From Dracula to Alien: the evolution of space vampires

The horrors of Alien and Lifeforce have their roots in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A look at the roots of space vampires and their meaning:

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What do you think of when you think of Dracula? Isolated Romanian castles? Villagers making holy signs to ward off evil? Crucifixes brandished like shields? Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the popular consciousness is the archetypal supernatural horror novel. A monster that cannot be killed by mortal means, but is to be warded off with garlic and crucifixes, bound by magical rules such as its inability to pass a threshold uninvited.

Although there are no vampires in the Bible, it is a monster intrinsically bound to Christian theology, from movies like Wes Craven’s gloriously trashy Dracula 2000 that revealed Dracula to be the cursed immortal, Judas, to Mike Flanagan’s miniseries Midnight Mass.

Yet when we go back to the source, the novel, Dracula, paints a very different picture. The expert brought in to fight Count Dracula when he reaches Britain is not a Catholic Priest, but a doctor and scientist, the famous Professor Van Helsing.

The team that comes together to defeat Dracula are not magic or religious practitioners. They are the razor’s edge of Victorian modernity and use all the latest technologies and sciences available to them to kill the vampire. To help Dracula’s victims recover, the characters make frequent use of the then-experimental technology of blood transfusions. Over the course of the narrative, large portions of the characters’ accounts are recorded onto wax cylinders. Even as they establish the supernatural rules and ancient lore that define Dracula’s existence, they do it in a methodical and scientific fashion.

Vampire science

Dracula has persisted because it’s a book that withstands multiple readings, but a big one is that it’s about tradition versus modernity – medieval foreign aristocracy versus the best of modern British imperial ingenuity. Jonathan Harker gets all the credit for actually doing the vampire in, but the truth is he has to share that credit with the frequently forgotten character, Quincy Morris, a cowboy representing a “New World” even more modern than Victorian London.

If you scratch the surface of this most supernatural of supernatural horror stories, you quickly discover the beating heart of a science fiction novel underneath. Oddly enough, Dracula is a clear descendent of The Vampyre by John William Polidori, a book conceived at the same gathering that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, which stakes (sorry) the claim to being the first science fiction novel ever written.

But like any decent head vampire, Dracula has sired legions of offshoots, and if you follow some of those bloodlines, those science fictional qualities start to shine all the brighter.

One of the most influential attempts to draw the vampire further into the world of science fiction was Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. This book took the vampire curse to its logical conclusion, with its hero, Robert Neville, the last surviving human in a world overrun with vampires.

What makes this story stand out is not just the nightmarish premise (which inspired George A Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, and from there, the entire zombie apocalypse genre), but once again, the methodical and scientific way Neville goes about trying to solve the problem of the vampires.

Over the course the novel, Neville (and Matheson) take each element of the vampire myth and ground it in a scientific explanation. The thirst for blood and the aversion to sunlight are qualities of bacterial infection. The inability to see their own reflection and their aversion to holy symbols is a kind of hysteria. Bit by bit I Am Legend takes the vampire from being something otherworldly, to something very much part of our own.

From there, vampires have proliferated through science fiction – not just through their post-apocalyptic zombie descendants, but through vampire dystopias such as Daybreakers (2009), or stories with increasingly high-tech and scientifically-minded vampire hunters such as Channel 4’s superlative Ultraviolet. And so, as vampire sci-fi grew, it was inevitable that eventually they would go to space.

Bloodsuckers in space

Vampires are well-suited to outer space. There’s an active sub-genre of space zombie movies, but space is an environment that is hostile to everything about them. Enclosed spaces, small population, lots of sturdy, lockable doors – absolutely not a zombie’s natural habitat.

Vampires, however, can make the most of being so far from the burning sun. Well reinforced airlocks aren’t an issue to monsters who make it their business to be invited in. And as a creature that likes to travel with a boxed piece of their homeland, Dracula would appreciate the logic of most spaceship design.

