Hideyuki Kikuchi released the first Vampire Hunter D novel in 1983, supplementing the incredibly rich milieu of fantasy entertainment that Japan had developed since the end of the second World War. The Vampire Hunter D OVA, released on December 21, 1985, is based entirely on the first novel in the series.
As of 2024, the author is still alive and the series is on-going. There are currently 41 Vampire Hunter D novels in print.
Enter The Vampire Hunter
It is the year 12,090 AD, and a vampire aristocracy has emerged as a decentralized but de facto world power.
D is a mercenary vampire hunter who wanders the wastes which prevail in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
The vampires are aloof, coming out of their baroque citadels to feed on their subject populations as it suites them. Meanwhile D, the dhampir, is the only force capable of standing between this predatory elite and their mere human prey.
‘Dhampir’ is what the products of human/vampire matings are called on this alternate earth. Though he is the genetic offspring of the most ancient and powerful vampire of all, Count fucking Dracula, D has aligned himself with the underdog, the human cause.
While he is an outcast in both human and vampire societies, D isn’t bitter about it. If there is such a thing as sigma done right, this man is it. Mysterious, alluring, riven by internal conflict, a lone wolf committed to the path of justice.
His left hand has it’s own face, it’s own set of special powers, and its own bad mouth. It is the physical embodiment of the Devil’s Advocate. This might be an oblique reference to the left-hand path of Black Magick. While D owes his life to it, the hand is like a fractal image of the turmoil and division at the crux of D’s being.
The dhampir is haunted within and without by a legacy of dark dealings which he can never escape. This is a case where the sins of the father are visited on the son, and his left hand won’t let him forget it, not even for one second.
In the english dub, D is voiced by Michael McConnohie.
I feel safe from the vampires listening to him speak. It isn’t surprising, then, that the female protagonist of the film and victim of the Vampire’s attentions, Ms. Doris Lang, offers herself to the dhampir early in the film.
But D must forego the human comforts of sex and companionship in order to resist being consumed by his own vampiric bloodlust. When he starts to get arroused, his fangs do, too. Not that this is central to the action of the film. It’s an element of his persona that is explored in exactly one scene. It’s awkward enough for the short time that it does come up, but the scene is worth referencing because of how neatly it reflects the spirit of the age that the film was born in.
The interrelationship of sex and violence is a theme which has always had currency, but it was trafficked with particular frequency in the 1980’s. Gothic smoke-show Elvira saw her advent in 1981; for all that she was just Moriticia Adams brought up to speed for a generation raised on cocaine and disco, Elvira presages a decade in which the popularity of horror as a genre would skyrocket.
Far from being a cult phenomena, this was a decade wherein primal instinct and atavistic impulse went mainstream.
Duran Duran’s song ‘Hungry Like The Wolf‘, released to international acclaim in the May of 1982, is a song which plays on the near proximity of violent and sexual imagery.
The English new-wave troupe was probably riffing on American pop singer Meat Loaf’s 1977 ‘You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth’, which opens with this spoken-word dialog between songwriter Jim Steinman and actress Maria McClain:
Steinman: On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses? McClain: Will he offer me his mouth? Steinman: Yes. McClain: Will he offer me his teeth? Steinman: Yes. McClain: Will he offer me his jaws? Steinman: Yes. McClain: Will he offer me his hunger? ...
- Surely this is drawing on the exploitative subtext embedded in the popular European fairytale ‘Little Red Riding Hood‘.
- Published as Rotkäppchen by the Brothers Grimm in Germany in 1812, the ‘Little Red Riding Hood‘ story had appeared in print over a century earlier in France under the authorship of Charles Perrault. In all probability, though, ‘The Little Red Riding Hood‘ story shares identity with a folk tradition that can be traced as far back as archaic Greece.
- Nevermind the fertility rites of Lupercalia; The Roman author Pausinaias (110-180 CA), writing in the first century AD, tells the story of a people who offered a virgin annually to a malevolent spirit dressed in a wolf-skin. The spirit would violate the girl, until one year a boxer named Euthymos came along to kill the evil spirit and marry the girl. In other words, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a modern adaptation of a myth that has run a several thousand year relay race.
- Duran Duran was one of the foremost pop groups of their decade. They borrowed their name from the then-and-now legendary psychedelic exploitation film Barbarella (1968), wherein the mad doctor Durand Durand perpetrates advanced forms of sexual abuse against the eponymous heroine in the name of evil. All of this is played off as being very comical in the film, but it’s hard to lose sight of what we are really looking at: a strobing pattern wherein themes of sexuality and violence are played off of one another in sequence.
- David Anderson, a neurobiologist from the California Institute of Technology, has demonstrated that sexual and aggressive behaviors emerge from the same cluster of neurons in male fruit flies and male mice. In mice, the neurons that govern these behaviors are found in the amygdala and hypothalamus. These are the most evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain; structures our own brains hold in common.
- The mass appeal of blood and tits, particularly when they are found in tandem, might be hard-wired into us.
- Modern astrologers take Pluto to represent the forces of sex, death, and regeneration. Pluto is the latin name for Hades, and Hades is the lord of the underworld. Pluto is therefore given provenance over all that is dark, hidden, maligned, and dangerous; things like sex and death, for instance
- Considered the higher octave of Mars, it may also function as a planetary omen of shocking violence. Change isn’t always pretty; after all, the total destruction of forms is often the only means by which a true rebirth may be effected. Thus the Black Mahakala, a spirit of material dissolution synonymous with death itself, is praised in Tibetan Buddhism as the great Liberator of Forms.
- Pluto entered its native sign of Scorpio in 1983, where for the next 12 years it would preside over such dark, hidden, or maligned phenomena as the Sword and Sorcery boom, the rise of Goth and Heavy Metal, the Satanic Panic, the AIDS epidemic, and the release of Vampire Hunter D. Like the sign it was born under, this film’s appearance was to herald the beginning of a season of rapid and profound transformation.
- Directed by Toyoo Ashida and financed by the CBS/Sony group and Ashii Productions, Vampire Hunter D (1985) was the first film of its kind. A Japanese handling of European Gothic horror firmly couched in the aesthetic tradition of English HAMMER films, it was replete with blood, monsters, boobs, ambivalent villains and jagged heroes. It was something that had never been done before.
- In the United States, direct-to-video releases had a potent stigma attached to them. Only the very worst productions went straight to video. In japan, a VCR in every home and a bottomless pit of demand for animated media necessitated the creation of the OVA market. OVA, or Original Video Animations, are anime designed to forgo theatrical release to be sold directly to the consumer for private consumption.
- The format had been pioneered in 1983 by Mamoru Oshii, who would go on to direct Ghost in the Shell (1995), widely considered one of the best animated films in any genre of all time. This new marketing and sales strategy gave film-makers considerable freedom; instead of depending on large family audiences to make their money back, it was now a viable business model to appeal to any sizable niche.
- Vampire Hunter D was aimed at teenagers and tired students and adults aged 20-40; its hyper-stimulating bloodbaths and carefully articulated revelations of the female form were designed to arouse and to entice, diving deep beneath the prefrontal cortex.
- The artistic and commercial success of the visual formula which Toyoo Ashida pioneered here would be replicated in a veritable storm of thematically similar OVA releases which came in the wake of Vampire Hunter D. Several of these titles were, like the Vampire Hunter D OVA, direct adaptations of Hideyuki Kikuchi’s work. Wicked City (1987), Demon City Shinjuku (1988), A Wind Named Amnesia (1993).
- With Hideyuki Kikuchi at the forefront, we should mention his long-time collaborator, Yoshitaka Amano. Amano had served as a character designer at Tatsunoko Productions for thirteen years before embarking on a solo career in 1982. First publishing his uniquely oppressive yet elegant and beautiful multimedia works in Japan’s S-F Magazine, Amano quickly became one of the most sought-after hired guns of Japan’s burgeoning Dark Fantasy scene. When he accepted a commission to illustrate the covers for Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D series, the assignment immediately boosted the profile of both Amano’s and Kikuchi’s work in what would become one of Dark Fantasy’s most fruitful partnerships.
