Browning’s Dracula and the development of the classical screen vampire: genre, form, and figure

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dracula (Browning, 1931) introduces the general parameters of the classical screen vampire narrative of the 1930s and 1940s; a drawing-room murder mystery. In this investigative ‘drama of proof’, the murderer, already known to the audience, is a vampire who has inserted himself between a young engaged couple, seeking the woman for himself. The classical vampire protagonist is an unreflecting figure driven by a craving for both the young woman of his desire and for human blood as sustenance. The inevitable death of the vampire represents a triumph of ‘life’, marriage understood as the basic unit by which community reproduces itself, playing out a Freudian (and romantic) opposition between the erotic instinct and the aggressive instinct or death drive. The classical screen vampire narrative does not remain static. Two key developments in the classical period are considered: non-vampires masquerading as vampires and the vampire problematizing their own relationship with vampirism.