By Ivan Phillips
The exploration begins, appropriately, at night. It is 1980, a static caravan in Widemouth
Bay, Cornwall. A ten year old boy, on holiday with his family, is watching television. His
younger brother is asleep nearby and his parents have gone to the caravan park’s bar.
Widemouth Bay is well named: it is a bay, and it is wide, a gaping mouth open to the best
and the worst of the weather coming off the southern Irish Sea. On this particular summer
evening there is lashing wind and hard, fine rain. The caravan creaks like the rigging of
an old ship. The curtains are open. The windows show wet dense blackness. The boy is
watching a TV movie and it has him transfixed, terrified, unable to move. The scene
shows a floating, smiling vampire child clawing at a casement window in modern day,
suburban America to gain access to his still-human, still-mourning brother. Grief, relief
and fatal mesmerism, nails scratching unbearably on glass, a hellish mist that drifts into
the intimate, familiar, domestic space with the solid, brutal, gentle embrace of undead
brotherhood…
The TV movie is Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979, see figure 1), starring David
Soul and based on Stephen King’s 1975 novel.1 The young boy is me. And it will be a
long, long time before I’m able to sleep in a room with the curtains open at night.
*
Windows are interfaces. So are mirrors. The tradition of seeing them as such goes back at
least as far as Brunelleschi and Alberti, and is a commonplace within discussions of new
media.2 This paper is an attempt to investigate the peculiar and striking relationship that
the mythical figure of the vampire has always had with such interfacial objects, in
particular the most popular and important media adjuncts of the mirror and the window in
modern times, the printed page and the moving image screen. Languages – verbal, visual,
computational – are interfaces, too, and these are inevitably implicated in any discussion
of media. The vampire has drifted and shifted through the pages of newspapers, travel
journals, novels, poems, comics, and plays for 300 years, it has haunted cinema and
television for almost a hundred, its shadow is creeping into the social, narrative and ludic
networks of the digital. A creature of ambivalence, a haunter of thresholds and dweller on
the margins, the vampire is uniquely well adapted to the conditions of media
convergence. It is impatient of windows and doors, invisible to mirrors, but it will be
found wherever – to attempt a definition of the interface – one thing meets another.
An interface is much more than the place where one thing meets another, of
course; or at least, the nature of that meeting is more complex than such a shorthand will
allow. It would be restrictive to adhere closely to computer science contexts and
definitions, or to become distracted by discriminations between hardware interfaces
(wires, plugs, sockets) and software interfaces (codes, languages). A soft definition offers
richer hermeneutic possibilities, allowing for the subtleties and ambiguities of the
‘semantic’ dimension identified by Steven Johnson in his consideration of interfacial
relationships ‘characterized by meaning and expression’.3
An interface is fundamentally a place of translation and feedback, where x is able
to feel the presence of y and, more importantly, enjoy the illusion of contact with y or
even of becoming y. The contact and the becoming are illusory, because the two sides of
the interface never actually merge: instead, they become mutually implicated, more or
less intimate. Touch-screen technologies, widescreen, surround-sound, the elsewheres
and the somehows of virtual reality: these are all cultural fantasies of the erased interface
or, in N. Katherine Hayles’ term, ‘material metaphors’ of full translation.4 The interface
imagines a condition of achieved union, where x and y become indivisible, but it can only
enact an approximate condition of divided commonality. The illusions of interfacial
transcendence are closely associated with related illusions of aliveness, responsiveness,
animation: the moment when the engine ignites, the laptop awakens, the avatar moves, or
the corpse rises from the grave. The vampire is a product of this liminal ontology.
The concept of the medium – from medias: the middle, the junction, the inbetween – is fundamentally connected to that of the interface. I have sketched a general
arc of the vampire through mass media forms, from print to pixel, but it might be useful
to think of media in more expansive terms. For Marshall McLuhan, media are not objects
– a television, a newspaper, a telephone – but environmental and social processes. In his
well known but often misunderstood axiom ‘the medium is the message’, the medium is
anything that extends the human, and its message is its social impact or effect rather than
its informational content.5 In this respect, a car, a house, a woolly hat or the pockets in a
pair of trousers are all forms of media, variously extending the legs or the hands or the
hair on the head, effectively shrinking space or overcoming physical limitations.
Adapting McLuhan’s ideas, it is possible to see the relationship of the vampire and the
interface in a more historically and culturally alert way: offering to ‘extend’ its victims in
tantalising but grim ways, the vampire doesn’t simply follow the evolution of
representational media forms but it also embodies the social changes, anxieties and
periods of unsettlement that are the correlatives of this evolution. This is recognised by
Stacey Abbott when she examines the rise of ‘vampire cyborgs’ in film and by
Allucquère Rosanne Stone when she adopts and adapts Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt
as a prototypical boundary figure for the dawn of the digital era, ‘a vampire for our
seasons, struggling with the swiftly changing meanings of what it is to be human or, for
that matter, inhuman’.6 It is also evident in Freidrich Kittler’s seminal essay ‘Dracula’s
Legacy’, in Jennifer Wicke’s exploration of ‘the technologies that underpin vampirism’
and, more recently, in Van Leavenworth’s reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the
source text for Star Foster and Daniel Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003). 7 In
this interactive fiction, set in the Bethlem Royal Hospital in nineteenth century London, a
vampiric word virus threatens to disintegrate the communication networks of incipient
modernity.
