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Blood for Dracula



cast :

Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, Dominique Darel, Stefania Casini, Arno Juerging

crew :

Directed by: Paul Morrissey
Written by: Paul Morrissey
Produced by: Andrew Braunsberg, Andy Warhol, Jean Yanne
DOP: Luigi Kuveiller
Editor: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi
Music Score by: Claudio Gizzi

release date :

1975

Shot in 1973, ‘Blood for Dracula’ (also known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula) is normally regarded, for better or for worse, as a gratifyingly camp soft-core schlockfest. The premise is simple (so much so that some of the title’s lengthier European variants practically constitute plot synopses): in desperate need of virgin blood, Dracula (Udo Kier) heads to Catholic Italy where he sets about wooing the daughters of an out-of-pocket titled family. The resulting film is absurd, grotesque and often gorgeous but – like a certain Transylvania aristocrat – it also conceals a sinister secret. For, despite his preoccupation with sex, violence, sadism and addiction (even more evident in earlier Warhol-affiliated productions like ‘Flesh’ (1968)) director Paul Morrissey is also a Catholic Republican, a hard-line conservative who’s previously held forth on the pernicious effects of liberal permissiveness and lamented the waning of institutionalised religion. Gary Morris, addressing this circumstance in a 1996 issue of Bright Lights film journal, concluded ‘it's impossible to reconcile these knuckleheaded views with Morrissey's unique body of work.’ Morris is wrong however; despite all the gore and skin on show in ‘Blood For Dracula’ one can’t help but be struck by the seam of alternately wistful and resentful anti-liberalism that runs through the movie. At the level of narrative it’s practically a parable, one in which the last representative of an old culture (Dracula is described by Morrissey as a ‘failed idealist’) sets out on a search for purity and traditional values but finds instead a dissolute nobility and a self-serving lower class who cloak their hedonism and violence in leftist ideology. The father of the Di Fiore family (Vittorio de Sica) is a compulsive gambler, the house is decaying rapidly and the two marriageable daughters (Dominique Darel and Stefania Casini) are vain, indolent nymphomaniacs who divide their time between pleasuring Mario the Marxist manservant (played – with characteristic sulky reserve – by Morrissey mainstay ‘little’ Joe Dallesandro) and incestuously canoodling with one another. Mario’s rote socialism may be merely a screen for his resentment and sexual sadism, but his fury and virility are genuine and ultimately it is the count who comes off worst in this clash of cultures old and new – an outcome Morrissey represents as entirely regrettable. The fear of being outbred by an Other represented as bestially sexual and virally fertile is, of course, a staple of anti-Muslim/black/communist/‘chav’ prejudice (delete as appropriate), and while in Bram Stoker’s famous novel it was the vampire who represented a threat to English purity, here it is Dracula himself – sickly, emasculated and too civilised for his own good - whose bloodline is threatened by the real bloodsuckers he finds himself among, the hypocrites and wastrels he foolishly pins his hopes on. This is at least an original and ironic spin on traditional vampire lore.


Depressingly, the same cannot be said of the film’s portrayal of lesbianism, which is as predictable as it is unenlightened. There’s a long tradition of linking female homosexuality to vampirism, one that runs from Nineteenth century works like Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla,’ Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ to a host of less exalted works cinematic works roughly contemporaneous with ‘Blood for Dracula,’ including ‘Vampyres’ (1974), ‘The Vampire Lovers’ (1970) and Jesus Franco’s groovy ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971). Even when a degree of sympathy or solidarity informs these portrayals (and Baudelaire identified so strongly with Paris’ “femmes damnees” that he considered calling his landmark collection ‘Les Lesbiennes’), lesbian appetites are still portrayed as exotic, insatiable and vicious. When we first see Saphiria and Rubinia Di Fiore they are doing some gardening, hacking art a patch of sterile soil where flowers used to grow and playfully exposing themselves to their younger sister Perla (Silvia Dionisio). They soon leave off in order to flirt with Mario, however. Immediately lesbianism is linked with entropy and infertility, while simultaneously being constructed as something girls only get up to when bereft of men or else for men’s benefit, to tease or entice them. The idea that lesbian intercourse isn’t real sex – just a bloodless, passably diverting substitute, little better than masturbation – is also reinforced both by the persistent presence of mirrors in their scenes and by the sisters’ resemblance to one another, which both helps to equate lesbian sex to sex with oneself and suggests that it isn’t proper sex because proper sex between siblings wouldn’t be something fit to represent as erotic. After being semi-vampirised (not being virgins they can’t become full vampires) the sisters are seen languorously caressing each other on a divan as a record spins on the gramophone, an image that succinctly demonstrates Morrissey’s apparent belief that lesbian sexuality is ersatz, narcissistic and unproductive, that it goes nowhere.


