A Film Canon

If the Universal horror cycle aestheticised the collision of analytic and continental traditions, through interminable, self-defeating discursion, then the Hammer cycle aestheticises their reconciliation, through the strongest - and most literal - cinematic vision of English Gothic to date. Hence Fisher's Dracula, which not only restricts Stoker's narrative to Germany and Transylvania, but suffuses both with an exaggerated, almost camp Englishness, revealing the Anglo-Saxon within as an object of both operatic horror and broad comedy, and tracing its lineage to the hypothetical remoteness of period drama. The result is sufficiently anti-discursive to represent a break from most sound horror traditions, returning to the imagism of the silent era - or, alternatively, imbuing sound itself (and especially screams) with a plasticity that renders it almost visible - but bolstering it with an unprecedented prescience for the erotic appeal of blood, which is progressively abstracted from its various narrative functions to become a cipher for the fetishistic appeal of Technicolor itself, and transfused to the viewer through a panorama of rich, red surrogates, all centring on the increasing proximity of Dracula's bulging eyes to the lipstick of his victims. As this might suggest, it is not merely horror, but spectacle, and the sheer act of watching, that are eroticised, with Christopher Lee's iconic performance reducing Dracula to a disembodied, objectified, almost sculptural gaze - a cipher for the ravenous, ravishing eye of the viewer - as if he had finally located his reflection in the audience, and were violently embracing it.