unquestioning adherence to tradition? Was it an act of purification? A means of differentiation or purgation? Was it, itself, a source of infection rather than redemption? These are serious, troublesome, ideologically loaded questions about violence, the monstrous, boundary making, and the limits of heroism. My aim

viii

Preface

in this book was to take seriously the dramatically enacted and hardly uniform answers that popular fictions provided to these questions.

To this end, when researching The Living and the Undead, I sought to be as comprehensive as possible, ranging primarily across the spectrum of English-language popular culture from the 1890s to the 1980s, taking in juvenilia and paperback originals, low-budget movies and Masterpiece Theater, widely known classics and obscure titles. My focus, however, centered on a set of interrelated films, novels, and telefilms, (with one stage play), stretching from Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to the second film in George A. Romero’s zombie series, Dawn of the Dead (1979), and notably including Hammer’s Count Dracula films, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). Attending in detail to how the encounter between the living and the undead was worked out, embellished, and resolved (or not resolved) in each of these stories occupies the bulk of this book, which obviously would have taken a different shape had I written it after the release of memorable movies like Near Dark (1987), Braindead (1992), The Addiction (1995), 28 Days Later (2002), Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2005), and Let the Right One In (2008). For me, it is not so much a question of how these post-1985 films might fit into some schema I have established but, rather, how they extend, transform, reiterate, and re-inscribe an ongoing set of narrative possibilities and thematic concerns.

In designating a particular body of related texts collectively as the story of the living and the undead, I was attempting to engage then-current theorizations of genre. This particular story, preoccupied with the passing on of knowledge, infused with the air of mortality, and self-conscious about the desire for closure, looked to be a prime site to explore the historicity and messiness of genre and to track popular culture’s degree of variation and difference as well as its reliance on repetition and similarity. Subsequently, Rick Altman, Steve Neale, James Naremore, and others have convincingly argued that genres are discursive constructs, not so much up for grabs as potentially contested and capable of re-articulation while always being historically grounded, variable, and hybrid. We can see this process at work quite dramatically with horror over the past twenty years, evidenced by the proliferation of subgenres and short-term cycles, the marketing strategies of DVDs, the increased repackaging of older product, and the wealth of genre-related discourse on and off the World Wide Web. What I have called the story of the living and the undead stands as an admittedly heuristic construct, a “genre”

ix

Preface

identified for the purposes of analysis. I was able to point to certain ways that these novels, films, and made-for-television productions were linked, one to another, by lines of adaptation, influence, or affinity, but the real test is whether the reader finds it productive to group the tales of Stoker, Romero, and the rest together as instances in an ongoing story of the wild work that links and defines the living and the undead.

To explore this genre, The Living and the Undead relies on close textual readings of books, films, and television productions, examining them in terms of narrative strategies, thematic emphases, and formal qualities, and putting them into dialogue with a broader discourse concerning violence and community. This method was in some measure a reaction against what I took to be the devaluation and underestimation of horror and other contemporary popular narratives. At the same time, I was frustrated as much by the hyperbole common in fanzines and the abstract models of gendered spectatorship offered by psychoanalytic film theory as by a version of ideological criticism that hinged on the reductive distinction between what qualified as “progressive” and what was deemed unproblematically reactionary in the contemporary horror film. Thus, attending with equal care to the scene-by-scene details and the larger narrative arc of Romero’s gory sequel to Night of the Living Dead as well as to Murnau’s acclaimed silent film seemed to me fully warranted and was a way to challenge, indirectly at least, a certain bias against and oversimplification of modern horror movies as well as a way of re-viewing a hallowed classical tradition. In this regard, Joan Hawkins offers a particularly insightful take on the relations between “high” and “low” horror in Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (2000).

