Dracula: Endless Night--The Story of an Unproduced Screenplay

Dracula: Endless Night will be the last of my four screenplays (out of six, all written in the 1990s) to be published by Ambler House Publishing, in e-book editions.

This version follows my “Theory of Dracula,” as woven into Dragon’s Ark: Dracula as a creature of enormous power, a symbol of the human wish for absolute power and total freed; a libertarian wet dream perhaps. This is a Dracula who loves being Dracula—as so many of us, especially men, might like to be, regardless of the consequences for the world.

Beyond that, there is little direct resemblance between script and novel, as I wrote the novel without looking at the screenplay at all and with only the barest continuity. You can read each of them as self-contained pieces.

I wrote Dracula: Endless Night in the late 1990s under the title Dracula: A Tale of Power. Why didn’t I start earlier? Probably a lack of confidence. For one thing, my concept of Dracula as a Superman of Evil, a sociopath with supernatural powers, seemed so obvious and simple, I was sure someone else—living in some remote wealthy castle in darkest Hollywood--would beat me to it any day.

But no one did. As I waited and waited, the film Draculas were becoming increasingly small and bloodless, turned to dry husks under the harsh daylight of Modernism, materialism, chronic skepticism and, perhaps, a misguided sentimental humanism that denies the existence and reality of the evil in all our hearts.

Finally, I had to face facts: to see Dracula as I wanted to see him, as he capered about in my mind and soul—profoundly scary and disturbing, mortally and morally dangerous--

I’d have to write it myself.

AND SO TO WORK

I set to work probably in 1996 or 1997. Writing took about a year and a half and nine drafts.

One of my first tasks was to reinvent the clichés that have accumulated for the past 100 years. The trick was to do it without diminishing or demystifying Dracula.

One thing I’d learned over the years was that many of the concepts Stoker employed in his novel came not from traditional folklore, but from his own highly fertile imagination. (Here, I’ll stop to thank David Skal, especially his brand-spanking new Stoker biography Something in the Blood.  For one, the crucifix as a talisman was drawn from a production of Faust, starring Stoker’s overbearing boss of nearly thirty years, Henry Irving.)

Then, there’s the Count’s non-reflective qualities; sleeping in a coffin filled with soil from his homeland; the use of garlic and wolfsbane as further talismans to ward him off. These were all inventions of Stoker, a non-practicing Irish Anglican. They were inspired mostly by his lifelong love of fairy tales and theater and further nourished by his career as both theatre critic and theatre manager.

Knowing all this freed me up (though pedants and purists might disagree). It allowed me to bring my own game to the table, set my own rules. I could explore another theme besides sex. Namely power, the “ability to do things,” as the philosopher/psychoanalyst Rollo May put it.

My Dracula would be about power. This, of course, is political, maybe even “Nietzschean.” To quote that dislikable demonist Aleister Crowley, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” would be my key to Dracula. Instead of Dracula as a winged penis draped in a cape and tucked in a tuxedo, he would be a fascistic fist smashing the window of the world, a militant hand grabbing, shaping, crushing our common reality. A pure nihilistic will at war with all the rules known, natural, human, religious, spiritual.

He is a Dracula articulate and self-aware. And wherever he goes, he drains the life and color out of everything, leaving behind a lifeless desert. His face peers out at us throughout human history, a face worn by the greatest tyrants and conquerors. Vladimir Putin might be one current example; the late unlamented Osama bin Laden (or “Osama bin Dracula”) another.

(I’ve just learned that even this concept is not quite as original as I thought, thanks again to Skal’s new book.  House of the Vampire by George Sylvester Viereck, a 1905 novel, explored the same theme, but there the Vampire’s powers were purely psychic, as he sucks the creative life out of a Bohemian community to make their work his own.)

I’d not read Stoker’s novel in some years and elected not to read it again, at least in the beginning. Its outlines were well imprinted in my memory, and with my own concept in mind, I feared confusing Stoker’s fever dream with mine. I wanted my Secret Self to do as much of the writing as possible.

THE OTHER LIVES THEREIN

And so we have Dracula, a monster for all seasons: black-hearted magician and ruthless prankster, a power-mad demon so in love with his own life, he can’t imagine it ending.

But that’s not enough. For him to be comprehensible and fearsome, the brave souls who take up arms against him must be equally compelling.

