Getting it in the neck

‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t his Enlightenment rationalism seen off such sub-religious voodoo? Well no, mon frère, it hadn’t. In fact, here we are, a quarter of a millennium on, and those vampires are still with us. Films, rock concerts, novels, TV shows, they’re full of fangs and dripping with blood. We’re suckers for those suckers — so much so that even academia is getting in on the act. As Nick Groom, an English professor at Exeter university says in his densely researched new book: ‘Vampires are good to think with.’

Well, there’s certainly a lot to be said about them. Symbols don’t come more labile. The earliest vampires, Groom tells us, were ‘reputed to have powers of shape-shifting’. The later ones shape-shifted like their producers’ lives depended on it. Take the Dracula of the Hammer Horror cycle. Over the course of a decade and a half, Christopher Lee’s antics were a — doubtless unconscious — metaphor for what was going on in the wider body politic. In the first Hammer picture, Dracula — which came out within months of the Notting Hill riots — Lee played the character as a Byronic charmer tempting hitherto clean-living blondes over to the dark side.

Come the sexual revolution, though, the Count turned prudish. In Taste the Blood of Dracula he was so shocked at the sight of a bunch of repressive Victorian patriarchs being pleasured in the knocking shop he drank them dry. A few years later, in Dracula AD 1972, he was letting his hair down and getting it on with the hippies of the King’s Road.