In fairness, ‘Blood for Dracula’ never takes itself as seriously as the above critique might suggest, and reducing it to a conservative allegory misrepresents a film which, however problematic, simplistic and contentious its politics are, nevertheless rewards viewers in various other ways. Perhaps here it’s worth invoking Roland Barthes' distinction between significance - the messages that the film, however implicitly, conveys – and signifiance – the textures, affects and feelings, incommensurable with any particular message or meaning, that it generates. For, within its essentially reactionary narrative framework, ‘Blood for Dracula’ supplies a considerable amount of humour, colour, beauty and pathos, not to mention a handful of especially arresting images and the odd unexpected cameo (Roman Polanski is terrific as a wily local peasant). As I’ve already suggested, Morrissey likes to have his cake and eat it too, and revels in the portrayal of the same moral laxity he affects to deplore, sugaring his anti-liberal message with lashings of glamour and titillation. As such, the film affords viewers ample opportunity to spy on the decadent pleasures of the aristocracy (disapprovingly, of course) even as they are supposed to be rooting for the ailing, out of his time Dracula. By the same token, the film affords more politically progressive viewers ample opportunity to take in its sensuous sumptuousness (disapprovingly, of course) even as they are supposed to be critiquing its attitude to society and sexuality. And, despite all the impassioned finger-wagging in this review’s preceding paragraphs, I’m forced to admit that – like the feminist film critics who Slavoj Zizek claims deconstruct film noir in an attempt to legitimise their enjoyment of it – I enjoyed the thrills ‘Blood for Dracula’ has to offer, cheap as they sometimes are.


Not least among these is the pleasure of just gazing. Light and colour are deployed to create a range of arresting non-naturalistic effects - the shimmering reds, creams, and champagnes of the Di Fiore mansion, for example, induce an almost amniotic sense of languid stasis. As always with Morrissey’s work, the lead actors are uniformly beautiful; if Dallesandro and his conquests seem to find endless satisfaction in staring into the mirror then one can hardly blame them. The statuesque, heavy-lidded Darel and Casini spend most of their screen time lolling about in (or half out of) skimpy lemon-coloured nightclothes, and Dallesandro’s Olympian physique gets plenty of exposure as he goes about his business (which, whether it be chopping firewood or bedding the sisters, is always undertaken with the same dispassionate frown on his face). Dallesandro is a far from compelling ideologue - given Morrissey’s politics he’d hardly want him to be - but he does convince as an aggrieved outsider prepared to play on his looks to get what he wants from people he despises – which, essentially, is to say he convinces as Joe Dallesandro, the grudging Warhol superstar fascinated but a little sickened by others’ propensity to fawn over him.


Although Warhol’s involvement with Morrissey’s movies had become literally nominal by the time of ‘Blood For Dracula,’ the spectre of the Factory - with its gallery of beautiful, doomed cosmopolite pin-ups being idol-ised by the vampirically pale, frail Andy – haunts the film (certainly Morrissey would subsequently complain of Warhol’s Draculaesque leaching of acclaim for work which he really had very little to do with). The first scene, in which the etiolated Dracula makes himself up and applies what looks like boot polish to his milky hair before an empty mirror, also has Warholian resonances, evoking Lou Reed singing ‘Make Up’ and Peter Hujar’s photograph of Candy Darling (the ‘drag queen superstar’ featured in Morrissey’s ‘Flesh’ and ‘Women in Revolt’ (1971)) fully dolled up on her deathbed. In a sense, though, it is a pity that 1970s NYC isn’t more present in ‘Blood for Dracula.’ The film is set in the 1920s, at the point, as Morrissey claims in the commentary, ‘when the modern world started to evolve into the toilet that we live with today.’ But a Dracula movie that harnessed Morrissey’s flair for portraying seedy urban street life might have been more interesting, especially given the continuity of concerns (sexual morality and exploitation, addiction and overdoses) that, as I’ve already suggested, links ‘Blood for Dracula’ to more realistic Morrissey fare like ‘Trash’ (1970).