Unsettlement is a key idea here, and it can be related closely to the changing
nature of the media interface. In particular, it can be observed that all media, when new,
seem to undergo a period of unsettlement or radical instability, which is characterised by
formal self-consciousness and experimentation. The early years of the printing press, of
the novel, of photography, of cinema, of the computer, all provide evidence of this. An
initial period of creative openness and cultural uncertainty is followed by absorption into
a ‘mythic’ (in the Barthesian sense of the word) world-view, characterised by more
settled and comfortable processes of narration, representation, reception.8 Once a medium
has been culturally assimilated, the restless energies of its inception are diverted into
marginal practices which nevertheless inform and, at times of major political or cultural
change, challenge the mainstream. One of the persistent myths of modernity is that the
media of the past (unlike those of the present) were always stable, settled, known,
welcomed, understood. The vampire, constantly embodying resistance at the interface,
conveys an awareness that this state of settled grace was never the case.
The vampire is, after all, a profoundly unsettled creature. It drifts between.
Neither alive nor dead – definitively un-dead – it dramatises humanity’s troubled sense of
being vulnerably, temporarily, uniquely alive while the rest of the universe is either
differently (unselfconsciously) alive, inanimate, or dead. It is caught in the eternally
collapsing architecture of oppositions, an inhabitant of the anomalous zone. As a myth,
the vampire embodies erotic allure and necrotic repulsion, the dead flesh made sexy, the
kiss that kills but at the same time embalms. It is both vagina dentata and ‘a penis with
teeth’, sexually restless and disoriented, veering between the asexual, the homosexual,
the heterosexual and the pansexual, between a pitiful impotence and the most compulsive
potency. The vampire represents impossible antiquity and an infinite present, both the
ultimate old age and the promise of eternal youth. Typically depicted on or beyond the
edges of society, it attains the classlessness of the outsider even as it oscillates wildly
between the extreme coordinates set by the peasant Peter Plogojowitz and the aristocratic
Lord Ruthven. The vampire is at once the most desolate remnant of the human and the
most inhuman manifestation of the monstrous. It can be ferociously atavistic, transported
in the soil of a melancholy nationalism, but it is also stateless, nationless, dispossessed. It
belongs nowhere but is found everywhere.
Something of the mythic power of the vampire’s paradoxical nature is captured in
another piece of television viewed by my ten year old self. State of Decay (1980), a story
from the classic series of the BBC’s Doctor Who, features the eponymous hero in an
encounter with Zargo, Camilla and Aukon, the three vampire rulers of an exploited,
drained, medieval culture.9 The power behind this triumvirate is revealed to be the Great
Vampire, the last of an ancient scourge that was supposedly eradicated by the Doctor’s
own people, the Time Lords. Examining the chronicle of ‘the last great battle’, he reads
that the king of these gigantic cosmic parasites apparently escaped the field, ‘vanished,
even to his shadow, from Time and Space.’ The Great Vampire has, it transpires, been
recovering for millennia beneath the Tower of the three vampire rulers, feeding on
peasants, and it is now beginning to stir. More significantly, from a mythical perspective,
it has been recovering on a remote, insignificant planet in E-Space, or Exo-Space, a space
beyond known space, a kind of nowhere between universes, a celestial interface. Luring a
ship full of Earth colonists from the 22nd century into its bleak, marginal refuge, the Great
Vampire has transformed the crew into his vampiric servants and fixed the descendants
of the original passengers into a state of unchanging, pre-modern, superstitious abjection.
Outside everything, poised among the lost, waiting on eternity for its terrible return, this
monstrous creature is a figure of the vampire as unsettled interfacial shadow.
Significantly, it is represented only as a spectral trace on various troubled interfaces:
present in the ritualised, camply intertextual language spoken by both the peasantry and
the rulers (The Great One, The Three Who Rule, The Wasting, The Selection, The
Arising), it is also glimpsed briefly as a blurred image on a forbidden and antiquatedly hi- tech scanner screen (see figure 2), and finally as a gigantic clawed hand breaking through
the membrane of its underground resting place as it attempts resurrection.
