Opulent Vampire Aesthetics: A Haunted Bloodline

Opulent Vampire Aesthetics:

A Haunted Bloodline

article by Isabella Edwards

Dracula, 1931

The vampire lies recumbent in silk, velvet, a fine lace of cobweb. Ghastly white, an aristocrat in a crumbling castle or gothic manor, they gorge on the blood of common folk to preserve their eternal undeath.

This is the prevailing image of the classical vampire in Western popular culture, which coagulated in the 19^th century with literary works including The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula. The vampire signifies a relationship to power, a dynamic of extraction and exploitation. In Capital, Karl Marx employs this captivating metaphor to describe the draining effects of capitalism on the bodies and psyches of workers,

Dracula, 1931

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

The 1931 Tod Browning adaptation of Dracula committed to celluloid the suaveness the Count had picked up in the 1924 Hamilton Deane stage play and established the gothic visual aesthetic for screen vampires. In sumptuous chiaroscuro, Castle Dracula and Carfax Abbey’s sweeping staircases and macabre crypts are emblematic of a dying social order.

Dracula, 1931

The aesthetics associated with vampirism reflect the face of inequality in their own eras yet are displaced in time. Vampires are revenant pasts, and, in their undying youth, gesture towards the future. The gothic aesthetic is one of ruined opulence, skeletal ceiling vaults thronged with bats. It is glamour decaying. Haunted excess.

First introduced in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, this hauntology describes a disjunction of time and place and focuses on revenant historical, cultural, or political ideas that haunt texts and the cultural conversation at large. It is protean, with its applications shifting from Derrida’s analysis of Marxism to Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds’s music and pop culture writings. The vampire myth punctures through time, with each incarnation defining itself by and against the vampires of the past, advancing towards a haunted future.

Jacques Derrida

The Hunger, 1983

By the 1980s, “gothic” had accrued new meaning. Goth rock of bands such as Siouxie and The Banshees and The Cure had emerged from post-punk and the dying gasps of glam rock. It was the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The dramatic wealth inequality and rampant consumerism of the decade ushered in a new wave of vampires that were not aristocratic but embodied conspicuous consumption. The 1983 film The Hunger, based on the Whitely Streiber novel, starred Catherine Deneuve as Miriam, a cool and cruel ancient vampire, and David Bowie as her not-quite-immortal companion John. The opening scene sees the stylish vampire couple cruising a goth club for fresh blood, intercut with shots of goth band Bauhaus playing Bela Lugosi’s Dead, with lead singer Peter Murphy staring down the barrel of the camera. The fragmented edit uses the visual language of MTV, a new medium of the period, to convey the seduction and consumerism of its characters. A music video, after all, is an advert.

Miriam and John are yuppie vampires, part of the consumer class. Deneuve is costumed entirely in Yves Saint Laurent, and the couple display their luxuries in a beautiful New York townhouse. Its style-as-substance, the “beautiful things” Miriam possesses are part of the allure for young doctor Sarah (Susan Sarandon), as she is initiated into the vampiric lifestyle. The pristine home is nonetheless haunted by the still-living yet desiccated bodies of Miriam’s former lovers in the attic.

Alexander McQueen 1996 SS

Alexander McQueen’s 1996 Spring/Summer collection was named after and inspired by The Hunger. It featured his famous “worm corset”, which juxtaposed unbiodegradable and unyielding plastic with bodily rot, the corpse as food-for-worms. Styled under a corporate blazer pushed to its dramatic limits, it embodied the vampire aesthetic contrasts of glamour and decay, death beneath capitalist production.

In Rice’s 1983 article for Vogue, “David Bowie and the End of Gender”, she describes Bowie in the same lush and rapturous prose she would later use for her beloved vampire Lestat. She had, in the previous decade, made vampires truly sympathetic for the first time with her novel Interview with the Vampire, and drew on Bowie’s queer and theatrical star power for the sequel. Lestat is awoken from his slumber by rock music and is soon swept up by the shimmering romance of the commodity world. He hunts and haunts as a dandy flâneur adorned in a combination of antique and modern couture. The Vampire Lestat tracks his transformation from an 18^th century French aristocrat to a 1980s rockstar, which follows the trajectory of the vampire as the face of capital.

What does vampirism look like today? The recent TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire re-stages the interview to a modern-day penthouse apartment in hyper-capitalist Dubai, with its vampires as multi-millionaire art dealers. Dubai thrives on its perception as a place out of space and time, obscuring any complicated history of oil, slave labour, and geopolitical entanglements. But, as Mark Fisher reminds us, haunting resists the homogenisation of time and space under capitalism. Through the interview, the characters reveal thorny pasts, histories intentionally obfuscated. Dubai and its vampires are still “stained” by time. The apartment is brutalist and modern, a mausoleum of cool grey concrete. It harkens back to the geometric shapes and archways of Islamic architecture with none of their ornate details or rich colours. It’s still the gothic horror of being trapped in a tower by a supremely dangerous and powerful being, just with a cleaner façade.

iwtv set pics from production designer mara lepere-schloop

Interview with the Vampire Set 2022

Interview with the Vampire Still

Twilight 2008 stills

We have seen these modern minimalist vampires before. The late-2000s pop culture phenomenon that was the Twilight saga of books and films saw the luxurious sterility of the Cullen family. Glittering white and oppressively beige, the Cullen’s expensive cars and clothes are more covert for a conservative era of “quiet luxury”. These are billionaire vampires that mingle with the general human public. They cannot be ostentatious for fear of exposure. The first Twilight film came out in 2008 and can be seen as an artefact of “recession core”, where the symbols of wealth become recognisable to only those in-the-know. The sleek modern aesthetic of the Cullen’s luxury residence, with furniture designed by Mies van der Rohe and Eames, is the face of extreme wealth in the 21^st century. Just look at how easily Edward Cullen was metabolised into a sadistic businessman for 50 Shades of Grey.

Right now, with widening wealth inequality and increasing conservatism, we are seeing numerous vampires haunting our imaginations and screens. From the libidinous gothic of Eggers’s remake of Nosferatu to the summoned spectres of the past and future in Sinners, they mutate and proliferate.

Opulent Vampire Aesthetics:

The vampire lies recumbent in silk, velvet, a fine lace of cobweb. Ghastly white, an aristocrat in a crumbling castle or gothic manor, they gorge on the blood of common folk to preserve their eternal undeath.

Whether gothic glamour or malevolent minimalism, they point to seats of economic power, yet also disrupt, transgress, and decay.