Unsolicited thoughts on Dracula, the vampire myth, and how to fix them

Lately I have mostly been watching Dracula movies. I read Dracula in high school and found it shockingly kick ass despite nearly a century of mostly lame adaptations. Despite being perhaps the most adapted character in movies, I believe the definitive Dracula (and vampire) kinographeme has yet to be produced. In this thread I will tiresomely explain why vampirism has consistently been fucked up by generations of film and TV hacks, and a few geniuses who should have known better.

Vlad the Impala lol

Metaphysics vs logistics

The biggest problem with screen vampires is not Twilight (that problem is a consequent of this one). It's the physicality.

Dracula (the book) gets it right, everything else gets it wrong. In the book, un-dead expert Van Helsing lists everything Bram Stoker picked up from his research into vampire myths: their powers, limitations, and general characteristics. Subsequent generations read this like a Pokemon card, in which Dracula is weak against fire but gets a +5 attack after nightfall.

The problem with adaptations is that they make literal everything that exists in a soupy fog of theory in the book. This is compounded by the worst invention of the movies, for which no less a master of the form than Murnau is responsible: instant death by sunlight.

If you play this straight, 99% of vampires would just die by accident, and that is fucking retarded.

In the book Dracula is not harmed by sunlight whatsoever, nor does it harm vampires in any of the original myths. His powers are stronger at night and he prefers to rest during the day, but he can get around during daylight just like you can get around at night. Nosferatu, a loose adaptation, uses the sunlight concept esoterically to suggest the triumph of good over evil. This works in a silent German Expressionist art film. It does not work in entertainment flicks. When you combine a bunch of really easily exploitable weaknesses, vampire flicks become a farcical exercise in logistics: using crosses to herd the vampire toward an open window, making sure to take down the curtains, at which point the vampire either skeletonises, turns to dust, bursts into flame or just dies. It's like the video game Lemmings where you just have to steer the pesky vampire the right way. The Hammer movies are especially egregious in this way: in one instalment Dracula dies because he trips up in a bush he could simply have walked around.

Durrr

Another concept is that vampires can't enter a home without being invited. Taken symbolically, this is about the need to willingly invite evil into your heart. Taken literally, it becomes really, really stupid. When your monster has more debilitating weaknesses than useful strengths, your monster sucks, and not just blood.

The solution to this is to de-emphasise the physicality of the vampire, to go back to the well of folklore in which vampires are evil spirits like a demon or poltergeist, that can affect the physical world but are not part of it - not just guys with superpowers. This makes sense of why the vampire casts no shadow and no reflection, can change shape or dissolve into mist, and is unharmed by bullets: because they're not really, physically there. For the same reason, warding off the vampire with a cross, making it retreat to its grave, and hammering a stake into its heart should be viewed as a spiritual conflict, more like an exorcism than a physical slapfight. If your faith is impure, the cross should have no effect. If it is pure, it should still require a strong effort of will to force the vampire to retreat, like any of those exorcism or house-cleansing scenes in movies. Randos chasing vampires around with two matchsticks or sausages or dildos in a cross shape looks comical and ridiculous.

1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula gets this right. It's the only thing it gets right, but it gets it right.

No sympathy for the devil

The literary Dracula is an evil prick who keeps his three sidechicks locked up in his castle and brings them babies to drain. When one of the babies' moms shows up to beg for the life of her child, Dracula sets a pack of wolves on her that tear her to shreds. He then takes a boat to England, killing everyone on board, transforms into a huge dog and mauls the first Englishman he sees, springs a wolf from a zoo, and generally causes mayhem and destruction for the fun of it. All that crap about searching the ages for his long lost love was an invention of the movies and does nothing but water down a character who was conceived, and is by far best understood, as a ruthless, sadistic psychopath. Good, nice, angsty or sympathetic vampires are always a huge mistake and don't even make sense since their entire existence is satanic in nature. I know everyone thinks they want complex sympathetic villains because they think it makes them seem like deep thinkers, but no one wants that and it's always terrible. Vampires should be less like Gary Oldman and more like Mola Ram.

