In the Flesh: Blood for Dracula

Dracula, that iconic figure of bygone and bloody glory, that aristocratic parasite in whom so many national and sexual anxieties are bound up again and again over the decades, is in Paul Morrissey’s vision rendered wormlike and pathetic, more wretched than in any other incarnation to date. At the start of Blood for Dracula we watch as he (Udo Kier) painstakingly colors his drab and faded hair and eyebrows, as he lays the spent remnants of his vampiric coven to rest in their overtaken warren of a castle. We have gone beyond faded glory. Beyond decay. Of the once-great predator, only a fragile husk remains, an emaciated figure often confined to a wheelchair for fear that the mere act of walking under his own power will cause him to collapse in upon himself. He subsists on a meager diet of bread and vegetables, unable to feed on any blood but that of an untouched virgin. Twice we see him attempt to slake his thirst on sexually active victims only to succumb to fits of vomiting and spasm, blood drooling from his slack and lipless mouth as he moans over a bathtub like a drunk.

The first time we see Dracula feed successfully, he’s sucking a little girl’s blood out of a loaf of bread after his servant Anton (Arno Juerging) happens upon a fortuitous accident. Later we watch as the vampire laps blood left over from the rape of the child Perla (Silvia Dionisio) from the floor of a chapel, an insect feeding on the discharge of brute copulation. Discovered by Esmerelda (Milena Vukotic), he cringes like a kicked dog, lacking the strength even to rise to his feet. At every turn he is presented as querulous, frail, fussy, and piteous, a peevish little mosquito unable to cope with the changing sexual morals of the world around him. He is entirely reliant on his manservant Anton. He cannot so much as sniff out his own prey. Kier is perfectly cast, skeletally thin (he went through Hell to lose enough weight for the part) and quintessentially redolent of old Europe’s bygone beauty, his chiseled cheekbones and huge, ghostly eyes giving him the look of someone already half a corpse.

Claudio Gizzi’s score is the film’s other foremost attribute, a sort of proto-Badalamenti collection of string and piano arrangements at once heartbreakingly tender and darkly gothic. Its class politics, typical of the films made under Warhol’s imprimatur, are nastily sardonic, with the anemic Dracula and his dense, money-crazed aristocratic hosts trying to suck the life and money out of one another respectively while virile, brutish socialist Mario (Joe Dallesandro) despoils the family’s daughters and seizes their land for himself. There’s a fascinating cynicism to it, a sense of disenchantment with Soviet programs and contempt for the swaggering politburo strongmen who had come to define Communism abroad. He may hack his way through Dracula and his concubines with ease, but what does he have to offer that the Count and the squalid di Fiore family didn’t? Perhaps only that he’s vital. That hot blood courses in his veins. That he is a man who fucks and takes, and Dracula has become the irrelevant affectation of a sexless, inbred aristocratic order.