Creature Double Feature, Dracula, Poe, Bradbury, American popular culture archetypes

Wednesday 5/15/24

I did a little detective work today to see if I could pinpoint a date to when I first saw 1931's Dracula--or, rather, about half of it. I entered in media res. I was four-years-old. It was on Creature Double Feature. I have to go over this essay I just wrote about Dracula in the AM. It's about 2700 words long.

Creature Double Feature was a horror fan's delight in the Boston area, especially if you were a kid who liked classic horror. Why if you were a kid? It started in the early afternoon. Now, this didn't mean you stayed in watching Creature Double Feature rather than going outside. But let's say it was the winter and it was freezing and snowing, or it was a spring day with the rain coming down, or, in my case, you were essentially marooned at your grandmother's house for some family activity, and you found a way to break free to the family room.

A lot of horror films--because they're horror films--air at night. If you were a kid, they might have come on after your bedtime. Black and white horror films--like the early run of Universal pictures in the undead/monster vein--were often the stuff of the very late hours, when you had virtually no shot of seeing them. They were for people watching TV at one in the morning.

Between the films on this program--and enough snowy and rainy days--and the books I managed to get my hands on, I had quite an early education in cinematic horror. From those films, I moved to horror literature. I first remember reading Poe at seven or eight and thinking him...turgid. Even then, on some level, I realized that he was more of a conceptualist than a writer. Ray Bradbury is the same way, but with a different style. Poe was turgid, Bradbury could be a very lazy pulp-type of writer. A Bradbury story is an idea, but rarely do his stories integrate. You read the first few paragraphs and it's so half-assed, like he's thinking he doesn't even need to try. A newspaperman writing fiction. Then you'll get a paragraph where he puts in a bit more effort.

Dracula struck me as mind-blowing in its impact. I knew I was watching the first of something. A patriarch of a film. A forefather of American popular culture. Or at least a figure that was there fairly early on.

Our pre-Dracula archetypes were Ben Franklin, Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, a few baseball players, the Headless Horseman. What else? Lizzie Borden? One if by land. Salem witches? George Washington. Casey at the Bat. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Billy the Kid. That was early America, even if Finn especially is this timelessly primordial--as in, perpetually fresh out of the soup--construct of the pre-American American.

Lugosi's Dracula was modern-era American popular culture. By way of England. And Hungary. And Broadway. And Hollywood. The vampire legend was rendered anew--modern--by the silver screen. There was a front-and-center placement because of the medium in the popular culture. That movie was to movies as the Yardbirds were to rock and roll. What--or who--influenced more of that which in turn followed? Think of the range of that picture's influence. What it opened up. What in turn fed off of it.

This was arguably our first official supernatural film. Previously, you'd get this shoehorned explanation at the end of "horror" pictures. It was these jittery crooks holed up in the old manse. That kind of thing.

I always knew certain things were different. I heard "Penny Lane" for the first time around this period, and I thought, "Different." It wasn't like the other things on the oldies station. People say Dracula is a relic, but that to me is no more accurate or viable a statement than saying that dust seen floating in the last of the sun's rays on an autumn day makes for a relic. That's not what that is. It's a visible--but evanescent--liminal state. Two, if you like. A place, and sighting of, what's between afternoon and evening, light and dark, and corporeal life--for we are observing this dust--and that to which we return. So, three, really.