The Evolution of the Vampire's Image: Part I
© Anne Graves
Cultures from all around the world have had their own ideas of what a vampire is. The Malaysian "langsuyar" is a powerful and beautiful woman who sucks the blood of children through a gaping hole in her neck. The "callicantzaros," a Greek vampire, had long fingernails and would attack only around Christmastime, using its long nails to tear people to pieces.
Nowhere in the world, however, is there a culture whose vampire resembles Bela Lugosi.
To be fair, it wasn't in the movies that the change in the vampire's image began. In 1819 (long before Bram Stoker), John Polidori wrote "The Vampyre," a short story about an aristocratic and attractive (though pale) vampire, which was inspired by an idea of Lord Byron's. When Stoker's novel was published in 1897, the aristocratic vampire appeared again, though he didn't necessarily cut an attractive figure: "His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose....The mouth...was...rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth....For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed....The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor....His hands were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point."
Now, before Tod Browning's version of Draculaappeared, featuring Lugosi as lead vampire, F.W. Murnau directed a film called Nosferatu,which was released in 1922. In the film, Max Schreck plays the vampire Graf Orlock.
Orlock is a much different figure of a vampire than we've become accustomed to: he is decidely more monstrous. Far from aristocratic, he has talon-like fingernails, a mouthful of hideous teeth, long, pointed ears and glaring eyes. (If you'd like to see more of Orlock than just the picture shown here, visit The Slot at http://thesync.com/features/ where you can watch the entire film Nosferatu--as long as you have RealPlayer.)
Nosferatuis considered by many critics to be one of the best vampire movies ever made. However, it almost didn't survive. Although the names were changed, the story of Nosferatuwas very similar to Bram Stoker's Dracula,and since rights had not been secured from Florence Stoker (Bram's widow) prior to making the film, she ordered all the copies of the movie to be destroyed. Fortunately, at least one survived, allowing us to see an early film portrayal of a vampire that is much different from what we imagine today. The recent movie, Shadow of the Vampire,which revisits Schreck and Murnau back in the 1920s, would not have been made without it.
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