*
Examples of vampiric unsettlement at the interface are innumerable, varied and
ramifying. When The Vampyre was published in 1819 – in an unsettled period for the
novel itself, as it transformed rapidly from an elite artefact into a popular medium – the
issue can be traced in both the fabric of the narrative and in the briefly disputed question
of authorship. Worked up by Polidori from a prose fragment abandoned by Byron, it was
initially attributed to Byron, has a main character partly based on Byron, and became the
focus of an irritable display of pique from Byron, who simultaneously laid claim to the
tale (by publishing his original fragment as an appendix to his contemporaneous poem
Mazeppa) and distanced himself from it: ‘Damn “The Vampire,” – what do I know of
Vampires? it must be some bookselling imposture.’10 Issues of parasitism, influence, and
infection – not to mention society politics and literary fashion – haunt the authorial
interface of this founding fiction of modern vampire mythology just as much as they
haunt the tale itself.11
When F.W. Murnau came into conflict with Florence Stoker over questions of
authorial rights for his film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) a hundred years
later – at a time when cinema was arguably emerging from a quarter-century of
unsettlement into a state of cultural self-assurance – the shadow of The Vampyre might
have been seen to fall across them. Intriguingly, the exaggerated shadows which are one
of the most powerful visual tropes of Murnau’s film have been recognised by Abbott as
spectral links between the myth and the medium, specifically in the scenes where the
Count attacks Hutter and Ellen: ‘In these sequences, Orlock’s “shadow” is projected onto
the bright, white surfaces – Hutter’s bed and Ellen’s nightgown, respectively – like film
itself is projected onto a screen.’12
In the early years of sound cinema, the vampire again appeared to mark a
troubling of the interface. Bela Lugosi’s selection for the title role in Tod Browning’s
Dracula (1931) was remarkable for its counterintuitive brilliance, his limited English
meaning that his lines were delivered with such slow, relished determination that he
would forever seem to be straining against the newly sonic medium as much as against
the language itself. Within a year, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr: The Strange Adventure of Allan
Gray (1932) – a talkie that almost entirely abstains from talk – would exploit a
comparable unease to gloriously poetic effect, affecting an apparent nostalgia for the
recently deceased silent film. As Jean and Dale Drum have written, with wonderful
understatement: ‘Dreyer’s first sound film was a radical departure from other sound films
of the time, for the dialogue of Vampyr is very sparse.’13 In fact, as the Drums reveal,
Vampyr was actually shot as a silent film, with sound being added in post-production.
Even more strikingly, it was shot as a silent film in three different versions, with English,
German and French mouthings respectively. The polyphonic complexity of a world of
mass communication, symbolised by the rise of global sound cinema, is indulged through
Dreyer’s perfectionist multiplication of effort and expense at the same time as it is
parodied by his presentation of a talkie that feels like a silent.
A consonant case study is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) which, at the beginning
of the digital screen era, saw Francis Ford Coppola and his son Roman determinedly,
even obsessively, exploiting the possibilities of primitive cinema technologies. The
effects of this go beyond the ‘affectionate recuperation of early cinematic styles’
identified by Ken Gelder.14 Appearing between James Cameron’s visual effects
milestones The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and John
Lasseter’s game-changing computer animation Toy Story (1995), the film – disliked by
many vampire scholars – is remarkable for the opulence of its ‘in camera’ effects.15
Spatial juxtapositions and distortions, appearances and disappearances, inversions of
physical laws, and other elements of baroque spectacle, are achieved using methods
which frequently date back to the origins of cinema itself, to the founding experiments of
the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès, R.W. Paul and Cecil Hepworth. Physical
projections, multiple exposures and combined takes, forced perspective shots using
scaled model work, matte paintings and glass shots, hand-cranked footage filmed with an
antique camera, jittery first-person viewpoints achieved with an intervalometer: such
regressive techniques achieve a quality of visual force, noise and fluidity which is
comparable to that of the ‘hybrid aesthetics’ associated by Lev Manovich with the
innovations of the digital age.16
When Dracula’s eyes burn in the sky, or his shadow takes on a life of its own, or a
train rattles along the top of Jonathan Harker’s open journal, spilling steam across the
pages, these effects are accomplished with an immediacy equivalent to that of many
digital sequences. This immediacy – to adopt the ‘twin logic’ of Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin’s influential book Remediation – is also a form of hypermediacy.17 In
other words, its very transparency draws attention to itself, the active presence of the
medium being visible at the moment of its illusionistic erasure.
Just as many critics have indicated a law of diminishing returns for Coppola’s
‘postmodern’ adaptation, the insistence on pre-digital effects might be seen as a
gratuitous and hollow nostalgia at odds with the blockbuster context. This would be,
however, to miss the sophisticated ironies that Coppola’s film implies and, in its physical
realisation of a digital age spectacle, masks. These are typified by the elaborate simplicity
and primitivism of Coppola’s technique in realising the shaving scene, in which Jonathan
is surprised by the Count’s sudden appearance at his shoulder, the mirror having shown
no reflection (see figure 3).
