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Amores decadentes: Drácula apasionado

Decadent Loves: Passionate Dracula

Translation: Naia Rios

Leaving aside other readings, the approach to vampirism as a subject of art is to interpret it as a metaphor for illicit sex, the passionate outburst of a repressed love, and the morbid expression of a libido reacting to a society sickened by industrialization, scientism, and materialistic desacralization. It is true that a vampire’s attack could be a metaphor for a simple and ordinary sexual assault, that is, a rape in which the fangs take on a phallic function, regardless of the sexual or gender identity of the predator and its victim; but if the bite is accepted, then the attack becomes an act of love, where “sex” is the manifestation of deep feelings, and through which the victims and the vampire accept each other, as two mirrors reflecting each other in a single soul.

With his novel Dracula (1897), the Irish writer Bram Stoker not only presented a magnificent book of supernatural adventures, with suspense, terror and horror carefully distributed and dosed; he also created a path for personal revenge against the hypocritical Victorian Puritanism that condemned sexual options like the ones he repressed. Thus, Dracula presents itself as a catalog of paraphilias that were punished in his time (and, as the case may be, in ours too), such as male homosexuality, lesbianism, pederasty, necrophilia, adultery, group sex, bestiality and sexual alternatives such as what we now cheerfully call “polyamory”. Stoker speaks of all this under the guise of vampirism, obviously because the writer did not want to suffer the same fate as his great friend Oscar Wilde.

As many people did not think when his film was released, Francis Ford Coppola was not the first to reimagine the character of Dracula from a more emotional perspective, humanizing the monster and showing his emotional vulnerability. In fact, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (F. F. Coppola 1992) was marketed as a love story, rather than a horror story, as a large part of its audience saw it, and in this sense, the film draws more from Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beastthan from Stoker’s novel. But Coppola was not the first to develop the theme of decadent love in a passionate Dracula. Two other pioneering works also share the same year of production: Dracula Negro (Blacula, William Crane, 1972) and El gran amor del conde Drácula (Javier Aguirre, 1972). Both modernize the legend by emphasizing the story of heterosexual love between the vampire and the female protagonist. The responsibility for this romantic nuance lies primarily with the screenwriters: Joan Torres and Raymond Koening in the American film, and Jacinto Molina Alberto S. Insúa and Javier Aguirre in the Spanish film.

In Drácula Negro, vampiric love is decadent because it is a macabre love and nourishes life where none exists. The vampire believes that he has recognized in a young American in the 70s the reincarnation of his wife, who died too soon at the end of the 18th century. In this way, the vampire offers a love stronger than death. In the Spanish film, the nocturnal predator also falls in love, and one of the greatest achievements of this production is the filming in natural locations, which helps to achieve a hybrid aesthetic between decadence and the Gothic, suitable for a story in which the romantic prevails over the terrifying. But if the two works coincide in the sensitivity of the vampire and the tragic sense of his existence, the difference is seen in the form of the character. In this regard, the great originality of the North American film was the breaking of racial taboos and the transfer of the protagonist of Dracula (who only appears in the film’s prologue) to a black alter ego. Hence the pun on the original language title. In this sense, the film is representative of blaxploitation, a current of American cinema featuring African-American protagonists, which proposed producing films aimed primarily at black audiences, but not without neglecting to satisfy audiences of other ethnicities. The racial (not necessarily racist) sense of this production policy led to films that revisited formulas that were successful among whites, but by changing the race of the protagonists. In this case, the “black version” of Count Dracula was played by the theater singer and actor William Marshall. In the Spanish film, however, Dracula himself plays the leading role, played by Paul Naschy. Both films end with the vampire’s self-immolation, as a demonstration of the sincerity of their feelings and their moral level: in Drácula negro he commits suicide after losing all hope of love, after his wife is killed by a policewoman who believes in her reincarnation after vampirization; in El gran amor del conde Drácula the vampire takes his own life to prevent him from attacking his beloved in the future. The image of the suicidal vampire has a famous literary predecessor in Varney el vampiro (Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood), a penny dreadful consisting of 237 chapters, written by James Malcolm Rymer (or Thomas Preckett Prest, specialists disagree) and published in series between 1845 and 1857. In this entertaining pamphlet, the vampire commits suicide for love, jumping into the crater of Vesuvius.

