It’s hard to know how I feel about the avant-garde art world of the 60’s and 70’s when we’re this far removed from it and the impacts and challenges it brought to the art scene have been absorbed and incorporated and been the subject of subsequent reactions, and then reactions to those reactions. It doesn’t help that almost all of my knowledge of it comes from critical appraisals of that scene, either contemporary or retrospective, rather than grappling with the primary works themselves. In some ways this is unavoidable, I’m never going to be able to attend a performance of ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ or go to a party at The Factory. Watching ‘Blood for Dracula’ is the closest I’ve gotten to the world of Andy Warhol, and it was something of a surprise to find I actually have an opinion about it: I hate him and everything he stands for.
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| Just a very handsome man. |
In a way it’s deeply unfair to Paul Morrissey to immediately bring Andy Warhol into a discussion of this movie, as despite the marketing he really didn’t have anything to do with it. It was originally released in America as ‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula,’ and naming it that made sense considering Morrissey and Warhol had just concluded a loose trilogy in ‘Flesh,’ ‘Trash,’ and ‘Heat’ in the years before this with Warhol heavily involved in those as both writer and co-director. In another way it’s completely fair because Morrissey was closely associated with the Factory scene and was clearly philosophically aligned with it, this movie being no exception.
Just about every generation likes to think it’s the first one to discover irony and find sincerity deeply uninteresting. There are also artists who are always interested in deconstructing the prevailing trends and assumptions of their times. What Warhol and those around him did wasn’t inherently new but they were dealing with relatively new mediums so at the time what they attempting was considered fairly radical, but in hindsight it can be recognized for what it was: Warhol, Morrissey, and the whole lot were just the first mass-media trolls.
This isn’t to say that the scene wasn’t interesting or important, it just didn’t end up leading anywhere particularly worthwhile. In the age we live in it’s hardly a groundbreaking observation that dismissing everything as fake, phony, or worthless and tearing everything down and not emotionally investing in anything leaves you in a very lonely place indeed. Irony burnout is a real thing. Deconstructionism is useful in figuring out what works and what doesn’t, for evaluating existing structures and questioning if they’re as important as we think they are, but as an end in and of itself it very quickly leads to nihilism, which is where I think this movie ends up.
Parodies like ‘Blazing Saddles’ and ‘Galaxy Quest’ work because they so clearly love what they’re making fun of. Paul Morrissey, on the other hand, thinks horror movies are stupid and hates the kind of people who like to watch them. Reportedly he made this and ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ back to back in one long production at the suggestion of Roman Polanksi as kind of a joke, which doesn’t improve my opinion on Polanski’s sense of humor. ‘Blood for Dracula’ is often described as a black comedy and it is but it’s that nasty kind of black comedy that’s empty at the very center, that leaves you uneasy at the end wondering why anyone involved even made the movie if they hate everything so much.
I will credit the movie with this: it doesn’t feature any newlyweds. The conceit of the movie, and it’s really not a bad one, is to turn the typical Dracula power dynamic on its head: what if instead of a sexy, powerful Dracula we had a weak, sickly one going through the vampiric equivalent of heroin withdrawal? Meanwhile the premise is simply a comedy premise: what if Dracula could only feast on female virgins, couldn’t find any in Romania so travels to Italy to find some but it turns out all the young women down there are actually sluts. One of the surprising things to me upon doing some research on Morrissey and the Warhol scene is that in many ways they were pretty reactionary when it came to how they viewed women. Morrissey in particular seems to believe in traditional sexual politics and describes himself as both conservative and a right-winger, although considering how much blatant quasi-porn is contained in his movies his views aren’t particularly straightforward.
The opening scene of the movie is very strong: Udo Kier, as pretty as he ever was on screen, as a pale, albino Dracula putting on makeup and painting his white hair in an effort to look marginally human. The visuals are doing a whole lot of work here, indicating that Dracula is weak and dying but still making something of an effort, it blurs the gender lines and portrays him as week and womanly which will contrast later with the character of Mario the servant. The camera also turns to reveal that he has no reflection in his mirror, which will be an important plot point later but does rather raise the question of why he was sitting in front of a mirror to put on makeup when he can’t use it, but maybe old habits just die hard.