Dracula’s human characters are of their time, written for the mass audience of its day; to us, they seem flat stereotypes of 19^th century Victorian nobility, almost like foils to the invading demon. They are exemplars of manly Victorian self-confidence, sure in their faith that there’s not a challenge that can’t be met by stout-hearted Englishmen (even as they weep and cry all over the place).

Renfield and Quincey Morris, for example, seem like arbitrary fill-ins. They don’t make much sense, especially Morris, who seems parachuted in only because Stoker fiercely admired America and Americans. (Skal’s biography provides fascinating insights on this, especially Stoker’s intriguing friendship with one Walt Whitman.) Renfield, at least, expresses a grotesque sensationalism, even though he’s of little help to Dracula. He may be one of the most incompetent sidekicks ever.

I went about reimagining the other characters, all of them, to make them more vulnerable and interesting. It’s an ancient cliché by now, but Hitchcock’s rule remains true: suspense is character. I wanted characters that audiences today would fear for, both existentially and morally.

I fashioned Jonathan Harker as a naïve and rather smug Englishman abroad whose confidence in himself and his outlook are destroyed when he’s confronted by a power more spectacular—and infinitely weirder--than that wielded by the empire that birthed him. He must fight to regain his courage. His gal Mina Murray Harker becomes a woman who goes from being bullied (by her cold-hearted step-sister Lucy) and humiliated by scandal to a more mature and braver—much braver—woman than she is at the start.

I dumped Lord Goldaming entirely while building Quincy Morris up to a believable, capable—and charming—Wild West hero, one haunted by his past as an Indian fighter, but still a warrior and killer at heart.

And Renfield—the weakest and most wounded--at last, is of some use to Dracula. I also made their first encounter more logical than it is in the novel, where the Count seems to pluck him out of his top hat.

One the biggest changes relates to Dr. Van Helsing and his sidekick, Dr. John Seward. About this, I’ll say no more, except that, perhaps, my take on the good doctor trumps all others up to now (and you’ll have to find out for yourself what I mean).

As I reached the end of the first draft, I realized that one other change lay in store. My concept of Dracula made Stoker’s original ending unworkable.

As I reached the end, I picked up Stoker’s novel for the sixth time, with the Leonard Wolf annotations. I was genuinely surprised by how close my version stuck to Stoker’s story (except for the ending). I can only credit Bram Stoker for writing such a remarkably sturdy tale. Whatever its shortcomings, Dracula still stands tall.

THE STARS IN MY SKY

One question I bet you have is, whom did I envision acting in my movie, should it ever get made?  That was a hard one. One reason many versions of Dracula fall short is due to casting, mostly of the title character. Dracula is a compelling, hypnotic figure, a true star of darkness and only a real star of equal and unique stature could capture him. In the best film versions, Dracula not only sucks blood, he sucks the light and life out of everything. Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee all have one thing in common: you can’t take your eyes off them.

My list was a very small—and no it didn’t include dear Lee Van Cleef, who, besides having passed to the other side by then, was too much an American to play such a cosmopolitan terrorist. Christopher Lee was by then, too old, though I wondered what might have happened had I been a little more courageous and acted a little sooner.

I had only one actor in mind to play the Count, who could convey that proud strutting monster, who would compel the audience’s attention from first to last.

Namely, Charlton Heston.

 

Heston’s star, one of the very brightest of the 1950s and 1960s, had dimmed over the years. By the 1990s, he’d taken to character roles. I’d not seen him for years when I happened to be watching Alaska, a minor Disney film from 1996, in which he played a very mean and very nasty big game hunter targeting a sweet innocent polar bear, going up against the brave young people trying to protect it.

The movie was great scenery and not much else except for ol’ Chuck, who made a terrific villain, his chiseled face and ferocious stare shooting holes in the screen. Nor was this the first time he’d donned the black hat: he made a compelling and commanding impression as villainous Cardinal Richelieu in the best-ever 1973 version of The Three Musketeers, directed by Richard Lester.

As illustrated by the Dell book cover below (the first copy i ever owned), the resemblance between Stoker’s original conception and Heston was strong. I had every reason to think he would not only make a good Dracula, but a great one.

 

Who could play him now? It’s hard to say: Alan Rickman was another favorite candidate of mine. He, alas, is also gone. Nowadays I imagine Patrick Stewart as a most fearsome Dracula, though I worry he may now be too old as well.

