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With box-office grosses for Francis Coppola’s “Dracula” zooming to more than $50 million in its first 10 days, there’s still a lot of life in the vampire genre--despite a streak of so-so, modern-day spinoffs, including “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Innocent Blood” and “To Sleep With a Vampire” (from Concorde, set for video release in January).

What “Dracula’s” booty really suggests is that there’s a market for movies that mix blood and eroticism with 19th-Century trimmings. Gothic Chic, for want of a better term.

Saturday night’s re-airing on CBS of a Gothic-flavored “Dracula” TV movie starring Jack Palance (originally shown in ‘74) was one manifestation. Another is that TriStar Pictures has two “very active” projects (says a well-placed source) in this category--”Frankenstein,” the Zoetrope production that Kenneth Branagh will direct (Coppola was originally attached), with Frank Darabont now rewriting Steph Lady’s screenplay, and “Mary Reilly,” a female slant on the Jekyll-and-Hyde story, originally developed by Roman Polanski (who wanted his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, to play the lead). It’s now being rewritten by Christopher Hampton (“Dangerous Liaisons”).

The seeds of Gothic Chic were arguably first planted in the mid-’70s by Anne Rice’s erotic vampire novels, a trilogy consisting of “Interview With the Vampire,” “The Vampire Lestat” and “Queen of the Damned.” The irony is that none of them has ever made it to the screen. The new reality is that one of them finally will. Probably.

As recently recounted in Film Clips (Nov. 15), “Interview With the Vampire” has gone through an agonizing development history, spanning some 16 years and a long cast of characters--Paramount, John Travolta, Julia Phillips, Michael Levy, Lorimar Telepictures, Warner Bros., David Geffen, etc. “Interview’s” basic stumbling block, according to most observers, has been Hollywood’s squeamishness over the book’s homoerotic tone and especially regarding Rice’s 6-year-old female vampire character, Claudia.

Geffen Films, in any event, has been intensely developing it over the past couple of years, having commissioned drafts from Michael Cristofer, Anne Rice and, most recently, Steve Katz. If Katz’s draft meets with approval, production of the film should result “very quickly,” says one inside source. (Then again, similar optimistic projections about a “Vampire” movie have been heard time and again.)

Geffen’s apparent haste may be motivated by the fact that another of its projects based on an Anne Rice novel, “The Witching Hour,” is, for the time being, off the track. This despite notices in the trade papers that began appearing last summer and continued until recently that “Hour,” under director Richard Donner and producer Lauren Schuler-Donner, was scheduled to be shot soon in New Orleans. Several drafts were written by Mark Allen Smith; a revision by Chuck Pogue, who shared screenplay credit with David Cronenberg on “The Fly,” was not met with overwhelming enthusiasm, according to an agency source.

The problem with “The Witching Hour,” says a production veteran familiar with the Rice oeuvre, “is that it’s a story-within-a-story. The inner story is terrific, all about witches, but the top story, the story you need to make a movie with, sucks.”

Geffen’s interest in filming “Interview,” the source observes, “is misplaced. Louis (the central vampire character) is such a whiner and a kvetcher, but Lestat is a lusty adventurer--he’s the one you should make a movie about.”

“You can see the success of Rice’s vampire books as an affirmation of the primal and the erotic,” says Julia Phillips, who was fired off the “Interview” project when Geffen became angered over her references to him in her book “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.” “It’s no accident that the last really repressive era, the Victorian era of the 1890s, produced Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula.’ Is it any surprise that the Rice novels have ascended during the age of Reagan, Bush and AIDS?”