PERSPECTIVE ON HORROR : The Serial Killer Is Our Dracula : Monsters of mythic gruesomeness tap into the last taboo of our body-conscious generation: Death.

In Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche, “The West-End Horror,” the great detective and Dr. Watson--on the trail of a maniac who has been terrorizing London’s theater district--grow suspicious of Bram Stoker, manager to the celebrated actor, Sir Henry Irving. Sneaking into Stoker’s quarters, Holmes and his sidekick discover a novel in progress. As they leaf through its pages, they come upon a passage in which a Transylvanian count named Dracula forces a young woman to lap the blood from a wound he has opened on his own chest. Watson is appalled by the obscenity of this scene. “Great heavens!” he exclaims. “This is depraved!”

For us, Count Dracula has become such a domesticated figure--a pitchman for breakfast cereals and star of Saturday morning kiddie cartoons--that Watson’s response seems quaintly old-fashioned. But Meyer’s book reminds us not only how shocking Stoker’s novel seemed to its earliest readers, but why it packed such a charge. “Dracula” (as Meyer’s Watson perceives) is a kind of Victorian soft-core pornography, rife with dark, sexual fantasies--episodes in which virginal young women are transformed into lascivious demons, and passive males wait in an agony of longing to be embraced by the vampire’s voracious brides.

More powerfully, perhaps, than any book of its day, “Dracula” demonstrates that the social and psychological function of horror is to release the repressed, to give vent to the most taboo and shameful subjects of the period. In the Victorian era--when modest housewives clothed piano legs in frilly skirts and clitoridectomies were performed to prevent the crime of female “self abuse”--the creatures that haunted the collective imagination were nightmare incarnations of disavowed sexual impulses.

Another famous monster of the time, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde (whose very name refers to the forbidden, to that which we hide from the sight of the world), is likewise the embodiment of those “beastly appetites” that his painfully proper alter ego, Dr. Henry Jekyll, cannot live within himself.

We, of course, inhabit a very different world from that of Stoker and Stevenson. The most shockingly taboo topics of their time are the everyday stuff of our pop entertainment. It is not sex that we hide away (on the contrary, we broadcast it via every medium of mass communication) but a very different aspect of our biological existence. In a way that would have seemed wholly foreign to the Victorians--indeed, to people in virtually every period of Western civilization preceding our own--we have turned the physical realities of death into the ultimate taboo.

French historian Philippe Aries, in his monumental study “The Hour of Our Death,” charts the shift from “the old attitude, in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe” to our present-day perception of death as “shameful and forbidden.”

Evidence of this cultural shift is everywhere around us. The current, controversial ad for the Benetton company, showing an AIDS sufferer and his family at the moment of his death, shocks us not only because of the harrowing, heart-rending nature of the scene, but because the sight of someone dying in the company of his loved ones is so alien to our experience. Compare this image with Dr. Stanley Burns’ extraordinary volume, “Sleeping Beauty”--a collection of 19th-Century post-mortem photographs that strikingly demonstrate how comfortable our forebears felt in the presence of death.

In an age when actual death has become so frightful and obscene that we cannot look it in the face, it is perhaps inevitable that this ultimate taboo has come back to haunt us in the form of our own mythic monster, a figure that symbolizes what Aries calls “forbidden death.” This figure, of course, is the serial killer.

As the case of Jeffrey Dahmer makes frighteningly clear, serial killers can be all too real. But our fascination, indeed obsession, with these beings, who have come to pervade our popular culture, reveals that the serial killer performs the same symbolic function for our society that Dracula and Mr. Hyde served for theirs. The serial killer is the return of our repressed.

Though critics decry “slasher” films as misogynistic porn, the victims of the mythic serial killer are as likely to be men as women. Freddie Krueger dispatches as many adolescent jocks as co-eds, and it is a male census-taker whose liver Hannibal Lecter consumes with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

The serial killer is Death the Devourer, and what his victims have in common is their youth and vitality. Books and films like “Red Dragon” and “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” are our version of the medieval danse macabre . The serial killer visits men, women and children alike, breaking into their bedrooms at night or striking while they’re strolling in the park. He demonstrates just how easily our flesh is deconstructed, no matter how pumped-up it is by Nautilus machine or silicone implant. Our fitness mania and our fascination with the serial killer are simply two sides to a single coin--our terror of bodily decay and physical death. We lace up our Nikes and try to run away. But there is no escape.

Of course, our popular arts tell us otherwise, which is why we find terror films like “The Silence of the Lambs” so oddly reassuring. The mind games played between Hannibal Lecter and FBI trainee Clarice Starling are the equivalent of the chess match between Death and the young knight in Ingmar Bergman’s classic, “The Seventh Seal.” Hollywood seeks to assure us that youth and fitness can prevail. But the reality, which we find too awful to face, is that we are locked in a losing game.