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Anne Rice's Creation Meets the Vampire of Traditional European Lore.
Few are unfamiliar with the vampire of traditional Transylvanian lore. A ferocious, feline monster, the black-cloaked figure lives in history through popular oral tradition and literature. Bram Stoker's Dracula celebrates this archetyp, proving that an old myth can frighten to smithereens a contemporary audience. Yet, since it's inception in the seventies, a new fiend has grown in notoriety. Anne Rice's Lestat De Lioncourt, the leading man of her wildly popular, Vampire Chronicles is the flamboyant David Bowie-like Dracula of 70's, 80's, and 90's. And some could argue that he is robbing the archaic Count Dracul of his lure.
Vampires in all traditions differ from other mythical supernatural beings in their resemblance to humans. Lestat possesses human qualities such as a spirit and a mind. However, his character contains different proportions of these qualities than Stokers old Dracula. Lestat is godly. He does not readily embrace his thirst and the necessity to kill for it; rather, the 'hunt,' as his kind refers to it, is his existential condition. Just as humankind either indulges or reviles his or her primal nature, vampires, according to Rice, must cope with their own unique kind.
When He is not hunting the evil doer (specifically this brand of human, as it justifies his continued existence), Lestat and Anne Rice's other vampires are trading stories, philosophy and amusements with the elite, the eccentric and the pure-hearted of humanity. Lestat makes his lovers people Dracula would cower from, like a nun and religiously fanatical daughter of one of his very own victims. Free of constraints such as death and taxes, Lestat liberates those in his company and consequently, friendship is more often than not his motivation for initiating a mortal into eternity. Anne Rice's vampires are also like man in that they are 'social animals' and thus enjoy fellowships with other vampires and at certain points in their eternity most have been part of a coven. Their spirits evolve through time, like those of human beings; physically though, with the preternatural shimmer in their hair, their pale, marble-like flesh, crystalline fingernails and jeweled eyes they more resemble earthbound deities.
Bram Stokers Dracula is no exception to the rule, and like Anne Rice's Lestat he resembles man as well. Yet in contrast, Bram Stoker's adaptation of the nature of these mythical beasts reveals just that: beasts. Dracula bears little resemblance to humans beyond appetite. What is eternal is not his soul, like Rice's creation, so much as his insatiable thirst for blood. He kills indiscriminately, with neither a guilty pleasure nor moral qualm. In fact, it is man's spiritual beacons that he mortally fears, such as crucifixes, which I will discuss later. In short, it is very unlikely that Dracula would take a nun as a lover. The count is not freed by immortality, but imprisoned by it. Therefore he has no companions but those unfortunate's who find themselves like rodents in a mousetrap in the dingy abysses that he calls home. It is even less likely that he would live with other vampires; In Dracula's social habits, he more resembles a spider than a man.
Dracula's few human friends live as spiritually ever-deviating, reptile-like slaves unless they are made immortal. In which case, they transform into spiritually impoverished, reptile-like slaves with eternal life. No one in the castle evolves. The traditional vampire has the pale face and fangs, but he or she lacks the luminescent appearance of his or her successor.
Lestat, also known as 'the brat prince,' is endowed with an unusual wealth of talents and is the most passionate of Anne Rice's vampires by far. However, he and the rest of Rice's vampires can all be killed in the same ways. A stake through the heart or a crucifix won't do a thing to these nearly indestructible beings. In fact, as Louie once said in Interview with the Vampire, they are "actually quite fond of looking at crucifixes." Decapitation only delays resurrection, regardless of how the remains are scattered. The only two ways to kill Rice's vampires are by fire or by somehow placing them in the sun (which would cause them to ignite into flames, thus making this death a mere variation of the expiration by fire). And there are even limitations to this. As the vampires in the Chronicles age they become even more invincible. Against Lestat, for instance, the sun possesses only the power of a high powered lamp in a tanning booth.
On the other hand, fire would do absolutely nothing to a vampire of the old tales unless it was produced directly by the sun's rays. Anyone who has seen enough vampire movies and read vampire novels is familiar with the vision of Dracula running around doused in flames while his victims try to drive a stake into his heart. Don't allow yourself to be misled into believing that this fact somehow makes vampires of the older collection more indestructible. There are far easier ways to kill the Count. If you are lucky enough to find where he sleeps, which is a relatively easy task, all you would need is a stake and a capacity for stomaching the sight of blood to do away with this schoolyard bully. If you are slightly squeamish to the sight of blood, never fear. You can get a cheap tin crucifix from a flea market for ten bucks or less and do your worst with that, though truthfully all you need to do is hold it up to him, and he will perish within seconds. Suppose you are not the murdering type; just challenge him to a mean tennis tourney, and substitute that ball for a garlic clove!
There you have it; Count Dracula is a fossil with half the sensuality of Lestat and a quarter of the finesse. Sure, he can turn himself into a bat, but while Lestat is flying through the universe faster than the speed of sound, I doubt he feels the lack. The only thing these two former humans really have in common besides sucking blood and fearing the sun is that they both sleep in a coffin, and one can argue that Lestat has left that old habit behind after the first book. He has discovered that he can sleep in graveyards, beneath the Sahara sands and even buried within foliage on the floor of the rain forest. When he chooses to take up the old routine, he prefers elaborately custom built marble tombs to barely secure, rusty, spider infested castles in the damp mountains of Transylvania. And please don't forget that while Dracula mortally fears churches, Lestat has slept in one, just for the hell of it.
There is no further argument. They both possess immortality but clearly, only one seems to know what to do with it. And the popularity of Lestat over Count Dracula is not only a result of one being new and the other being old. The true fans of horror no longer want to be frightened by the mere fantasy of the fearsome. We want what scares us to our very core: Our selves. We want to see ourselves dressed up and romanticized, satirized and suffering and sinning. And then we want to see it again.
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