They quickly found their way into sci-fi TV, from the “Salt Vampire” in Star Trek’s The Man Trap and the giant Great Vampire of Doctor Who’s State Of Decay (which the Doctor kills by ramming a rocket ship through its heart), to the Space Vampire in Buck Rogers In The 25th Century’s episode, ahem, Space Vampire.

But it’s in movies that we really see the space vampire come into its own.

It starts with the Italian movie Terrore nello spazio, or as it became known in English-speaking markets, Planet Of The Vampires. Released in 1965, it rarely gets mentioned in conversations about classic sci-fi horror, but it more than deserves its place in the pantheon.

Based on Renato Pestriniero’s Italian short story One Night Of 21 Hours, it tells the story of two spaceships that crash land on an unexplored planet, to find it inhabited by malevolent disembodied forces that inhabit the corpses of the ships’ fallen crew and set about attacking the rest of them.

The film’s aesthetic immediately nails it down in time. The magnificent costumes and production design are the kind of slick, colourful display that takes you back to 1956’s Forbidden Planet, 1950’s Destination Moon, or the original series of Star Trek or Lost In Space. Still, these designs have a darker, more gothic edge. Most noticeable are the high collars on our heroes’ black space uniforms, clearly designed to evoke memories of Dracula’s high-collared cape.

Beyond that, in Planet Of The Vampires, those smooth curves and shiny surfaces have become grimy with space dust, pointing the way to the sort of used, functional space environments that would become the norm in the likes of Star Wars and, even more notably, Alien.

In fact, watching Planet Of The Vampires, it doesn’t take long to realise that this was a direct inspiration for the godfather of sci-fi horror. There are shots of the spaceship’s twin exhaust that are exactly replicated in Alien’s shots of HR Giger’s iconic crashed alien spaceship. The lighting of the planet, with its striking shadows and thick layer of ground mist, make the Alien parallels even more marked. Likewise, at one point the crew of astronauts discovers a gigantic, ancient, alien corpse in a scene that draws immediate similarities with the appearance of Alien’s Space Jockey.

Sexy alien vampires

Once that line of descent becomes clear, the debt that Alien’s eponymous monster owes to Dracula becomes clearer. It’s not just that it is a dark figure with protruding fangs that hides in the shadows. The threat that the Alien presents is more than purely predatory. It doesn’t just want to eat you. It wants to infect you, penetrate you in a way that implies sexual violation just as Dracula’s fangs have always been about far more than simply extracting blood (and of course, the one way to kill him is to penetrate him right back).

For all that Ellen Ripley set the standard for “strong female protagonists”, when she quietly works her way around an escape pod in a vest and pants, the energy is much the same as watching Ellen Hutter in her night gown as Nosferatu’s Count Orlock stalks into her bedroom.

One of Alien’s writers, Dan O’Bannon, went on to write Lifeforce (1985), an adaptation of Colin Wilson’s novel, The Space Vampires. The film isn’t afraid of trading on its screenwriter’s pedigree – the opening act is essentially a speedrun of the opening act of Alien, before quickly returning the ship back to Earth. Like Alien and Dracula, the threat the aliens present is as much sexual as it is carnivorous. But unlike Dracula, the victim of the sexual predator in these movies is male.

In Alien, the sexual nature of the threat is hard to miss – a creature with a head like a giant toothy phallus, found in a ship full of HR Giger’s gynaecological architecture, forces a tube down a man’s neck and subjects him to the pain and body horror of an unwanted pregnancy.

In Lifeforce, that kind of metaphorical imagery is abandoned in favour of making the deadly threat an attractive naked woman (played by Mathilda May).

As one character says at one point in the film, “She… was the most overwhelmingly feminine presence I have ever encountered. I was drawn to her on a level…”

“Was it sexual?” another character asks.

“Yes. Overwhelmingly so, and horrible. Loss of control.”

We can trace an entire subgenre of “Alien vampire” from here. This is the trope that leads to the Species movies, or Scarlet Johansson’s hitchhiker hunting alien in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin (2013). In the movie Star Trek: First Contact (1996), the Borg, an amorphous, depersonalised hivemind in the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series, have their pale makeup touched up to become more corpselike, while assimilation no longer requires an entire alien operating theatre, but only an injection of nanites delivered by twin punctures to the neck. But the most dramatic change is the introduction of the Borg Queen, the perfect Head Vampire, using seduction to try and make Data her willing servant.