A mirror-shaped hole is cut into the wall and the actor, Keanu Reeves, stands behind it,
his face visible in opposition to a stand-in actor who has his back to the camera. The
mirror is a glassless window: the assumed interface is absent, the reflective surface
perceived but never present. Reeves, in other words, performs as his own reflection, and
Gary Oldman’s Dracula is seen to lack one altogether. A live and naïve trick stands in
place of – in a sense, simulates – a post-produced digital illusion. Brilliantly, the
mechanics of the scene embody several of the thematic oppositions of vampire
mythology – presence/absence, self/other – at the same time as literally merging two of
its recurrent interfacial tropes, the transparent glass and the reflective one.18
Just as Dreyer’s Vampyr performs a redaction of silent era cinematics within the
new contexts of the ‘talking’ interface, so Coppola’s version of Dracula enacts a critique
of the emergent digital spectacle through retrospective celebration of the physical. From a
metacritical point of view, it embodies an extreme form of Fredric Jameson’s notion of le
mode rétro, one taken beyond the surface details of intertextual referencing and into the
mechanical interior of the production.19 Dreyer’s near-silent talkie might, in a similar
sense, be seen as expressing something of the spirit of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art,
which dates in its original form from 1932, the year of Vampyr’s release, and which
famously probes the impact of speech on cinema.20
The formalisation in these films of distinct critical sensibilities – sensibilities alert
to unsettlement in media – is evidence of the particular responsiveness of the vampire
myth to deep cultural change. In the case of Bram Stoker’s Dracula this is manifested to
such an extent, and with such an overflow of excited self-awareness, that the entire film
effectively becomes – to borrow from William Empson – a ‘self-inwoven simile’.21
Empson coined the phrase in order to characterise a form of figurative poetic language in
which,
not being able to think of a comparison fast enough [the author] compares the
thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own
nature, or that it sustains itself by supporting itself.22
Empson’s exemplar for this is Percy Shelley (‘So came a chariot in the silent storm/ Of
its own rushing splendour’),23 but in relation to Coppola’s version of Dracula it is
possible to see a tendency towards extreme symbolic self-referentiality, a kind of
intertextual implosion of the mythic representation. This seems to be what many of the
commentators who have denigrated the film have targeted, Fred Botting’s analysis being
representative:
Coppola’s film mourns an object that is too diffuse and uncertain to be
recuperated: it remains, reluctantly, within a play of narratives, between past and
present, one and other.24
Botting uses the adaptation to close his survey of the Gothic mode in culture: ‘with
Coppola’s Dracula, then, Gothic dies.’ Nina Auerbach prefers to confine the film almost
entirely to the endnotes of her study, where she argues that it ‘turned the quest for
authenticity into a sad joke’, her judgement chiming with Botting’s: ‘it may be that
Coppola has killed Dracula at last.’25 Gelder, in a bracketed aside, simply accuses the
director and co-producer of ‘self-monumentalisation’.26 In the interfaces of academic
practice – notes, parentheses, conclusions – the critics lament the decadence of vampiric
apotheosis. Then again, Tomasz Warchol (in unusually approving tones) makes the point
titular and core to his 2003 paper ‘How Coppola Killed Dracula’.27
In blunt terms, Coppola’s film is so saturated in awareness of its sources, its
predecessors, its points of historical, folkloric, literary, technological and cinematic
reference, that it becomes a spectacular paradigm of empty and self-parodying excess.
The more it strives towards definitiveness, authenticity and a rich distillation of meaning,
the more it lapses into circularity and hectic imitation, the ‘short-circuited comparison’
that Empson bemoans in Shelley. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that criticisms of Coppola’s
adaptation should so consistently sound like the criticisms traditionally levelled at both
Romanticism and postmodernism within cultural discourse. ‘The Form is its own
justification,’ Empson writes, ‘it sustains itself, like God, by the fact that it exists.’28
A self-inwoven simile is vampiric, auto-vampiric, feeding off itself. The same
might be said about the vampire genre in fiction. Coppola’s film, named explicitly after
the book that is its primary source text, is also thick with the cinematic tradition of
adaptations that it can never escape but that it consciously seeks to transcend. The
distorted shadows that attend Oldman’s Count are projections from Max Schreck’s Count
seventy years earlier. In the same way, Coppola’s foregrounding of the technologically
mediated nature of the story environment is predicated on Stoker’s novel, with its
newspapers, typewriters and phonographs, its mindfulness of the medical and
psychological trends of the late 19th century. Conscious that Dracula was written at the
interface of the Victorian and Modernist eras, Coppola creates a version of the myth that
aims to be definitive not only in its putative closeness to the novel but also in its
depiction of cultural paradigm shift. The shift (to the mass media age) that textures the
world of the film is in balance with that (to the digital era) which negatively informs its
production. A strict adherence to pre-digital methods of spectacle becomes, in this
respect, far more than a wilful eccentricity on Coppola’s part. It enacts a formal irony that
is fundamental to the film’s representation of Stoker’s novel.
An irony that has not gone unnoticed is the emphatic presence at the heart of the
film of the one major mass media technology that is pointedly not referenced by Stoker:
the cinema. In a conspicuous deviation from fidelity to the original book, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula extends the Count beyond the bitter, brittle ancientness of his literary original –
closely approximated in the initial scenes between Dracula and Jonathan – and introduces
a rejuvenated byronic anti-hero, bursting naked from the crated earth of Transylvania and
into a distinctly modern England. The Count transforms from a withered, alienated,
ethnic grotesque into a youthful, attractive flâneur, a cosmopolitan European who reads
the newspapers and – when he first encounters Mina (or re-encounters Elisabeta) – is
eager to experience the wonders of the kinematograph. This transformation has irritated
many,29 but it is consistent with Coppola’s tendency to see suppleness as the abiding
characteristic of both the Dracula myth and the idea of authenticity. The true copy – the
accurate translation – is as elusive and illusory as the vampire. It is, like the idea of
settled, stable, discrete traditions, a figment of the interface.
Oldman’s Dracula, sauntering through London as love-struck tourist rather than
pestilent invader, has inevitably proven controversial. Even so, those who have held up
his blue-tinted sunglasses as evidence of Coppola’s travesty might consider that, far from
being incongruously ‘cool’ anachronisms, they are both historically accurate and
mythically cogent. After all, one of the accursed undead, walking in daylight, would be
well advised to sport a pair of such interfacial screening devices, designed by the English
optician James Ayscough in the mid-1700s.30
*
The fundamental interfaces are the door and the window. These quiet translators of
experience – from one to other, here to there – are the symbolic and actual locations of
boundary rituals ranging from the baby’s first arrival home to the deceased’s final exit
from it. They are built into the customs of intimacy (the bride carried over the threshold)
and those of state (the arrival of Black Rod); they are culturally ingrained as sites of
rapture (Romeo: ‘what light from yonder window breaks’), trauma (Catherine’s ghost in
Wuthering Heights), voyeurism (Hitchcock’s Rear Window), trepidation (Philip Larkin’s
‘Sad Steps’ or ‘Aubade’) and daily domestic routine (Mrs Ogmore-Prichard: ‘before you
let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes’). A door that creaks or slams, that is locked,
knocked at, or bricked up; a window that is jammed, boarded over, or broken: these are
resonant, evocative signs.
