THE Irish writer director? Neil Jordan, whose film of Anne Rice's Interview - With The Vampire is the most commercially successful vampire movie of them all, describes Bram Stoker's Dracula as "a magnificent novel". He recalls "the terror" of reading it for the first time and marvels at its atmosphere of "dread". However, he points out, "it's never been filmed as the original book apart from the BBC production", a reference to Philip Savile's 1977 Count Dracula which featured Louis Jourdan as the Count and Frank Finlay as Dr Van Helsing.
The great majority of vampire movies have been "ridiculous parodies", Jordan observes, singling out as rare exceptions two of the earliest productions in the genre - F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr.
Nosferatu is widely regarded as the first feature film based on Stoker's novel though it was actually preceded a year earlier, in 1921, by the Hungarian Drakula, of which no known prints exist. Murnau achieved a haunting, highly stylised treatment of the book featuring the unsettling figure of the bald, skeletal Max Schreck in the central role.
But his film was an unauthorised adaptation - and Stoker's widow, Florence, successfully sued the production company, which promptly went bankrupt. In 1925 a court ruled that the negative and all prints of Nosferatu should be destroyed; fortunately, some prints survived and were amalgamated in a restored version. The 1931-32 Vampyr, by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, was based on stories by another Irishman, Sheridan Le Fanu, and is rightly regarded as a masterpiece.
The first notable American movie on the subject, Tod Browning's Dracula, predated Dreyer's film by a year and was chiefly notable for the eerie central performance by the Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi. When he himself died in 1956, Lugosi was buried in his Dracula cloak.
The mostly frivolous vampire movies which followed over the next 25 years never came close to matching Browning's film, not to mention Nosferatu or Vampyr. In 1958 the British company Hammer Films resurrected the Count in the first colour version of Dracula, featuring the imposing Christopher Lee, smoothly suave and icily menacing in the title role, and Peters Cushing as Van Helsing. "I thought it would be a success," Lee said when I mentioned his 1958 Dracula during an interview seven years ago, "but I never dreamt it would be as popular or as enduring as it is."
The success of the movie encouraged Hammer to produce a succession of low budget sequels and spin offs, and over the next 14 years Lee bared his fangs in Dracula, Prince Of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, Taste The Blood Of Dracula, Scars Of Dracula, The Satanic Rites Of Dracula and Dracula AD 1972.
More interesting vampires movies from other sources during that period included Roman Polanski's affectionate homage to the genre in the 1967 satire, Dance Of The Vampires, which was released in America as The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck. It featured Polanski himself: and his wife, Sharon Tate, with the Irish actor, Jack McGowran, and Ferdy Mayne as Count Von Krolock. "For Polanski in Newman observes in his book, Nightmare Movies, "vampires are entitled to as much respect and understanding as any other ethnic sexual minority.
There were also several baroque Italian films directed by Marion Bava, including the 1960 Revenge Of The Vampire and the 1963 Black Sabbath, which encountered censorship problems here and in Britain. However, one of the most exploitative additions to the genre, Hammer's 1970 The Vampire Lovers, based on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, somehow slipped passed the censor here and became a huge Irish box office success for its explicit scenes of lesbian seductions by the vampire played by Ingrid Pitt. Perhaps it was passed because its scantily clad women characters were seen to "pay for" their promiscuity - a salutory warning to mna na hEireann at the time.
IN the 1970s Dracula was played, with variable results, by actors from Jack Palance to David Niven to Frank Langella to George Hamilton, the latter in the campy comedy Love At thirst Bite. The 1973 Andy Warhol - production Blood For Dracula proved unintentionally funny, with Joe Dallesandro cast, as ever, as a stud, here hacking off Dracula's limbs. In George Romero's thoughtful but disturbing Martin (1977), the eponymous vampire - was a psychotic innocent in a cruel world. And the truly strange German director Werner Herzog delivered a ponderous and often risible: Murnau remake in the 1979 Nosferatu The Vampyre, starring the mannered Klaus Kinski.
Since then we have had everything from Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as vampires in Tony Scott's glossy 1983 The Hunger, through director Kathryn Bigelow's imaginative picture of bizarre vampires led by Lance Henriksen as an undead America Civil War veteran in the 1987 Neur Dark, to the sight of Nicolas Cag eating bugs in the 1988 Vampire Kiss. And there were such epheeral efforts as Transylvania 6-5000, of which the title was the wittiest feature and the inane British picture I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle, starring Neil Morrissey of Men Behaving Badly.
In 1992 Stoker was given proprietorial title credit in Francis Ford Coppola's $40 million production Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was as over acted as it was vastly overrated. In the New York Times Frank Rich, then the paper's drama critic, unconvincingly interpreted it as "a movie that both frightens and arouses by playing off the unchecked fear of further AIDS invasions of the national "blood stream". Rich noted that "the neck wounds inflicted by Gary Oldman's Dracula, seen in closed up, look like the lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma".
It was followed by Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, a clever, allegorical vampire movie set in Mexico City and involving an ancient artefact - which extends the life of its user in exchange for an unquenchable thirst for blood, and by the Gothic psychodrama of Neil Jordan's dark and dangerous Interview With The Vampire, with Tom Cruise as Anne Rice's vampire creation, Lestat.
Seventy five years on from F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, there are no indications that the audience's thirst for blood sucking is diminishing. Some of the best reviews of the current US television season have gone to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, while the dire Eddie Murphy comedy, Vampire In Brooklyn, decently went on sale in Irish video stores. Showing at the IFC in Dublin at present is Abel Ferrara's pretentious The Addiction, a cold and gory contemporary 1995 horror movie of vampires in New York City; and next month the IFC screens the well regarded French film Irma Vep, in which the Hong Kong action movie queen, Maggie Cheung, plays herself as an actress in Paris to act in a remake of Feulliade's silent crime serial, Les Vampires. The title of Irma Vep is, of course, an anagram.
