"What you people want?” “Just a couple more minutes of your time, about the same duration as the rest of your life.” The bar scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s cult 1987 neo-Western vampire classic, Near Dark, is one of horror’s most iconic sequences. It marks a point where brooding atmosphere explodes into brutal violence, and it does so with consummate style. Bill Paxton’s psychotic Severen exudes an air of deranged menace, but when he slices the bartender’s throat with a razor-edged spur, he looks cool doing it.
“Near Dark and The Lost Boys both came out in the same year, which is crazy,” says Creeper frontman Will Gould, whose band sank their teeth into a rich vein of vampire mythology on Sanguivore, Metal Hammer’s 2023 album of the year and a fully fledged concept album that sucked in all the right ways.
“We took a lot of visual cues from both of them, but especially Near Dark. Bill Paxton’s character had the leather jacket and the sunglasses on, he was covered in blood. We basically based the whole look around that.”
Creeper aren’t the first band to draw inspiration from the blood-drinkers of literature and film. Metal has had a long and fruitful love affair with the undead. The Witch and The Northman director Robert Eggers’ high-profile remake of classic 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu is in cinemas from January 3. Its be-fanged antagonist Count Orlok – a bestial, inhuman version of Dracula – has inspired countless bands over the years, from Saxon and 80s thrashers Dark Angel to Darkthrone, whose drummer Fenriz has said that the frostbitten atmosphere of their classic 1994 album, Transilvanian Hunger, was influenced by the original black and white movie.
“Vampires are the most enduring character trope to emerge from the legacy of gothic literature and culture, probably because they speak to a need people have for something that is transgressive, escapist and romantic,” says Joel Heyes, a writer, cultural commentator and goth musician who performs under the name Byronic Sex & Exile. “They are essentially powerful outsiders who embody the ideas of romanticism - eternity, power, terror, beauty and sadness.”
There’s a lot in there to appeal to numerous outsider groups, but particularly subcultures like goth and metal, which come with a built-in preoccupation with some of the darker elements of life and death.
“For me it’s the extremes, which give you dramatic things to sing about,” says Will Gould. “You go from the highest form of crushing obsession and love and lust - the ‘I have crossed oceans of time to find you’ sort of thing - and then you have the blood and beheadings. It’s gory and romantic and brutal and I think that’s what keeps people coming back again and again.”
The original vampires of European folklore were monstrous figures who inspired genuine fear in superstitious populaces. There was a widespread belief in these undead revenants, as indicated by numerous ‘vampire burial’ sites uncovered by archaeologists and containing corpses with staked hearts and decapitated skulls.
“I think vampires started out as spectacles of horror that seemed to provide explanations for things that we didn’t fully understand,” says Dr Helen Driscoll of the University of Sunderland, who has a background in evolutionary psychology and an interest in vampire mythology. “But they have now evolved beyond that horror aspect. Humans have an understanding of our own mortality but we also have a strong instinct to survive. In many ways, vampires transcend human limits and we want to be like them.”
The first major work of literature to bring vampires to a wider western audience was John Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre (Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician and the tale sprang from a story-telling session that also saw Mary Shelley create Frankenstein). It was followed in 1872 by Sheridan Le Fanu’s groundbreaking novella Carmilla, centred around a female vampire, but it was Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula that really hypnotised the public.
“And the popularity of that really became the basis for what we see now, which is vampires being worth billions to the economy,” says Helen Driscoll. “If you look at all of the films, the books, the games and the music inspired by vampires, that is ultimately a result of Dracula.”
The character of Dracula was partly inspired by Vlad Tepes – aka Vlad The Impaler – a real life 15th century nobleman from Wallachia (now modern-day Romania), who had a penchant for skewering his enemies on stakes. His unquenchable bloodthirst has inspired songs by several extreme metal bands, from Marduk to Macabre and countless others. By contrast, Stoker’s Dracula was a more darkly romantic figure, and the book’s themes of sexual repression and deathless love are more suited to bands such as Cradle Of Filth, who have utilised vampiric themes and imagery on several songs, not least 2006’s Lovesick For Mina, which centres on one of Dracula’s female protagonists, Mina Harker.
“What I find appealing is the combination of polar opposites,” says Will Gould of the Victorian vampire. “Eternal love versus extreme violence and death. Love and death work against each other and it’s fun playing with those themes.”
While there was a romantic appeal to the vampires of Stoker, Le Fanu and Polidori, they were still very much portrayed as the Other; an antagonist to be defeated. It was Anne Rice’s 1976 book Interview With The Vampire that changed the game, painting the vampire – in the shape of main characters Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt – as sympathetic protagonists. The subsequent series of books (The Vampire Chronicles) and later film and TV adaptations fleshed out Rice’s original idea, introducing a wealth of undead characters wrestling with morality and immortality as they walked through the ages.
“With Interview With The Vampire we started to see the humanising of vampires,” says Helen Driscoll. “That was part of them moving from existing purely in the horror genre to being characters that we could relate to. We also started to see a moral aspect to vampires.”
