The Twenty-Third Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Blacula (1972), directed by William Crain and starring the profoundly sonorous William Marshall.

In the 18th century, the African Prince Mamuwalde travels to Count Dracula’s castle on a mission to enlist Transylvania’s aid in ending the slave trade. Sadly, along with being a diabolical blood-sucking fiend, Dracula is racist. In retaliation for being called out on this, Dracula assaults Mamuwalde’s wife Luva, turns Mamuwalde into a vampire, whom he dubs “Blacula,” and imprisons him in a crypt so that he will hunger in agony for eternity. Blacula is released two hundred years later when a gay couple (who are portrayed sympathetically—though, regrettably, the f-slur is used a few times later) purchase the castle and ship its furniture, including Blacula’s coffin, to an antiques warehouse in America. Blacula at last sates his appetite by feasting on the peculiar new-fangled denizens of 70’s Harlem. Soon, however, he runs into Tina, a woman who is the living image of his long-dead Luva. His conviction that she is in fact his wife reborn forces him to reconsider his undead purpose.

Blacula’s plot is surprisingly faithful to Bram Stoker’s novel. Mamuwalde himself parallels Jonathan Harker in that he visits Dracula’s castle in a professional capacity and dines with him, only to be attacked by Dracula’s brides. After becoming Blacula, he travels to America aboard a Demeter-like cargo ship and takes up residence in a Harlem warehouse just as Dracula did in London. Tina obviously corresponds to Mina. The other main protagonist, a medical examiner, is a combination of Dr. Seward and Van Helsing. And the medical examiner’s cop friend and wife play the Quincy and Holmwood roles respectively. Their investigation follows the same beats as the novel’s: they uncover a vampire in a cemetery and slay it; launch an attack on the prince of darkness’ lair; and try and fail to protect their friend from the fiend’s romantic obsession.

With its playful portmanteau title and mix-and-match premise, one would expect Blacula to be a comedy—but no. Aside from a few wry moments of satire, Blacula plays it straight. Both the source material and the new social context are handled with grave respect (pardon the pun). This direct approach thoroughly succeeds, though, both because a well-executed rendition of Stoker’s classic tale will always be engaging and because good drama in blaxploitation Harlem will always be incredibly fun. The wild contrasts between the original material and the milieu it’s transplanted into go off in the viewer’s head like fireworks. Added comedic commentary would just get in the way at the fireworks show.

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Since we’ve already discussed the vampire as doppelgänger and vice versa, we can instead use Blacula to examine another type of duplication: reincarnation. Of course, we can say that Blacula is a doppelgänger of Dracula in a metatextual sense, as a cinematic reinterpretation. However, the reincarnation of Blacula’s wife is actually not taken from previous versions of Dracula. Although the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows introduced this plot a decade earlier, as far as I am able to tell, Blacula is the first adaptation of Dracula specifically to have his attraction to the Mina character be explained in this way. The addition works so well at adding a doomed romantic dimension that it has been repeated ever since, most notably in Coppola’s Dracula. Tina, as well as subsequent iterations of Mina inspired by her, obviously is not aware that she is a reincarnation, though. Rather, her status as a double is something that the vampire lord imposes on her. As such, identification with the dead wife functions as a predatory tool for Blacula to control her response to his advances and to shape her self-image. Thus, the doppelgänger as reincarnation is not the monster of this story but the victim. To some extent, we all experience such doppelgänger-ization whenever we are compared unfavorably to our “original” versions, i.e. our precursors in some role.