Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2017

Few production companies have been as synonymous with one genre as Hammer Films and its horror output. However, for every ‘Hammer Horror’ successfully produced, several potential projects failed to make it into production. This article will utilize five separate drafts of the unmade Hammer project Vlad the Impaler, an adaptation of a BBC Radio 4 Drama produced in 1974. Utilizing Vlad the Impaler as a case study will allow for a further contextualization of Hammer’s production methods between 1975 and 1979, a period in which Hammer only produced two theatrical films. The project was also developed further throughout the 1980s/1990s, at a time when Hammer did not produce a single film. More broadly, this article will use Vlad the Impaler as a methodological case study, and examine how we can expand on existing works within the field on unmade adaptations.

The BBC’s 1977 Count Dracula is cast firmly in the mould of a BBC classic serial, privileging fidelity, frocks and location shots. However, a surprising amount of cultural work is done by the adaptation’s few but striking deviations from its general principle of fidelity, such as the total omission of Arthur Holmwood, the turning of Lucy and Mina into sisters rather than friends and Dracula’s speech in defence of vampirism, coupled with the absence of any suggestion that vampirism might be a metaphor for something other than itself. This adaptation’s focus, I suggest, is to precipitate the arrival of modernity, as a half-glimpse of the Simone Martini Annunciation in the crypt of Carfax leads into Dracula materializing in Mina’s bedroom as white smoke like an Unholy Ghost, suggesting that a new era is about to dawn and that sexuality is out of the coffin in which the Victorians sought to imprison it.

This article sets out to explore how the vampire, a quintessential European monster which has been related to aristocracy, blood purity and colonialism, has been radically transformed following its migration to America. By adapting to the conditions of the New World, the creature has been Americanized by gradually abandoning its European traits – a process similar to the one described by exponents of Americanization such as Frederick Jackson Turner. During this transformation, the creature that once was a destructive force of nature has essentially been humanized. Instead of an animated corpse that lurks in the shadows, the vampire becomes a historian and an agent of history, occasionally a positive one. In this re-imagination of the American vampire we can discern ideas of American exceptionalism. At the same time, this transformation allows the vampire to become a vocal critic of the negative aspects of American history. The article explores the Americanization of the vampire by underlining the balance between the concepts of the vampire as an agent of American superiority and as a reliable narrator of the country’s history as expressed in seminal works of American vampire fiction.

Taking into consideration Julie Sanders’ distinction between adaptation and appropriation and Julie Grossman’s notion of ‘elastextity’, this article focuses on how contemporary adaptations of an archetypal vampiric text have progressively led to its appropriation by another cinematographic narrative genre. Dracula is the model of the ultimate vampire in the public eye, but also in the minds of modern creators, who began to exploit the ‘elastextity’ of the traditional vampire codes, ethics and images. After undergoing a process of humanization, ‘new’ vampires started appearing at the turn of the current century such as Stephen Norrington’s Blade (1998) and till Gary Shore’s recent representation of Dracula (Dracula Untold, 2014). They represent a new kind of vampire, one associated with the aesthetic of American superhero films. With this evolution vampires have come to represent a new model of superhero expression linked, by virtue of their nature, to sacrifice, redemption and hope.

At the 2016 fan convention VidUKon, I curated and screened a vidshow themed around vampires. A vidshow is a curated programme of fanvids, fan-made video art pieces that adapt television and film sources into short videos, which is shown at media fan conventions. To plan this, I first selected vampire-related examples from my research collection, and then drafted a list of screen vampires to guide my search for other vids to address gaps. From there, my curation was guided by a series of questions about how these pocket-sized adaptations would contribute to the vidshow’s representation of screen vampires. How do these act as a history of media fandom’s relationship with screen vampires? Vids are works of textual analysis that offer critical and creative responses to their source texts. What would my selection argue about how we watch vampires? I propose that vidshows are a site of negotiating fan-favourite and cult canons of vampire shows and characters.

This article aims to identify the traces of vampire presence in Nordic cinematography. The author examines examples from traditional literature and points to the fact that even Viktor Rydberg’s Vampyren – for many years, the only representative of Nordic vampiric literature – does not depict a ‘canonic’ vampire. Wajda tries to answer a question: is it possible to find a vampire figure among rare examples of Nordic horror films from the twentieth century? In 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer depicted the figure of a vampire in an unorthodox way. The author of this article indicates that vampirism was not a source of superpower as in American cinema. The presented study advances an understanding of vampire presence in Nordic cinema and proposes an analysis of selected films that can be deciphered as examples of ‘a vampire unseen’on-screen. Furthermore, the author compares ‘vampire unseen’ creations with the modern approach to vampires.

Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, Margherita Laera (ed.) (2014) UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 296 pp., ISBN: 9781408184721, h/bk, £90.00; p/bk, £28.99

The Forgotten Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence Short Stories, Jason Mark Ward (2016) Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 275 pp., ISBN: 9789004309043, h/bk, €82.00