Was the inspiration for Dracula actually a baby?
Reflections on my occult obsessions, vampire lust and the energy-draining power of small children
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When I was a teenager, I wanted to be kissed on my neck. I wanted to stretch it out, offer it to those I desired, submit to them as if role-playing vampire and victim. Often I’d feel frustrated when their lips moved elsewhere. Or when they kissed badly – those horrible washing-machine kisses of adolescence. ‘Go back,’ I willed them with my thoughts, wishing they’d obey. But I did not have the power to move them with my mind, and I did not yet know that words were where my real power resided.
I was a gothic teenager, fascinated by vampires, curious about witchcraft, keen on films such as The Craft and The Crow. I remember once, for a Design and Technology class, tasked with a project to make a perfume bottle (a questionable choice, I now reflect, for an all-girls’ school), I was criticised for designing mine in the shape of a coffin. I had called this fragrance Morbid, its hand-drawn font painted red and styled like dripping blood. But my male teacher felt it inappropriate, would have preferred a product more pleasant, less provocative – named something, I can only imagine, like Girlie or Glitter instead.
In 1994, Interview With The Vampire came out in the cinema. At that point I would have been 13 years old, so I must have watched it when it was broadcast on TV a year or two later. This film cemented my vampire obsession. It wasn’t simply the A-list cast of some of that era’s most charismatic movie stars (Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, Tom Cruise), and I don’t think I realised at that age how sexual it was, how homoerotic, though perhaps subconsciously I understood full well. In fact, that’s probably why I liked it. Beautiful men, dangerous and feminine, wearing frock coats, pressed together, close to kissing, biting each other…
As I got older, the appeal of the occult endured and offered comfort. My parents divorced when I was 17. That same year, I joined a boarding school for sixth-form. Each week while I was away, my mother recorded onto video cassette every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer I missed on TV; a weekly vigil to hit record as that iconic theme tune blasted out. She did not necessarily understand my obsession with this show (which was deep and still endures today), or that the characters Buffy and Willow were like friends to me, helping me navigate life’s challenges, but she knew it meant a great deal to me. Those VHS recordings were acts of love. And sometimes, even now, if I get annoyed with her, I remember this devotion and cool down.
My mother also shrugged off the sprigs of rosemary I began sticking to the doorframes of our new house – “For protection”, I said. And the little altar on my dressing table, with candles and dishes of salt and earth, plus a silver letter-opener of hers that I co-opted into a symbolic ritual knife. It was, perhaps, unusual behaviour for the daughter of observant Jews. But my parents never seemed to mind these pursuits. After all, around the walls of my childhood playroom was my father’s collection of 1930s horror-movie posters – Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and The Black Cat, King Kong and Frankenstein. As I played with my Barbie dolls and Thundercats, there they were, these strange and mysterious and monstrous figures as comforting as home.
That two of these posters now hang on the wall above my own children’s play area is no intentional mirroring. That particular wall happened to be bare, so we put the prints there. But while my kids don’t mind the pictures, some children visiting have given them a fearful stare. It’s possibly inappropriate, I realise. I may have to move them one day.
My vampire fascination was never about blood. It was about power and control and submission and lust. The unlimited potential of fantasy, the possibility to be someone else, the opportunity to unleash deep and dark desires in a socially acceptable way. I didn’t ever really want to be a vampire, though I dressed up as one often enough. Even that time my parents sent me to our synagogue for a fancy-dress party to celebrate a Jewish festival and all the other kids were dressed as biblical kings and queens. And there I was, with my plastic fangs, my fake blood, my cape.
I still love a cape. I’ve had a few. In fact, I wore one for my 40th birthday. I wrapped it around my huge pregnant body, which had grown for almost as many weeks as I had grown years. I couldn’t fit into anything else, and as I swirled in this cape – coincidentally, I note, by a brand called The Vampire’s Wife – I felt otherworldly.
Held inside of me was my second child, made of me, fed by my blood, a force whose physicality swept in great turns below my skin like an oceanic creature. By nine months, a foot or hand would push from inside, press its outline on my belly. I had created a life beyond my own, and when my pregnancies were successful – and two unfortunately were not – I felt powerful yet fragile, life and death precariously close.
But everything changed when I became a mother – that power dynamic shifted.
When my firstborn arrived, I began to think that surely Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula had to be a baby? It was uncanny how vampiric newborns were. How my own perfect and pure and beloved child fed off my body, sucked from my breast, turned me nocturnal. In his room, the moon glaring through the window while I nursed and nourished him, my son’s pale blue eyes would blacken in the night, as if he became another creature once darkness descended.
He dictated how I lived, even when it left me weak. And I was hypnotised by this child, enchanted, even as he drained me. I became his familiar. In loyal servitude to this new master. And it is a role I still inhabit for my youngest son. Almost two years since his birth and still breast-feeding (and almost five years into parenting), I feel drained of energy and yet still entirely enthralled by my two tiny masters. They are beautiful and exceptional and occasionally monstrous too. I would do anything for them, give them everything, even my life.
I am secretly pleased my children have developed their own special interest in what my oldest son calls “spooky stuff”. Pumpkins decorate our living room, a huge paper bat suspends from the window. My baby walks around saying “Appy Allo-weeeeen”. A glow-in-the-dark eyeball rolls along the floor. I wonder if I’ve nurtured gothic sensibilities in the same way other parents foster football allegiance or an interest in pop music. But let’s see. They may one day find it all very silly, or – worse – weird. They may not desire those 1930s horror-movie posters in the same way I hounded my father to grant them to me. My two sons are, surprise-surprise, their own little people. I cannot control their minds.
But for tonight, I shall dress in my finest black attire, don pointy hat on my head and help my children haunt our neighbourhood with their terrifying cuteness. And while my overall look is far more ‘knackered mummy’ than ‘mistress of the dark’, I shall suck sugar from sweet treats in a way that will have to sustain me for now. And I shall feed off their joys, until I rise once more, my power restored, a magical new season of me.
A brilliant read! The Craft is still my favourite film ever!
Loved this! Happy Halloween from one former (read: current) vampire obsessed ‘90s goth to another 🎃