Aesthetically and thematically, The Vampire Chronicles had a huge impact, not only on vampire lore and the horror genre but many areas of the metal scene. The presence of Lestat, Louis and their fellow vampires is in everything from the gothic sumptuousness of My Dying Bride’s A Kiss To Remember and Type O Negative’s mournful Suspended In Dusk to the flouncy shirts, facepaint and bombast of Powerwolf, who mix up their lycanthropy-themed songs with plenty of vampiric imagery.
Italy’s Theatres des Vampires have built a career on writing and singing about vampires. Founded as a black metal band in 1994 by vocalist Alessandro Nunziati before drifting towards goth metal territory, they took the name directly from Interview With The Vampire – specifically a coven of Parisian vampires who used theatre performances to kill in plain sight. Alessandro left Theatres des Vampires in 2004, and today releases solo albums under the name Lord Vampyr.
“In literature and film adaptations, they are cruel beings, but also very melancholic and profoundly lonely,” Lord Vampyr says. “But then the association is often made between vampires and evil or Satan, as in [1973 Hammer Horror movie] The Satanic Rites Of Dracula. It’s a versatile figure, so adapts to both gothic atmospheres and more extreme ones.”
The late 70s and early 80s saw cinematic portrayals of vampires turning increasingly more vicious and explicit. 1983’s The Hunger, starring David Bowie as an undead immortal, and featuring goth pioneers Bauhaus performing their classic single Bela Lugosi’s Dead, an homage to the 1931 Dracula movie and its Hungarian-born star, was an erotic arthouse classic, but it was an outlier. More typical were the likes of 1979 mini-series Salem’s Lot (claustrophobic smalltown dread and jump-scares, based on a Stephen King novel) and the aforementioned Near Dark (vampires as blood-drenched outlaw gang).
Musically, vampire-inspired songs were getting darker and more blood-splattered too, as evidenced by Venom’s Bloodlust and Slayer’s At Dawn They Sleep. The 1990s saw both the campy fun of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, with its alt rock soundtrack, and the more transgressive literary work of William Joseph Martin, who explored vampirism alongside sexuality and gender roles in 1992 novel Lost Souls (published under the name Poppy Z. Brite). The latter was a continuation of vampire literature’s exploration of queer themes, from the lesbian overtones of Carmilla to the homoerotic relationships between Lestat and Louis in Interview With The Vampire.
The latter book was turned into a blockbuster 1994 film, starring Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis (and featuring Guns N’ Roses’ less-than-stellar cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil on the soundtrack). Despite the initial reservations of Anne Rice herself, it was a surprisingly effective adaptation of the book. The same couldn’t be said for 2002’s Queen Of The Damned, a mangled version of two more Rice novels, The Vampire Lestat and the eponymous Queen Of The Damned.
What the latter movie did have in its favour was a killer soundtrack, written by Korn’s Jonathan Davis and performed by artists including Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and Disturbed’s David Draiman. The biggest vampire franchise of the 21st century was undoubtedly The Twilight Saga. While its metal credentials were tenuous, it did at least introduce a new generation to music’s dark(ish) side, with Linkin Park, Muse and Green Day all featuring on various soundtracks from the five films.
“That’s an example of vampires situated more in romantic fiction but the dark side is still there,” Helen Driscoll says. “In psychology, there’s something that we refer to as the dark triad of personality: narcissism, which is self-love; Machiavellianism, which is manipulative personality, and psychopathy, which is linked to a lack of empathy and guilt. We see those traits embodied in vampires but engaging with this kind of media gives us a chance to explore it in a safe way in a fictional scenario.”
That’s one of the reasons why tapping darker themes through music can be healthy. Which is just as well, because vampire mythology – and metal’s obsession with it - is as immortal as the characters it’s based on. Some of the more notable works of recent years include the post-apocalyptic vision of Justin Cronin’s novel The Passage, Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 arthouse movie Only Lovers Left Alive, comedy movie-turned-TV series What We Do In The Shadows and the Scandi-horror of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let The Right One In, turned into two different films.
“Let The Right One In was another big one for us because we wanted a more platonic take on love,” says Creeper’s Will Gould. “It was more about companionship and the idea of ancient vampires living through the years and wanting a connection with somebody. [Sanguivore protagonist] Mercy was based partly on Eli from Let The Right One In, but also Claudia from Interview With The Vampire, who is turned when she’s younger but is just as scary as the other two. We basically put a lot of classic vampire folklore and tales into a blender and came up with our own thing.”
Asked whether he’d accept if a real-life vampire invited him to step into the shadows, the Creeper frontman laughs. “Who’s to say I haven’t?” he replies. “But no, I’d like the power and the blood-drinking, but I’m not sure this is a world I’d want to live in forever. When you see me wearing sunglasses and covered in fake blood, it’s pure escapism."
Sanguivore is out now via Spinefarm. Creeper play Bloodstock festival in August.