The contribution of the two films mentioned above has influenced two later films of greater importance.

Nosferatu, vampiro de la noche (Nosferatu; Phantom der Nacht, Werner Herzog, 1979) is a wonderful meta-cinematic exercise, where remake gives way to re-birthing, as a loving homage to the main masterpiece of vampire cinema: Nosferatu (Nosferatu; Eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922). Hypnotic to the point of madness, thanks to its musical soundtrack, locations and photography, the film strengthens the story of decadent love by presenting the predatory instinct as an addiction thanks to the meritorious incarnation of the vampire by German actor Klaus Kinski, and the fatal attraction to the ethereal, almost ghostly Lucy, played by Isabelle Adjani in one of her best cinematic interventions. As in Murnau’s original film, the vampire falls into the trap of Lucy, the first “vampire hunter” in the history of audiovisuals, capable of killing herself to save her community, just as Christ offered his blood to redeem humanity. It is a bold Christian vision of a woman who causes the desolation of the vampire in love, an immortal condemned to eternity who never manages to satisfy her anxiety, because not feeling loved is like dying in life, without ever dying completely. In this sense, the asthmatic breathing that Kinski occasionally gives to his character seems to me to be a complete interpretive achievement, at least if I apply a psychosomatic reading to asthma, for example, as an expression of the repressed crying of tears never shed. Is it a coincidence that the controversial Klaus Kinski titled his autobiography I Need Love (Ich brauche Liebe)?

Among the many features of Dracula (John Badham, 1979), the choice of actors stands out. Frank Langella successfully starred in the play by Balderston-Deane, which inspired the film, and managed to give the character nuances that approached Byronic dandyism, basing the character on Lord Ruthven, the sinister protagonist of the famous story The Vampire written by John William Polidori in 1819, with whom he had a painfully close relationship. The “Dracula” embodied by Lord Byron, Lord Ruthven and Langella are attractive, immoral, fascinating, and doomed to a tragic fate. If Christopher Lee modernized and eroticized Dracula for the Hammer film, Frank Langella followed his example to update the character, but humanizing his feelings. A powerful, elegant and stylized figure, endowed with a dark and exotic beauty, Langella manages to make his Dracula shine with originality, moving away from the icon established by Lee and continuing the physical image of the gala that Badham himself proposed two years earlier in the film Saturday Night Fever (1977), starring John Travolta.

Langella’s close-ups and close-ups are among the best in a film in which the camera seems to be as enamored with the character as the victim. The actor’s restraint, a testament to his talent, spared gestures and movements and for the first time the cinema shows us a talkative Dracula, like the one Stoker describes in his novel. The vampire’s words are his best weapon after his gaze, a gaze that sometimes reveals his true “self”, his bloodlust or the deadly hatred he feels for his enemies, as seen in the close-ups in which the actor makes his pupils tremble, giving his gaze a demonic hue. Langella managed to maintain the balance between erotic seduction and explosive brutality, which were already present in Lee’s subtle interpretation, but Langella, who we also found in Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu, gave it an emotional dimension. Both interpretations will build on a precedent that Francis Ford Coppola used in his enchanting 1992 version, which is more decadent for its aesthetics than for its content. But if Kinski’s touching vampire is a complete sufferer, a pessimistic loser, Langella suffers because he loves, but loves to conquer. Indeed, the development of the romance between him and Lucy, on the one hand, and the modern ambiguity of the film’s ending, on the other, suggest that Dracula is victorious; as Lucy’s mysterious smile indicates when she sees Dracula’s cloak drifting away, carried by the sea breeze.

If Terence Fisher and Hammer’s team had proven that “vampire hunters” could represent a “Good” of dubious nature, John Badham created a group of “do-gooders” who act as antagonistic villains who try to break up the lovers’ pair of Dracula and Lucy. Although until then the image of the vampire had represented a sinister threat that disturbed the love relationship between heterosexual human couples, Badham’s film presents a trio of Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and Johnathan Harker, annoying intruders who want to destroy the happiness of the two lovers. The veteran British actor Sir Laurence Olivier convincingly embodied Van Helsing; Donald Pleasence gives the character of Dr. Seward original comic relief; Trevor Eve, as befits a film that aims to identify the audience with Dracula and support his cause, plays a shameless and unsympathetic Harker; Kate Nelligan and Jan Francis play Lucy and Mina respectively, and both depart from the role of sex object that they have been accustomed to. Kate Nelligan’s physical attractiveness, in particular, is less important than the strong personality she gives to her character, a perfect example of a modern woman caught in the web of an outdated society.

In such a context, who are the monsters? An important secondary theme is the generational conflict between fathers and daughters, a consequence of the underlying problem: the battle of the sexes and the vindication of female freedom in the face of patriarchal oppression. In a show of intelligence, the script modifies the original relationships and turns Lucy and Mina into the daughters of Doctors Van Helsing and Seward, respectively. And if the daughters are passionate about Dracula, their fathers do everything possible to oppose the will of their “girls.” Irrational paternal jealousy can lead to radically aggressive attitudes when male rivals appear, provoking in their daughters an emotional transference that puts an end to the Oedipal love they felt for their father and transfers it to a younger man. If we apply this psychoanalytic perspective, the film takes on morbid incestuous nuances in the gruesome and sinister scene in which Lucy ends up impaled on her own father’s stake. Van Helsing penetrates his own daughter with an instrument of a well-known phallic nature; that is, Van Helsing rapes his daughter as punishment for her “infidelity” in having loved another man (the vampire). Similarly, Dr. Seward, unable to understand Mina, struggles to prevent her romance with Dracula, who becomes the great enemy to be fought, not so much by sucking the blood of his lovers as by becoming the common rival of Van Helsing, Seward, and the dull Harker. Thus, the patriarchal trio loses its hold on women, who decide to emancipate themselves through their professed love for a man who defies conventional morality. In this film, Dracula is an unusual feminist seducer avant la lettre. On the one hand, he seems to manipulate women with his “Don Juan” attitude, but on the other, he claims to value independence, personality, and strength of character as the highest virtues of women. He finds this feminine ideal personified in Lucy, who also acknowledges her feminist ideology in a conversation with her friend Mina.

The transgressive will of this film goes so far as to reverse roles and destinies: Dracula kills Van Helsing by impaling him with a wooden stake; the “reconciliation” between Jonathan and Lucy is forced by the insistence of the scorned young man, who doesn’t know how to lose in the game of love; instead of feeling comforted, Lucy deeply mourns Dracula’s death while simultaneously rejoicing in the knowledge that their adventure isn’t entirely over. Can the vampire be resurrected? Has Dracula planted his seed inside Lucy? Will she have offspring? After all, when Van Helsing and Jonathan enter the ship’s hold, they find Dracula and Lucy embracing inside the box, like lovers asleep in their macabre marital bed.

All vampiric love is also decadent because it is sacrilegious. The promise of eternal life follows the logical structure of Christian doctrine, as any theologian would admit regarding the subject of the resurrection of the body: death is a necessary prerequisite for resurrection, but what the Church legitimizes in the case of Jesus Christ or Lazarus, it condemns if the agent is a vampire and the resurrected person is an ordinary person.

The craving for blood as an addictive drug; the romanticism of tragic love; the hyperesthesia inherent in the vampire and his vampirized; the symbolic androgyny inherent in Dracula’s queer taste, free from prejudices about the sexual identity of his victims; the search for a mate as the only means of combating the spleen of a being who hides his melancholy; paganism as the basis of a myth that finds its transgressive expression in the heresy of occultism… There is no escape; vampire love is decadent by nature; it can only be decadent, otherwise it is not vampiric. Out of the question, then, are works like those concocted by Mormon writer Stephenie Meyer and company.


OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Klaudia Gomez Tombelle (26 de agosto de 2025). Amores decadentes: Drácula apasionado. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 13 de abril de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/14ia5


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