Finally, sometime in 1999 or so, I finally finished Dracula: A Tale of Power and went through my usual routine of dozens of letters to dozens of agents. I even tried to contact Charlton Heston, via his son, Fraser Heston, a Hollywood producer.

This time, they all came back negative. No one even wanted a look (though Fraser Heston sent a very polite note). I had underestimated the impact of the Coppola version, even seven years later, despite my rather low opinion of that film.

Dracula: A Tale of Power returned to its tomb, to sleep, I thought, forever more.

RESURRECTION

As mentioned above, when I wrote Dragon’s Ark some ten years later, I gave almost no thought to the screenplay, when I got the notion that publishing the best of my scripts as little e-books—sideshows to my main event novels—this version of Dracula seemed a natural choice, perhaps as a finale.

As I re-read the script, I was distressed to discover that, unlike the other scripts I published, this one suffered from the strict mechanics of standard screenplay formatting guidelines. Both literary and cinematic horror are acts of hypnosis. The inclusion of stage and camera directions and all the technical specifications required by screenwriting ((EXT., INT. CUT TO, the dialogue slugs) broke the spell I was trying to cast, making it unreadable to anyone but film professionals, in the same way architectural drawings are only enjoyable to architects.

So, I rewrote it as a prose piece, known in the trade as a “treatment.” I think it now casts a much stronger spell. I also tweaked the title, partially at the suggestion of long-time friend and colleague, the ever-suffering John-Ivan Palmer, who thought the original subtitle was too much on the nose.

(I'll also stop here to thank Cathi Stevenson of Book Cover Express, who provided a wonderful variation on the cover for Dragon's Ark.)

I think you’ll enjoy this take on a great myth. You’ll find it suspenseful, terrifying, horrifying, occasionally funny, sometimes touching and always entertaining. Its flaws are mine, not Bram Stoker’s and I leave you to discover them for yourself. You will be surprised. You may be shocked. I hope you’ll be damned good and scared.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Cover design by Cathi Stevenson/Book Cover express

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel will appear this Fall 2016. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies and Now Speaks the Devil (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Scribed, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Exciting Secret Adventures of Naked Man

Author John-Ivan Palmer’s long colorful career in American show business gives him a lens able to focus on corners far removed from the experience of most writers.

Since the 1960s, the peripatetic Palmer, has roamed the country, first as a magician and, later as a popular stage hypnotist and mentalist. Along the way, he's written a huge number of of distinctive, often brilliant, articles on the often-treacherous ins-and-outs of the fading world of traveling show business folk. He is, in his words, "the only known literary author who is a stage hypnotist."

In his long overdue first novel, the farcical, roughly charming and racy picaresque Motels of Burning Madness (The Drill Press, 195 pp; available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc.), he takes willing readers on a fast, entertaining, bawdy, no-holds-barred voyage into the musky backwater swamp of male strippers and other remote bizarries of live entertainment in America.

Though very explicit, Motels is not a sex novel at all of the type found in Borders’ erotica section. Instead, it's a picaresque novel, a traditional form stretching back to Ancient Rome and Petronious' Satyricon. Set in the early 1980s Rome of Los Angeles, its protagonist is Huey Dubois, a 24-year-old gigolo and stripper of fine uncut endowment, not much brain, but more heart than you’d expect. Handsome Huey is a misfit’s misfit—a good soul who’s not much good at anything but being a prancing, g-stringed boy toy, and because of that, he always seems to be bumping n’ grinding away in survival
mode. He’s paradoxical young man: though an exhibitionistic gigolo, stripper (and other kinds of performance, er, artist), he pursues these pursuits while a sense of misplaced honor constantly struggles to break through his selfish exterior.

Even his own private desires make him a freak in an environment already a-roiling with alternative, offbeat desires (S&M fans and the like). Huey has little taste for women his own age. He likes them older. In fact, much older as revealed in Palmer’s sympathetic portraits of Huey’s three main forty years-plus paramours: Malibu matron Madelein; Debra, the abused, lonely wife of an L.A. cop; and, the real
song of his heart, Gloria Madlock, the late-night waitress at the Donut Hole for whom Huey loyally puts on a free midnight show from behind his hotel window, san culottes.

