V-Day Special!

 Hope you're all having a lovely Vampire Day, folks. I thought I'd do a little special to make up for my laziness over the past few weeks. So, in no apparent order, here's my top ten fictional bloodsuckers!

Dracula (Dracula (1897) Bram Stoker)
The granddaddy of them all, and the one that turned the vampire from a stinking corpse into the suave arisocrat we know and love. He's an elegant metaphor for everything Victorian society feared from homosexuality to mainland immigrants, and over a hundred years after Stoker first put pen to paper, he still gives us the galloping heebie-jeebies, even if that's mostly through films. To me the definitive film Dracula has to be Christopher Lee (though I admit Gary Oldman had his moments, Frank Langella was pretty cool, and Bela Lugosi is fabulous) because he really captures the mixture of nobility, sexuality and animal ferocity. So here's a nice little video of some of Mr Lee's best bits.




Carmilla (Carmilla (1872) Sheridan Le Fanu)
She predates Dracula by over twenty years and although she hasn't appeared in quite so many movies, she's still one of the most influential characters in vampire fiction. She's the archetypal lesbian vampire: sexy, ethereal and with a definite hold over the novella's vulnerable young heroine. She's also to thank for the habit fictional vampires have of using anagrams of their names, she uses two such pseudonyms in the course of the story. She's been referenced in everything from Batman to True Blood, but most famously in Hammer's racy 1970 flick The Vampire Lovers


Count Orlock (Nosferatu (1922))
Okay, so he's basically a bald Dracula but he remains one of the creepiest bloodsuckers of all time. Whether you see him as a Jewish caricature, a penis with teeth or just a rat-man, the combination of dance-like movements and exaggerated features is guaranteed to give you nightmares. He's also to thank for the sunlight myth, and where would every vampire flick since be without the prerequesite crumbling-to-dust sequence? 

Lestat de Lioncourt (Interview with the Vampire (1976) Anne Rice)
Anne Rice may have given up on her vampires these days and she didn't exactly do them many favours with the later tales in the Vampire Chronicles, but I prefer to remember Lestat as he was when we first met him back in '76. Bold, arrogant, mean and utterly selfish yet vulnerable and romantic, Lestat is everyone's favourite vampiric hedonist, and with him Rice set the mould for the next generation of vampire characters. Here's a clip from the wonderful 1994 film adaptation, with Tom Cruise playing the brat prince himself.


Miriam Baylock (The Hunger (1981) Whitley Strieber)
Miriam is one of my favourites thanks to Tony Scott's brilliantly arty 1983 adaptation of the novel, where she is played by the beautiful Catherine Deneuve opposite the equally beautiful David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. It's a story that emphasises, among other things, the loneliness of immortality, as Miriam's lovers just don't share the same longevity that she does. There's something bitterly tragic about that climactic scene where her former lovers, now decrepit and elderly, attack her. Here's the fantastic opening sequence to the film, featuring the classic Bauhaus track Bela Lugosi's Dead

Zillah (Lost Souls (1991) Poppy Z Brite)
He may not be one of the most famous vamps of the 90s, but he's certainly one of the most extreme. With Lost Souls, Brite took everything Anne Rice had done to it's logical conclusion, creating a group of vampires for whom nothing was taboo. Zillah is the leader of a trio of decadent libertines who cruise around the US in the back of a van, killing, screwing and boozing wherever they go. He even has an affair with his own son. In short, he makes Lestat look like a nun. Sadly there's not been an adaptation of the book and interviews with Brite are hard to find, so no video here.

Alucard (Hellsing (1997-present) Kouta Hirano)
So far the vampires on this list have been quite a bunch of sex-pests, so here's a vampire with very little interest in seduction. Alucard is the star of Hellsing, an enjoyably trashy and very pretty manga series, and, yes, I'm aware that he's actually a version of Count Dracula, but he's such a departure from Stoker's novel that I think it's fair to list him separately. Alucard is an incredibly powerful vampire and although he's the servant of the Hellsing Organisation, a secret society that deals with supernatural threats, he takes great pleasure in his work. He's a first class sadist and practically indestructable, so he can afford to spend his powers turning into a young girl or doing funky things with his hair. And let's face it, if you were an immortal shape shifter, wouldn't you do that? Here he is carving his way through a room from the English dubbed version of the thrid of the Ultimate series.

Eli (Let the Right One In (2004) John Ajvide Lindoqvist)
If you thought there weren't any taboos left for the vampire genre to discuss, Let the Right One In nabs one of the last of them with it's uncomfortably frank subplot of paedophilia. Eli, a twelve year old vampire who has "been twelve for a long time", is aided by a nasty piece of work who murders for her in exchange for her attentions. Eli herself (or should that be himself?) is a perfect mix of fragile vulnerability and viciousness. She's scruffy, otherworldly and quite unlike the stereotypical vampire, and that's why I love her.

Rex (Urban Gothic - Vampirology (2000) Tom De Ville)
Urban Gothic was a short lived, low-budget UK series that ran on Channel 5 for two seasons, but the second episode, Vampirology, was easily the best. It takes the form of a documentary following London vampire Rex (wonderfully played by Keith Lee-Castle, who regular readers may remember from kid's show Young Dracula), a sharp, chic, arrogant young man who likes nightclubs, Ingrid Pitt and cigarettes. He's witty and regularly quips snippets of self-spun philosophy, but there's a sadness there too. That's a lot of characterisation to pack into one 25-minute episode! Sadly the only video I could find with clips of this episode is in this fan vid, I don't usually like fan music video things, but here it is anyway.


Donald (Tales from the Crypt - the Reluctant Vampire (1991)
Tales from the Crypt always had a wicked sense of humour, but this episode had me in stitches. Malcolm McDowell plays Donald, a latter-day vampire who works as a night-watchman at a blood bank. He doesn't like to kill and considers himself a bit of a failure, but the receptionist at the blood bank rather fancies him. It's a terribly sweet and ludricrously funny episode, something I often watch when I need cheering up.


So that's that then. Honourable mentions go to Morbius the Living Vampire from the Spiderman comics for kitsch value and having covers like this, to the underwater vampires in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing for a really novel take on the myth, to Bill Compton of True Blood for proving that you don't have to be skinny and pale to be a vampire, and to Silas of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book for never actually having to use the word "vampire".

I'll leave you with Concrete Blonde and a little bit of "Bloodletting"