Test footage backs up the director’s claim that he had planned for the film to be less wackily ‘absurdist’ than ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ (1973), intending for Dracula to be a serious and sympathetic figure. A quirk of fate meant Kier had to step in at the last minute to substitute for Srdjan Zelenovic, the gangling, pallid Yugoslavian originally meant to play the title role. In the screen test Zelenovic exudes a wan, subdued gravity – Morrissey calls him ‘aristocratic... reserved, aloof and uncommunicative’. By contrast, Kier – with his huge grey eyes and a livid diagonal vein running across his forehead - plays the count as brittle and wracked, prone to seizures and all-but wheelchair-bound. Although his Dracula may have ended up hammier than Morrissey would have wished (his accent renders virgin “wurjin” – something of a barrier to credibility), the portrayal is nevertheless magnetic and affecting, and succeeds in generating sympathy for the bloodsucker. The first meeting between Dracula and the Di Fiores’ eldest daughter, a skewed-looking proto-spinster brilliantly played by Milena Vukotic, is genuinely moving. Shots of Kier leaching nutrition from a blood-soaked loaf of bread and lapping blood off of the floor also conjure a certain pathos, and while the scenes of him voiding the sisters’ impure blood into the bath - having mistakenly taken them for ‘wurjins’ and bitten them - are histrionic, they’re also beautiful; the shot of Kier with his head tipped back as blood wells from his mouth, striping his neck, is phenomenally striking. The effect is enhanced by Claudio Gizzi’s extravagantly pretty soundtrack, which flirts with schmaltz but generally maintains an appropriately bittersweet tone.


‘Blood for Dracula,’ then, is a strange film; ‘artier’ and more accomplished than most of the vampire sexploitation movies of the era (Morrissey is scathingly dismissive of Hammer’s output), it nevertheless feels somewhat zany and slight next to, say, Herzog’s ‘Nosferatu’ remake (1979). As notable for the array of names and talents it brings together (and the contexts it places them in) as it is in its own right, the movie’s status as a curio is deserved. Perhaps the most surprising thing, for viewers more familiar with Morrissey’s earlier work, is what a good fit the world of Victorian Gothic – a world of nostalgia, paranoia and prejudice – is for the director, how sharply the setting throws into relief the moral and political conflicts and contradictions that characterise Morrissey’s work.


Watch


Country: France/Italy
Budget: £
Length: 108mins


Filmography:
‘Flesh’, Paul Morrissey, 1968, Factory Films
‘Flesh for Frankenstein’, 1973, Paul Morrissey, Compagnia Cinematigrafica Champion
‘Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht’, 1979, Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
‘Trash’, Paul Morrissey, 1970, Filmfactory
‘The Vampire Lovers’, 1970, Roy Ward Baker, American International Pictures
‘Vampyres’, 1974, Jose Ramon Laraz, Lurco Films
‘Vampyros Lesbos’, 1971, Jesus Franco, CCC Telecine
‘Women in Revolt’, 1971, Paul Morrissey


Bibliography:
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, 1977
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, OUP, 1998
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, Penguin, 2004
J. Sheridan le Fanu,A Glass Darkly, OUP, 2007
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Penguin, 1995
Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, 1997


Pub/2008


More like this:
'Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb', 1971, directed by Seth Holt, Michael Carreras
'Flesh For Frankenstein' 1973, directed by Paul Morrissey
'The Backwoods', 2007, directed by Koldo Serra