Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (59 page)

PART 1 THREE CORPSES IN THE FOUNTAIN

Well before
La dolce vita,
the Trevi Fountain was made internationally famous by the film
Three Coins in the Fountain
(1954), based on John H. Secondari’s novel
Coins in the Fountain
(1952). A major commercial hit in its day, Jean Negulesco’s wide-eyed yet stuffy movie was one of a run of glossy 1950s productions —
Roman Holiday
(1953) was the keystone in the cycle — showcasing European locations. The premise was always that down-to-Earth Americans find romance abroad with fantasised Europeans (often Royal) in an era when international tourism, hitherto exclusive to the rich or the bohemian, was for the first time a middle-class pursuit. There’s a Dracula connection: one of the romantic leads is Louis Jourdan, later notable in
Count Dracula.
Casting a Frenchman as an Italian Prince is typical of Hollywood’s ‘they’re all foreign so what’s the difference?’ attitude.
Three Coins, Roman Holiday
and company present Europeans rather as the
Twilight
franchise does vampires: glamorous, romantic, non-threatening, wealthy, beautiful objects. I use the basic premise of
Three Coins
for
Dracula Cha Cha Cha
: three foreign women in Rome, having romantic complications. The overripe Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn title song, a number one hit for The Four Aces (US) and Frank Sinatra (UK), outlasted the memory of the movie.

Princess Asa Vajda: the vampire villainess of Mario Bava’s
La Maschera del demonio
(1960), also released as
The Mask of Satan, Black Sunday
and
Revenge of the Vampire.
The dark-haired, striking English actress Barbara Steele earned her horror-movie immortality — tagged ‘the only girl in films whose eyelids can snarl’ by Raymond Durgnat — in the dual role of Princess Asa and her descendant Katja. Notionally based on Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Vij’, the film was written by Ennio de Concini and Mario Serandrei. Steele plays Gloria Morin, the character based on Sophia Loren, in Fellini’s
8½
(1963).

Dracula’s wives are not to be confused with Dracula’s brides. Ilona Szilagy, Queen Victoria and Sari Gabòr are real people, though only Ilona was married to Vlad Tepes in our history. Elisabeta is Vlad’s perhaps mythical first wife: she’s supposed to have committed suicide upon hearing a false report of his death, as dramatised in the prologue of
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1992). Marguerite Chopin comes from Carl Dreyer’s film
Vampyr
(1932).

Hugh Walpole’s Castle of Otranto is in the province of Otranto, in the heel of Italy, well away from Rome.

CHAPTER 1: DRACULA
CHA CHA CHA

‘Dracula
Cha Cha Cha’.
Composed and performed by Bruno Martino, the Italian pop song first appeared (briefly) over the end credits of
Tempi dun per i vampiri/ Uncle Was a Vampire
(1959), in which Christopher Lee (just a year after his first performance as Dracula) plays comedian Renato Rascel’s inconvenient ancestor. The song, a bigger hit than the film, is also used in Vincente Minnelli’s
Two Weeks in Another Town
(1962), where Barzelli (Rosanna Schiaffino), another character based on Sophia Loren, dances to it in macabre circumstances. ‘Dracula
Cha Cha Cha
’ has been covered in multiple languages by Henri Salvador, Rod McKuen, the Tango Saloon, Los Dandies and Bob Azzam; a selection of versions can be found on YouTube. Martino also recorded a sequel song ‘Draculino’.

Count Gabor Kernassy. When populating the vampire jet set of
Dracula Cha Cha Cha,
I naturally looked to Italian vampire movies of the period. Kernassy is played by Walter Brandi in
L’ultima preda del vampiro/Playgirls and the Vampire
(1960).

Malenka: the name comes from Amando de Ossorio’s
Malenka
(1969), also known as
Malenka
—
The Niece of the Vampire
and
Fangs of the Living Dead.
Like
La maschera del demonio
and
L’ultima preda del vampiro,
it’s one of those films in which the lead plays the vampire ancestor and a lookalike descendant. The dual role of Malenka and Sylvia Morel is taken by Anita Ekberg; the Malenka of
Dracula Cha Cha Cha
also stands in for Sylvia, Ekberg’s character in
La dolce vita.

Paparazzi: the term
paparazzo
comes from the character played by Walter Santesso in
La dolce vita.
That Paparazzo was based mostly on the photographers Tazio Secchiaroli and Marcello Geppetti; screenwriter Ennio Flaiano took the name from a character in George Gissing’s novel
By the Ionian Sea
(1901).

CHAPTER 3: G
IALLO POLIZIA

Giallo
(literally, ‘yellow’) is an Italian term for a brand of thriller originally published in yellow covers (just as the term film noir derives from the French
Série Noir
imprint). In Italian cinema, the term is associated with a cycle of gruesome, stylish, cosmopolitan murder mysteries.

Inspector Silvestri (Thomas Reiner) appears in Mario Bava’s important
giallo Sei donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace
(1964).