This dude was hardcore af as fucc

On camp and cliché

A large part of the effectiveness of Dracula at the time of publication was due to the exoticism of the Transylvania setting. No one knew anything about Transylvania, as evidenced by the fact the only thing you know about it now is fucking Dracula, so poor hapless Jonathan Harker was venturing into the very unknown. Even epic gamer HP Lovecraft cited Dracula in his essay on the canon of supernatural horror. Today, however, Gothic castles, gypsies, capes and bats have the exact opposite effect: they're familiar to the point of redundancy. Dracula imagery is so saturated into pop culture through Count Chocula, Sesame Street and worse that it would be an uphill struggle to salvage any of it from the realm of camp.

At the same time it is important we remember that the classic imagery serves a function: the labyrinthine castle offers endless dark corners for the vampire to stow his coffin, the cape serves to transform him from the mere shape of a human into something more amorphous, and so on. Alternative presentations must keep these type of functions in mind. The clichés are easy enough to swerve without neglecting their essential utility. The vampire may be aesthetically situated anywhere in the world and, since he may live for centuries or more, at any point of origin in history. If the East European style vampire is nowadays over-familiar, there is no shortage of exotic and mysterious corners of the world and history that can produce the same effect. A Babylonian, Scythian, Cambodian, Aztec or Zulu vampire might be cool. How about a Haitian Voodoo vampire with a zombie Renfield ghoul? That would be sweet. Similarly the bat and wolf being overdone isn't a problem: Van Helsing notes that vampires can also command or take the form of rats, owls and moths.

Killer BOB tier cosmic horror vampires would be fuccin sweet

No modern science crap

I don't know who needs to hear this, but scientific explanations for vampirism are stupid. Every time it's a virus that coincidentally makes people functionally vampires, the result is worse than if you didn't explain it at all, because now your audience are actually thinking about how that might work and therefore why it wouldn't. If there's any explanation at all, it should just be supernatural.

Subtext stay subtext

Finally, vampirism must never be used as a metaphor for any or all of the following, or anything else.

• Sex
• STDs
• Drugs/addiction
• Homosexuality or other sexual orientations or fetishes
• Rape
• Wealth/fame

These have all been done to death, and they're all stupid. Metaphors aren't clever storytelling, and they always break down at some point because the unalike things being equated are unalike. It's the same problem with the X-Men comics and/or movies where they're meant to be this hippy civil rights analogy but if people could blow your head off with a thought in real life you'd be team sentinels all the way. Metaphors are for midwits. Moreover, as writing devices, they draw too much attention to themselves. If you're telling a story you want some degree of immersion, so using some dumb metaphor is like having intrusive title cards saying "Act 1", "rising action", "clap now" and "the end (please leave)".

The fact vampirism shares certain vague similarities to disease or sex or whatever should stay, at most, subtext. People are smart enough to pick up on that stuff by themselves, and it doesn't matter anyway.

By keeping these points in mind it should be possible to do a vampire movie that doesn't lick my prostate, but the last good one was literally Dreyer's Vampyr in like 1932 or something, so I wait in vain.

This is the one from which Coppola ripped off the device of the independently moving shadows. Check it out, it's gr8

Vampire movies, RANKED

Kino tier:

• Vampyr
• Nosferatu

OK tier:

• Dracula with Bela Lugosi

Shit tier:

• the rest

Did I miss any good ones??? Leave a comment or not whatever fuck you

Bastard role models: Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu was an awesome bastard during the "Spring And Autumn Period" of Chinese history, because in China, Summer doesn't happen. Sun Tzu is best known for his book The Art Of War, which is about trolling your enemies. It includes descriptions for dealing with lolcows, such as "If [your lolcow] is angry, Disconcert him. If he is weak, Stir him to pride. If he is relaxed, Harry him. If his men are harmonious, Split them". The book is also padded with the bleeding obvious, like advising you to run away if you are heavily outnumbered. This proves that Sun Tzu, just like you, fudged and padded his way to a passing grade on everything he did.

The Art Of War also contains built-in protection for the author, by saying "One can know Victory And yet not achieve it". This means even if you fail, Sun Tzu's ass is covered.

