Part II: Walking off the Page:
O Brave New World, That Has Such Monsters in it!
As the century turned and the nineteenth gave way to the twentieth, vampire literature remained popular, but was about to make something of a transition which would make it even more so, and allow it to reach a larger and more varied audience. Now set free from the chains of superstition and folklore, and accepted as a genuine character in literature, vampires were hungry for more, and with the advent of new technologies on the near horizon, they would soon get their wish. As silver screens across the country began to light up with “magic pictures”, and cinema took its first, fumbling, silent steps in the dark, vampires would be there. One thing, as I noted in the very beginning of this journal, some years ago now, that people love is to be frightened, and while today you can be shocked by anything from a slasher stalking unwary co-eds to maniacal lunatics with saws, other dimensions and even Hell itself - or a variant of it - this is all possible due to hi-tech special effects, myriad colour film and the one thing that really brought movies, if you will, to life: sound.
But back in the first years of the twentieth century film-makers were just getting to grips with this new and exciting medium, and feeling proud if they could get images of people up on those screens. And so they should have been: early cinema was fraught with trial and error, and paved the way for the blockbusters we take today for granted. But sound was a long way off yet, and so cinemas rang to the music of pianos and audiences watched in rapt amazement as people moved jerkily across the screen, their words mouthed and carried to the eyes of the onlookers via speech cards.
Such a medium would not suit today’s horror movies, even going back fifty years or more, but one creature that needed few if any words to hypnotise and terrify was our friend the vampire. If you watch even the classic Hammer Dracula movies, the only real dialogue is from the human characters; the vampire (usually Stoker’s eponymous father of vampires, or a variant of him) tends to speak but little, allowing his movements and his expressions to convey the fear and spellbinding awe of his presence. So vampires were from the beginning a good fit for silent movies, which is probably why they feature in the very first of what could be called horror movies, where the action generally is minimal, the effects all but absent, and evil can be conveyed by the arching of an eyebrow, a shadow thrown across a wall or staircase, or a bat flying across a moonlit sky. Hey, who needs words, right?
Still, though I don’t know a lot about silent cinema (that will change when I start researching my History of Cinema journal, projected 2026/2028) it’s fairly clear that though there were some classics such as
Broken Blossoms ,
The Wind and of course
Metropolis, the heyday of the medium seems to have been in the area of comedy. Slapstick, physical, pratfall comedy: your Keystone Cops, your Buster Keatons, your Harold Lloyds. And of course your Charlie Chaplins. So I’m not going to suggest that vampire movies came of age in the era of silent film. There was one classic of course, as we probably all know, but other than that, it’s a sporadic history really up until a certain studio whose name relates to a workman’s tool got involved, and then suddenly everyone loved Dracula. And slowly -very slowly - by extension, other vampires. Nevertheless, vampire movies - well, let’s be honest: Dracula movies, which is really about all there was back then - did surface in the early years of the medium.
That of course does not mean for a moment that vampire literature vanished, or that people lost interest in the written word regarding these monsters. Far from it: like two of their kind feasting on each other, the one fed the other and even now, it’s hard to say which is the more popular, with television in the frame too. But all that’s for later. Back as the twentieth century dawned, people were still fascinated with writing about vampires, and to be fair to these authors, few if any took Stoker’s story as their guide, despite perhaps the, to say the least, loose nature of copyright at that time. So we have plenty more vampire literature to look into, and we will.
But inevitably, as time marches on and cinema comes of age, it will be the screen we will be mostly concentrating on. I will be doing a full timeline, which is to say, looking at when this book was released and then this film, so that it will involve both media (and later of course television, but that will be in part three) so that neither gets missed out. And with the century only begun and cinema not due to raise its head for another twenty years, it leaves us with two decades of writing to get through, so this is where we begin, or indeed, take back up the story.
Timeline: 1900 - 1920
Title: “The Tomb of Sarah”
Format: Short story
Author: F.G. Loring
Nationality: English
Written: 1900 (note: from now on I'm just going to put down when the story was published as the date here; if it was written years prior, I generally don't know that, and anyway, it's more a case, surely, of when people could read it. So "written" is now interchangeable, in this case, with "published").
Impact: ?
Famous firsts: First “sympathetic” vampire story?
Synopsis: Before I even read it through, based on the little I have read, it appears to me that Loring was basing his story somewhat on that of Countess Bathory, the infamous “Blood Countess” of the sixteenth century, in that it concerns the opening of the tomb of a woman described as “the evil Countess Sarah.” Now, I may find this to be mere coincidence, but consider: given that this is a story written only three years after that seminal Stoker novel, and that unsubstantiated sources often claim
Dracula was based on her legend, it sort of makes sense, especially if Loring, a navy man and radio technician by trade, wanted to write something different, but building on the success and fame and indeed popularity of the Irishman’s novel. Why exactly he decided to write a vampire novel is a mystery to me; I read that he normally wrote technical manuals and so forth, so how that suddenly becomes an incentive to delve into the dark world of gothic fiction I don’t know, but there it is.