Within the mythos of the vampire, of course, the door and the window have a
potent place, making the site of encounter a key feature of any narrative representation.
The entrance of Sir Francis Varney into the gigantic tale which bears his name is relevant
here:
A tall figure is standing on the ledge immediately outside the long window. It is its
finger-nails upon the glass that produces the sound so like the hail, now that the hail
has ceased.31
Dracula’s first appearance in Stoker’s novel is similarly emblematic. Following a
nightmare journey, Jonathan is confronted by ‘a great door, old and studded with large
iron nails, and set in a projecting doorway of massive stone’. He is immediately menaced
by a sense that the apertures of this ‘vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows
came no ray of light’ are barriers rather points of transit: ‘Of bell or knocker there was no
sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my
voice could penetrate.’ Revealingly, it is thoughts of familiar windows which comfort
him at this point – ‘I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home,
with the dawn struggling in through the windows’ – and light and sound through the
castle door which fixes him in the terrible present:
… I heard a heavy step approaching beyond the great door and saw through the
chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and
the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating
noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
This is noise at the interface, what a communication theorist would identify as entropic
information, a perplexing overload of stimulus. Dracula has arrived to greet his guest but
can make no initiating move towards him, must wait on the frozen moment until
approached:
He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his
gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had
stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his
hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince…32
The vampire, in one tradition at least, requires invitation: the predator must be welcomed,
permitted to cross the interface.33 (Ruthven, we might remember, is ‘invited to every
house’ in London society.)34 This aspect of the folklore provides the titular, narrative and
emotional core of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In (2004) and its
cinematic adaptations by Tomas Alfredson (2008) and Matt Reeves (Let Me In, 2010).
Drawing its title from a song by Morrissey, that quintessential inside-outsider, the
story reinvents the vampire as Eli, a misfit living among misfits in the anonymous 1950sbuilt Blackeberg suburb of Stockholm. An eternal and subtly androgynous twelve year
old, Eli forms a desperate and touching bond with her bullied next door neighbour, Oskar
Eriksson. Psychologically aligned with her, Oscar is both sexually drawn to her and
physically disgusted by her, even before the many secrets of her existence are revealed.
From the title of the tale onwards, it is fundamentally concerned with margins,
boundaries, thresholds and moments of crossing. Most obviously, Eli must receive an
invitation before entering a dwelling, as in her first visit to Oskar at night:
‘Oskar…’
It was coming from the window. He opened his eyes, looked over. He saw the
contours of a little head on the other side of the glass. He pulled off the covers, but
before he managed to get out of bed Eli whispered, ‘Wait there. Stay in bed. Can I
come in?’
Oskar whispered, ‘Ye-es…’
‘Say that I can come in.’
‘You can come in.’
‘Close your eyes.’
Oskar shut his eyes tightly. The window opened and a cold draught blew into the
room. The window was carefully closed.35
Powerfully, in Alfredson’s film adaptation, the scene in which Oskar confronts Eli about
his suspicions of her vampirism, presents the children talking through the glass pane of a
door in the girl’s bare flat, their outspread hands touching – or seeming to touch –
through the interface (see figure 4). This can be seen as a crystalline refinement of the
solid wall through which the two, who have adjacent rooms, have previously
communicated using Morse Code. Common to the novel and both films, this ‘Pyramus
and Thisbe’ tableau embodies the theme of connection-and-division and is given added
richness by the contrast between Oskar’s trompe l’oeil picture wall – depicting ‘a forest
meadow’ – and Eli’s blank partition:
Oskar lay there with his hand pressed against the green surface and tried to imagine
what the other side looked like. Was the room on the other side her bedroom? Was
she also lying in bed right now? He transformed the wall into Eli’s cheek, stroked
the green leaves, her soft skin.36
Even before it is ‘opened’ by a shared code, the wall becomes a screen for Oskar to play
out his fantasies of otherness and association.
Dominated by an architecture of connections – not just windows and doorways,
but also bridges, paths, subways, underpasses, staircases – Let the Right One In might
almost have been written as a model of the vampire tale as interface fable. The novel
begins with a metaphorically freighted description of the first inhabitants crossing the
Traneberg Bridge in 1952 ‘with sunshine and the future in their eyes’, and much of the
action, notably the killing of Jocke Bengtsson, takes place in the Björnsongatan
underpass and on the nearby pathways.37 This is made explicit when Lacke follows
Virginia after their row in Gösta’s flat and sees her being attacked ahead of the point
‘where “Jocke’s path” – as he had started to call it – met “Virginia’s path”’.38
The symbolic importance of these physical interstices is emphasised in both film
adaptations, Alfredson’s especially. Here, as well as recurrent shots of bridges,
underpasses, and so on, the poetics of transparency are employed not only in the
previously mentioned scene between Eli and Oskar, but also in the episode in which
Jocke’s body is recovered from the river. Cut from the ice, the corpse is raised high by a
crane, embedded in a glassy slab, caught in the interface between water and air. In
Reeves’ version – in which the main characters are renamed Owen and Abby – the
voyeurism of the former is accentuated through his habit of spying on his neighbours
using a telescope. This is, indeed, how the audience first encounters him. Oskar, in the
Alfredson film, is first seen staring into his own reflection in his bedroom window.