In examining how the story of the living and the undead has been told and retold across different media over almost a century, I imagined a hypothetical viewer or reader who comes to know these stories one-by-one, roughly in chronological order, reading Dracula (1979), for instance, in light of Dracula (1973) and Horror of Dracula (1958), and on backwards to Stoker’s original text and its nineteenth-century antecedents. I was less concerned with pointing out, for instance, certain fairly obvious topical references to the Vietnam War in Night of the Living Dead, than in analyzing this film’s full spectrum of human work and undead labor and its intertextual relations, via I Am Legend, to a tradition of vampire stores. By the same token, I was more interested in speculating about how we can understand Dracula (1931) as a retelling of Stoker’s novel and

x

Preface

Dracula: The Vampire Play (1927) and as one iteration in a cluster of stories pitting a master vampire against a small cohort of humans than in examining the making of this film or situating it as a product of the Hollywood studio system, and, more generally, of America during the early Depression years. These particular historical topics would, in fact, be well treated in later research by, among others, Rhona J. Berenstein (Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema [1995]), David J. Skal (Hollywood Gothic [2004]), and Robert Spadoni (Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound and the Origins of the Horror Genre [2007]).

The Living and the Undead is directly concerned with how the revivified and mobilized undead circulate, driven by appetite and desire, while the living attempt to defend the borders of the nation, the community, the home, the family, and the self. But what about the cultural circulation of these texts themselves? How were these novels and movies marketed, distributed, exhibited, and reviewed? Even before the advent of digital technologies, how were they repackaged and repurposed for various audiences, delivery systems, and commercial opportunities? These questions did not drive my research project, though they have come to seem to me increasingly important. To cite only two possible lines of inquiry: Dracula’s ascent up the ladder of literary respectability and Night of the Living Dead’s ubiquitous availability on 16mm and all subsequent audio-visual formats would make for rich case studies of the circulation of horror as a popular genre with an increasingly global reach through the twentieth century.

More than two decades after the publication of The Living and Undead the particular variant of the horror story that it explores is unquestionably alive and well, and vampires have continued to attract their share of critical attention in perceptive studies like Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997) and Stacy Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World (2007). All of the retellings of Dracula I consider—even more obscure titles like El Conde Dracula (1970) and the PBS miniseries Count Dracula (1977)—have been released in digital format. At the same time, the more-or-less direct lines of descent I noted have continued to proliferate. A third screen version of I Am Legend with full blockbuster packaging premiered in 2007, and after appearing as a mini-series in 1979, ’Salem’s Lot was adapted by the BBC as a radio drama in 1995 and surfaced in 2004 again as a mini-series, this time produced by Warner Bros. for the TNT network. Stoker’s Dracula served as the source for

xi

Preface

Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), as well as for a 2006 BBC telefilm and for Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), based on a production by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. (Less directly informed by the novel are other post-millennium “Dracula” films like Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Curse [2006], Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest [2008], Dracula 2000 [2001], Dracula II [2003], and Dracula III: Legacy [2005].) Among the many published sequels to Dracula is Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula: The Un-Dead (2009), authorized by the Stoker estate. Versions of the novel previously difficult to access have also become more readily available, including Orson Welles’s 1938 Mercury Theatre radio dramatization of Dracula and Stoker’s own unproduced five-act stage adaptation, Dracula: Or the Un-Dead, A Play in Prologue and Five Acts. Digital technology has made it easier to distribute versions of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror with significantly different soundtracks (including the original score), while Shadow of the Vampire (2003) takes as its narrative premise the production of Murnau’s 1922 film. Thanks in part to the vagaries of copyright law, Romero’s living dead have likewise had a thriving screen life. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead have both been remade, and Romero has continued the saga with Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), and Diary of the Dead (2007), while The Return of the Living Dead (1985), another “authorized” sequel, spawned four additional installments from 1988 to 2005.

Of course, new titles specifically related to the set of novels, films, and telefilms I examine in this book count for only a fraction of the vampires and zombies set loose on the marketplace since 1985, particularly when we look beyond film to take into account series fiction, graphic novels, and video/computer games. Given the focus of The Living and the Undead, the new variation of prime relevance is not the Twilight franchise (2005–present), Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003), or even HBO’s True Blood (2008–present), but rather those stories that foreground the dedicated and preternaturally capable vampire hunter, equipped with an arsenal of specialized weapons and facing off against a virtually never-ending supply of opponents. Based on a Marvel Comics character, the Blade trilogy (1998, 2002, and 2004 films, then continued as a short-lived television series), for example, relies on the special effects and choreographed fight sequences of the big-budget action film, as does the CGI-driven period piece Van Helsing (2004), with the aged professor now a hard-bodied superhero. Vampires (1998, with a 2002 sequel set in Mexico), in contrast, puts its hard-boiled, wisecracking slayer in the modern