Rather like the more famous story, “The Tomb of Sarah” is also written in the form, mostly, of a journal, though in this case the author’s father. As a restorer of churches, he is called upon to renovate a particular church wherein he finds a tomb with a rather disturbing message inscribed on it, more a warning really (well, to those of us who can see what’s going to happen anyway). The inscription reads: SARAH.
1630.
FOR THE SAKE OF THE DEAD AND THE WELFARE
OF THE LIVING, LET THIS SEPULCHRE REMAIN
UNTOUCHED AND ITS OCCUPANT UNDISTURBED TILL
THE COMING OF CHRIST.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON, AND
THE HOLY GHOST.
To be fair to the author’s father, he doesn’t wave away the warning dismissively - in fact, so far as I can read, he doesn’t even take it as a warning, more a request not to disturb the dead - and is greatly concerned that, due to the subsidence of the old church, it must be moved, otherwise the floor may collapse. Reading up on the legend, he discovers this Sarah to be the Countess Sarah, who was believed to be a witch or some monster, who had as a familiar a wolf. This wolf, it was said, would catch children or small animals and bring them to the countess so that she could suck their blood. Believed invincible, this contention was proven false when a mad peasant woman, who blamed her for the loss of her two children, carried off (she said, according to the legend) by her wolf, strangled her. She died, as the tomb notes, in 1630.
The description Loring gives, and that of the decoration upon it, is chilling:
The tomb is built of black marble, surmounted by an enormous slab of the same material. On the slab is a magnificent group of figures. A young and handsome woman reclines upon a couch; round her neck is a piece of rope, the end of which she holds in her hand. At her side is a gigantic dog with bared fangs and lolling tongue. The face of the reclining figure is a cruel one: the corners of the mouth are curiously lifted, showing the sharp points of long canine or dog teeth. The whole group, though magnificently executed, leaves a most unpleasant sensation.
When the top part is removed - the tomb is so heavy that they must move it in two pieces, Loring notes that it seems to have been sealed with some sort of putty or mortar, which has kept it airtight, and when they look in, expecting to see a wizened corpse and smell the foul stench of over two hundred years of decay, they are amazed that the body, though looking emaciated and starved, yet looks fresh and young, and there is no smell. Lacerations around the neck show that the legend may very well be true, and the cord which hung around her throat in the carving is here too.
The author’s father has been described by the author at the beginning as a man who is well-versed in folklore and tradition, and has been researching the history and legends attached to his own family. A man, it would seem, ahead of his time - a sort of Van Helsing figure, you might say - he knows all about vampires, and so when at sunset the day the tomb is opened every dog in the village begins howling, then suddenly stops, and mist rolls in on a summer night, he fears the inevitable. Not everyone, of course, is as open-minded as he, and he can’t mention his suspicions to anyone, so he decides to observe alone. With great courage and determination, he watches as, after another chorus of dog howls, this time from the churchyard, a huge lupine shape appears out of the fog and bounds away. Terrified, but intent on proving that it is what he thinks it is, he waits for it to return.
And it does. Just after midnight, with another dreadful howl, and vanishes into the mist. The next day he goes to see the rector, and tells him of a “large dog” he has noticed prowling around. They decide to see if they can trap it, lest it worry the cattle, or worse, and the author’s father - whom we now learn is called Harry, and therefore so shall I name him - prevails upon the rector, a man called Grant, to help him lift the lid of the tomb, pretending he wants to take a sample of the mortar for some reason. As they do, the rector gives out a gasp. The corpse in the tomb looks to be alive, all colour having returned to it, and its eyes seeming to contain a light of malevolent life. Spooked (he quickly convinces himself it was a trick of the light, or his own imagination) Grant has the lid closed. But Harry knows what they have seen.
He also knows what the “mortar” that sealed the tomb is: pieces of the Host, the Communion wafers which vampires abhor - apparently - as the power of God and light. He believes this protects him; he also knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that the wolf spoken of in the tales of the countess was not her pet or her familiar, but she herself. Drained by two centuries of sleep and starvation, the undead thing is weak, and can only hunt as a wolf for now. But once her strength returns, the curse of the vampire will descend on the village. He has to stop her before this happens.
He prevails upon Grant to accompany him, and, having failed to penetrate the ghostly fog -
“there was something so chilly about it, and a faint scent so disgustingly rank and loathsome that neither our nerves nor our stomachs were proof against it” - they hide and watch the big wolf walk by, coming out of the churchyard. Finally convinced this is more than a simple dog, Grant agrees to help, though being a rector his first instinct is to pray and put it all in the hands of God. Harry tells him though that he knows what to do, and when they open the tomb again there is such a change come over the corpse that the rector almost believes. The body is now fresh and young, the teeth grown long over the lips, a trickle of blood leaking down from them, and worst of all, the smell! Like that of a slaughterhouse, writes Harry, knowing what has happened.
