This is a significant date for fans of horror, the Gothic, and the macabre. Both Vlad Dracula (AKA Vlad the Dragon and Vlad the Impaler), the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster, were born on 30 August. Vlad Dracula was born 30 August 1400 and Mary Shelley came into the world in 1797, but isn’t it awesome that two of Western culture’s most enduring mythic terrors are connected in such a weird way?
Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster remain Gothic classics and are renewed againa and again because they tap into two significant aspect of the zeitgeist — 1) the fear of death and it’s odd connection to sex, and 2) the fear of technology that was born with the Age of Industrialization.
Dracula is death, and we all fear death, but he is also – with his penetrating fangs and exchange of bodily fluids – sex as well. He stalked, and overcame, the Victorian Virgin Mina Harker and could compel her even though she didn’t love him.
For Victorians, who thought it was unnatural that a woman could feel lust at all and didn’t think “good” women could force themselves to commit indecent acts with anyone they weren’t deeply in love with (cultural tropes that stick around even today), the very concept of a alluring blood-drinker like Count Dracula tempting and releasing the sexuality of women was chilling. He could make women lusty! He could make middle-class women want to be penetrated! He was a FOREIGNER whom middle class white women would bang! THE HORROR.
He also represented the “invasion” of Britain by foreign evil-doers who were clearly there to have their wicked ways with English women and supplant English men. Can you tell there was some anti-immigration hysteria going on at the time in England? Especially fear of the darkly brooding Slavic peoples coming to the shores of the United Kingdoms and “taking over”. Vampires are thus still popular because they still manifest the fear of the Other; the non-Western and essentially perverse strangers to Our Culture who will upend the status quo and disrupt order.
For a lot of people, change and disruption is just about the scariest thing possible. Cultural change is simultaneously scarier than death and more erotic than sex. Dracula was the unliving embodiment of the West’s deepest fears and intense desires.
These dark, change-making vampires — with their sex and death and Otherness — are particular dangerous in that they will unleash ‘women’ and female sexuality. Female sexuality has always been seen as exceptionally terrifying in patriarchal cultures. The worst obscenity in Latin was the word ‘landica’, which meant clitoris; the penis was a good luck totem but the clitoris ‘nasty’.
Female vampires were the apex of scary female sexuality. Women who were turned into vampires become voracious seekers of hot bodily fluids, and seduced men with the intent to kill. They lose all ‘proper’ modesty and used their fangs to penetrate the male body. They became the active sexual partner rather than the passive sex object. They are also, by virtue of their transformation, physically stronger than men. They could force and dominate men without consent. You can see why the patriarchy would poo on itself with fear at the very concept of female vampires.
Frankenstein’s Monster, in contrast, is the fear of what runaway technology – uncontrolled and godless science – will do to us as humans. Surely if we tamper with things beyond our purview we will pay for it with our lives? And what happens when the technology surpasses our human abilities? That’s part of why the Terminator franchise was so popular – Skynet was just another incarnation of Frankenstein’s Monster and it was up to humans to undo the nightmare technology had wrought. The Matrix trilogy taps into those same fears.
Even if technology in our service the way it was supposed to be, we can’t trust it. It might develop a mind of it’s own and turn on us. That fear is behind the plot line of the movies I, Robot and Ex Machina, as well as for a crap ton dystopian science fiction.
Stories about service technology turning on its creator reinforce the cultural suspicion that the people who distrust technology, rather than embracing it, are the smart ones. All technology is at risk of becoming Frankenstein’s monster, and all technology should be treated as untrustworthy until – as always happens – it becomes the new norm and doesn’t really count as new technology anymore.
People used to be scared to death of electricity in the home; it was used as the animating force in Mary Shelley’s book for a reason. President Benjamin Harrison was frightened of the White House electric lights, and avoided touching them lest they zap him dead. Now, we’ll howl like banshees if the electricity normally in our home isn’t there. It isn’t scary. It is necessary.
Technology is also untrustworthy because we’re never sure if it is going to be friend or foe. Will nuclear power be used to colonize space or blow the whole human race to smithereens? Are our phones connecting us to the wider world in unprecedented ways, or turning us into mindless slaves of blinking lights? Even when it is theoretically performing FOR us, are we really serving it?
The Matrix remains so popular in part because it explores Frankenstein’s Monster from a slightly different angle – but it is still ultimately the story of Man trying to escape his own creation. When we gain technology, what does it take from us? At what point does it strip us of our humanity? When does the monster finally defeat us, as it defeated Dr. Frankenstein?
Again, terrifying and unstoppable change and being forced to deal with the unfamiliar are the central themes of both Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster. A lack of familiarity and control are some of the scariest motifs in cultural narratives. Only death (espeically a death that involves being eaten) seems to be more frightening to humans than change.
But what is death but the ultimate unknown and unfamiliar?