Movies - Blood for Dracula

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Blood for Dracula is a 1974 film by Paul Morrissey, starring Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, Maxime McKendry and Arno Juerging. Roman Polanski and Vittorio de Sica appear in cameo parts.

The film is shot on beautiful locations in Italy and was partly improvised as the filming of Flesh for Frankenstein had been quicker and less costly than expected.

Like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu
(1979) was more a politcal allegory using the imagery of Murnau's silent classic more than it was a horror movie, so it is with Morrisey. Although less explicitly than in the Frankenstein film, where modernity was described in an Anthony Giddens-like discourse, as a "juggernaut" out of control, the theme in the Dracula film is more focused on the values of the "new" and the "old" world.

Morrisey lets De Sica and his family represent European traditional values, and produces a narrative of a doomed Europe that is self-destructing as the bourgeoisie attempts to survive making an alliance with the aristocracy while the aristocracy (represented by the pathetic Dracula in what some consider one of Kier's best performances) is losing the battle of power against the powers of industry and modernity.

Dracula travels from Transylvania to Italy in his search for virgin blood as he believes the moral values in a Catholic country must be better than the increasing unmorality of the modern world. Here he meets the conservative De Sica who wants to marry off his daughters in order to provide a source of income, as he cannot take care of his duty as a protector of culture at the brink of economic ruin.

Modernity is, however, already in the process of seducing the young and innocent, conceptualized as a combination of Marxist beliefs and American pragmatisms (the Brooklyn-accented Joe Dallesandro), as Morrisey is saying that the conflict of the day is not Capitalims vs Communism but rather Modernity vs Traditionalsm.

Like comparable films of the period, La Grande Bouffe for instance, there is no sense of good vs evil. Dracula is tragic while our Marxist "hero" is oppressive and ruthless. The question the film rather seems to raise has to do with whether the moderns ("Protestants") and their belief in progress produces an ethic that is more sound than the belief in social order and stability ("Catholics").

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Movies - Blood for Dracula

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