- Amano’s cover designs so impressed themselves upon the visual perception of the franchise that he was brought aboard the production team of the 1985 film in his perennial role as lead character designer .
- In 1987, Yoshitaka Amano’s next big break would come when he was offered a job as lead character designer for the fledgling software company Squaresoft’s flagship Dungeons and Dragons emulation, Final Fantasy (1987). Is it any wonder, then, that D and Red Mage are wearing the same costume?
Within two years, the violence, sexuality, and otherworldly spectacle of Vampire Hunter D would be outdone in every respect by an OVA based on Toshio Maeda’s Legend of the Over-fiend (1987).
I feel that I must advise you not to watch this one. I’m sorry I even mentioned it. It was to illustrate how quickly things had moved from one level to the next.
I don’t say this to further entice you. I mean that Legend of The Overfiend was expressly designed to shred your head-space, break your moral compass, and to play it’s part in opening the gates of Hell on earth. While Vampire Hunter D has redeeming social value, LoTF does not. It is a virulent spiritual contagion doused in Illuminist, transhumanist, and technocratic fetishism. I’m pretty sure it was conceived, executed, and released as a brain-washing device by and for those same elements.
If it wasn’t, some maverick screenwriter sure knew a lot about the shape of conspiracy theories to come in a pre-internet 1987.
Who am I kidding. All this shit is profoundly damaging.
- Toyoo Ashida, director of Vampire Hunter D, passed away in 2011 at the age of 67. In the world of Japanese anime, Toyoo Ashida’s pedigree is a long one. A prolific animator, director, character designer, and producer, his legacy embraces a range of titles, most of which a casual anime fan in North America has probably never heard of.
- Vampire Hunter D (1985) and The First of The North Star (1986) are the directorial contributions which carved his name forever in the annals of international anime super-stardom. ‘InuYasha’ (2000) is another project with a high international profile that he was involved with; here he is credited in the role of key animation. If you don’t know what a key animator does,
“A key animator is the artist [who] draw[s] the pivotal moments within the animation, basically defining the motion without actually completing the cut. The anime industry is known for allowing these individual artists lots of room to express their own style.'
- Toyoo Asida also recieves animation credit in 1970’s Cleopatra. This was the second installment in Mushi Productions’ Animerama, a trilogy of animated films intended for an adult audience. It was preceded by 1969’s Arabian Nights. Cleopatra features a totally zany, off-the-wall plot wherein three people learn that an alien race plans to conquer humanity by implementing the so-called ‘Cleopatra Plan’.
- The three transport themselves back in time to the royal court of the historic Cleopatra to unravel the details of the mysterious but definitely sinister plot. Here, one of the crew conceives a passion for Cleopatra. Hilarity ensues, historical event are referenced, loosely obeyed and freely manipulated to tell a funny story framed in crude puns and big titties.
- In the end, we learn that the aliens are going to disguise themselves as beautiful women and bang their way to planetary conquest. The people who would love to see that were really disappointed when the aliens never got around to it. Perhaps because of that, the film failed wherever it went.
- It is said that the Ptolomeic Dynasty of Greek-Macedonian Egypt so ‘enthusiastically embraced inbreeding, …[] that the sixteen roles of Cleopatra’s great-great grandparents were filled by six individuals’. No shade on Cleopatra, or the late Toyoo Ashida, or people who are inbred, but the Cleopatra of the 1970 Japanese adult film does seem to have that Habsberg jaw going on.
- More on that later.
- Mushi Productions licensed Cleopatra to Xanadu Inc. in an effort to save themselves from bankruptcy by way of a subtitled release for an English-speaking audience. American theaters marketed it as a pornographic film, and as ‘the first ever X-rated animated feature’. It was neither.
- Awkward boobs drawn by Toyoo Ashida were simply not enough for the pornographic theater-going audience, who demanded their money back. Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz The Cat (1972) had become the first animated film to receive an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America a little over a week before Cleopatra was released in the United States as ‘Cleopatra: Queen of Sex (1972)’ with a self-applied X rating.
- The third installment of Mushi Pro.’s Animerama trilogy, Belladonna of Sadness (1973) might be more relevant to our discussion; for all that it does not feature the handiwork of Toyoo Ashida, it is heavily endowed with the sort of thematic content which would become the bread and butter of many OVA production studios working in the aftermath of Vampire Hunter D’s release and the onset of the Pluto-Scorpio transit.
- Here we find sex, violence, and revolutionary politics laced up in a tight corest of brilliant animation, but I don’t want to say too many nice things about the film.
- I suspect all three installments of Mushi Pro.’s Animerama trilogy were vehicles designed to surf on the waves that Barbarella(1968) had made, and Belladonna of Sadness retained all of the most disturbing features of its inspiration. Not only did Belladonna of Sadness retain those features, it took them to dizzying new heights which makes me question the emotional status of everyone involved in the project. Here is a film universally praised for its ground-breaking aesthetic vision wherein a woman is increasingly subjected to sexual torture and social abuse until she dies, but I’m supposed to feel better about all this because the French Revolution is fomented by her angry ghost. If you want to read a beaming review, read someone else’s.
- Leaving aside a critique of the intentions, methodologies and the immediate and long-term effects of the French Revolution, the romantic view is that it was a successful peasant revolt in which France became one of the first western nations to depose its own hereditary monarchy.
- Vampire Hunter D (1985) is built on the premise that ancient vampiric monarchies which thrive on the blood of peasants will reign on earth as late as 12,090 AD. This is a bleak prophesy which mocks the martyrdom of Belladonna; one which mocks every public institution that an American raised to believe in the Constitution would dare to invest their faith in; and one which might actually come very near to the awful truth of this world.
- I hope you made it this far, because this is where it starts to get good.
The City Drinks Blood
- The thing which made me think of the Vampire Hunter D film after all these years was the experience of downtown San Diego after dark. This city is 110% future-vampirique.
- Worse still, San Diego may not be unique in this respect; but it takes the eyes of a poet to see down into the truth of it.
- Have you ever listened to goth music?
- The basic waveforms generated by an analog or analog-modeling synthesizer are traceable throughout the modern city’s architecture; while the city is a place where synth-based music makes the most sense. They are in a sort of harmonic resonance.
- The ven diagram which compares goth music to the city at night might be a circle; consider, if you will, how fucking cold they both are.
- It’s hard for me to believe the city isn’t an energy weapon directed against the people that live in it, that these aren’t the vampire citadels of the far future that ‘Vampire Hunter D‘ was talking about.
- In the city, you can feel it all around you:
- The Vampire Aristocracy is already here.
- This is Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch: an entropic sink which draws blood and heat down into itself. It converts the human life-force into electrical potential, and exports this current as raw financial power.
- The machinery of the modern city, like all good vampires, leaves deformed ghouls drained and corrupted by it’s influence.
- Wandering benighted among a maze of faceless monoliths, blind in the unknown depths of their hunger and lost in the narrow valleys winding between these surreal peaks of grim metal, where is the hero that could break this gruesome spell?
Might Is Right
The Countess L’armica Lee becomes one of the most sympathetic characters in the film when she says,
'after all, neither honor nor love have any meaning in the world I come from. In the world I come from, there is only one rule: the strong shall live and the weak shall die.
This same idea has been articulated in various formulations throughout history. It even appears in Book I of Homer’s Iliad, the oldest book in the western literary canon, when King Agamemnon lords his power unfairly over the demi-god Achilles for no other reason than because he can.
