Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page A

version of Dracula, directed by silent-film veteran and former circus performer Tod Browning, is a curious movie to watch today. Though stagy and old-fashioned, its lack of musical accompaniment makes its long silent moments—when only the hiss and crackle of the soundtrack can be heard—chillingly effective.
    And then there is Lugosi. His eyes burning, his dark hair slicked back, his attire immaculate, he stands in his cobweb-enshrouded castle and, as wolves howl outside, intones in that incomparable accent, “Listen to them, children of the night. What music they make.”
    For millions of people, this was their first encounter with a vampire, and audiences everywhere ate it up. Over the next 80 years or so, countless actors would play Count Dracula—Christopher Lee (who in the 1950s was the first to sport fangs), Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman—but every portrayal invited comparisons with the image of Lugosi that was so deeply ingrained in the popular imagination. And most of them performed the role in evening clothes and cape.
    The actor who forged the mold could never quite escape the clutches of the character he had fashioned. Béla Lugosi died in 1956. When he was buried in Hollywood’s Holy Cross Cemetery, graveyard to the stars, he was wearing Dracula’s cape.
    R AVENOUS H ARPIES
    That opera cloak had an additional critical function: When the actor lifted his arms, the cape spread out into the semblance of bat wings. Wolves may have been his familiars, but Dracula preferred to take the form of a bat.
    When Lucy Westenra’s increasingly anemic condition is linked to the presence of a giant bat outside her bedroom window, Morris (the American sportsman in the tale) recalls an experience on the South American pampas: “One of those big bats they call vampires had got at [the mare] in the night, and, what with his gorge and the vein left open, there wasn’t enough blood left in her to let her stand up, and I had to put a bullet through her as she lay.”
    Bats have long been associated with the powers of darkness. Streaming out of their underworld caverns at twilight, their leathery wings and hideous faces have long been appropriated for depictions of devils.
    A new twist was added to immemorial bat lore in the 16th century, when conquistadors returned from tropical America bearing lurid tales of bats “of such bigness,” Pietro Martyre Anghiera wrote in 1510, that they “assaulted men in the night in their sleep, and so bitten them with their venomous teeth, that they have been…compelled to flee from such places, as from ravenous harpies.”
    These vampiros, as they came to be called, were accused of all kinds of predatory activities. By the time his Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil was published in the 1860s, Captain Richard Francis Burton could sum up in one sentence three centuries of loathing for vampiros: “It must be like a Vision of Judgement to awake suddenly and to find on the tip of one’s nose, in the act of drawing one’s life blood, that demonical face with deformed nose, satyrlike ears, and staring saucer eyes, backed by a body measuring two feet from wing-end to wing-end.”
    If anything, that was likely a case of mistaken identity. The vampiro was long assumed to be the large, fearsome-looking monster that Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus had classified in 1758 as Vampyrum spectrum, or the spectral vampire bat. Similar giant bats, in the Far East as well as in tropical America, were also given names such as Vampyrops, Vampyrodes, or Vampyressa .
    Because the activities of bats were cloaked by darkness, it was centuries before naturalists discovered the truth about the creatures: Of the hundreds of bat species worldwide, ranging in size from the five-foot Malay kalang to the tiny bumblebee bat of Thailand, only three were bloodsuckers, and they were all in the New World. Among the “false vampires” and “ghost bats” spread from Africa to Australasia,