The next night they prepare to put an end to the vampire. Harry leaves a message in his account that, should he or both of them fall, whoever reads his words will know what to do to save the village. They lock themselves into the church and gasp as a mist arises from the tomb, coalescing into the figure of Sarah. Even the sceptical parson cannot pretend this is anything other than what it is, and places himself in Harry’s hands. They wait till Sarah leaves the church, walking literally through the wall, then they go to her tomb and open it. They place dog roses in the now-empty sepulchre, and Harry makes a circle of garlic and dog roses around the tomb, a circle the vampire cannot step into. He warns Grant to be on his guard, as the vampire can hypnotise him from a distance and cause him to walk outside of the circle, where he will be hers.
And she does. She tries her best to entice him, but Harry remains strong. Forcing her into the tomb he removes her power, and then the two of them lift her out and read the burial service over her, releasing her soul, as Harry stakes her, and all is well. Or is it?
A sort of postscript or epilogue tells of a child being found a few days later in the church, very pale and drawn, with two small marks on her throat…
Comments: I really like this story. For only the second one after
Dracula - and
Blood of the Vampyre was written, or at least published, the same year - Loring does a very good job both paying homage to Bram Stoker and making sure he is not copying him. While he uses some elements of
Dracula there are others he makes up - or takes from folklore - himself, and he turns a few of what would later become vampire literary traditions on their head, such as vampires being unable to go into a church - Sarah is buried in one, and seems to suffer no ill-effects leaving it - and weakness confining the vampire to animal form. In
Dracula this seemed to be a sign of his strength. He also allows his vampire to walk through solid objects, just as she is. We know Dracula can do this, but he has to turn into a mist in order to do so.
I like the overall sympathetic way Loring treats his vampire. Is this because she is a female and he felt that women should not be too demonised in his story, especially as, as would be the case for decades, the vampire hunters are both male, and as always the hammering in of the stake couldn’t have a more phallic interpretation when used against a female vampire, an almost ultimate rape? But in his story, the stake does not necessarily kill the vampire, but releases the spirit of the woman it has trapped for centuries. This is really interesting, and deserves further discussion.
Stoker’s - and, for a long time, everyone else’s - vampires are pure evil. Monsters, fiends from the pit, creatures preying on humanity, gorging on their blood. There will not really be a story which, to again I think quote Otto from The Simpsons, looks at it from the vampire’s point of view till the closing parts of the twentieth century, when Anne Rice will make us think differently about the undead. Here though Loring is sympathetic. He doesn’t see the vampire as evil, or, to put it more accurately, he doesn’t see the countess as evil. He believes her possessed of an evil spirit, and therefore essentially innocent, as he calls her “the poor body” and speaks of “release from this living hell”, so it’s clear he does not see her as a monster, but only that which has her entrapped in its evil web.
This is in contrast to, I think (would have to check as it’s been over a year since I wrote in this journal) the first vampire not seen as an out-and-out evil monster, but a soul ensnared, and able to be released. Even in
Dracula, Stoker does not give us to understand that the count’s soul has been released when he is killed. There is no mention of any evil force inhabiting his essence; it is assumed he is evil, and this is the case with just about every other vampire we have come across. There have been exceptions, where in one - I can’t recall, but the one where the man is telling his wife his friend has been taken over and he is next - the idea of pity for the damned soul is floated, but once taken, the human and the vampire are, even in that story, treated as one.
So here I think, while we cannot call his vampire the first female example, and while it is surely, as I hazarded at the start, based at least partly on Countess Bathory, I think we can allow him the first notion of a vampire who is not beyond redemption or salvation, or to be more accurate, a soul which is not beyond the grace of God, if only the evil being holding it prisoner can be destroyed. I’m also not sure (though I should be) that Dracula turned to dust, so this could be the first example of the usage of that form of vampire death. It’s also interesting that the panther the countess is said to own/turn into is called Bagh: is this a reference to Kipling’s Bagheera from
The Jungle Book?
While I am very impressed with this story, if hardly original, I would say there is a fundamental flaw in it that shows me that perhaps Loring may not have been cut out for fiction, or at least, adventure or suspense writing. While the father relates the tale well, he tends to, if you will, shoot himself in the foot literarily, as twice he tells us the outcome of the event and then goes into the narrative. Stoker at least had the sense to have Harker talk about what they were going to do, then write the scenes, and leave the outcome till afterwards, as is, to be fair, the way this sort of writing should be done. But Loring says things like,
“July 12th. All is over. After the most terrible night of watching and horror one Vampire at least will trouble the world no more". And then
“And now to my tale”. It’s like putting the ending before the denouement, or something. It tells you that everything is okay, so that the tension, the suspense, the fear is removed, and you really don’t have any worries for the hero, as you know it all worked out. I feel that’s a mistake.
Otherwise, he makes good use of vampire lore, while choosing not to reference all of it (nothing about running water, mirrors, bats or crucifixes) and the story stands up very well for one of, if not the first of the twentieth century.