Roundly criticized by great thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Cicero, and St. Augustine, L’armica’s Doctrine emerged as a distinct political and moral philosophy with the publication of Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 pamphlet ‘Might Is Right, or The Survival of The Fittest‘ wherein it is stated,
'Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice, but by Might. Disguise it as you will, the naked sword is still the king-maker and the king-breaker, as of yore. All other theories are lies and lures.'
Might is Right was published 4 years before the death of Friedrich Neitzche, and probably owes its own popularity to a philosophic ghoul which the madman philosopher had summoned from the dark depths of the popular consciousness, which had only recently been mauled by the onset of the Industrial Age.
Long-admired by assholes of every stripe, The Law of The Jungle which the Countess L’armica pronounces as an axiom is more properly called the Law of the Concrete Jungle, because even wolves do not abandon their wounded.
The unifying principle and singular law which reigns in this land of concrete, glass, and steel is the Vampiric Law:
NO LOVE.
- In dealing with the undead, it’s important to remember that they are already dead.
- Deprived of life, deprived of light, deprived of bodily warmth and comfort, the vampire is not an obligate carnivore; it is an obligate parasite.
- The Count Magnus Lee offers keen insight into how things must stand in the eyes of those who wear the gloves in this dire experiment:
“since we took control of their lands, the humans owe us something for the simple existences our efforts allow them.”
BlOODLINES
The Countess L’armica Lee is heavily concerned with the purity of her bloodlines. Aristocrats are always heavily concerned with the purity of their bloodlines.
This is, after all, part of the formal definition of ‘aristocracy’: Admittance is hereditary.
Aristocracies are devices by which powerful families cultivate, maintain, and transmit hereditary power.
When L’armica’s father, the Count Magnus Lee, who is descended from the originator of the whole line of the Vampire Aristocracy, decides to turn a mortal woman into his new concubine, L’armica becomes irate.
How could her father cheapen and dilute the ancient and noble House of Lee by bringing this mere human hussy into its fold?
It’s a good question, and the film gives us the prosaic answer. He’s done this before. He is bored, and immortal. He is going to use that girl, and then he is going to devour her in the narcissistic discard of the undead apex predator.
Count Magnus Lee is confident of his control in this situation, but the young upstart L’armica recognizes in this mere human tramp an existential threat.
She might be on to something. Consider, if you will, these thought-provoking parallels:
The Transmission of Wealth and Power
In Greek pre-history, the rule of a hereditary elite brought tyranny upon the people. In response, the ancient Greek city-states appear to have actively resisted the development of further aristocratic entrenchment.
Even in the earliest phases of recorded Greek history, hereditary claims to wealth and power appear to have been comparatively weak. In Homer’s Odyssey, the prince Telemachus, when faced with the prospect of his death, states
‘there are other kings among the Achaeans, full many in sea-girt Ithaca‘ (Od. 1.395).
The whole action of the Odyssey is stabilized by the central image of the wealth of Odysseus’ estate being depleted under the ancient hospitality laws by noble suitors who seek to join Penelope in her marriage-bed, probably as an inroads to the land-holdings she is attached to. Telemachus, son of Odysseus, is in real danger of being deprived of his hereditary claim to the wealth and power of Odysseus.
- Intergenerational wealth accumulation was undermined by inheritance laws as well. Hesiod, among the earliest Greek writers alongside Homer, bemoans in his ‘Works and Days’ that his useless brother should have inherited the greater share of their father’s estate. Wealth was coupled with land ownership, and land ownership was always divided and sub-divided among kin upon the death of the patriarch.
- At a generational level, then, wealth and power were both unstable commodities in the ancient Greek world. Perhaps this is all as it should be; after all, the ancient Greek city-states are credited with piloting the first representative governments in the western hemisphere. Even if those representative forms of government more often than not catered to the interests of oligarchies, it appears to have been uncommon for overwhelming quantities of wealth and power to remain concentrated in the same house for more than three generations.
- Later European aristocracies would not make the same mistakes.
- Marriage alliances among aristocratic houses were valuable not just for political reasons, but because they represented the transfer of assets. Wealth is rarely found without a reflection in temporal power.
- But international relations are not stable. Many states had grown into great and mighty empires only to collapse back into the obsolescence of petty fiefdoms.
- A vampire aristocracy which had remained stable for over ten thousand years would know by 12,090 AD what mere human aristocracies understood from at least the time of the archaic period in Greece; as well as fortunes could be won in an alliance of marriage, they could just as easily be lost.
- One way to ensure that wealth and power would continue to recirculate within the same family group for an indefinite period would be to… restrict marriage alliances to within the same family group.
- This is how the Spanish branch of the aristocratic House of Hapsburg famously authored its own downfall; too much consanguinity (‘Of the same blood’, inbreeding) over a period of two hundred years produced a string of steadily worsening genetic defects which reached their zenith in the birth of Charles II on November 6, 1661, who was also called ‘El Hechizado’, or ‘The Hexed’.
- Among his other handicaps (like the Hapsburg jaw I mentioned in part II), Charles II was impotent. Having produced no heirs upon his death, a war of succession would place the reigns of the Spanish monarchy into the hands of the House of Bourbon, where they remain to this day.
- Perhaps the Spanish branch of the house of Hapsburg was a grand experiment; by the time of it’s dissolution and downfall, techniques which would allow for indefinite generations of consanguineous marriage without producing catastrophic, line-ending mutations appear to have been worked out by other aristocratic families.
Endogamous Power in the 21st Century: A Case Study
We’re going to grab the low-hanging fruit by invoking the famous example of the Rothschild Banking Dynasty. If this fruit hangs low, it isn’t because it’s low on the the tree. It’s because it’s so heavy.
The first great scion and founder of the house of Rothschild, Mayer Amschel, had five male heirs, each of whom helped to develop the Rothschild banking enterprise into a multinational entity.
Solomon Rothschild opened the Austrian branch in Vienna; Nathan Rothschild opened the English branch in London; Carl Rothschild opened the Italian branch in Naples; and James Rothschild opened the French branch in Paris. Between the offspring of these four brothers, no less than ten consanguineous marriages took place, mostly cousin-to-cousin.
The late Jacob Rothschild, quoting his 19th century ancestor James Rothschild, said in a speech at Sotheby’s NYC on November 8, 2018:
'.. in our family, we've always tried to keep love in the family. In this sense, it was more or less understood since childhood that the children would never think of marrying outside to family, so that our fortune would never leave it.' [Laughter from the audience, and Jacob] You couldn't write that today.”
Not every aristocratic marriage can occur within the same bloodline, though. In order to avoid another Hapsburg fiasco, outsiders are strategically bred into the aristocratic fold.
The injection of fresh blood, so to speak, into a system which functions to preserve ancient wealth and ancient power, an ancient racket of dark predation lorded over lesser beings, is sort of like Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ if her famous Victorian romance also came with a subtext of demonic coersion.
I wonder if this isn’t the ultimate meaning behind Count Magnus Lee’s pursuit of the lowly ranch-hand Doris Lang?
Pluto, Persephone, and the Vampire Aristocracy
The vampire’s uncanny powers of seduction have been at the center of the modern vampire mythos ever since Bram Stoker’s Dracula feasted on the innocence of Lucy Westerna in 1897.
The conventional wisdom is that ‘sex sells’, and there is a large body of evidence to bear the old addige out-
But the enduring appeal of the Dracula myth might also be because the picture Bram Stoker gave us, which has in some way colored virtually every represntation of the Vampire since, is built on a much older template, one familiar to us by way of our lived experience.
The whole thing might be a repackaging of the the Greo-Roman story of Pluto and Proserpina, or Hades and Perseophone in Greek.
On it’s surface, this story functioned to explain the origin of the changing of the seasons to people who didn’t know science.
It’s easy to read in between the lines of the popular vampire myth and find basic features of the world we inhabit reflected back at us. I hope by now that I effectively communicated that thought. If not, there it is, stated in plain language.
