The Resurrection of the Undead

Dracula is back. So is Count Orlock. And Lestat. Plus Nick the slacker and Queen Akasha and Jeri Ryan as a bloodsucking concubine. Call them what you will, dress them in jeans or tuxedos or gowns with plunging necklines, vampires are once again in the air, swarming their way to darkened cinemas this Christmas season and well into next year.

Not that they’ve ever really gone away. Francis Ford Coppola’s sumptuous “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” set the bar for technical artistry, winning three Oscars back in 1992; horror meisters John Carpenter and Stephen King have paid homage to the genre; actors including Gary Oldman, Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise and Susan Sarandon have all felt the urge to sink their teeth into vampire roles; and even cute-as-a-baby-bat Jonathan Lipnicki donned a black cape to play a vampire’s best friend this fall in “The Little Vampire.”

The vampire legend has been reworked so many times--nearly 200 movies and counting--you’d think filmmakers would want to drive a stake through any story pitch that included “fangs,” “garlic” and “porcelain-skinned neck” in the same sentence.

Instead, at the box office, vampires manage to remain forever young.

Coming soon:

* “Dracula 2000” (Dimension Films, opens Friday). When high-tech thieves in London break into Dracula’s gleaming chrome coffin, they set loose the long-slumbering count, who makes up for lost time by zipping over to New Orleans during Mardi Gras in search of fresh prey. Produced by Wes Craven.

* “Shadow of the Vampire” (Lions Gate, Dec. 29). What if Max Schreck, the obscure German actor who played Count Orlock in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent-film classic “Nosferatu,” really was a vampire? Willem Dafoe plays Schreck as a Method actor-gone-mad in this wryly creepy, fictionalized account, with John Malkovich as the autocratic director.

* “The Forsaken” (Screen Gems, April 2001). Inspired in part by a real-life gang of Florida teenagers who believed they were vampires, this contemporary story tracks the journey of Nick, an “infected” hitchhiker (Brendan Fehr from the WB TV series “Roswell”) who wanders Arizona’s back roads in search of a 400-year-old predator.

* “Queen of the Damned” (Warner Bros., October 2001) In the long-awaited sequel to 1994’s “Interview With the Vampire,” Lestat reinvents himself as a rock star. Singer-actress Aaliyah plays Queen Akasha, a petrified Egyptian demon awakened by the elegant vampire’s wicked Goth music. She teams with Lestat to seek vengeance on her enemies.

* “Vampires: Los Muertos” (Screen Gems, date to be determined) Jon Bon Jovi stars in this sequel to “John Carpenter’s Vampires.” Filming begins in January. Tommy Lee Wallace directs his own script. Carpenter serves as executive producer with Sandy King.

Why hasn’t the world-weary vampire worn out its welcome? For one thing, Americans love loners, especially when they’re dangerously sexy and immortal and more powerful than everyone around them.

“He’s the James Bond of evil,” says Craven. “Dracula is articulate, he’s sophisticated and he’s a more contemporary sort of villain in the sense that he’s not on the plains with sagebrush; he’s amongst us. And when you get beyond the biting idea, the idea that somebody can transfix the victim, almost like a cult figure if you will, gives him a much more subtle appeal.”

‘Vampires Go Where the Power Is’

As “Dracula 2000” makes clear, vampire stories are the ultimate shape-shifters, able to transform themselves to suit the times. Nina Auerbach, author of “Our Vampires, Ourselves,” (University of Chicago Press) asserts simply, “Vampires go where the power is.” Auerbach points out that “The Vampyre,” published in 1819 and inspired by Romantic poet Lord Byron, celebrated intimate friendships among elegant men, defining the popular notion of vampires for decades to come. She says it’s no coincidence that two years after Oscar Wilde was “pilloried” for his homosexuality in 1895, Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” was published, stripped of all homoerotic overtones.

Migrating from literature to movies--following the power--the 20th century vampire mutated again and again, subtly altering its identity to feed on the popular imagination. Notes Auerbach: “You can watch the total transformation of Dracula. In Bram Stoker’s novel he’s repulsive, a foul old man, a foul wolf, a bat, an embodied disease.”

