List

Vampires II: Elegant, Manipulative, Afflicted.

Exquisite dandies, lovers, lustful, bloodthirsty, overly dramatic, campy, theatrical but also brutal and feral. A figure very much popularized and watered down, continuosly reworked and readjusted in the collective imagination. Lugosi (1931) and Lee (1958) where the original, stylish and polished dandies, though cold and calculating predators, and especially Lee's portrayal shows sexual undertones in Dracula's predatorial behaviour; then, the character of Barnabas Collins (60s) launched the yearning, sensible vampire in deep emotional turmoil searching for his long lost now reincarnated love (a trope taken from 1932's The Mummy). Curtis' Dracula (1974) introduced this elegantly tragic archetype in the Dracula cinematographic canon and Badham's version (1979) set the bar higher for sexual explicity, while Scott (1983) completed the process with his toxic vampire continuously trapping and changing lovers to fill the infinite void of her solitude, contributing overall to the modern cinematic of the vampire mostly as a sensible, tormented and beautiful charming monster that may or may not interlace toxic, manipulative and/or psychosexual relationships with his victims, and, most importantly, is more human than hunger even though, in the end, cannot escape his consuming nature and may or may not go through deep suffering because of it. Bigelow (1987), Coppola (1992) and Jordan (1994), then, further explored and cemented forever this portrayal, with Coppola having most probably made the best of them all, a masterpiece in taste and gothic grandiosity.