Review: Simon Bacon, Dracula as Absolute Other: The Troubling and Distracting Specter of Stoker’s Vampire on Screen (2019)

Simon Bacon, Dracula as Absolute Other: The Troubling and Distracting Specter of Stoker’s Vampire on Screen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2019).

Ever since Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, his vision of the vampire has dominated the popular imagination as the representation of absolute horror. Vampire lore had existed for millennia across numerous cultures, but Stoker’s iteration of the monster as an almost undefeatable entity that represents a cultural other and threatens to subvert modern societal norms has resonated throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, particularly on film. Moreover, many of the other figures in Stoker’s novel—Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray Harker, Lucy Westenra, Quincy Morris, Renfield, and Professor Abraham Van Helsing—have also become pliable, archetypal characters, recycled in many iterations of the Dracula mythos, each time re-enacting their classic roles in different contexts. In Dracula as Absolute Other: The Troubling and Distracting Specter of Stoker’s Vampire on Screen (2019), Simon Bacon examines how various films have used Dracula to represent whatever “other” their audiences and filmmakers have feared—from F. W. Murnau’s Weimar-era German film Nosferatu (1922), with its themes of antisemitism, to Cole Haddon and Daniel Knauf’s American television series Dracula (2013-14), with its fears of technology, big business, and colonialism.

Bacon identifies “distortion of self” as the unifying thread that holds the Dracula mythic cycle together. He uses the terms “troubling and distracting” to describe the distortion of self as perceived by the characters. Bacon explains that “a disordered state intimates a loss of identity or a divided self, if only temporarily. Troubled/troubling and distracted/distracting can then be terms used to describe the state when one’s identity is disordered, or one is no longer oneself” (4). Dracula, a monstrous being from the past made up of “various forms of unacceptable difference” (1), disrupts accepted social orders and threatens individuals with the loss of selfhood. Bacon divides his study into five chapters focusing on trauma from the past threatening those in the present, ethnic otherness, money and consumerism, physical force and abuse, and technology. Each chapter looks at several versions of the Dracula myth from different eras and its evolution according to varying social and cultural contexts.

The strongest aspect of Bacon’s work is how he views Dracula, Renfield, and the “Crew of Light” (the characters who oppose Dracula in Stoker’s novel) as archetypal personas who, much like folkloric figures, flow in and out of different storylines to fulfil the same functions. Each iteration of these characters, however, changes the narrative in some way particular to its time period and audience expectations. Dracula functions as the ever-undead other who threatens society from the margins and whose near-invulnerability to attack and fantastic powers make him an almost unconquerable foe, oftentimes with apocalyptic results. Yet the other characters are essential to the Dracula narrative, too, in how they relate to the monster and highlight his otherness, his strength, and his ability to drain away from the lives of others in perverse preservation of self. Bacon frequently notes the importance of Renfield, whose role is to show the subservience that Dracula inspires in others. Renfield in Nosferatu, Bacon argues, is not only a feminized character over whom Nosferatu and Van Helsing battle to control, but he also displays behaviour suggestive of a shell shock. Bacon notes that in the years following World War I researchers of shellshock, which we now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), equated the condition with hysteria, thus feminizing those who suffered from the condition (19). In this way, Renfield is both true to Stoker’s original and yet specific to contemporary anxieties. Similarly, in The Strain TV series (Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, 2014-17), for instance, Renfield is Eldritch Palmer, a wealthy and selfish old man who betrays humanity for the promise of eternal life. Further, Bacon argues that this character represents “white corporate America’s” troubled relationship with the Holocaust, a “wider racial discrimination, the vilification of immigrants, and the corruption of children” (44). Palmer represents the twenty-first-century anxieties over late-stage capitalism and its sacrifice of the future for short-term profits. Likewise, the roles of the other main characters change each time (their roles as hunters or hunted or both) and all explore some aspect of the myth unique to their times.

Fig. 1 - The Twilight series (2008-2012).

Bacon’s analysis of the Twilight series (2008-2012) might prove a particular treat to fantasy and animation scholars (Fig. 1). Bacon sees the series and its fandom through the lens of late-stage capitalism. Bacon observes how when Edward enters sunlight he sparkles instead of suffering any ill effects. The sparkly animation for the vampires of the Twilight series denotes both their “romantic” nature (41) and their vampiric consumerism (99). Like Dracula, Edward is heir to vast riches, but his sparkly instead of dark nature makes him more palatable for modern audiences who want romance on screen and merchandise in their nearest store. Bacon suggests that Edward’s sparkly appearance marks him as “the most conspicuous point of wealth” in his family (99), suggesting that wealth in these films is “an almost spiritual aspiration” (100). Thus, vampires are no longer ancient monsters hoarding wealth in castles and draining others of their blood, but rather sexually attractive potential mates who offer the benefits of both immortality and wealth.

