Interview With the Vampire Aficionado

Not many people on the Skidmore College campus know the dean of faculty’s bloody secret.

Phyllis Roth, 51, has an enduring passion for one of the most suspenseful novels ever penned--Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

In the early 1980s, Roth, then an English professor at the school in upstate New York, wrote a critical biography of Stoker that is still widely recognized--so much so that when she went to Romania last year for the first World Dracula Congress she, too, was widely recognized.

“It was great fun to be known,” says Roth, now a dean steeped in such relatively toothless topics as higher education financing. “People stopped me and said ‘Oh, you’re Phyllis Roth.’ ”

And it was a very “campy” group, she says.

“When one of the vampire wannabes had to have emergency root canal,” she adds, laughing, “it just freaked me out.”

Part of the conference involved touring sites related to the novel as well as to the 15th-century figure that Dracula is based on--Vlad Tepes, nicknamed Vlad the Impaler, a prince who started out protecting his empire from Turkish invaders but got carried away with brutality. (He murdered as many as 100,000 people but apparently wasn’t quite the bad guy as reinvented in Stoker’s novel, Roth says.)

Either way, Dracula, who has long been a cinematic idol, is likely to become a lot more chic in the upcoming year.

This spring marks the 100th anniversary of publication of the novel and already the count’s calendar is filling up: a Dracula Centennial is planned in Los Angeles this spring; a Dracula ballet will premiere in England; Boston will hold Dracula Day on Nov. 8, 1997, to celebrate the fictional vampire’s birthday; a special session will be held in Dublin at a summer school devoted to the study of Dracula. And those are just the events Roth has heard about via e-mail.

Whether putting on blood-spattered masks for Halloween or swarming to see the latest Dracula film, the public seems to have an undying interest in vampires. We apparently are drawn to these creatures that commute between life and death because they are so closely associated with what we fear may be our own bestiality, concludes Roth.

“If you wake up from a nightmare, you are even more reassured than if you never had it in the first place,” says Roth, who before she wrote the Stoker biography wrote a scholarly article examining the legend from the psychoanalytical perspective. It’s art in order that it not be life,” she says.

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Though the major work of her career has been as a Vladimir Nabokov scholar, Roth was first bitten by the Dracula story when she was teaching it in a Victorian literature class in the 1970s.

“There was something about the structure of the story that irritated me the way a grain of sand irritates an oyster,” she says. “Which is not to say I produced a pearl.”

But she produce an epiphany.

“All the ‘onstage’ sucking [in the original book] is not done by Count Dracula but by the women after they become vampires and become sexual and therefore threatening,” says Roth, noting that the men respond by driving a stake through the women’s hearts.

In the biography, Roth refers the reader to a classic “primal” scene in the novel where Dracula slits open his breast and forces Mina Harker to drink his blood:

“With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension. His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest, which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.”

From scenes such as this Roth took a particularly Freudian view of the novel, and the way it intertwined sexual passion and ugly violence.

“Death and sex, two key expressions of humanity, are often reflected in vampirism,” she says.

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Over the years Roth has seen all the Dracula movies, and rates a 1922 black-and-white version with Louis Jordan as the most terrifying and the recent Francis Ford Coppola version as the best of all.

“ ‘Love at First Bite’ is a hoot,” she adds, “and even though it is a parody, it movingly captures the poignancy of Dracula’s situation.”

But the Coppola version, she says, “although he doesn’t get it all right, it does include mature sex and valuable contemporary illusions such as to AIDS that add resonance to the terror of bloodsucking, which profoundly expresses the vampire’s continuous threat to humanity.”

Plus, she adds with a deep laugh, “What is safe sex with a vampire? Shouldn’t we be asking that today?”

Oddly enough, Roth is not asked to give an annual Halloween lecture on campus. Her life as a top administrator has taken her so far from the topic that she suspects if she ever does return to pure academics she’ll choose to return to Nabokov or Jane Austen, not Dracula.

“I had my say,” she says, sighing.

She would recommend “Dracula” as a novel.

“It sustains suspense brilliantly,” she says. “So I’d recommend it. But read Jane Austen first.”