In an interview on Horror

Your whole fascination with horror started with Dracula, but it was the film that got you into the book.

Yes, that’s true. I saw the Bela Lugosi movie before I read the book. I was about 11 years old and I managed to persuade my parents to let me stay up late at night to watch it. I did actually read the book very soon after that. In those days if you saw something and you liked it you couldn’t go out and get the DVD – the book was often the only sort of extra merchandise that was about.

So what was it about Dracula that grabbed you?

Of all the books I’ve listed here it’s actually the worst! It’s full of things that don’t work or are overdone. But, even though it’s an 1890s novel, there’s still a real narrative drive, even when it hares all over the place and changes points of view. I love all that stuff with the train timetables and the newspapers and the diary extracts which go out of their way to convince you that the whole book might be true. It’s one of those things where the whole cultural impact is greater than the book itself. Actually, I don’t think it’s as good as Carmilla. But it is still undoubtedly the great vampire novel. There wouldn’t be a whole rack of vampire books in bookshops if it wasn’t for Dracula. Other stories in this genre tend to be slightly more refined, more ironic. But the thing about Dracula is that it’s a good old-fashioned blood and guts melodrama designed to be frightening. It’s also got all these other kinds of levels and meanings. And I think one of the things that people like about it is that it can mean so many different things. There’s a political reading and a Freudian reading and all other kinds of interpretations of what is going on in this big sprawling book. Unlike a lot of the classics I still enjoy re-reading Dracula.

And you have actually written various spin-offs, haven’t you?

That’s right. Amongst others I have a book called Anno Dracula. It is literally a vampire book because it takes from other books and bleeds them dry! It’s as much a critique as a sequel. Dracula has been a big part of my creative life. I keep going back to it.

In an interview on the Pioneers of Criminology

On to Dracula.

This was published in 1897, the same year Vacher was captured. I was drawn to Dracula because the Count was the perfect incarnation of evil as society saw it – the personification of the criminal type. When you read the physical description of Count Dracula, he does not resemble the handsome vampires we see on television; rather, he looks like a thug. He has one continuous eyebrow across his forehead, thick hands, pointy teeth and pointy ears. The description bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the ‘born criminal’ hypothesised by the great Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso felt that certain people were born with the physical characteristics of a brute, and an inborn tendency to commit crimes. Dracula was the incarnation of that sub-species, which Lombroso described as the ‘criminal man’.

He also exemplified the duality of the human spirit, which was another popular theme of the time. Before becoming a vampire, the Count had been a military hero, a man of inestimable nobility and bravery. After his incarnation as Dracula, his evil overshadowed his nobility. In that way, he represented the notion that the human spirit holds equal and opposite capacities for greatness and depravity.

I find it interesting that during this period, in the 1880s and 90s, with the birth of psychology, the question of good and evil shifted from the domain of the clergy to that of the scientists. You’ll note that it wasn’t a priest who defeated Dracula, but a scientist.

But this notion that there is a criminal type, who can be identified by the shape of his skull etc. – that turned out to be barking up the wrong tree, right?

In a sense, yes. The theory of phrenology was wrong, but the basis of that theory – the localisation of brain structures and their effects on behaviour – essentially was accurate. Franz Joseph Gall, who invented phrenology, is one of history’s laughingstocks, but in an odd way he was a man before his time.

Lombroso’s concept of the ‘criminal type’ was a more sophisticated concept than Gall’s, but it too attempted to link criminal behaviour to a genetic proclivity. On the other hand, Dr Alexandre Lacassagne of France felt that criminality was caused by the environment, based on his experience spending several years analysing the social, economic and family conditions that produced criminals. Their debate over the origins of criminality marked the birth of the nature/nurture debate.

The belief in the born criminal continued long past Lombroso’s day. In the 1920s, there were the famous Jukes and Kallikaks studies in which scientists looked at extended families of criminals to demonstrate that crime was hereditary. Then in the 1960s came the hypothesis that an extra Y gene predisposed someone to criminality.

We now know those studies were invalid, but the debate isn’t over. In fact, it’s taken an unexpected twist. Currently, neurologists doing MRI scans of the brains of criminal psychotics are finding certain dysfunctionalities in the way various parts of the brain communicate with each other. Certain people do seem to have tendencies towards a lack of empathy, and a lack of impulse control. The research is very young, but there may well be a neurological component to criminal behaviour. So we can’t say, in a self-satisfied way, ‘Those people from the 1890s didn’t know what they were talking about!’ Maybe they were on to something. 

In an interview on Fantastical Tales

Your final choice is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Why do you think this is still a classic?

Vampirism is a growth industry. Dracula is bigger than Jesus now. Halloween has overtaken Christmas. All this came from the imagination of an Irishman, Bram Stoker, who never went to Transylvania, but pored over maps and stories in the British Museum library at desk 07 – right next to 06, where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, and 05, where Lenin wrote What is to Be Done? Stoker's Dracula is an immortal who suffers from the mortal disease of love. He fed on the blood of a long history to emerge fully alive into our techno-vampirical world. He's become so chic that his minions have a hard time keeping out the mobs, who are begging to have their blood sucked so that they might live all night forever.