This is something I think the Vampire Hunter D film has in common with the literary and cinematic tradition it’s based on. It’s a story so familiar to us that even the human peripheral nervous system knows it by heart. It resonates on a deep level. It always has, and it always will.
I wouldn’t have subjected myself or you, the audience, to such a rigorous analysis of the film if I didn’t believe it myself, but I have committed the sin of overpromising and under-delivering by using Vampire Hunter D as a springboard to talk about everything except the movie. Its kind of ridiculous and self-indulgent when I could have summarized my thesis in a brief sentence:
Vampire Hunter D is about a Vampire Aristocracy and it matters because the Vampire Aristocracy is real. There, I said it.
I have barely gotten around to talking about real-world vampire aristocrats, and I might never do it.
Because I am afraid to do it. For one thing, I get really triggered looking at this stuff. I feel sick and frightened just from making this photo montage.
No one is ever going to take us seriously, except people who already take this seriously. Is it worth dying for? Is it worth sacrificing your entire life, all your peace of mind, all your friends and family for?
I’m not that brave. Brass tacks,
It’s much safer to script pages and pages picking apart animated films and avoiding the real issue. Waste your time time talking about what happened thousands of years ago instead of what’s happening right now.
But the fact is, it might never have been necessary to reference Vampire Hunter D in the first place: for it is the myth of Pluto and Persephone which may well blow the lid on the whole Vampire Aristocracy.
Maud Ellman ends her introduction to the 1996 University Press edition of Bram Stokers ‘Dracula’ with the observation that: the many interpretations of the monster, from…
“[The many interpretations of the monster, from]...perversion, menstruation, venereal disease, female sexuality, male homosexuality, feudal aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the proletariat, the primal father, the antichrist' have render the figure of Dracula basically meaningless.”
But Bram Stoker himself had at least one meaning in mind when he forged a link between his gothic horror masterpiece and the weatherworn edifice of ancient myth.
In Dracula, The good ship Demeter makes landfall at Whitby on the east coast of Britain on August 6th, during the last week of the Dog Days of Summer, which are ruled by the Dog Star, Sirius. The crew is mysteriously absent, and the ship has run aground.
After the Dog Days, summer turns bittersweet. The wind carries Autumn on it’s breath, and you can feel the ground shift beneath your feet. At the height of summer, you begin to sense its opposite number. Shadows begin to lengthen, and the cold hand of winter begins to assert its dominance.
This must be the Cruel Summer that British pop group Bananarama was talking about in their 1983 radio hit; for The Demeter is not a good ship at all.
Instead, The Demeter is the ship which bears the casket of Dracula himself, and the son of the Dragon has come on business.
If you don’t get the reference, ‘Dracula’ means ‘the son of the Dragon’ in old Romanian, and that’s pretty bad-ass. ‘The Dragon’ is what Satan is called in the King James translation of the book of Revelation, verse 19, so in the heavy Christian ambiance of 19th century Europe, Dracula is like the son of the Devil himself.
Demeter is the Goddess of Agriculture in Greek mythology. She can be thought of as representing the soil, the crop, and the harvest.
Taking the wide angle, Demeter might even represent the earth itself. The Romans knew her as Ceres, where we get the word ‘cereal’ from.
Persephone is Demeter’s daughter. She is a complex figure, and that might be understating the matter.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is our earliest and most comprehensive source for the Myth of Persephone. Everything else either references this version or is a kind of fan fiction, like the Roman version we find in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter introduces Persephone as Kore, a word that means ‘Maiden’ in Greek. In her Maidenhead aspect I think of her as The animating principle; That self-generated chemical fire burning at the core of every cell. She is the spark that tells the seed to grow, and how to do it.
She is the Spring and the Summer, the pride and joy of her mother, and her wisdom is both innate and inviolable.As primal, unspoken intelligence, Koreis the initiator of all life on earth.
In the season of Beltaine, the earth rings around it’s own Maypole, and The Maiden’s song goes up when the whirling dance of the planet brings it at last into that Goldilocks Zone where Life can flourish.
In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the God of the Underworld is called Aidoneus. Aidoneus means ‘The Hidden One’.
One day while Kore is frolicking on the plain of Nysa, a fissure opens up in the earth. Aidoneus rides out on his chariot and snatches the maiden up, dragging her down with him into the earth.
The activity of Kore, as the embodiment of life itself, depends on the presence of Helios, which is why I think it’s interesting that Helios is one of the only gods who sees her get abducted. The other witness is Hekate, a hidden goddess. From the beginning, myth is keyed into the difficult relationship between interior and exterior, light and dark.
On one level, the Perseophone myth speaks to the interdependence of life and death observed in the cycles of agriculture. The burial and wedding of Kore the maiden is an allegory which implies the vegetative process, the way seeds are born from the death of last years harvest. And how In order to grow they must be married in body to the darkness.
The Persephone myth also seems to encode the Scorpio-Taurus axis, with the sign of the scorpion ruling over the onset of Winter and the Dying Season, and the sign of the bull ruling over the height of Spring. The signs are six months apart, on opposite sides of the 12 sign Zodiac; in the celestial drama playing out year after year, the Bull is metaphorically ‘killed’ by the scorpion.
With Kore’s disappearance, Demeter is devastated. She takes a torch in hand and dons the guise of a raven. Cloaked in the color of mourning, The grieving mother wanders from snow-covered land to snow-covered land inquiring after her daughter.
For nine days and nine nights, the goddess searches without tasting food or drink. The cave-dwelling goddess of the crossroads, Hekate, takes pity on the poor woman, and tells her where she can find her beloved Kore; Down below, In the dark halls of Aidoneus, who is Hades, who is Pluto.
It makes sense that the god of all that is dark and hidden, the master of the cold season, would insist on the company of the May Queen. While he stands in power over the endless rows of the dead, there is little warmth in the bones and gold he keeps in the dark vaults of the earth.
..But Pluto …
is Demeter’s brother. If Pluto is Demeter’s brother, that makes Persephone his niece. but nothing is too weird for the gods of Olympus; Persephone is herself the product of incest.
she was born from the union of Zeus and Demeter, who are brother and sister.
This is actually an angle which Pluto works in order to sell everyone else on the deal. In his overtures, he makes the point more than once that he would make a good match for the maiden specifically because he is her fathers brother.
In the context of creation myths, where origins are often traced back to a single pair or a foundational myth, incestuous relationships are sometimes downplayed or overlooked. This motif may also reflect real-world practices, as seen in the historical Ptolemaic Dynasty, the Habsburgs, and broader European aristocracy. These dynasties practiced endogamy to preserve their wealth and power.
Mythology often serves to transmit cultural tendencies and social norms. In the case of Greek myths, endogamy might symbolize both the preservation of a financial legacy and, potentially, a genetic one. Could it be that modern European aristocracies see themselves as descendants of the gods of Olympus, reflecting a deeper connection to classical civilization? The way some aristocrats, like Jacob Rothschild, speak about their family’s historical estates, suggests a deep connection to the past beyond mere financial investment.
Demeter finds Kore in the captivity of the underworld, and asks if she can have her daughter back. Pluto says no, so Demeter appeals to her other brother, who happens to be the highest authority in the Universe.
But Zeus also denies her request.
… whats a girl to do?
Demeter resolves to force Zeus’s hand in the only ways she knows how. She withdraws her gifts from the world and for the first time,the stark mantle of winter descends upon mankind. Men, women, and livestock begin to die in droves. Zeus soon finds himself deprived of the rich sacrifices which provide his lordly sustenance, and the king of the gods must yield to the wrath of Demeter.
Zeus sends fleet-footed Mercury down into the depths of Hell to fetch Kore out.
Mercury is said to be the most clever of the gods, the god of tricks and subterfuge. But Pluto proves himself even more clever than the god of thieves when he tricks Kore into eating a pomegranite seed. This small act inexplicably seals the marriage vows of The Hidden one and The Maiden.