With its liminal concerns articulated through topography as well as character and
event, Let the Right One In demonstrates a continuation of the classic thematic
structuring of vampiric mythology through opposition: life/death, youth/age, human/nonhuman, desire/repulsion, male/female. It also indicates how intricately and forcefully
these are bound into the fabric of the imaginative interface, not least in the tension
between morality and immorality. Håkan Bengtsson, the paedophile who ‘cares for’ Eli,
is able to justify his feelings for the child – and the crimes he is prepared to carry out for
her – by reflecting on her anomalous condition:
It was the best of all possible worlds. The young, lithe body that brought beauty to
his life, and at the same lifted him from responsibility. He was not the one in
charge. And he did not have to feel guilt for his desire; his beloved was older than
he. No longer a child.39
When he is discovered in the act of child murder, acquiring more blood for Eli, his
response – to protect her, since his face is now known in Blackeberg – is to destroy his
own first interface, his face, his skin, ultimately his identity, using acid. Significantly,
when he returns as a mutilated, brain-dead, priapic vampire following his eventual death
(an element of the plot removed from both films), it is on the Traneberg bridge that he is
first seen.40
A prominent facet of Eli’s boundary nature in the novel is her androgyny,
movingly poised alongside her uncertain humanness in a question to Oskar: ‘Would you
still like me even if I wasn’t a girl?’41 The theme of gender ambiguity is understated in
the films, particularly in the US adaptation, but one of the most haunting qualities of
Alfredson’s production is the design of Eli’s voice. Deciding that the voice of teenage
actress Lina Leandersson was too childlike and girlish, he had her lines overdubbed
throughout the film by the adult voiceover artist Elif Ceylan. In a fascinating replication
of the dubbing of Dreyer’s ‘silent talkie’ in the 1930s, Anderson modulates the sonic
interface to convey the alienated, indeterminate existence of his vampire. Eli’s voice,
sultry, uncanny, not-quite-right, effectively ‘speaks’ the anomalies of her being, neither
alive nor dead, neither adult nor child, neither male nor female, neither human nor
monster.
The melancholy paradox of Eli’s condition – of the the vampire in general – is
communicated with terrible beauty in the moment when she is goaded by Oskar into
entering his flat without invitation:
He stopped when he saw a tear in the corner of one of Eli’s eyes, no, one in each
eye. But it wasn’t a tear since it was dark. The skin in Eli’s face started to flush,
became pink, red, wine-red and her hands tightened into fists as the pores in her
face opened and tiny pearls of blood started to appear in dots all over her face. Her
throat, same thing.42
A spectacular gift for the filmmakers, this scene – Eli ‘bleeding out of all the pores in her
body’ – represents a collapse of boundaries, spatial, physical, ethical, mythical. Eli,
having reluctantly breached Oskar’s dwelling, suffers perforation of her own physical
limits. The existential liminality of the vampire has never been so vividly, painfully,
tragically represented. Lindqvist’s in many ways highly traditional vampire tale
nevertheless constitutes a radical restatement of the essential features of the mythology.
*
Claiming cinema as ‘the rightful place of occupation for the vampire’, Gelder describes it
as ‘a suitably nomadic home’ for the creature, one which ‘eventually goes everywhere’ as
‘an internationalised medium43’. Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires, which begins by
referencing Méliès’ Le Manoir du Diable (1896), is written from a similar conviction.
The exploration within this paper does nothing to contradict (and much to confirm) the
centrality of the cinematic depiction, but hopefully suggests a slight adjustment to our
sense of how the mythology has been mediated since the early 20th century. As we move
further into the 2000s, it is clear that the structures of the media world are becoming
increasingly complex and involved, bringing a profound transformation in the nature of
knowledge and information, of creativity and audiences, of the possibilities of
storytelling, the relationship between media forms, the meanings and significance of the
interface. This would seem to endorse Milly Williamson’s portrayal of an alternative,
non-mainstream tradition within recent vampire culture, one in which ‘creativity takes
numerous shapes; sartorial self-expression, fan fiction, role-playing, the creation of clubs,
journals, websites, and more’.44 Williamson’s socio-political reading – reminding us of
Marx’s invocation of the ‘vampire’ of capitalism45 – accepts that the mythology can
never escape the ‘hierarchical cultural field’ of the market, but the most cursory internet
search will indicate the extent of the vampire’s web-based nomadism. Similarly, a brief
sampling of computer game history illustrates the occupation of this bright young
medium by the forces of the undead, from The Count in 1981 to Vampire Rush in 2011. If
nothing else, the migration of the vampire across the new media environment might
suggest that counterculture and culture have never been harder to disentangle.
