I emailed Dracula’s people because I was heading to Romania, for a global democracy forum that I help lead.

While I’m in Bucharest, I asked, could I take the train up to Transylvania and spend a day chopping it up with the Count? After all, he’s been around for 600 years and has seen many, many dark times for governance and democracy.

In reply, I got a cryptic text telling me to arrive by midnight at an address in Beachwood Canyon, high in the Hollywood Hills above L.A. The place was invisible from the street, and so dark I had to turn on my iPhone flashlight to find the door.

But then, at my knock, the world’s most famous vampire opened the door. He ushered me to a chair in a room lit only by fireplace.

Dracula: Welcome to my castle in the air. Now, can my servant Renfield get you something to drink? Want to join me for a pint of O-negative?

Me: Thanks, but I’m fine, Count.

Dracula: Please, call me Vlad. And suit yourself (pouring blood into a glass). I need a drink from a stiff before discussing democracy these days.

Me: I hoped we’d be meeting in Eastern Europe and talking about June’s European elections and rising authoritarianism there. What are you doing in L.A.?

Dracula: Romania will always be home, but many decades ago, I realized that Hollywood would never stop calling. I used to stay with my friend Bela Lugosi, right down the street, but he got tired of the LAPD knocking on the door asking for me every time some teenage girl got a hickey. So, I had this place built. It’s small for a castle, but I never went and had a family like Gomez Addams.

It’s more than paid for itself. To date, more than 80 films have been made about me. Yes, those Netflix execs—who suck more blood in a half-hour pitch meeting than I have in my whole existence—don’t pay well. But it’s amazing how much work my fellow vampires at CAA can get me for uncredited script doctoring and story consulting.

I advised the cast during the New Orleans shoot of Renfield, a 2023 comedy with Nicholas Cage playing me. Nick and I hit it off. I’m not saying he’s a vampire—I respect his privacy—but I will say he didn’t have to do much to get into character.

Me: Do you see the story of Dracula having an impact on how the world runs?

D: Sometimes I worry I have too much impact. Porphyria—which they call the vampire disease, because you have trouble with sunlight and sometimes must retreat into darkness—used to be considered rare. Now, with everyone up half the night on their screens, people are becoming more like me.

Despair has its own calms, I suppose. And I enjoy a long night. But the fact that we’re so atomized makes democracy and self-government quite difficult.

Me: Vlad, you’ve been around longer than anyone living. In human form, you lived as the ruthless ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s, famous for your cruelty toward your enemies. Then, vampires became an obsession in the 1700s, and you emerged publicly in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and have been famous ever since. In all that time, what has changed the most in how humans govern themselves?

D: What’s changing the most is the very nature of what it means to be human. And that’s changed self-government and everything else.

We not only live longer, but we never go away. I died in 1476, yet I’m still around, sort of human. AI means that humans can stay alive digitally long after our human bodies are dust. We are all vampires now.

Which means that humans need to take a much longer view and build more flexible institutions. Because humans and vampires alike are changing so fast. Look at me. I started as this figure of fear—of violence, of disease. I was the bad, undead guy. But now in popular culture, I’m the cool Gothic mainstay, an outsider. Just look at how I’m portrayed by younger, better-looking actors.

The secret of my success is flexibility: I don’t fit into categories or labels. I’m good and I’m bad, real and unreal, dead and alive. And this makes me emblematic of what the British literary historian Nick Groom, in The Vampire: A New History, calls our “vampirocene era… in which the human race has the transformed the world, but in doing so has also lost its primacy.”

Me: Vampirocene? So, you’re saying the world is getting better?

D: It’s definitely more open, inclusive and democratic. I know that sounds strange—Dracula, optimist. But that’s only because so many people are still thinking too short-term.

Look at Romania. Just two generations ago, we were ruled by a far crueler villain than I ever was, Nicolae Ceaușescu, a communist dictator who built a society nearly as totalitarian as North Korea. But we learn from failure, not from success. Now Romania is in the European Union and the eurozone, and we have a real democracy, despite the pressures coming from that other Vlad, who impaled far more people than I ever did, running Russia.

Me: Aren’t you worried about potential right-wing gains in June’s European elections?

D: Sure. The world seems full of good men—but there are monsters in it.

There are always people trying to scapegoat democracy for our problems. There are always tyrants trying to kill off democracy.

Just like there are always people who hate vampires. Some hate us so much that, like that Buffy chick, they seek to slay us.

But no matter how hard they try to kill us, we vampires keep coming back, because people want us. Take Interview with the Vampire—it was a book, then a movie, and now it’s a TV show, all huge hits!  The same thing is true of democracy. Look at Turkey—its national government goes theocratic and authoritarian, and yet its cities respond by becoming more democratic.

