FILM / Safer sucks: Vampires are back in Hollywood. John Lyttle writes on how Aids has given new life to a dying myth

VAMPIRISM is an amazingly adaptable myth, perhaps the hardiest of all pop culture symbols. In the past cinema has used it to represent capitalism run amok (Thirst), fear of ageing (Countess Dracula), urban alienation (Vamp, Vampire's Kiss), pathological reluctance to enter adulthood (Martin, Once Bitten, I Was a Teenage Vampire), religious faith (Vampyr), drug addiction (Incense for the Damned) and class conflict: decadent nobleman Dracula is a peasant plucker, invariably bested by the professional middle-class personified by Professor Van Helsing and cohorts.

So it should come as no shock that producer/writer/director James Bond III's Def by Temptation contains the following update on dangerous female libido: succubus/vampiress lures married man to her canopied coffin/bed. In the guise of an erotic game, a knife is employed, cuts are made and bodily fluids exchanged. The morning after the night before, 'Norman' awakens to find his body battered and torn. 'You crazy bitch] How am I supposed to explain this . . .'

'To your wife?' replies his evil playmate. 'Those marks are nothing compared to what what you're going to get later. Honey, I've given you something there's no cure for. It will grow and grow till it consumes you.'

'You don't look like you've got anything.'

'Is that what you're going to tell your wife?'

The script is deliberately ambiguous as to the exact nature of the disease - is it the scourge of vampirism itself or something altogether more contemporary? - but the intent was clear enough for horror writer Kim Newman to observe: 'The yoking of vampire themes with HIV is no doubt destined to become a cliche of the 90s vampire movie.'

Indeed. What is surprising is that it has taken moviemakers so long to exploit what is bleeding obvious. In fact, the studios have been inexplicably out-of-synch. While bloodsucker novels - Sunglasses After Dark, Queen of the Damned - enjoyed a fierce revival during the mid-Eighties as global health panics took hold and pop culture needed, once again, to ponder the Big Sleep, film more or less abandoned the vampire in favour of zombie flesh eaters and sundry demons, creatures that offered more opportunity for the gore effects that had come to dominate the genre. Video, B- flicks and a smattering of intelligent independent productions such as Near Dark and Graveyard Shift helped keep the Undead legend alive, but the last truly big budget item was 1987's The Lost Boys, an semi-parody in the vein of Fright Night, aimed at a teen market probably happy to see the implications of sex reduced to Freudian infantile oralism: 'Sleep all day. Party all night. It's fun to be a vampire', as the poster put it.

Yet vampirism is a multi-purpose metaphor for Aids, a truth wittily acknowledged by Larry Cohen's Return to Salem's Lot, in which the unhappy bat folk have been reduced to feeding on cattle, humans no longer being safe prey (one can only hope that the sequel will be Revenge of the Vamp-Cows, a chiller about vicious Friesians living off the milk of the living). Blood, sex and death are, after all, the Gothic ingredients of vampire lore. The parallels are almost embarassing in their exactness. First and foremost, vampirism is a disease - arch-moralist Van Helsing calls it 'the contagion, a plague' - and a disease transmitted by a quasi-sexual act. It's also an act that triggers forbidden desires (enter gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, paedophilia) disavowed by repressed society. The vampire is likewise a counterfeit: he or she looks normal, healthy. It is impossible to know the 'truth' until they disintegrate and the 'hidden nature' is exposed. The decayed features of the crumbling Christopher Lee eerily foreshadow gloating before-and after- photos of the late Rock Hudson. And like traditional vampirism, once caught, Aids is finally fatal, with no known cure. Sunlight, hawthorn stake and holy water are mere placebos. As the House of Hammer teaches, vampires always come back.

'Actually, Aids has been awfully good for the vampire,' explains critic Richard Dyer, author of Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism. 'In the Eighties no one believed in vampires any more. I don't mean in vampires proper, but in the meanings of the image. Perhaps that explains the vaguely spoofy nature of the later films. The image was getting tired. It no longer had resonance. Now the image has fresh impetus, a new currency.'

And new converts. Hollywood may not make Aids movies - too financially risky, too likely to give offence - but it's willing to make movies that allegorise Aids. (For confirmation peruse Fatal Attraction, Cronenberg's The Fly and the forthcoming Aliens3.) Thus Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula: The True Story, rumoured to give the blood-passion-death-HIV equation a deep, thorough and sumptuously romantic work-out, rests in post-production, while Roger Corman's Dracula Rises and - timely title this - To Sleep With a Vampire are due in September. Anne Rice's long-awaited Interview With a Vampire, the last word in rampant polymorphous perversity, is finally set to roll, as is Red Sleep. Then there's Darkness, Nightland, Innocent Blood and the Valley Girl slapstick screams of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Hollywood vampire has risen from the grave. Silence of the Lambs scriptwriter Ted Tally approves of coming at the issue obliquely: 'The fundamental problem with an Aids screenplay would be structural. What do you do in the third act? Except the obvious.'

Metaphors have other advantages, commercially speaking. Complex, controversial issues are removed from the realm of the real, immediately distanced and simplified. Drama is made out of a crisis, and pressure groups are likely to think twice before picketing the local multi-plex. Still, Richard Dyer wonders how the latest formula variations will transform previous incarnations. As he notes vampirism was already associated with homosexuality well before Aids. Lesbian vampires have abounded since J. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 novella Carmilla, copping a thrill from luring comely young maidens from the straight and narrow (The Hunger, Lust for a Vampire). The scenario may be designed to tantalise heterosexual men, but the daughters of darkness are invariably worthy role models; strong, unexpectedly tender, sisterly and supportive. What appears to be seduction could be a 'coming out' story, a challenge to the very concept of a fixed sexuality. Meanwhile the model of the vampire as a snappily-dressed tragic outsider haunting the night melts directly into gay male stereotype. The image could be celebrated as a convincing, if cloying, picture of an oppressed minority. The ambivalence compels. Even the translation of the vampire's relentless hunger into the gay male's supposed compulsive promiscuity might be viewed, as Dyer says, as a 'statement about how thrilling and how terrible being enslaved by desire is.'

Aids limits that scope. Now such playfulness might just as easily be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay men are responsible for the spread of Aids, a reminder that in the battle between notions of good and evil, vampires are always, by the fade-out, found to be on the wrong side. 'Today, there's an easy slippage from sex to disease,' says Dyer, a statement equally applicable to real life and reel life. 'If vampirism is coded homosexuality, then the terrible deaths meted out to male vampires must be about homophobia. But contradiction is integral to myth. It's necessary to promote change. Really, what could illuminate the point better than the vampire having a new lease of life because of Aids?'

(Photograph omitted)