The word Persephone means something like ‘Bringer of Death’; and it is this title under which the now-married Kore was to be honored as Queen of the Dead.
The pomegranate, which ripens between September and November, symbolizes the Fall of the year. In the context of the Persephone myth, it may also represent the beginning of carnal knowledge, the loss of innocence, and the first menses.
The juice of the pomegranite is naturally blood-red and it’s clusters of seeds, when exposed, look almost like the outer surface of a brain. To the ancients, this one-of-a-kind fruit may have represented the trials and grim transcendence of physical dissolution as reflected in the wave of death occasioned by the onset of autumn.
By way of the pomegranite, persephone becomes bound to the underworld in perpetuity. In a deal mediated by Zeus, Demeter is forced to accept a shared custody arrangement.
Under the new deal, for half of every year, Persephone would reign on earth alongside her mother.
For the other half, she would rule alongside Pluto as the Queen of Hell. As the story goes, the seasons as we know them were born out of a maidens capture; Autumn and winter are personified as the bitter grief of a desolated mother.
In volume one of the Vampire Hunter Deep Reads series, I mentioned how I find some significance or serendipity in the fact that that Vampire Hunter D OVA was released a little after the start of the 1983 Pluto-Scorpio Transit.
Scorpio is considered the native sign of Pluto; the sign where the rich God of Death feels most comfortable expressing himself.
Through the lens of the Pluto-Persephone myth, I am even more impressed with the concurrence; for Doris Lang is a clear stand-in for Persephone, while Count Magnus Lee plays the part of the hyperwealthy God of The Dead. D acts as a sort of dark Orpheus, or perhaps, a dark Demeter in drag.
As both May Queen and Queen of the Dead, Persephone mediates between above and below, seen and unseen. She is the gatekeeper at the entrance to the realm of shadows.
But this isn’t a service she volunteered for.
When the earth opened beneath her feet and Aidoneus set forth from his subterranean realm to seize the Maiden,
she cried out to her father for help. From high on Mount Olympus Zeus heard her calling to him, but he turned a deaf ear on her pleas. Not only did Zeus aid his brother in Persephone’s abduction; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter suggests that whole thing was Zeus’ idea in the first place.
This detail recasts Persephone as the archetypal high-value maiden being pawned off by her male relatives to the highest bidder.
I think that is what we are really looking at in the Pluto/Persephone myth. it reflects a social function- normalizing the practice of fathers selling off their daughters, sometimes as young as 12, for financial, political, or social gain.
Persephone’s example primed young girls and women to accept the judgment of their fathers, and to accept strangers as husbands; while Demeter’s grief modeled for mothers the acceptance of losing their daughters, almost as a sacrifice to the grieving goddess.
The protocols of the Eleusinian Mysteries are… well, mysterious. Disclosing the mysteries was strictly taboo, and if this taboo was ever violated, we have no record of it.
What little we do know about the true nature of the rites at Eleusis is drawn mainly from The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is speaking to us from a distance of about 1,800 years, and in coded language.
Archeological evidence supports the Homeric Hymn’s narrative, while also suggesting it’s sociological purpose:
Physical Inscriptions relating to the Eleusinian Mysteries invoke Persephone as Kore, the Maiden. While her husband appears alongside her under the title ‘Plutoun’.
In the ancient Greek poetic tradition, the god Mercury is sometimes given the epithet ‘rich in flocks’. That is, rich in the mobile wealth which characterizes pastoral, agrarian, and nomadic civilizations.
Pluto, on the other hand, is considered rich in all things that reside in the earth; Rich in minerals, metals, and gemstones. Pluto is thus the lord of those forms of wealth which imperial civilizations have historically thrived on.
‘Plutous’ is the greek word for wealth. ‘plutocracy’ is the name given to that system of government wherein power is derived from wealth.
In the Homeric works this is given an ironic twist; here, Pluto is most frequently referred to as being rich in the souls of the dead.
Waddesdon Manor is one of the most famous Rothschild estates;
Developed by Baron Ferdinand De Rothschild from 1877 to 1883, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England, is a testament to it’s creators lavish tastes.
The fountain of Pluto and Proserpina is the centerpiece of Waddesdon’s south-facing gardens.
Completed in 1720 for the ducal estate at Parma by Italian architect and sculptor Guiliano Mozzani, the fountain was likely an homage to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s masterpiece of baroque sculpture.
If they’re telling the truth when they say that all wars are bankers wars, once again:
Vampire Hunter D exposes the real-world Vampire Aristocracy.
The Vampire's Seduction: Revisited
Anne Rice’s ‘The Interview with a Vampire‘ was first published in 1976. I have to wonder if Hideyuki Kikuchi didn’t take direct inspiration from this book; ‘The Interview with The Vampire’ is about internal conflicts in the hidden world of Vampire Aristocrats who have ruled across the centuries from inside the deep shadows of history.
Rice’s vampires are as steeped in sex appeal as they are their own monstrosity, but the author was only widening the margins of the dark sensuality that had been intertwined with vampire fiction from the beginning.
The legend of the Vampire had always labored over the taboo.
Vlad Dracul, who lived from 1431 to 1476, provides the historical basis for the modern Vampire myth. His life and crimes were roughly contemporaneous with the advent of the moveable type and Guttenbergs printing press, which first saw action in 1436. Lurid novels detailing the atrocities of the cruel Wallachian prince were among the first best-selling paperbacks in Europe.
In Victorian England, human sexuality was about as taboo among polite society as impaling people on wooden stakes. Perhaps even more so; if the Industrial Revolution tells us anything about the Victorian attitude toward other human beings, it’s that it was inhumane at best.
Considered alongside the rampant human rights violations of Industrial Revolution, I have wondered if the Victorian social mores regarding sexuality might have had less to do with a commitment to christian values and more to do with a commitment to human misery.
When I said at the beginning that the theme of seduction was first married to our image of the Vampire with the publication of Irishman Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, I was being disingenuous for the sake of strengthening the identification of the modern Vampire myth with the ancient Persephone myth.
Bram Stoker was knowingly and deliberately cultivating this identification; he even named the ship which carried Dracula to England the S.S. Demeter. Bram Stoker’s real inspiration, though, was the work of another Irishman, one who was still alive and working when ‘Dracula‘ was written.
Sheridan La Fanu’s gothic novella ‘Carmilla’ was published in 1872, 25 years before ‘Dracula’. A point-by-point comparison of both works makes Bram Stoker look like a shameless grifter.
‘Carmilla’ had all the trappings of so-called ‘gothic’ literature- gloomy castles, forboding countrysides, and the shape-shifting revenant scions of decayed aristocracies who feast on human blood.
‘Carmilla‘ also had overtones of seduction, though with a distinctly sapphic bent. The blood countess wins her victims, all of them female, through her supernatural craft, beauty, and charm.
Rather than being based on Vlad Dracul, ‘Carmilla’ seems to be a pop-horror rendition of the notorious Countess Elizabeth Bathory. A noblewoman of late 16th century Hungary, Elizabeth Bathory made a name for herself by draining virgins of their blood so that she could bathe in it.
It may be that ‘Carmilla‘ has been overlooked because of the way it de-emphasizes the role of the male. The men in ‘Carmilla‘ are weak and ineffectual, and all the steamy action is girl-on-girl. Though they take different angles of approach, both ‘Carmilla’ and ‘Dracula’ may be read as Victorian period dramas; moralistic elaborations on the dangers and depradations of lust. If either work were so one-dimensional, they might have lived and died within the contraints of their own time; but both continue to resonate with audiences the world over.
By incorporating psychological and spiritual seduction into dark tales of murder, predation, and pan-generational intrigue, we are invited to contemplate trust, vulnerability, and ultimate betrayal by one’s own best instincts, directly undermining reality as the reader understands it.