As the novel opens, Madelein from Malibu has just given Huey the boot out of her beachfront bodega in the mis-belief that Huey stole her jewelry. The next day, Madelein winds up mysteriously dead. Not surprisingly, straight society’s suspicion naturally turns toward Huey, who, like his associates in the sexual underworld, is no friend of law and order, lying to the cops even when he’d better off telling the truth.

Soon, Gloria herself mysteriously vanishes as the law closes in. Huey has to leave L.A., but on the way out, he takes us on a gamy, hair-curling tour through the underground of male strip venues, “staggette” parties, private video shoots, all of this arranged by some of the sleaziest, most crooked agents imaginable.

With the hot breath of the law steaming his shoulders, Huey jumps from a bedroom window and lands in a fugitive’s gig--a traveling male striptease troupe that takes him through Las Vegas and on a zany zigzag into America’s heartland (where the biggest audiences of all exist for this kind of entertainment). This barrel-bottom, Barnum & Bailey male animal act happens to be the hideout of a fellow narcissist whom Huey suspects made off with both Madelein’s jewelry and her life: the perfectly named Billy Slipton.

After a series of entertaining and tawdry mishaps—why anyone would ever choose this showbiz career path befuddles my comparatively conservative mind—Huey rips off and gives the nefarious Slipton the slip and sets fire to the troupe’s motel in his escape (hence the title).

Hugh finally tracks his beloved Gloria in Omaha, only to learn that she, like so many in this world, keeps her own secrets, even while parading naked.

After a pungent exploration and analysis of women’s mud wrestling (there’s actually a business and craft behind this performance genre), Huey learns once again he’s only found another bad refuge and so must flee. From there, he stumbles into my favorite stop-over in the entire novel: Clown Town, a bizarro setting that could birth a whole novel of its own inside its limits. (At this point, I must leave you to discover this community for yourself.)

At the end, Huey does land on his feet, a little wiser and, as he realizes with touching insight, a little older. Like other comic heroes, he may not get what he starts out wanting, but he gets something much better.

Palmer—who worked as a male stripper to research Motels (I doubt George Plimpton went so far)—describes Huey’s world with lively evocative care, insight, humor and remarkable kindness. Such a milieu is a natural target for easy putdowns and lazy, knee-jerk moralism. Palmer avoids both.

Sometimes, though, the narrative seems thin. We’re told little, if anything, about Huey’s background and the plot eventually seems to drift away from its whodunnit aspects. Motels of Burning Madness could have burned on for a few pages longer; for example, I wanted more insight into Huey’s brief sojurns of dancing in respectable middle-class households. Though, with a roomful of women grabbing at his intimacies, Huey probably doesn’t have much time to ponder the family photos he passes by and reflect on his outsider's role in the secret world hidden behind those bland smiling masks.

(Photo by author)

The Generic Year-End Book Review And A Christmas Note

Because everyone else does this and I’m as much a conformist as anyone—put a single malt in my hand, point me to the nearest cliff and I’ll run faster than any lemming in town—I’ll share my literary cultural highlights of this typically distressing year in this fantastically weird decade where "I Like IKE” somehow passed for useful wisdom.

As I reached the end of 2009, my judgment that Shoot the Piano Player, David Goodis’s emotional and bleak tale of a hard-luck piano player, finely and sincerely told, was the best book I’d read all year.

But wouldn’t you know it? The great Russian magician himself Vladimir Nabokov (Na-BOE-kof) slipped a last card into the TBR deck at the last moment with his great and magical tragicomedy Laughter in the Dark.

Told like a classic fairytale in a deceptively light-footed cadences, this stunning light-footed 1939 novel (Nabokov translated himself) relates the downward spiral of a stuffy bourgeois art critic whose obsession with a lovely (but untalented, callow and cruel) nineteen-year-old actress unravels his tidy consciousness and dull, but happy life. Nabokov would revisit this plot again in Lolita, but readers who may find that novel too dense an experience (not me) will find a fast moving, ecstatically written and suspenseful tale where never a word is put wrong (and wait ‘til you meet arch-villain Rex). I find the idea of novels centered around matrimonial cheating to be dull, but this is one novel I want to throw into everybody’s lap. Take my word: you will be entertained.

Another book that made me smile during the year was another early Nabokov work, his novella The Eye which first appeared in English in Playboy magazine in 1966. This wry spin of gamesmanship featuring another of Nabokov’s toxified romantics who thinks he’s committed suicide and become a ghost (Nothing to say on The Invention of Laura, which quietly awaits my eyes, but I sense it’s of more value to Nabokov scholars and bibliophiles than general readers).