In the 1931 film, Bela Lugosi embodies Dracula as an aristocratic tyrant with a sexuality modeled in some ways, Auerbach says, on Rudolph Valentino’s screen persona. In the staid ‘50s, Christopher Lee’s Dracula emerges from England’s Hammer Studios as a flamboyant seducer and, by 1972, after the politically traumatic ‘60s, Frank Langella is still sexy after all those years, but his Dracula is tinged with melancholia. Says Auerbach: “They all take Bram Stoker’s plot but change it radically.”

“Shadow of the Vampire” writer Steven Katz savors the genre’s creative possibilities. “You can take that relationship between vampire and victim and turn it into any number of metaphors. They were originally a metaphor for contagious disease and then xenophobia, where you have this whole idea of a vampire coming from a foreign country into England infecting the women and killing everybody. [August] Strindberg’s ‘Dance of Death’ used it as a metaphor for marriage.”

Then there’s Anne Rice. Katz believes her books featuring the vampire Lestat became a popular phenomenon because they resonated with an American public made acutely aware of AIDS: “She wrote ‘Interview With the Vampire’ in 1976 and it became a cult novel. She wrote her follow-up ‘The Vampire Lestat’ around 1982, which was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. [When it was published in 1985] suddenly her books jumped right to the top of the bestseller list. I really think the vampire is all about the dangers, guilt and illicitness of sex more than anything else--the idea that you can have sex with someone and you are changed the next day. You’re ill, or you’re not the person you were before.”

Or, as Auerbach puts it, in Lestat’s sensuous, sealed-off world, “Vampires can be gay again.”

“Shadow of the Vampire” adds yet another new subtext, as much a meditation on the demonic demands of high art as it is a monster movie. In “Shadow,” says Katz, “One of my real targets is how we raise artists up on a pedestal, when most of them, outside of their craft, are real sons of bitches. F.W. Murnau was ruthless in his need to forge a new standard of filmmaking. “You can look at a dictatorial director like Erich von Stroheim, [or writers and artists like] Ezra Pound, [T.S.] Eliot, [Edgar] Degas--these are extraordinary artists who are desperately awful human beings. How much is it worth to make a good movie? It’s something I ask myself every time I sit down to start a new script,” Katz says with a laugh.

Dafoe, who plays Schreck-Count Orlock with stunning theatricality, says he welcomed the chance to go over the top. “To some degree, naturalism has ruined theater and movies; everything gets based on comfort and recognition. Because an established genre like this is not based on naturalistic behavior, it’s like a filter. You get the audience in a darkened theater and you can think about things in a new way. When you strip away the social graces, we all are, really, animals.”

Dafoe’s pallid, pointy-eared Orlock is a gawky outcast from the moment he emerges from his cave. Actor Brendan Fehr’s reluctant vampire in “The Forsaken” is, by contrast, a twentysomething Everyman who just happened to be bitten in the right place at the wrong time.

Fehr says: “We take the route that this could be a vampire eating next to you in a restaurant. We went with no fangs, just typical people who have been bitten and, you know, turned. I’m just some slacker kid and I’m trying to get my life back.”

Auerbach dismisses the vampires-who-wish-they-weren’t sub-genre as too low-voltage for her tastes. “It’s very deadening, like a rabid animal--all you can do is get some blood before you wither.”

Preying on the Goth Generation

She might like “Dracula 2000,” which finds a thirsty count unapologetically preying on the Goth generation. Director Patrick Lussier, Craven’s longtime editor, says his gimmick is right there in the title. “When you’re making like the 75th Dracula, of course you need a twist--ours was how do we bring Dracula into the present day?”