Perhaps what the vampire manifests most powerfully is the cultural narrative of
change, specifically the tension between imposed change and desired change, between
the attack and the seduction. This, I have argued, is why the notion of the interface – the
point and process of translation, transition, transfer, transformation – is such a useful one
when considering the mythic endurance and adaptability of the vampire. It offers a means
of seeing anew those representations of the undead which have ghosted modern media
since before 1819, especially those moments when the creature stands at a threshold. In
Browning’s Dracula, for instance, there is the iconic scene in which Renfield arrives at
Dracula’s castle. The Count bids the solicitor to follow him up the vast, curved staircase,
and in doing so passes through the colossal screen of a spider’s web without breaking or
even troubling it (see figure 5). Renfield, understandably disturbed by this event, is
forced to tear at the silk with his cane to gain entrance. We are reminded, at this moment,
of one of the key features of the vampire, its ability to transcend the continuities of
physical space, in a vital sense manifesting the fantasies of virtual reality. To pass
through a giant web without breaking it is to pass through the interface as if it wasn’t
there. The dream of the erased material interface that seems to drive so much of 21st
century technological design is a dream that the vampire (excepting the barrier of an
invitation) takes for granted. This is a point given detailed and persuasive attention by
Abbott, when she traces the technologically determined shifts between the material and
the spectral vampire in modernity.
Of course, a vampire doesn’t just walk through cobwebs, float through windows,
seep under doors: one way or another, it punctures skin, the locus of our primal and most
fundamental interface. It bleeds one self into another self and, in doing so, radically
disrupts the idea of boundaries. This is the significance of the solid undead flesh
becoming immaterial mist, or the human(oid) figure transforming into bat or wolf or ratswarm. In its physical metamorphoses and its predatory modus operandi the vampire
destabilises the line between transformation and permanence, the line where all our
dreams and nightmares of technology begin.
As I suggested earlier, the interfaced machines of the digital age fascinate us, in
part at least, because they affect the appearance of life. Just as the steam engines of the
early Victorian Age must have astounded and unnerved with their animal warmth, their
growling motion, their steam-farts and bellows, and the disembodied voices of the
phonograph, the telephone and the wireless must have haunted the late Victorians, so the
winking lights on our own sleeping technologies, the vibrations of our mobile phones, the
actions of our on-screen avatars, the voices of our Sat Navs, seem to either seduce or
threaten us with their apparent aliveness.46 It is an aliveness conjured from the interplay
of memory, calculation, responsiveness, and dialogue. In the early days of cinema,
Maxim Gorky reacted with unease to the travesty of life he saw projected before him at a
Lumière Brothers screening. For Gorky, Lisa Bode has written,
[t]he screen becomes a window onto a disturbing terrain between life and
death, between flesh and shadow, and between the animate and the inanimate,
where apparently living figures appear ‘condemned’ and ‘bewitched’ by the
actions of this, then new, image technology.47
This recalls to me the horrific poetry of the episode in Dreyer’s Vampyr, where Allan
Gray – disembodied, apparently dreaming – witnesses himself staring up out of a
windowed coffin, alive but dead (see figure 6). Briefly glimpsing the withered vampire,
Marguerite Chopin, peering down at him, he is presented with a view of a burning candle
dripping wax, then massing clouds in a sky beneath which he is being carried,
presumably to be buried. This scene communicates, perhaps better than any other, the
ideas that this paper has been presenting; it captures perfectly, disturbingly, the presence
of the vampire where x meets y in the mediation of experience. It also, in its conjuring of
sheer frozen terror, takes me back to that ten year old boy watching Salem’s Lot in a
Cornish caravan park in the days of Margaret Thatcher.
1
Stephen King, Salem’s Lot (London: New English Library, 1976). The visits of the
undead Ralphie Glick to his older brother Danny is not detailed in the novel (pp. 68-71,
pp. 74-6, p. 104) but Danny’s subsequent attack on his friend Mark Petrie is clearly an
influence on Hooper’s screen adaption (pp. 239-41).
2
See, for instance, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromola, Windows and Mirrors:
Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency (London and Cambridge,
MASS: MIT Press, 2003), and Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti To
Microsoft (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
3
Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms The Way We
Create And Communicate (San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997), p. 14.
4
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002), pp. 21-4.
5
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; repr. London
and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 7 et passim.
6
Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), pp. 197-214; Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of
Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (London and Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 178.
7
Freidrich Kittler, ‘Dracula’s Legacy’, Stanford Humanities Review, 1 (1989), pp. 14373; Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its media’, ELH, vol. 59, no. 2
(Summer, 1992), pp. 467-493; Van Leavenworth, The Gothic in Contemporary
Interactive Fictions (unpublished doctoral thesis, Umea University, 2010), pp. 144-179.
The study can be downloaded in full via the SwePub website at http://swepub.kb.se
[accessed 13 July 2011].
8
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972).
According to Barthes ‘the very principle of myth’ is that ‘it transforms history into
nature’: ‘it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of
essences’ (p. 140, p. 150).
9
Doctor Who – State of Decay, written by Terrance Dicks, directed by Peter Moffatt
(BBC TV, 1980). The story was originally transmitted on BBC1 between 22 November
and 13 December 1980 and was subsequently novelised as Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who
and the State of Decay (London: Target Books, 1981). It is currently available as part of
the DVD box set Doctor Who: The E-Space Trilogy (2 Entertain, 2009).
10
Byron, Letter to John Murray, 15th May 1819, in Selected Letters and Journals, ed.
