A Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls - By Red Page 0,21

open-minded, or if he simply couldn’t conceive of a man being the victim of a woman, even if she was a vampire. Either way, it didn’t go over too well with the generally stuffy English middle class.

In fact, neither Carmilla nor “The Vamprye” made an enormous impact on English culture. In addition to the shortcomings in writing, both were short stories with minimal plots at a time when dense Gothic novels were becoming all the rage. And frankly, a pale, less humorous Lord Byron and a waifish, snooty lesbian just aren’t that scary. The people wanted real horror.

Ultimately it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula that landed like a thunderclap on the European psyche and established the popular concept of the vampire. It was big. It was epic. It was, at the time, really, really scary. Back in the 1800s, England was simultaneously fascinated by and frightened of for-eigners. Scary stories have a long, time-honored tradition of preying upon our fear of “The Other,” a culture or person we don’t understand. At around the time of Dracula’s popularity, steamships and trains made mainland Europe and beyond far more accessible to the English middle class than in times past. This made for some splendid holidays abroad (or not, as in Aubrey’s case), but it also made the British Isles much more vulnerable to everything from new diseases to foreign 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 55

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business competition. The figure of Dracula, with his dour looks, broken English, and hairy palms (ick!) descending upon pristine, virginal England with all his exotic, wicked eastern European ways, was both enthralling and terrifying.

So it was Stoker who set the precedent in vampire literature. And unfortunately, even though Dracula was published almost a century after Polidori’s book, it progressed little in its depiction of females. Mina Murray (later Mina Harker) has the potential to be a real character with something vaguely akin to motives, at least until the dirty foreign vampire corrupts her, but Lucy Westenra is never anything more than a plot device. And while Dracula had succeeded in making the male vampire a true figure of horror, female vampires were a different story. Dracula’s female vamps are sad, wretched, hissing scavengers, always subservient to the lone alpha-male vampire master.

After Dracula, there was a bit of a lull in the development of vampire mythology until the early twentieth century, when the first vampire movies appeared: Nosferatu (a supremely creepy silent German Expressionist film that was essentially Dracula with all the names and some of the plot changed) and Dracula. For all its faults, the original Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi is an elegant piece of work that is still somehow unnerving even for many modern viewers, although these viewers will also find that the early twentieth century was no more progressive in its portrayal of women than the nineteenth.

That could have been rectified a few years later with the Hollywood invention of Dracula’s Daughter, which follows 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 56

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Countess Marya Zaleska and her attempts to cure herself of the vampirism she inherited from her father. But Dracula’s Daughter is a cheap knockoff that makes little sense and frequently borders on slapstick. Throughout the movie, there is the sense that “the fairer sex” simply can’t handle being that evil. Of course, that wasn’t really a new idea in literature.

Even Lady Macbeth, that ultimate female evildoer, says,

“Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty!” She believes she has to abandon her gender in order to truly be bad.

Over the next forty years or so, vampire movies came and went, usually recycling the same old Dracula-type imagery and themes, and lots of hissing, cringing, submissive vampire women. In the late sixties, there were a few noble attempts.

Some might say that the first real success was The Vampire Lovers, loosely based off Le Fanu’s Carmilla and released in 1970. While a movie about wealthy lesbian vampires was a modest hit in France, the American public wasn’t quite ready for it yet.

But soon after, in 1973, one year after the Equal Rights Amendment was passed