Moving on: Peter Straub and Borderlands Press dished up a disturbing appetizer to Straub’s upcoming novel A Dark Matter in the form of the novella A Special Place: The Heart of a Dark Matter. As with many books I read, this is one of these things not for the sensitive among you,. Straub has taken a more stringent, spare approach to his prose in his recent novels and its works extremely well. The spareness makes this tale of young serial killer’s tutelage by a peripatetic uncle all the more upsetting and appalling, as it should be.

In a more historic-realist vein, Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer thrillingly dispensed with the notion that the Polish people failed to put up much of a resistance to the Nazi invasion of their country. It also made me wish I’d been hip to Furst’s work when it started appearing the late 1980s.

Loren D. Estleman pleased me for the fourth time in a row with another of his western tales The Wolfer. Published in 1978, it tells the story of a professional wolf hunter set against one of the great environmental disasters of the wild west—the near extinction of the timber wolf. With the passing in 2008 of Donald Westlake and the emptying out of the mid-list writers market (leaving nothing but God damned fucking juvenile YA zombie-vampire mashups--[Hey! Save it for the Ramsay Campbell discussion board!—Ed.]), Estleman seems to be one of the last practitioners of serious, finely-honed genre writing, a population I fear is fast-dwindling. I hope I'm wrong.

My favorite “new” writer of 2009 was David Corbett. The former private investigator published his first novel The Devil’s Redhead in 2002 and, I’m embarrassed to say, I only read it a few months ago. I promise to try to be timely when his Do They Know I’m Running? Comes out next year.

Another new old writer discovery was British author Nicolas Freeling whose entertaining, observant and nicely-titled 1966 mystery Because of the Cats this ailurophile came across in an obscure Berkeley used bookstore. Set in 1960s Amsterdam, it features a wry and world-weary Dutch detective and a nasty twist on Oliver Twist.

The Unique Novel of the Year award must go, however, to Motels of Burning Madness by a stage hypnotist named John-Ivan Palmer, who, if jacket copy veracity is to be trusted, personally researched this raunchy, wacky tale of a hapless, bone-headed, professional male stripper and his cross-country, cross-dressing journey through the grimy fringes of American show-biz society (I’ll undress—address--this entertaining, raunchy but good-hearted work at greater length in an upcoming piece.)

A CHRISTMAS NOTE:

I like Christmas. Like Faith and Unbelief in their purest, most demanding forms, there’s no defense for this position in either science or law.

The reasons why I love Christmas I won’t discuss now, but I’ll note that for most Americans the holiday has devolved far away from the original intent of both church and Charles Dickens into the deepest gutter of human greed to become a spectacle of sterile glitter, every moment flavored with anxiety, desperation, despair and debt. No wonder so many hate it. So, what’s the use of a hated holiday?

But recently, the stone cockles of my icy heart were warmed to read in a Slate magazine article (elaborated on in Time magazine) that a new War on Christmas has begun--a war waged by . . .

. . . Christians . . . .

Apparently, a large segment of Christians everywhere has had it up to their mistletoe with Christmas as defined by WalMart, Glenn O’Breilly, James Donahue, et al. (Something about Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple, instead of giving them the run of the joint while piteously demanding that they greet customer with “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” . . . sheesh!)

Calling themselves the Advent Conspiracy, this Plot Against WalMart-mas was hatched by an Oregon pastor named Rick McKinley, who, while sitting around with some of his colleagues four years ago, suddenly realized they were all dreading the upcoming holiday. “None of us,” he admitted, “like Christmas.” (“A Time to Worry,” as wise Mr. Boffo might say).

And so the conspiracy was hatched: to take Christmas back from the Capitalists and their scolding Satanic reactionary collaborators to its Gospel roots of love, charity, patience, forbearance, hope . . . all the values that you just know Bill O’Reilly hates.

The Advent Conspiracy's concepts are these: Worship fully, spend less, give more, love all. Which leads me to ask a question for all of you: of all those concepts, which one would you find the most challenging to live by?

I'll answer first: number four.

And so, a True Merry Christmas to you Christians who happen to be surfing by and to the rest, Happy Holidays!

There'll be no going to Hell for that.