This cat-and-mouse game of deception inverts the paradigm humanity is used to living in; the hunter becomes the hunted, and those who say prayers are now being prayed upon by those forces which prayer was meant to keep at bay.
So much of our life and culture as humans is symbolic. As such, it behooves us to understand the symbol systems which are in direct communion with the subconscious. Flies don’t just wander into the fly-trap; they are seduced into it.
I remember in 2016 when witches on Tumblr started sanitizing the classical image of Pluto the Abductor to give us Pluto the bad-boy lover, with Persephone merely disobeying the strictures of her mother to reign in Hell with the man she loves.
If you ask me, they are missing the point of the myth entirely. The abduction of Persephone creates winter on earth, which is how our ancient ancestors would have approximated Hell on Earth. Remember that in Dante’s Inferno, the 9th Circle where Satan dwells is a realm of perpetual ice; the deepest, darkest, and utmost pit of the Inferno isn’t hot; it’s cold.
This is stating the obvious but for most of our history autoclaves, canning technology, even grocery stores, did not exist. For anyone living an appropriate distance from the Equator, winter meant that what was growing would die, and that nothing further could grow; it meant strapping in for five or six months of bare subsistence, malnutrition, and all it’s related bodily illness.
Let’s face it, any goddess volunteering for such a service would have been a real bitch. This is the height of selfishness, and the modern revisionist interpretation of Persephone’s Abduction might perfectly encapsulate the narcissism spawned by the internet.
For a long time, the Vampire has been receiving the same treatment- it’s monstrosity has been progressively de-emphasized to leave us with a Vampire that is the embodiment of night, but a balmy night where the full moon lights your way; one that can be compromised with, one that everyone is in love with, something romantic.
Stephanie Meyers, author of the Twilight franchise, would resurrect the Sexy Vampire trope only a few decades after Anne Rice peaked, this time for a young adult audience.
While Anne Rice gave us a much more fair and balanced picture of the Vampire than Stephanie Meyers did, my metacritique applies to both:
Fetishizing that same creature which would regard us as little more than braying cattle is exactly what a Vampire Elite would want us to do.
It might be that the Vampire archetype has been called upon to fulfill more roles than were originally intended for it; for example, it is easy to read within the outlines of Morticia Adams, Elvira, the Hex Girls, and the whole Goth aesthetic, a post-industrial iteration of Hekate worship.
Hekate was the goddess of the Crossroads, the triple-headed Goddess of the moon and of High Magick.
To grasp the importance of this myth-image to the primal consciousness, look no further than Hesiod’s ‘Theogony’; his hymn to Hekate is the most extensive and elaborate of any of his passages addressed to any single god-form, even superseding the poets treatment of Zeus.
But for mere humans to honor the Night in the guise of the Vampire, one cant help but think of the psychological gimmick wherein the victim copes with their trauma by identifying with the aggressor.
The psychology behind this might be the same as what makes people of all ages press up against the glass of the wolf paddock at the zoo, eager to catch even a glimpse of that ancient terror. Even children admire the apex predator.
When it comes to kids standing in awe of the Vampire, my suspicious mind can’t help but feel like they’ve been conned into a form of death worship.
My favorite rendition of the vampire trope is the one we started with; the one where its romantic veneer slips away to reveal something hideous and demented, a naked mole rat of predatory thirst shivering in the lowest karmic hells of its own blasted soul.
This is the vampire we get in both Sheridan La Fanu and Bram Stoker’s pioneering Gothic horror novels. It’s the one we get in German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnua’s ‘Nosferatu’ (1922), which was an early cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s work.
It’s the source image that American hardcore group Bad Brains were leaning on when they wrote their song ‘F.V.K.’ (Fearless Vampire Killers), named for a Roman Polanski film of the same title but probably relating to the Rastafarian poetic tradition wherein ‘vampire’ is a term applied to any representative of the Babylonian spiritual system.
I’m not saying a good franchise should resist all attempts at innovation, but I think the vampire mythology continually reverts to its classical forms because those forms are the most resonant, the most psychologically pressing and instructive. The Vampire holds up a mirror to the absolute nadir of human potential. It is not something to be celebrated; instead, it is something to be resisted.
Magnus = Magus
The name of the Count in the Vampire Hunter D film, Magnus, is cognate with the Greek or Latin ‘magus’, a loan-word from Old Persian which is the etymological root of the modern English word ‘magician’.
The Magi were one of six Median tribes mentioned in The Histories of Herodotus (484-425 BC). This tribe constituted a hereditary priesthood which was alone responsible for administering the religious and sacrificial rites of the ancient Persian state. Their presence was required for state religious ceremonies to proceed at all (Herod. Hist. 1.132). You may recognize the Magi from the Nativity Story of Jesus Christ; The three wise men who followed the star of Bethlehem to honor the birth of the savior of mankind were Magian priests. Why was the birth of Jesus officiated by Persian magicians?
The Levitical Priesthood of ancient Israel, depicted in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, were a tribe which constituted a hereditary priesthood that was alone responsible for administering the religious and sacrificial rites of the ancient Israelite state. Their presence was required for state religious ceremonies to proceed at all.
Does this sound familiar?
Whats even more interesting is that both traditions were iconoclastic: they did not permit the worship of images,
and both were enthusiastic about animal sacrifice.
The outward similarities of these two priestly castes, the Magian and the Levite, leads one to wonder if their respective zones of influence would have overlapped.
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is yes, absolutely. I’ll give you the surface level;
In the biblical Book of Daniel, the Persian Emperor Darius appoints Daniel, an Isrealite, to lead the the soothsayers of his court after Daniel’s skill in dream interpretation puts that of Darius’ Magi to shame.
Is it possible that Jesus Christ was a champion chosen and elevated by the Magian priests to conduct operations against the Levitical tradition?
They were practically neighbors, and they were practically mirror images.
Was the Levitic Rite an offshoot of the Magian, or was it the other way around?
And what does all this have to do with vampires, anyway?
The Vampire’s Seduction is sometimes more, and sometimes less, but pretty much unequivocally portrayed as a form of hypnosis. Naming the chief vampire and antagonist of the Vampire Hunter D film ‘Magnus’ feels to me like a socio-political deep cut and a call-out;
the real black magic, the one true religion, the real seat of the Vampire King, has only ever been hypnotism.
Throughout all of recorded history, religious control systems are found collaborating with secular governments toward the end of effective state-craft. A basic understanding of this concept might be baked into the way we’ve named things.
Media was the name of the home of the Magicians in the world according to Herodotus.
Media is a word which is used in modern English to represent those physical formats which transmit works of art, or to represent the implements with which art made.
Books, CD’s, magazines, photographs, movies, crayons, acrylic paint; these are all different forms of media, or mediums; and the exploitation of mass media as a means toward the end of mass hypnosis is not a new idea.
Count Magnus Lee looks less like a sex-crazed Vampire Lord and more like an Italian Cardinal. ; can you think of a more strident example for the mind control powers of mass media than the abrahamic faiths?
It was the Vatican that gave us the final form of the Holy Bible. The Vatican is one of the most wealthy institutions on the planet. And remember,
"concentrations of wealth always find their shadow in concentrations of power."
In popular mythology the vampire is most commonly found framed in the mystique of it’s pan-European origins. Bram Stoker’s Dracula depicts an English Aristocracy under siege by a dark force which sailed in from Romania on the S.S. Demeter. Demeter was Persephone’s mother; get ready for a cruel summer.
In Kota Hairano’s horror-pop extravaganza Hellsing, Dracula takes orders directly from Queen of England.
This all gets really interesting when the recently deceased King Charles III of England tells us that he is a lineal descendent of Vlad III Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, who forms the historical basis for the Dracula legend.
Dracula is also the Illustrious Ancestor referenced by the Countess L’Armica throughout the Vampire Hunter D film.