Democracy and vampires have a lot in common.

Me: Do you really think that vampires can inspire a more democratic world?

D:  If an undead guy with a story as ugly and bloody as mine can still bring magic into the universe, then I’m quite sure that the living can collectively recognize that knowledge is stronger than memory, and conquer Earth’s scariest problems together.

The post In Midnight Interview, Dracula Sees Bright Future for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the first episode of AMC’s superb television adaptation, the white, aristocratic Lestat propositions Louis, in this iteration a Black Creole business owner, to “be my companion … be all the beautiful things that you are and be them without apology for all eternity.”

This Black queer reimagining—still set in New Orleans, but in the Jim Crow rather than the antebellum era—isn’t some anomaly in vampire fiction, but rather follows the larger cultural transformation that the bloodsuckers have undergone over the last two centuries.

After all, vampires never really die (Rice, for one, wrote 13 Lestat novels), but each generation continues to reincarnate them based on the fixations of the present.

British writer and physician John William Polidori is often credited with kicking off the gothic subgenre in 1819 when he published the short story “The Vampyre; A Tale.” But it’s less remembered that the same year Polidori’s narrative debuted (famously modeling the titular vampire after his demanding hypochondriac patient, Lord Byron), an American author knocked off the concept, immediately linking vampirism with race.

Set just before the Haitian Revolution, the novella, “The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo,” begins after a slave owner attempts to kill a boy who cannot be killed. At first, the vampire seeks revenge, but after marrying and turning the slave owner’s wife, the two not only form a family unit but eventually take a cure that enables them to return to their human forms and to Christianity. But their happiness can only go far in a world defined by skin color; the ending reveals that their mixed-race descendant, now a resident of Essex County, New Jersey, finds himself also experiencing “the thirst of a vampire.” As Katie Bray argues in her dissertation “Haunted Hemisphere,” the plot takes a wide view of race in America, questioning “not only putatively pure racial lines but also uncomplicated U.S. national narratives.”

Homosexuality, too, was present in early gothic vampire literature. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, serialized from 1871-2, became the prototype for the lesbian vampire novel, told through the perspective of a young girl named Laura who catches the attention of a mysterious stranger who comes to stay with her family following a graphic carriage incident. LGBTQ scholar Ardel Haefele-Thomas’ analysis of Carmilla and 1897’s The Blood of the Vampire, Florence Marryat’s story about a mixed-race psychic vampire named Harriet, suggests that both plots vacillate between “demonizing and showing empathy” toward their undead characters. This ambiguity—epitomized by Laura’s torn recollection of her vampire companion Carmilla, remembering her as “sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend”—underscores how these stories were not intended to be read as clear-cut morality tales. But if Carmilla and Harriet aren’t wholly demonized, their vampirism still makes them, ultimately, a stand-in for society’s fears, rather than fully realized characters with whom the reader can sympathize and identify with.

As it so happened, the same year readers discovered The Blood of the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s immortalized the vampire trope as we know it today with Dracula. To the Victorians, the bloodsucker was still, above all, a gothic monster.

It would take another half century before the vampire could begin to be re-imagined as a romantic lead, and daytime television is partly to thank for our change in appetites.

Dark Shadows, the ABC daytime soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971, acquired a cult following thanks in part to Jonathan Frid’s magnetic portrayal of the immortal Barnabas Collins, a vampire disgusted by his own habits. Then, five years after it off the air, came Interview with the Vampire, the debut novel of a 34-year-old graduate student in New Orleans. The novels in Anne Rice’s gothic horror series The Vampire Chronicles weren’t romances, but they humanized vampires, depicting them as three-dimensional characters.

Notably, Rice, who died in 2021, was a vocal champion of gay rights, and by treating her characters with care and giving them a clear homoerotic undertext, she invented a modern vampire. Joseph Crawford, a scholar who’s extensively researched the origins and evolution of the paranormal romance genre, argues that Rice helped to shift public mores, priming readers to be ready to accept this reimagining.

“The figure of the vampire has historically been used as a representation of marginalized and vilified social groups,” he writes in his definitive book The Twilight of the Gothic? and led by Rice, the “revisionist vampire fiction of the 1970s was, to some extent, a symptom of changing social attitudes towards such groups.”

Steamy vampire stories that were more sympathetic toward the undead skyrocketed in popularity, first in the U.S. and then abroad. Nearly a century after Stoker’s Dracula, even the Count was ready to be given a love interest by the 1990s with Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining (a genre-shifting, queer-coded blockbuster that Coppola made at the same time he was working on a project on the AIDS epidemic).

Vampire romances have continued to be in hot demand in the 21st century with the rise of properties like The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood. Over this period, the vampire may have picked up some new attributes (like being sparkly or “vegetarian”), but its basic DNA hasn’t changed; what’s changed is our perspective of the vampire’s condition. More and more, the public is considering what it means to date the other instead of demonizing it.