Leslie A. Marchand (London: Picador, 1984), p. 194. In a letter to Galigani’s Messenger,
which had attributed the novella to him, Byron wrote: ‘I have a personal dislike to
vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to
reveal their secrets.’ The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, IV, ed. Rowland E.
Prothero (London: John Murray, 1899), p. 119. Byron’s antipathy to the vampire had not,
of course, prevented him from utilising the myth to dramatic effect in his earlier poem
The Giaour (1813).
11
Famously, the story is a product of the same ghost story competition at the Villa
Diodati in 1816 which furnished Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, the Modern
Prometheus (1818).
12
Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, pp. 52-3.
13
Jean and Dale Drum, ‘Film-Production Carl Dreyer’, p. 34, in the book accompanying
Vampyr: The Strange Adventures of Allan Gray, dir. Carl Dreyer, 1932 (Eureka!, 2008)
[on DVD]. The text is extracted from Jean and Dale Drum, My Only Great Passion: The
Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2000).
14
Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 88.
15
Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: ‘This movie was
imagined, written and directed, then somehow engineered into being as if it were one
long, uninterrupted special effect.’ (‘Coppola’s Dizzying Vision of Dracula’, 13
November 1992).
16
Lev Manovich, ‘Image Future’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1:1 (2006), p.
26, p. 32, p. 43n8, et passim. See also ‘After Effects, or Velvet Revolution’ (2006) and
The Language of New Media (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Each of
these – and much besides – is available to download at http://manovich.net/ [accessed 31
July 2011].
17
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media,
(London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
18
This transposition recalls that of Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872; repr.
Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), the title of the volume which culminates in
‘Carmilla’ effectively converting St Paul’s shadowy spiritual window (I Corinthians
13:12) into a gothic mirror: ‘For now we see through a glass darkly.’ (p. ix)
19
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster, ed., The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 1983), p. 116. See also
Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso,
1991).
20
Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1957): ‘Not only does speech limit the motion picture to an art of dramatic
portraiture, it also interferes with the expression of the image.’ (p. 228)
21
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; repr. London: Peregrine Books,
1961), pp. 160-1.
22
23
Ibid., pp. 160-1.
Ibid., p. 161. The quoted lines are from Shelley’s last, unfinished poem The Triumph of
Life (1822).
24
Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 177-80.
25
Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (London and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), p. 213n50, p. 208-9n16.
26
Gelder, Reading the Vampire, p. 89.
27
Tomasz Warchol, ‘How Coppola Killed Dracula’, in Carla T. Kungl, ed., Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2003), pp. 710. Available at www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing-files/idp/eBooks/Vampires.pdf>
[accessed 22 July 2011]. Warchol concludes: ‘While the vampires he helped breed are
alive and well, Dracula himself, for those of us who have seen and known him for the
past century, has been dead since 1992. It was Francis Ford Coppola who killed him.’ (p.
9)
28
Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 161. Empson goes on: ‘Poetry which idolises its
object naturally gives it the attributes of deity, but to do it in this way is to destroy the
simile, or make it incapable of its more serious functions.’ Coppola, it can be argued, has
been led into a state of Shelleyan creative overexcitement by his idolisation of Stoker’s
novel and the traditions of adaptation that have stemmed from it.
29
Auerbach, for instance, derides ‘Gary Oldman’s whimpering costume-changes’ (Our
Vampires, Ourselves, p. 112).
30
See Richard D. Drewry, ‘What Man Devised That He Might See’ (1997), available at
www.eye.uthsc.edu/history/WhatManDevised.pdf [accessed 28 July 2011] and Stephen J.
Dain, ‘Sunglasses and Sunglass Standards’, Clinical and Experimental Optometry, 86:2
(March 2003), pp. 77-90, available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.14440938.2003.tb03066.x/abstract [accessed 28 July 2011]. Ayscough’s tinted glasses –
available in green as well as blue – were in fact developed to correct vision, not to protect
the eyes from sunlight. Nevertheless, they are widely taken to be precursors of the filter
spectacles which became popular in the early 1900s.
31
James Malcolm Rymer, Varney, the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood (1845-7; repr.
Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2010), p. 7.
32
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; repr. London: Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 22-3.
33
Here, interestingly, the classical formula is inverted: the implication is that Jonathan
Harker must accept the Count’s invitation.
34
John Polidori, ‘The Vampyre’, in Christopher Frayling, ed., Vampyres: Lord Byron to
Count Dracula (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 108. See also John William Polidori,
‘The Vampyre’ and other writings, ed. Franklin Bishop (Manchester: Fyfield Press,
2005).
35
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (2004), trans. Ebba Segerberg (London:
Quercus, 2007), p. 184.
36
Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, p. 83.
37
Ibid., p. 7, pp. 77-83.
38
Ibid., pp. 243-4.
39
Ibid., p. 119.
40
Ibid., p. 323-6.
41
Ibid., p. 137.
42
Ibid., pp. 380-1.
43
Gelder, Reading the Vampire, p. 87.
44
Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram
Stoker to Buffy (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 184.
45
Ibid., p. 183.
46
I am grateful to my colleague, Alan Peacock, not only for the phrase ‘steam-farts’ but
also for a number of long, enjoyable conversations in which many of the ideas for this
essay took shape.
47
Lisa Bode, ‘From Shadow Citizens to Teflon Stars: Reception of the Transfiguring
Effects of New Moving Image Technologies’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,
1:2 (2006), p. 174.
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———————— and
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——————
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