Bastard role models: Grey Seer Thanquol

Grey Seer Thanquol's contributions to bastardry are many and varied. Thanquol is a Skaven (rat-man) from the city of Skavenblight, in Skavendonia, in the Games Workshop Warhammer Fantasy setting. I like Grey Seer Thanquol, not least because he's blatantly The Brain from Pinky and the Brain on hard drugs. He is most well known for his brilliant plots being defeated at the last possible minute by the evil Gotrek Gurnisson and his pet man-thing Felix Jaeger, but his antics have taken him from Kislev (Poland/Russia/Czechoslovakia) to Lustria (South America) and Hell Pit (Birmingham).

Among his many admirable traits including Warpstone addiction (think red Kryptonite for everybody) and running human specimens through a giant maze (payback for white rats in real life), Thanquol is a master of the art of scrolling revisionism. This is the process, common to modern political parties and ideologies, by which defeats can be recast as victories, inconvenient allies as enemies, recent enemies as noble allies, and your own mistakes as the treachery of any nearby underling of sufficiently low status in the hierarchy to blame it on. This must be a virtue, as it informs 100% of our foreign policy, especially with regard to the Middle East. Think about it this way: if scrolling revisionism weren't a virtue, then our leaders, media, and ideological gurus, both left and right, would all be liars, incompetents and charlatans from head to toe and back to front. So, you see, it must be good to scroll.

Thanquol's contempt for any and all life makes him an ideal leader. He successfully captured an enemy tower despite only outnumbering them ten to one, and had his army burn down half a major city before escaping, leaving his bodyguards to die with the promise of "inevitable victory". OK, so he's a complete bastard, but let me ask you this: do you see someone capable of such reckless optimism failing his next interview? And isn't that why the upper echelons of our society are filled with that thing that always rises to the top? You know what I'm talking about.

In defence of tl;dr

Circumlocutory assholes on the interwebs are getting upset that nobody wants to read their pontifications, a point of view expressed since time immemorial by "tl;dr". tl;dr is, of course, Vietnamese for "too long, did not read" (source).

The reason people call tl;dr on your epic literature is because you can nearly always say the same thing using fewer words, which is considered common courtesy because no one's got time to listen to every idea you've ever had, especially not by way of a response to a two-word YouTube comment, like "this sucks", or "you suck".

There's a very complex algorithm modern homo sapiens sapiens use to determine whether something is too long to read. First, do they care what the conclusion is? Second, do they care more than they care about reading the next comment, or clipping their toenails? Third, is your writing entertaining? Why not? Didn't they teach you to write good at school? Why not?

tl;dr is an exhortation to write better; to be more efficient; to leave out the backstory about your dog.

If I were a literary critic (boring) I would call tl;dr on everything. Movies too. Drive was tl;dr as fuck. He didn't even drive that much. It's a soundtrack, not a movie. The Gone Girl was tl;dr too. The Hobbit? Too long for anyone to read. The book was like eight pages.

Anything tl should be dr.

ZOMFG new Jack the Ripper theory!!!

A few years ago, I published an article about the then-current Jack the Ripper identity. I have no idea if this theory is still popular, or if it is now widely agreed to be nonsense (but it's that one), but it got me thinking about the true identity of the Ripper, and I've come to a shocking conclusion.

"A Study in Scarlet", the first Sherlock Holmes novel, was published in 1887, marking the first appearance of the popular TV detective (Dr Spock). Shortly afterwards, in 1888, the Ripper struck.

Why wasn't Sherlock Holmes, the best detective in London's history, successful in catching the killer? Indeed, I contacted the Metropolitan Police Force in a dream I had, and they denied any record of working with Holmes at all on the case. Fans of BBC ITV's Sherlock Holmes will be aware that the police, in the guise of Inspector Gadget of Police Squad!, always turn to Sherlock Holmes to help them solve their most important cases. Yet where was Sherlock Holmes during the Whitechapel murders?? Coincidence??????????????????

????????????????

I can therefore reveal, for 100% truth, that Sherlock Holmes himself WAS the Yorkshire Ripper.

Case closed.