He laments to his servant Anton that he’s slowly dying without access to virgin’s blood. His servant, played by Arno Jürging in such a bad performance that I’m convinced that’s part of the ‘satire,’ suggests traveling to Italy under the pretext of finding him a wife. The idea is that because of the Catholic Church’s influence they’re more likely to find the ladies virginal. The movie’s time setting is inexact but it’s not too long after the Russian Revolution. Transylvania was a contested area during WW1 and only became officially part of Romania in 1918 and subsequently fought a short war with Hungary over it from November 1918 to August 1919. None of this factors into the movie in the least despite the fact that it should have. If you’re going to set your movie in Romania at either the tail end of or shortly after the First World War you should at least mention it. The real reason it’s set at that time is so one of the characters can be a Communist and they can make fun of that as well.
They load the count into his car and tie his coffin and wheelchair to the top and set out for Italy. In the meantime we meet the Di Fiore family, an aristocratic family who’s fallen on hard times. The parents have four daughters and a single servant name Mario. The daughters range from the ages of 14 to ‘too old to marry.’ Two of the actors are noteworthy. The first is Vittorio De Sica as the head of the Di Fiore family. He was such a central part of the Italian film industry it would derail this entire article to list all of his accomplishments. Let’s just say he directed ‘The Bicycle Thief’ and move on. The second is Joe Dallesandro as Mario. I’m not going to complain about the various accents sported by everyone in this movie, they’re all over the place, but even so his Brooklyn accent stands out. He was the star of a lot of Morrissey’s films and was one of Warhol’s Superstars. Openly bisexual, he was kind of the poster boy for underground gay cinema for a time.
The Di Fiore family is an example of the aristocratic poor. They own the house and its contents but don’t have any actual money, as the father has lost it all gambling in Britain. Thus when Dracula shows up jonesing for a bride and waving money around they’re more than willing to let him stay at their mansion and get to know the girls.
Much of the rest of the movie is Dracula attempting to find a virgin to drink from and learning the hard way that the middle two daughters aren’t virgins thanks to Mario. This involves feeding on them and then immediately violently vomiting the blood back up, and kudos to Kier for really going for it in these sequences, it starts horrifying, goes on long enough to become funny, then goes on long enough after that that it loops back around to horrifying again. This discourages Dracula enough that he tells his servant they will go back to Romania to let him die in peace. Before this happens Anton the servant finally notices that the 14-year-old daughter is probably a virgin and Mario discovers that Dracula is a vampire. Anton leaves to inform his master there’s still one daughter left and Mario comes to the very logical decision to rape the 14-year-old daughter. This is ostensibly so she’s not a virgin anymore, although he had earlier casually mentioned how much he would like to rape her. So, yeah, not a lot of sympathetic characters here.
It ends in a big ol’ whirlwind of action: Dracula discovers the eldest daughter is a virgin and turns her into a vampire, then Mario comes after him with an axe. While Dracula is being chased Anton is found and killed by the mother and the youngest daughter, then in probably the most famous sequence from the movie Mario chases after Dracula and cuts off each of his limbs in turn until a screaming Udo Kier torso is left writhing on the ground of the courtyard. The daughter he succeeded in turning runs in yelling to leave him alone, then Mario kills Dracula with a sharpened post and the vampire daughter tosses herself onto the other end to kill herself. Mario, the mother, and the youngest daughter walk inside, hard end.
A few other points of note: reportedly Vittorio De Sica wrote all of his lines in the movie and they are so much better than the rest of the script that I believe it. Joe Dallesandro didn’t go back to America for a while after production, staying in Europe and acting for about the next decade. While they’re packing at the beginning of the movie Dracula leaves behind his sister, tenderly helping her into his coffin before he leaves. She is never mentioned again. Not only did he inspire the movie but Roman Polanski has an extended cameo as a local messing with Anton. It’s entirely pointless.
I certainly didn’t hate this movie, I was in fact pleasantly surprised by the first twenty minutes as I had no idea it was intended as a comedy and went through quite a journey realizing that. However, over the course of the rest of the movie it slowly dawned on me that this was not an homage or a parody but a self-satisfied satire of something it considered basically worthless. Which misses the entire point of satire, which is to use it against institutions of respect and power. It has a sour mocking tone to it throughout. It’s also not particularly well made, feeling very much like what it is: an experimental filmmaker without conventional training mocking mainstream films without a familiarity in the technical basics to pull it off. It’s not without it’s charms, however. I’m a sucker for Udo Kier and he is entirely committed here. Joe Dallesandro wasn’t a great actor but he’s a compelling screen presence. And Vittorio De Sica was a genuine delight. In the end, though, if this is the kind of art spun out of the Warhol world it doesn’t make me all that interested in experiencing more out of it. Ok, I like The Velvet Underground just fine, but that doesn’t count.
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