It’s like I was telling you: The Vampire Aristocracy is Already Here.
Is it true, though? Is King Charles III of England really a lineal descendant of Vlad Tepes? Snopes says yes, King Charles III of England is, in fact, a lineal descendant of Vlad Tepes.
It is well-established that the incumbent dynasty reigning over England is non-native, and at least half germanic in origin.
But who were they before they were German?
Is this the dark force hailing from Romania to subvert the English Aristocracy that Bram Stoker was talking about?
In Hellsing, the Queen of England kept the Vampire in her basement as the first line of supernatural defense against the Catholics and the Nazis.
Snopes and the BBC can neither confirm nor deny a persistent rumor that the late Queen Elizabeth may have been a descendant of the prophet Muhammed. Yes, that Muhammed. First Imam and Founder of the Islamic faith Muhammed.
This gets really interesting when you consider that the Order of the Dragon which Vlad Dracula was named for was a Christian order- that the life and crimes of Vlad Dracula were framed by his conflict with and opposition to the Muslim Ottomans.
To understand exactly how high we should raise our eyebrows at all this, we have to return to the dark heart of the European Vampire Myth; to old Wallachia at the time of the Hungarian-Ottoman wars, to the time of Vlad the Impaler.
Tales from Old Wallachia: The Dragon and The Son of The Dragon
The Tale of the Dragon and the son of the Dragon is like an iron maiden of twists, turns, micro-pivots, folds and pockets, intrigues and counter-intrigues and eddie currents, gusts of wind and motivations unguessed. Please excuse the brevity, the gaps, and the broad strokes. My goal was ‘one page on the life of Vlad’ and I ended up with 2.3 instead.
In the 15th century, central Europe was riven by religious conflict. The Islamic Ottoman empire had waxed powerful, and was encroaching on the eastern borders of all Christendom. Vlad II was an illegitimate son of Mircea I, King of Wallachia, and had never been intended to rule anything. He was entitled with the Wallachian throne as a personal favor by Sigismund, Duke of Luxemborg and leader of the Holy Roman Empire, in honor of exceptional services rendered to the Order of The Dragon, a catholic military order patterned after the crusading Order of St. George. You know, the saint George that is famous for killing a dragon and giving people baths. Dedicated to the defense of Christendom, the Order of the Dragon also functioned as the Duke’s elite personal bodyguard. After joining the vaunted Order of the Dragon, Vlad II would thereafter bear the epithet Dracul (‘the Dragon’) as a honorific title. So proud was he of his new title and station that he would go on to have Wallachian coinage minted with the figure of a winged dragon.
Despite his other alliegances (I.e., to the defense of Christiandom and the Holy Roman Empire), Vlad II was compelled by his vassalage to the Ottomans to participate in an invasion of Transylvania in 1438. The Transylvanian leader John Hunyadi then came to Wallachia to admonish Vlad II to support his crusade against the Ottomans. Vlad II Dracul acquiesced, John Hunyadi routed the Ottomans in Transylvania, and the Ottoman Sultan Murad II demanded the presence of Vlad II at his court in Eridne (Adrianopole).Vlad II Dracul answered the summons, like a good vassal.
In 1442 Vlad II Dracul was imprisoned at Eridne, and John Hunyadi promptly seized Wallachia.
As a guarantee of future loyalty and compliance, Murad II forced Vlad II to leave his young sons Vlad III and Radu at the Ottoman capitol of Edirne as political prisoners before giving him leave to retake the Wallachian Throne. At the Ottoman court, the sons of Vlad II would share tutors with Murad II’s own son, Mehmed II.
When Vlad II betrayed the confidence of Murad II by sending a 4,000-piece calvary to resist the Ottomans at the doomed Battle of Varna in 1444, a letter Vlad II sent to the neighboring Transylvanian Saxons reveals that he “..left his little sons to be butchered for Christian peace, so that he and his country could be subject to the king of Hungary”.
Vlad III and Radu were not killed, though. Instead, Vlad III and Radu were being groomed to act in the Ottoman interest as puppet rulers. Radu converted to Islam, and would go on to participate in Mehmed II’s overthrow of the holy city of Constantinople in 1462. Constantinople had for centuries been regarded as unconquerable. It was one of the strongest bulwarks against the Islamic incursion, and it’s collapse marked the beginning of almost two centuries of military set-backs for Catholic Europe.
Upon the death of his father and eldest brother at the hands of conspiratorial boyars, Vlad III Dracula (‘son of the Dragon’) would return to his homeland in 1448 at the head of an Ottoman army as a claimant to the Wallachian throne. Radu (who had at some point been given the ephitet ‘the Handsome’) would remain in Eridne at the court of Mehmed II, who was now the Sultan and leader of the Ottoman Empire. Apparently, these two had become lovers. Vlad III and the Ottomans were repulsed by the supporters of John Hunyadi, the man who had ordered the assasination of Vlad II Dracul, and Vlad III Dracula would weather a long season of political exile in Moldova until the summer of 1456 when he would return to Wallachia again, this time buttressed by Hungarian knights.
It is here that the paper trail documenting Vlad III Dracula’s legendary cruelty begins. His first act as regent was to round up and have executed all of the officials implicated in the treasonous plot against his father and eldest brother, and to redistribute their wealth among his retainers. This move toward the consolidation of his power was regarded as necessary and just, but Vlad III Dracula’s embrace of tyrannical displays of ultraviolence would later cause the ephitet of Dracula to take on perverse dimensions; for The Dragon is also an ephitet of the biblical Satan.
In a conflict with the Transylvanian Saxons, Vlad III Dracula appears to have ransacked the cities of Brasov and Sibiu. The earliest Germanic stories regarding the Saxon’s interactions with Vlad III Dracula say that he dragged men, women, and children off to Wallachia to have them impaled on wooden stakes. The testimony of Basarab Laiota elaborates:
“...The officials and councillors of Brașov and the old men of Țara Bârsei cried to us with broken hearts about the things which Dracula, our enemy, did; how he did not remain faithful to our Lord, the king, and had sided with the [Ottomans]. ... [H]e captured all the merchants of Brașov and Țara Bârsei who had gone in peace to Wallachia and took all their wealth, but he was not satisfied only with the wealth of these people, but he imprisoned them and impaled them, 41 in all. Nor were these people enough; he became even more evil and gathered 300 boys from Brașov and Țara Bârsei that he found in ... Wallachia. Of these, he impaled some and burned others.
In 1460, Vlad allegedly brought more hell upon the Saxons of Brasov when he invaded Southern Translyvania and destroyed it’s suburbs, ordering the impalement of every man and woman that had been captured. By July of that same year, Dracula would address the burghers of Brasov as his ‘brothers and friends’.
Sympathy For The Devil
I don’t know what the Ottomans did to him while he was their political prisoner. His fondness for impaling people on wooden stakes makes me wonder if he wasn’t raped.
The bisexual escapades of Emperor Mehmed II have been a fruitful area of study. I don’t mean to draw a straight line between homosexuality and criminality, but the abberant behavior of Vlad III Dracula, should you take it at face value and not entertain the possibility that it’s all Saxon propaganda, forces one to wonder what actually happened to the man.
You don’t get fully betrayed by your Christian allies, with your own troops deserting to the side of the Ottomans, and then imprisoned for fourteen years, over rumors and hearsay. Nor do you take to having people of all walks and every stripe impaled en masse before you as a reflex in the course of a normal life.
He was at least mentally raped; after Vlad II Dracul betrayed Murad II, little Dracula was forced to take food, shelter, and instruction at the mercy of men who might kill him on a whim. Ottoman executions of political prisoners were usually quiet; a garrote wire around the neck in the night. This situation persisted far longer than even the best of men could be expected to endure without breaking a little. Vlad III Dracula was only eleven when he was passed into Ottoman captivity.