It seems that we struggle to imagine a threat anymore “alien” than a man being subject to sexual violence from a female figure.

Illegal aliens

Our fear of the alien vampire is about more than a sexual threat, however. Like a vampire, the titular Alien only truly becomes a menace once it is “invited in” – the fate of the entire Nostromo crew is sealed when Ash ignores Ripley’s adherence to quarantine procedure. In the plot of Planet Of The Vampires, Alien and many of their sequels and imitators, the main drive is to prevent what happens in Lifeforce. It’s about stopping the alien reaching Earth.

In case these comparisons are too subtle for you, they are writ large in the recent vampire movie The Last Voyage Of The Demeter (2023), an adaptation of a short chapter from the middle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, chronicling the voyage of the vessel Dracula uses to transport himself to the UK. It might as well be called “Dracula on the Nostromo”, playing out precisely like an Alien movie on a sailing ship.

The vampire isn’t a threat that can come to your home under its own power. It must be carried, like a plague rat, by the Demeter, the Nostromo, and the space shuttle Churchill in Lifeforce.

In Mark A Latham’s Sherlock Holmes novel, A Betrayal In Blood, Holmes investigates the events of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to discover the supernatural elements are a fiction, devised to cover up the xenophobically motivated murder of a Romanian immigrant.

It emphasises that the sexual threat Dracula represents is intrinsically bound with a fear of the foreign. The idea of foreigners taking our women, infecting our bloodline.

It is no coincidence that Alien, and the novel Lifeforce adapts, The Space Vampires, are inspired not just by Dracula but also the works of HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s work is rife with explicit racism that is disturbing to modern readers, but even when we strip that away, the beating heart of his work is a subtext of abject horror at anything foreign or Other.

Taking Dracula’s suave aristocrat and showing him as scary for his foreignness as much as the danger he presents is highlighting an element of the story that has always been there.

But it is not all that has always been there. If we follow the line from Dracula to Alien, there is a third element that stands out brightly.

Legal Aliens

Much as Reform voters and some Labour MPs might delight at the idea of an iconic monster being their ultimate bogeyman, an illegal immigrant, Dracula is no such thing. When he wants to make a hunting ground of Victorian London, the first thing he does is acquire a lawyer, buys some property, and ensures that his paperwork is in order.

This is the key to Dracula – he isn’t just a supernatural monster. He’s a monster nesting in the seat of established earthly power. He’s not some lone vagrant who sneaks over on a small boat before prowling the streets. He arrives on a vessel he legally chartered. He’s an aristocrat, a nobleman with a recognised lineage of the kind Victorian society would welcome, especially as he’s interested in acquiring property here. If that aristocrat’s arrival leaves behind a trail of girls with ruined lives and reputations, it would hardly be the first time. And after all, they invited him in.

Likewise, the Alien on its own presents no danger to the crew of the Nostromo, or anyone else. It is trapped in an egg, in a wrecked ship on an inhospitable planet nobody would ever want to go to anyway.

What makes the Alien a danger is the franchise’s real villain, the Weyland-Yutani corporation. They are the ones that send the Nostromo and, in Aliens, the Sulaco into the Aliens’ grasp. Like the crews of both of these ships, Jonathan Harker only comes into contact with Dracula because his employer sends him to Transylvania.

Instead of Renfield or Nosferatu’s Herr Knock, the Alien has collaborators in the form of Ash or Carter Burke, corporate lackeys whose goal is to get a sleeping body in a coffin-shaped case back to the place they call home, with nobody suspecting the danger that body holds.

In Dracula, and all its descendants, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, the greatest danger is not the monster, but the power structures that allow the monster to pursue its nature.

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Chris Farnell is the author of the Fermi’s Progress stories, a series about a spaceship that destroys every planet it visits. In its latest instalment, Graveyard Orbit, the crew encounter some vampire-like aliens…

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