The indeterminant nature of identity in the Dracula mythos, so commercialised in the Twilight series, might prove most interesting to scholars of animation. Throughout the film and television history of Dracula-inspired narratives, directors have turned to animation to maintain the importance of characters’ transformative natures. The Son of Dracula (Robert Siodmak, 1943) was the first film to use animation to show Dracula’s transformation into a bat (Fig. 2). Significantly, Bacon notes, Dracula drinks little blood during the film, instead of relying on his bat form to inspire terror and cause death through heart attack and strokes. Bacon suggests that “the curious split in the vampire’s personality” creates anxiety at the mere threat of having one’s vitality drained” (84). Five decades later, the movie Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998) once again used what was then cutting-edge CGI animation to emphasize the otherness of vampires. In the climactic scene where Blade confronts Deacon Frost, Blade slices apart his nemesis only to see his body parts reattach or regenerate. Bacon suggests that the “absolute otherness of Frost is a very intimate one, suggesting the same kind of miscegenation and blood disease mentioned in Stoker” (126). The moment when Blade cuts through Frost’s torso and it flies apart but is immediately tied back together by cords of CGI-animated blood hearkens back to the seeming invincibility of original Dracula, whose strength is drawn from the blood of others.

Fig. 2 - The Son of Dracula (Robert Siodmak, 1943).

The role of technology is one of the most compelling threads that Bacon traces throughout Dracula retellings/interpretations. In the original novel, The Crew of Light uses late-Victorian technology—telegrams, steam locomotives, typewriters—to defeat Dracula. This dependence on technology to defeat a demon from the monstrous past reflects the late-Victorian belief in the advancement of humanity through technological progress. Many iterations of the Dracula myth throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have returned to themes of the industrialisation of human life. After the horrors of World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons, the focus of the horror genre shifted from a mostly supernatural to a mostly scientific one (144). Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) film reflects this trend. In this movie, Dracula reanimates Frankenstein’s monster. Significantly, in mid-century America, the Dracula figure has evolved from being defeated by technology to wielding it with potentially horrific results. Blade continues the narrative of vampires and advanced weaponry, as the half-human/ half-vampire hero relies on specially-made weapons to kill vampires, becoming almost a cyborg (123-24). The television series Dracula (Cole Haddon, 2013-14) completely reverses Stoker’s Dracula’s relationship with technology (Fig. 3). It presents a steampunk vision of a sympathetic vampire who attempts to develop wireless electricity in his bid to oppose the shadowy Order of the Dragon, which attempts to control oil fields in the Middle East (162). The growth of the Dracula mythos alongside the rapid development of technology over the past 120 years reveals how much society has come to view science, with a mixture of awe and loathing, and how our fears of the unknown were once expressed primarily through the supernatural and are now expressed through speculative fiction about scientific inventions that control our lives even though many of us understand so little about them.

Fig. 3 - The television series Dracula (Cole Haddon, 2013-14).

Though Bacon does an admirable job of weaving together so many disparate threads through different time periods, there are a few weaknesses in the work. The most noticeable one is that in many sections there is too much plot summary before the analysis begins. It would also be helpful to see more research and commentary regarding filmmakers’ intentions and whether or not they were consciously making decisions to alter the canon of Dracula films or if indeed their creative decisions were made largely based upon the narrative needs of each film. Finally, the study ends rather abruptly at the end of chapter five without any sort of conclusion that looks back on the book as a whole and ties everything together.

Despite that, Bacon’s work is an admirable study of the corpus of Dracula’s cinematic topography that includes an impressive filmography, bibliography, a detailed index, and chapter notes. Scholars of film, popular culture, and neo-Victorian studies will find this volume a useful overview of Dracula films and one that would work well in a graduate or upper-division undergraduate course. Because it is not heavy on theory or jargon, casual readers interested in Dracula should find this work accessible as well. Overall, Bacon cogently shows how Dracula has evolved as a figure who represents otherness, and who continues to lurk as a primordial monster at the edges of our consciousness waiting to disrupt our modern lives.

**Article published: October 1, 2021**

Biography

James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University. His dissertation, David Copperfield: Victorian Hero, argues that Dickens used his biography to create new archetypes for the Victorian Age. Find James at his faculty website.