Why the Vampire Keeps Changing Its Politics

Line up a century of vampire films and the ideological reading swings so wildly that you begin to suspect the monster of insincerity. The vampire has been a decadent aristocrat draining the peasantry and a persecuted minority hunted by a mob. It has been the immigrant carrying contagion into a clean northern city and the last cosmopolitan in a country of philistines. It has been capital, and labour, and addiction, and adolescence, and queerness, and the landlord. Every one of those readings is supportable from the text of some real film. The monster’s politics are genuinely unstable — and the instability is a property of its design, which is why the vampire has outlived every other creature in the Universal stable.

The design flaw that became the feature

Consider what the vampire actually requires, mechanically, to exist as a story.

It needs a victim it must approach and persuade. The werewolf mauls whoever is in the field. The zombie has no preference. The vampire has to get invited in — the threshold rule is in Stoker and in most of the folklore that fed him — which means it must talk, charm, negotiate, and be attractive enough that someone says yes. Every other monster acts on the world. This one conducts a relationship with it, and a relationship has two sides, so the audience is obliged to spend screen time inside the predator’s point of view.

It needs a social position. A vampire must sleep somewhere defensible during the day, own that place, and have people to feed on nearby. That means property, a household, servants, a class location. You cannot write a vampire without accidentally writing an economy.

And it needs a long memory. Immortality drags history into the room. Whatever the creature was two hundred years ago is still on the premises, which makes the vampire the only horror monster that carries its own historical period around with it.

Those three requirements — consent, property, duration — are the entire toolkit of political fiction. The vampire was built, by accident, out of the same components as a novel about class. It will therefore hold any argument you pour into it, and it will hold that argument tightly, because the shape fits.

The aristocrat, and the reason he came first

Stoker’s Count is a landowner with a castle, tenants in fear of him, and a plan to buy London property. Hammer’s Dracula (1958) sharpened this into something almost agricultural: Christopher Lee’s Count is physically magnificent, sexually confident, and treats the Holmwood household as stock. Terence Fisher shoots him from below, in red, moving fast, against a Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) who is all reason, paperwork and dogged professional method. The class content is doing real work in that film — the vampire is the old order, the doctor is the coming bourgeoisie with a bag of tools, and the tools win.

Hammer then spent fifteen years turning the aristocracy over. Countess Dracula (1971) draws on the Báthory legend for a noblewoman who bathes in servant girls to stay young, which requires no interpretive effort at all to read as a landlord film. Twins of Evil (1971) is more interesting, because it sets a genuinely monstrous Puritan witch-hunter (Cushing again, superb) against a genuinely monstrous Count and declines to let either side be the good one. Once a studio starts doing that, the politics have come loose from the monster and attached themselves to the argument, which is where they belong.

Nosferatu (1922) is where the tradition acquires its most uncomfortable strand. Murnau and Henrik Galeen’s Orlok comes from the east, arrives by ship, and brings rats and plague to Wisborg; his features are a caricature and the film’s imagery of contagion arriving from elsewhere has a documented afterlife in the propaganda of the following decade. Pretending otherwise is not available to anyone who has looked at the film. What makes the case instructive is that Herzog took the same story in 1979 and inverted its politics without changing a single plot beat. Klaus Kinski’s Orlok in Nosferatu the Vampyre is a creature dying of loneliness, and the horror shifts onto the townspeople and their complacency. Same story, same monster, opposite argument. The vampire absorbed the inversion without a seam showing.

The metaphor everyone reaches for

Sex is the reading with the longest service record — I have argued its full history in the vampire as sexual metaphor across a century — and it is the one most often applied lazily, as though a bite were a decoder ring. Two films earn it by making the politics specific.

Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971) puts Delphine Seyrig’s Countess Báthory in an empty out-of-season Ostend hotel with a young couple, and the film’s real subject is the husband’s violence. Seyrig plays the vampire as an escape route. Kümel shoots the whole thing in reds and whites on marble, at a stately pace, and the seduction reads as liberation with a bill attached at the end. The film has a politics — about who has power in a marriage — and the vampirism is the mechanism, so the argument stays legible.

Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973) was financed as a Black vampire quickie after Blacula made money, and Gunn delivered an elliptical film about addiction, assimilation and the Black church that the producers recut and dumped. It is the most formally ambitious vampire film ever made in America, its blood-need functions as dependency rather than desire, and its ending turns on Christianity in a way no other entry in the genre attempts. The restored cut is the one to find.

Two moderns: the vampire as underclass, the vampire as snob

By the 1980s the aristocrat was exhausted and the genre went downmarket, which produced its best political films.

George Romero’s Martin (1977) strips out every supernatural element. Martin has no fangs, no powers, and no certainty that he is a vampire at all; he uses razor blades and syringes, and he lives in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a steel town that is visibly dying around him while his old cousin insists on treating him as a family curse from the old country. Romero shot it on almost nothing, in the actual collapsing town, and the film is a piece of Rust Belt reportage that happens to have a monster in it. Martin’s tragedy is economic. The old world’s superstitions and the new world’s unemployment arrive at the same conclusion about what he is worth.

Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) inverts it. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are centuries-old aesthetes in depopulated Detroit and Tangier, disgusted by “zombies” — their word for the living — and sustained by hospital plasma and a record collection. The film’s politics are those of the exhausted cultural elite, and Jarmusch is affectionate and merciless about them in the same shot. Hiddleston’s vampire is a snob who cannot stop being right about music and cannot do anything else at all.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) finishes the move. A chador-wearing vampire skateboards through a fictional Iranian oil town preying on men who mistreat women, shot in black and white to a Farsi-language post-punk soundtrack. The chador reads as a veil and as a cape at once, and Amirpour lets both readings stand.

The welfare state and the priest

The 2000s produced two films that carry politics so specific they are almost local government.

Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008) is set in Blackeberg, a real Stockholm suburb built as planned social housing in the 1950s, and John Ajvide Lindqvist wrote the novel about the place he grew up in. That matters to the film’s argument. Blackeberg was designed by a confident state as a solution — clean lines, communal spaces, snow, everyone equal — and Alfredson shoots it as a series of flat white voids in which a bullied twelve-year-old can be tormented daily and no adult intervenes. The vampire arrives into a social vacuum that the welfare architecture built. And the relationship at the centre is a grooming arrangement seen from inside: Eli has an adult servant who kills for her, that servant was once a boy like Oskar, and the film lets you work out the implication yourself without ever stating it. Alfredson’s craft decision is the one that makes it: he keeps the camera at child height and in wide shot, so the violence happens at a distance, small in the frame, with the snow muffling it.

Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009) runs in the opposite direction, loudly. A Catholic priest volunteers for a vaccine trial in Africa, dies, comes back a vampire, and finds that his new condition has left his faith intact and his continence destroyed. Park adapted Zola’s Thérèse Raquin for the back half, which is a genuinely strange decision that pays off, and Song Kang-ho plays the priest’s moral agony straight while the film around him becomes a farce about adultery and murder. The politics here are religious rather than economic: the film asks what a sacrament means when the blood is literal, and it is the only vampire film I know that treats Catholicism as a working system with rules instead of set dressing. The two make a fine double bill — a state that failed a child, and a church that failed a man, both examined by way of a creature that needs an invitation.

What the instability is worth

The temptation is to conclude that a monster which will argue any side believes nothing, which would make the vampire an empty vessel and its century of politics a century of projection. I think that gets it backwards. The werewolf and the zombie are the empty vessels; they are events, and a film can only ask what the survivors do. The vampire has interests — it wants things, owns things, and has to persuade someone. Any story built on a creature with interests will produce a politics, whether the film-makers intended one or not, and the politics it produces will be the one its makers actually hold. That is why Nosferatu betrays 1922 and Martin betrays 1977 and Only Lovers Left Alive betrays 2013 more accurately than most of the dramas released alongside them.

The monster is a stethoscope. Point it at a decade and listen. The fuller watchlist is in the vampire canon, from Nosferatu to Let the Right One In.