By 1459, Vlad III Dracula had ceased to pay tribute to the Ottomans. By 1462, the same year as the collapse of the great citadel of Contantinople, hostilities between Wallachia and the Ottomans had turned to open war. Not unprovoked, mind you; Vlad III Dracula had raided Ottoman lands, killing thousands of Turks and Muslim Bulgarians in an ersatz blitz over the border and back again.
When the Ottoman fleet landed at Braila on the Danube with an army second only to the one that had toppled Constantinople, Vlad III Dracula decided to pursue a scorched earth policy as he retreated from engaging with the numerically superior force. When Mehmed II came to the town of Targovis, through which the Wallachian forces under Vlad III had retreated,
...The sultan's army entered into the area of the impalements, which was seventeen stades long and seven stades wide. There were large stakes there on which, as it was said, about twenty thousand men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and the sultan himself. The sultan was seized with amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who had done such great deeds, who had such a diabolical understanding of how to govern his realm and its people. And he said that a man who had done such things was worth much. The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.
Mehmed II’s object was not the conquest of Wallachia; all he wanted to do was oust the trouble-making Dracula and place his loyal lover Radu on the throne. Despite several successful skirmishes against Radu and his Ottoman forces, more and more of the Wallachian troops deserted to Radu’s side. Radu also took pains to win over the Saxons of Brasov, who his brother had so grievously wronged. Ultimately, the terrible Vlad III Dracula was imprisoned in Hungary on the orders of Matthias Corvinus, the catholic King of Hungary who had previously encouraged Vlad III in his decision to throw off the Ottoman yoke.
While this isn’t the end of Vlad’s story, it should suffice to fill out a historical backdrop against which to consider the alleged ancestry of the English Royal Family. The Dracula legend is rooted in the conflict between Christianity and Islam. In the pairing of Charles III and Elizabeth II we might recognize a sort of bridging of the divide; a marriage alliance between the Order of the Dragon and the Dar al Islam.
When it comes to Vlad III Dracula and his attrocities, it can be difficult to seperate fact from fiction. His crimes hit the world stage around the same time as Johannes Guttenberg’s movable type printing press, and his gruesome exploits were gleefully embelllished with invented scenarios and accompanying woodcuts to produce the worlds first best-sellers. Perhaps because of his treatment of the Transylvanian Saxons, a Germanic people, tales of Vlad III Dracula’s calculated savagery are found in greatest abundance in the folkloric records of the Germanic and Slavic lands.
Romanian defense minister Ioan Mircea Pașcu has stated that Vlad would have been condemned for crimes against humanity had he been put on trial at the Nuremberg Rallies. An early best-seller about his ghastly exploits produced at Nuremberg in 1499 has him dining peacefully in the open air at a table surrounded by impaled corpses. It would seem he already has been put on trial at Nuremberg.
Embellishments of the infamous and troubled figure of Wallachia’s son of the Dragon are still producing best-sellers. There is an upcoming CG animation adaptation of Hideyuki Kukichi’s novels that will be released as Vampire Hunter D: Resurrection.
After so such a rich tapestry of information, you were probably expecting some grand statement or powerful and satisfying conclusion. I’m sorry, this article ends just like the Vampire Hunter D film. The earth opens up to swallow the Vampire’s dark castle, and our journey through the wastes of 12,090 AD continues.
1998: Love Letter to Vampire Hunter
In 1998, the video rental store was a cultural institution; a staple of the American Weekend. Either as a joke, on accident, or as a part of some sinister plot to traumatize and ensorcel children, our local video store had placed their full catalog of intense Japanese anime intended for an adult audience in the children’s section. With the help of our naive parents, all us kids got dosed on films like Lily C.A.T (1987), Wicked City (1988), Akira (1988), Ghost in The Shell (1993), 3×3 Eyes (1991), Mermaid Scar (1993), Psycho Diver (1997), and Ninja Scroll (1993).
I dont know if we were the right age for any of this stuff, but it felt appropriate-
Jamie down the street had already been collecting Spawn comics for a few years. Spawn was an American comic book franchise by the soon-to-be-bankrupt and now largely unsung Todd Mcfarlane about hell and vengeange which was as deeply shadowed and excessively violent as any of the Japanese imports. Cartoon Network’s ‘Toonami’ was a little over a year old, which would have been our second exposure to Japanese animation after reruns of Dragon Ball (1986-1989) and Sailor Moon (1992-1997). The first Resident Evil game had just been released, and South Park (1997-) was about three seasons deep. Its possible that we were just fixated on whatever was most lurid, most transgressive and gratuitous; we were, after all, children of the same cultural zeitgiest which had given the world such dubious gifts as ‘Beavis and Butthead‘ (1993-1997), ‘Aeon Flux‘ (1991-1995), and purple ketchup.
It was the year before our final year of Elementary School, and we were treading on the razors edge of childhoods end without knowing what it meant. All this adult content had been packaged in such a way that children just like us might eagerly devour it, and we did. This shit was like candy to us. Adult anime from the kids section at the movie store was like Warheads and Surge from the gas station. It was like paintball mode in Golden Eye 4-player mode.
From where im sitting it looks like America washed down the 90’s with a cocktail slurry of Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and Monica Louinski’s famous blowjob while I was fucked up on Mountain Dew, Surge, Wishbone, Gameboy Color, and Digimon. Starkly contrasting phases of life were about to collide in the crucible of middle school. Bullying, substance abuse, prescription drugs, school shootings, awareness of the escalating armed conflict in the middle east, petty crime and mental illness were about to take their tole. We were kids basking in a midsummer’s twilight ambiance of cartoon violence. Maybe we knew winter was coming. We needed to peer beyond the cheap facade of the impendingadulthood our parents and teachers were willing to show us and out into these electrifying, fetishistic neon renditions of some of the very worst of humanities’ collective imaginings We were like zoo-goers that through thick glass at brightly colored, venomous serpents.
1985’s Gothic fantasy-horror title, ‘Vampire hunter D’ was the first adult OVA (Original Video Animation) I ever watched. It was on a summer night in a three-room Coleman tent set up in Jamie’s backyard, with power run in from the kitchen on a bright orange extension cord. It was a first for me in a lot of ways. The first time staying up until 3 in the morning tweaking on caffeine, It was the first time I saw large quantities of blood and viscera being spilled in inks which seemed to florescence on the television screen like burning neon; the first time I saw a bouncing titty; and it was the first time I had ever watched anything about vampires without it contaminating my sleeping patterns with waking nightmares.
I don’t know what it was that I had seen. Francis Ford Copplas 1992 ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ (1996), the Legacy of Cain? An episode of Tales from The Crypt? Content monitoring in the 90’s was shit. At some point I had begun taking pains every night after I was in bed and the lights were out to wrap a second blanket around my ears and head and neck, so that the vampires couldn’t get me. This was a real fear. Even after my neck was secure beneath several layers of twisted blanket, I would stare out from my makeshift hood, peering into the dark to try and discern the shape of that which I feared. It lurked in the pitch black of the corners and the of the closet, waiting for me to let my guard down, and it knew that I knew it. Things went on like this for months.
I think Vampire Hunter D cured me of the habit.
The shock and the indulgent splendor of it all has long since given way to a self-conscious awareness of how goofy the film might actually be.
And yet.
The more time I have spent with it, the more I have managed to convince myself that it is a bonafide masterpiece.
In the 5th grade, I might have thought that the films’ genius lay in the way it skillfully contrasted men and monsters, titties and blood, the past and the future, death and love. Now I think that is a film of authentic power. It breaks the fourth wall and strikes up a deep and visceral resonance by pointing to salient features of the reality we inhabit. More than a metaphor, it might be a near-perfect deconstruction of the social and political mechanisms which have shaped the modern world, and of the ethos which has under-girded the entire colonial-industrial project.
You can watch it here:
