ABSTRACT
The vampire movie ranks among the most popular of the various subgenres of horror film.2 Among other endearing features, the myth of the vampire distinguishes itself as inherently possessing the potential for the expression of the “beautiful,” of beauty in horror.3 After all, as Christopher Frayling argues, vampires have been portrayed on film as “fashionably pallid and clean-shaven, with seductive voices and pouting lips, and . . . always sexually attractive.”4 This has not always been the case, as Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) attests. Still, the quintessential vampire Dracula has traditionally embodied the duality of “men’s [sic] hidden fears and desires,”5
of repulsion and attraction,”6 or-as Richard Dyer has observed-“the despicable as well as the defiant, the shameful as well as the unashamed . . .”7 Most film directors from classical Hollywood8 tended to portray Dracula as a character drawing upon the binary as presented by Bela Lugosi’s Count in Tod Browning’s Dracula of 1931: elegant, suave in appearance and demeanor, while on the inside, as Nina Auerbach describes, he is “so musty and foul-smelling, so encrusted with the corruption of ages, that . . . he is an eruption from an evil antiquity.”9 This Dracula imago persisted into the 1970s, with the character as portrayed by Jack Palance (Dracula, 1973) and Frank Langella (Dracula, 1979).
