Enabling Vampires

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I was skeptical at first.  Nicolas Cage as Dracula?  How could this possibly work?  Nevertheless, Renfield works.  A box office flop, I suspect that audiences may not be ready for a comedic treatment of Dracula, but this is a smart, savvy take on a classic, combining superhero films with vampire lore.  Let me take a step back here.  Renfield is a bit of a slippery character, shifting places with Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s original.  He is Dracula’s servant, but here he’s presented as becoming aware that he’s a codependent enabler.  In his seeking victims from the narcissists who cause pain in the lives of a church support group, Renfield comes to realize that he’s also a victim.  He teams up with the one honest New Orleans cop who’s not on the payroll of the local mob, and together they rid the Big Easy of both vampires and organized crime.

Overly ambitious?  Yes.  But the comedy actually works here.  This is a funny movie with several laugh out loud moments.  Maybe it’s CGI, but in several shots Cage actually looks like Bela Lugosi.  Nicholas Hoult does a wonderful interpretation of Renfield, the madman of the original movie, as well as factotum to the dark prince.  Those who know and appreciate vampire lore will find many subtle insider jokes here.  And Cage undertakes a campy, yet compelling version of Dracula.  Endlessly self-referential, the movie is a skillful blend of vampires, self-help wisdom, and even social commentary.  I’d heard that my expectations shouldn’t be too high here, so I was pleased when they were exceeded on almost very point.  

Horror comedy is difficult to pull off so that viewers feel satisfied that they haven’t wasted their time.  Renfield manages to do this with style, action, and even a bit of drama.  I have an inkling that over time this will become one of those movies that appreciates with age.  The story is convoluted, but this is in service of the comedy.  Everything is so wildly improbable—from eating bugs to gain super powers to Dracula’s blood bringing the dead back to life—and hilariously overblown that it overcomes the difficulties attending such a mashup.  It’s as if Cage knows viewers don’t always take him seriously, and yet he rises to the occasion.  With nods to The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as the vast library of Dracula films, Renfield is the result of homework done and boundaries crossed.

Psychotic Vampires

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Over the past several months, and unrelated to the current vampire craze, I have re-watched some of the classic vampire movies: Dracula, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu (both Murnau and Herzog), and even Shadow of the Vampire—a movie about making vampire movies. Although the prototype of the vampire goes far back in civilization, in some form back to even the earliest of civilizations, the modern rendition rests mostly on the imagination of Bram Stoker. I’ve been re-reading Dracula to recapture a sense of why this particular telling of the tale has become iconic. One suggestion that comes as I’m reading is that it presses the religious taboos of its Victorian era sensibilities. Indeed, Stoker consciously wrote religiously provocative elements into his story. Of course, in movie form the story is altered to fit the needs of both time and scope.

A character that transforms in these various films is Renfield, the lunatic. In Stoker’s original Renfield is the foil for Dracula himself, his devotion interpreted as insanity by the science of the day. At one point Dr. Seward, Van Helsing’s protege and the man in charge of Renfield, notes with clarion penetration, “for a strong man with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The combination is a dreadful one.” Renfield is, as a servant of Dracula, complicit in both homicide and religious mania. He uses Christianesque language when referring to his master. In describing his devotion, Seward notes, “He thinks of the loaves and fishes even when he believes he is in a Real Presence.” To a generation raised without Bible, this confession makes little sense.

I have contended throughout this blog that religion and horror are intimate familiars. To understand the appeal of the vampire, one must explore the religious context. Surely the simple neck-biting and blood-sucking without religious underpinnings would soon grow tedious. It is the sense of mystery—most fully realized in religious thought—that brings the vampire to life in the imagination of a generation lacking traditional religion. Not to mix metaphors too intimately, but there is a dose of Melville to be mixed in as well. Renfield is the epitome of madness, blindly following where he believes he is called. But the reader knows how sadly mistaken he is. So it is that I return to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and in so doing find a form of true religion.