The answer: Take a cue from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Like the TV series, which blends deadpan humor, freaky special effects and attractive young actors into a cheeky weekly melodrama, Lussier’s story plays up the Count’s sex appeal. “Dracula’s got a cool factor of 300,” exclaims Lussier. “He can adapt and blend and then take over. The direction we gave the actresses was, ‘You all want to have sex with him but don’t quite know why.’ ”

As for Dracula’s concubines, they seduce first, scare later. Says Lussier, “It’s all set up as in the myth, except in our version, these aren’t just three women who live in the basement of Drac’s castle. These are three very aggressive women who are becoming more than what they were.”

“Queen of the Damned” also seems poised to lure the girl-power generation that has made “Buffy” and its spinoff, “Angel,” cult hits for the youth-skewed WB network. Surround Lestat and Queen Akasha with dense, dark music provided by industrial rockers Korn, and Anne Rice’s characters are once again ready to infuse fresh blood into the vampire tradition.

At the end of the night, there’s a vampire for every demographic, a Dracula for each generation.

Auerbach grew up watching Christopher Lee and still pines for the glamour of the Hammer Films heyday. “You had these confined women with boring husbands and autocratic fathers, wearing high-collared Victorian dresses, and Christopher Lee sort of throws open the window, and suddenly these girls are in low-cut nightgowns, and they laugh and they’re sexy, and they have fangs. I like the romantic ones where you kind of fly out the window of patriarchy.”

Fehr’s favorite vampire flick is “The Lost Boys,” about a suburban crew of alienated teenagers, but he can appreciate classic vampire magnetism: “You’re always kind of drawn to him because here’s some suave, classy guy who looks like a playboy sucking on some chick’s neck and waiting for more.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Vampires Through the Ages

1477--Sadistic Romanian Prince Vlad Dracula is beheaded after a tumultuous reign fighting off Turkish hordes and impaling his own citizens, earning the nickname Vlad the Impaler.

1819--”The Vampyre.” Written by John Poldori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, the story idea germinates at the legendary scary-story challenge held at Villa Diodati in 1816, which also spawns Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

1897--”Dracula.” Bram Stoker’s famous novel is published. The story is inspired in part by Stoker’s boss, an imperious theatrical producer named Henry Irving.

1922--”Nosferatu.” (Photo No. 4) Over objections of Stoker’s widow, F.W. Murnau adapts “Dracula” for film, changing the character’s names and adding the dramatic device of sunlight as a lethal weapon. Max Schreck plays the hideous vampire.

1931--”Dracula.” (No. 1) After scoring a hit in the Broadway production, Bela Lugosi moves to the big screen, his “Transylvanian” accent defining Dracula’s persona for decades to follow.

1958--”The Horror of Dracula.” Christopher Lee makes his dashing debut in the title role. Six sequels follow, all produced by England’s Hammer Studios, including 1966’s “Dracula--Prince of Darkness” (No. 2) and 1968’s “Dracula Has Risen From the Grave” (No. 3, with Veronica Carlson).

1966-71--”Dark Shadows.” Barnabas (Jonathan Frid), resident vampire in the “Dark Shadows” TV soap opera, addicts a new generation of horror aficionados.

1979--”Dracula.” Frank Langella brings his dark-and-handsome persona from his Broadway production of “Dracula” to the big screen.

1979--”Nosferatu the Vampyre.” Werner Herzog directs Klaus Kinski in this remake of the Murnau classic.

1983--”The Hunger.” A rare female vampire movie featuring Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon includes David Bowie’s classic aging scene.

1987--”Lost Boys.” Teenagers in the ‘burbs. Disaffected youth. Kiefer Sutherland.

1992--”Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Francis Ford Coppola’s visually entrancing production starred Gary Oldman (No. 6, with Winona Ryder).

1992--”Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (No. 7, with Kristy Swanson). The small town of Sunnydale just happens to share turf with a portal for vampires. High school student Buffy is destined to fight them off. Way more popular small-screen successor debuts in March ’97.

1994--”Interview With the Vampire.” Tom Cruise (No. 5) and Brad Pitt portray glamorous bloodsuckers in the film based on Anne Rice’s 1976 novel.

2000--”Dracula 2000,” “Shadow of the Vampire.”