The Vampire Who Raised Me on Late Night TV

Most people remember the first monster that scared them. I remember the first one that didn’t. I was around eight or nine. I was allowed to stay up late on Friday night and watch The Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show. Bela Lugosi as Dracula was in one of those late-night movies. He was supposed to be the monster, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I was drawn to him, and decades later, I still am. It’s spooky season, so I thought there was no better way to celebrate than to finally ask why.

Lugosi wasn’t the only one keeping me up. There was Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak in The Night Stalker, a rumpled reporter chasing the kind of things nobody else believed in. My mom used to watch Dark Shadows, so Barnabas Collins was there too. Between the three of them, the vampire settled into my childhood and never moved out.

What pulled me in was simple, even back then. Those vampires were always really old, and even at that young age I saw wisdom in that. They were intelligent. They were eternal, they crept around at night while everyone else slept, and they could shift shapes when they wanted. A kid doesn’t need much more than that to be hooked for life.

Then puberty hit, and the Hammer films found me. Those were the ones with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Cushing played Van Helsing, the hunter with the stake and the steady hands. Lee played Dracula, and I saw him as an aristocrat of sorts. He was tall and cold, and he carried himself like he owned the castle, because he did.

There’s a scene in Hammer’s 1958 Dracula, released here as Horror of Dracula, that shows exactly what changed. A young woman named Lucy has already been bitten. Van Helsing has garlic hung in her room to keep Dracula out, and she begs the maid to take it away. When night falls, she opens the doors to her terrace and bares her neck. She isn’t hiding from him. She’s waiting. That was the seduction side of vampires, and at that age, it hit differently than anything Lugosi ever did.

Which brings up an honest question I had to ask myself while writing this. Is horror’s appeal really fear, or is it excitement?

It turns out fear and excitement aren’t very far apart. Fear and excitement run on the same wiring. The heart races, adrenaline kicks in, and attention sharpens. What separates the two is mostly whether your brain believes you’re safe.

In 2020, Marc Malmdorf Andersen and his team at Aarhus University put heart monitors on 110 people. Then they sent them through a haunted house in Vejle, Denmark. People enjoyed it most when they were scared, but only moderately. Too little fear bored them, and too much ruined the fun. The researchers compared it to play, where a small, controlled dose of danger is the whole point.

Horror lets us experience danger while knowing we’re probably safe. It allows us the chance to stand close to danger and walk away in one piece. I skipped the fear part entirely and only ever felt the pull. The vampire might be the monster built for exactly that. He’s dangerous enough to raise your pulse, but he’s also old, intelligent, and seductive. The danger shows up wearing something you want to get closer to.

As I grew, I read all the books, from Stephen King to Anne Rice. King dropped a vampire into a small Maine town in ‘Salem’s Lot. Rice let hers tell their own stories, and some of them gathered in covens. Those weren’t ordinary families, though. They schemed, they betrayed each other, and they outlived each other.

Ask me why vampires stuck around when other monsters came and went, and I’ll give you the honest answer. They live forever and have super strength. They can control your mind and seduce you, and some of them can fly. Being dead doesn’t ruin them either, not in a gross way like a rotting zombie. Honestly, they’re just cool as hell.

Then came Twilight, and Twilight sucked. There was the sparkling, the brooding teenage romance, and a vampire with no real bite. On top of all that, the Cullens lived together as a little family, sitting around a dinner table they didn’t eat at. Vampires don’t do that. Plenty of people loved those books and movies, and that’s fine. It just wasn’t a vampire to me.

For all those years of loving Dracula, I didn’t read Bram Stoker’s novel until my late thirties or early forties. It was close to the Dracula I’d carried around since childhood, but on the page he was a more vicious character. He could be animalistic in his actions. You might think that would cool things off. It didn’t. It held, and knowing what he was capable of actually strengthened it.

The best way I can describe him is a great samurai warrior. He’s calm in nature, but extremely violent when the time comes. That’s the Dracula who still seduces us. The danger was never something we put up with to get to the romance. It was the attraction all along.

So think about Lucy for a second, with the garlic gone and the terrace doors standing open. Most of us like to believe we’d keep those doors locked. Be honest with yourself this October. If he showed up on your terrace tonight, would you?