xii

Preface

Southwest, a terrain increasingly overrun by the undead, as the unwitting visitors to a remote Mexican strip club discover in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, with two later installments released in 1999). While the most well-known hunter is likely the redoubtable teenage heroine of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), the most interesting play on this theme may be serial narratives produced in Japan, like Hellsing (first a manga [1997–2008], then a thirteen-episode anime television series [2001–2], then a direct-to-video animated series [2006–present]) and, most widely seen and influential, Vampire Hunter D. Originally a series of novels (1983–present) by Hideyuki Kikuchi, which began to appear in English translation in 2005, Vampire Hunter D was adapted as a feature-length animated film in 1985, with a second film (Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust) appearing in 2000.

As Jamie Russell’s encyclopedic—and exemplary—Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (2005) attests, the zombie branch of the undead also shows no signs of becoming culturally or commercially extinct, regardless of how many stumbling creatures are decapitated or otherwise exterminated in films like Undead (2003), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and Planet Terror (2007). From the perspective of The Living and the Undead, what looks to be most fascinating about the resilience of the sometimes absurdly mundane living dead is the ongoing resonance of these creatures and the apocalyptic world they bring into being. The prospect of a land overrun with legions of the living dead—call it Zombieland after the 2009 movie—forms an especially telling contrast with contemporary fears of global terrorism, which is often represented as being threatening precisely to the extent that it appears to be an intricate system of technologically equipped, single-minded true believers able to infiltrate and wreak havoc on the everyday. Zombies en masse—un-terrorists, as it were—continue to serve as a threatening Other that is quite distinct from the intricately rendered and sometimes highly evolved vampire families, clans, subcultures, communities, and societies in stories such as the Underworld trilogy (2003, 2006, 2009), Near Dark, Vampire Hunter D, The Lost Boys (1987), Interview with the Vampire (1994), Blade, and True Blood—all of which depict alternative undead social configurations well beyond the fantasies of Stoker’s King-Vampire. Needless to say, there is still much wild work to be done.

GREGORY A. WALLER is professor and chair of the department of communication and culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930, Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition, and other works.

The University of Illinois Pressis a founding member of theAssociation of American University Presses.

University of Illinois Press1325 South Oak StreetChampaign, IL 61820-6903

www.press.uillinois.edu

waller cx.indd 378 7/1/10 2:57:56 PM

The Livingand the Undead

Slaying Vampires,ExterminatingZombies

gr

eg

or

y a

. wa

ll

er

“Fascinating studies of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century horror narratives. . . . A book which frequently displays great subtlety and insight.”

— Library Journal

“Highly recommended as a source book for those interested in the horror genre. In addition, Waller’s book provides a critical abundance of empirical data for any scholar concerned with genre studies, history, adaptation, narrativity, and intertextuality.”

— Wide Angle

“A fascinating account of the changing trends in vampire fi ction. . . . People truly interested in horror literature and fi lms will fi nd Waller’s book invaluable.”

— West Coast Review of Books

With a legacy stretching back into legend and folklore, the vampire in all its guises haunts the fi lm and fi ction of the twentieth century and remains the most enduring of all the monstrous threats that roam the landscapes of horror. In The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller shows why this creature continues to fascinate us and why every generation reshapes the story of the violent confrontation between the living and the undead to fi t new times. Examining a broad range of novels, stories, plays, fi lms, and made-for-television movies, Waller focuses upon a series of interrelated texts: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); several fi lm adaptations of Stoker’s novel; F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922); Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954); Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975); Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979); and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979). All of these works, Waller argues, speak to our understanding and fear of evil and chaos, of desire and egotism, of slavish dependence and masterful control. This paperback edition of The Living and the Undead features a new preface in which Waller positions his analysis in relation to the explosion of vampire and zombie fi lms, fi ction, and criticism in the past twenty-fi ve years.

GREGORY A. WALLER is professor and chair of the department of communication and culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896 –1930 and other works.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESSUrbana, Chicago, and Springfi eldwww.press.uillinois.edu

Cover design by Erin New. Cover photo: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979 West Germany/France), courtesy 20th Century Fox /Photofest, © 20th Century Fox.

Waller

Film / Cultural Studies

The Living and the U

ndead

Illinois

ISBN 978-0-252-07772-2