“Every age embraces the vampire it needs,” notes Nina Auerbach, a scholar of late 19th-century English literature.

Maybe there’s something especially hopeful, then, in the way AMC’s Interview with the Vampire continues to build on this context, bridging race, sexuality, and romance, with all their inherent nuance and complications.

Watching the show is a reminder that though the undead may be timeless, us mortals caught in their thrall are constantly changing. In this way, we, too, crave new blood.

The post Every Era’s Vampires Require New Blood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kern County, of course.

If a place could win an Academy Award for acting, I’d nominate the county at the bottom of the Central Valley for an Oscar.

A young director named Ana Lily Amirpour—who grew up in Bakersfield, the child of Iranian immigrants—recently released a low-budget but critically acclaimed film of the kind that rarely plays in her hometown. It’s called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In addition to being the first Persian-language vampire Western in movie history, Girl might prove to be the California movie of the year. Crucial to the film is how the small Kern oil town of Taft—30 miles southwest of Bakersfield—plays a presumably Iranian city named “Bad City” in the sort of indelible performance that might make Meryl Streep envious.

Kern County is the perfect setting for a Bad City because the place is so good at being bad. Its agribusiness uses lots of water imported from other places. Its cultural heritage revolves around music that celebrates being bad (from Merle Haggard to the metal band Korn) or defiance of opinion (the chorus of “The Streets of Bakersfield” begins, “Hey you don’t know me but you don’t like me”).

And then there’s the blood sucked to live on gloriously, which is to say oil. In a carbon-hating state eager to turn itself into an ecological preserve, Kern remains an unapologetic center of oil and gas production—and that’s been good for the place. Bakersfield in particular feels like an island of prosperity in struggling inland California; its unemployment rate, at 6.5 percent, is less than the state average (and two points below unemployment in Los Angeles). Here in California, it can be good to be bad.

Of course, the worthies in California government, business, and civic circles will tell you that they’ll fix Bakersfield, and the whole state, with high-speed rail, technology, and alternative energy. But can you trust them when they are so bloodthirsty themselves?

The vampires in Silicon Valley are sucking all the personal data they can out of you, for their profit. Hollywood just bit its fangs into more than $1.5 billion in state tax credits, which means that the 9,000 residents of Taft are subsidizing TV and movie producers. In Sacramento, public employees are talking about fiscal responsibility while spiking their own pensions, the pro basketball team has gobbled public subsidies, and politicians spend their nights on the hungry hunt for campaign donors.

In today’s California, who among us is not a bloodsucker?

Certainly, the heroine of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is. This vampire walks the streets of Kern County—OK, Bad City—after dark wearing a chador and sensible shoes. She encounters players in the local drug and prostitution economy and follows them home, where she dispatches them with the bite-to-the-neck efficiency of Jerry Brown handling a Republican challenger. But alas, this girl meets a guy, a dreamy James Dean type with a druggie dad. They don’t talk much, but they fall in love over music—“Hello” by Lionel Richie being a touchstone among the Persian vampire set.

This may sound campy, and it is, but Kern County, as its bad self, grounds the film. The “T” on the hills above Taft is visible in the opening shots. And the town, like any movie star (Taft’s oil patch has shown up in other films, most notably Five Easy Pieces), plays a character without losing itself; lights and Farsi signage were added to some of Taft’s less leafy streetscapes. There is an appalling lack of policing in Bad City—the bodies the girl leaves behind fill a shallow ravine without any forensic response—presumably because of the diminished police force’s pension costs.

The director Amirpour, in discussing her film publicly, has talked up her filming in Kern County. But she’s also been coy about what the place is supposed to be. “Did you think it was supposed to be Iran?” she asked one interviewer who assumed as much. My own take: Bad City is both California and Iran. And the movie’s appeal and romance has to do with that dual sense of place.

Bad places offer us blanker slates, where it’s easier to build new things and write new stories. Coastal California, which once offered so much flexible and open land for developers to build and movie producers to film, is now so cramped that you need to go inland to find anything resembling a frontier. It’s worth noting that a big Bollywood production, in search of empty vistas for a highway love story, filmed in Tulare County earlier this year.

Near the end of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the vampire confesses her badness to her love interest, and he’s OK with it. Then they drive off into the emptiness of the San Joaquin Valley, looking wary and happy. Maybe that’s because recently approved Proposition 47 reduces some of her felonies to misdemeanors. Or maybe it’s because regardless of whether you’re in a theocracy, like Iran, or a place with so much proscribed and regulatory goodness, like California, being bad can feel like freedom.

The post Give the Oscar to Kern County appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.