The Crimson Executioner (Mickey Hargitay) appears in Massimo Pupillo’s flamboyant
giallo Il Boia Scarlatto/Bloody Pit of Horror
(1965).

CHAPTER 4: MYSTERIES OF OTRANTO

Richard Fountain and Chriseis come from Simon Raven’s vampire novel
Doctors Wear Scarlet
(1960); Patrick Mower and Imogen Hassall play them in Robert Hartford-Davis’s film
Incense for the Damned
(1972). Raven, incidentally, contributed to the script of
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
(1969).

CHAPTER 8: JOURNALISM

Maciste, the Hero of Rome: the eternal strongman, a recurrent figure in Italian pop culture, was created by writer Gabriele d’Annunzio for the film
Cabiria
(1914), a spectacular of the Punic Wars. Played by burly Bartolomeo Pagano, Maciste returned in adventures with varied historical (even contemporary) settings throughout the silent era. Series entries highlighted the versatile hero as Maciste the Mountaineer, Maciste the Detective, Maciste the Medium, Maciste the Athlete and Maciste in Love. His ‘versus’ movie fight-card includes
Maciste contro la morte/Maciste vs Death
(1919),
Maciste contro Maciste
(1923) and
Maciste contro lo sceicco/Maciste vs the Sheik
(1925). The Dante-inspired
Maciste all’inferno/Maciste in Hell
(1926) was the first film the young Federico Fellini saw: he claimed his entire career was an attempt to recapture the impression it made on him. In the 1960s, after the success of the Steve Reeves Hercules films, a great many mythic muscleman movies were made in Italy and Maciste returned, played by Mark Forest, Gordon Mitchell, Kirk Morris and others. These movies mostly have ancient settings, though a new
Maciste all’inferno
(1962) finds the hero fighting evil in seventeenth-century Scotland and combines muscle-flexing action with the brand of gothic horror created by
La maschera del demonio
(its English title is
The Witch’s Curse).
Gordon Scott starred in
Maciste contro il vampiro
/
Goliath and the Vampires
(1962). In dubbed versions, the 1960s Maciste films often rename the character to make him a more internationally prominent hero: Atlas, Goliath, the Son of Hercules or Hercules himself. D’Annunzio used the name Maciste because it was understood to be a surname of Hercules — after a temple in the Tryphilian town of Macistus — and intended that the character be an avatar of the classical hero.

CHAPTER 9:
LIVE AND LET DIE

Gregor Brastov: the vampire villain of Charles L. Grant’s
The Soft Whisper of the Dead
(1982). Charlie’s classic monster trilogy is completed by the werewolf novel
The Dark Cry of the Moon
(1986) and the mummy book
The Long Night of the Grave
(1986). My story ‘The Chill Clutch of the Unseen’, about another archetypal fiend, was written in homage to the series.

CHAPTER 10: CAT O’NINE TAILS

The Three Mothers: this mythology — drawn from Thomas de Quincey’s
Suspiria De Profundis
(1845) — underlies Dario Argento’s trilogy of films, the classic
Suspiria
(1977) and
Inferno
(1980) and the belated footnote
La Terza Madre/Mother of Tears
(2007). A different take on de Quincey’s vision appears in Fritz Leiber’s novel
Our Lady of Darkness
(1977).

CHAPTER 11: THE DANCING DEAD

Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock: the character played by Tony Hancock in
The Rebel
(1961), of course. Created by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

Nico Otzak: later known for her association with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, Nico has a small role in
La dolce vita
. She’ll be back in
Johnny Alucard.

It’s unfair to say the American couple follow the fashion set by Quilty and Vivian: it’s the other way round. Though Charles Addams didn’t name the character until the TV show
The Addams Family
(1964), he’d been drawing his wasp-waisted, black-shrouded ghoul woman since the 1930s. The obvious model for 1950s horror hostess Vampira, Morticia might also have influenced the style of Vivian Darkbloom (a much cleverer anagram than most vampires use) in Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
(1955). Marianne Stone’s Vivian, in Kubrick’s 1962 film, and Carolyn Jones’s Morticia are lookalikes.

CHAPTER 16: KATE IN LOVE

telefono bianco:
during the Mussolini era, the heavily state-controlled Italian cinema industry turned out trivial, reassuring films known as white telephone movies: domestic dramas and romantic comedies with a fantasised upper- or upper-middle-class milieu and art-deco decors (the white telephone being a signature luxurious touch). Significant titles include
La dama bianco
(1938),
Inventiamo l’amore
(1938),
Centomila dollari
(1939),
Luce nelle tenebre
(1941) and
Il fidanzato di mia moglie
(1943). How these reflected the real lives of Italian audiences of the period can be judged by the fact that the cycle ran to a movie called
La vita è bella,
released in 1943. The critic Tom Milne coined the term
telefono rosso
to characterise the
gialli
of the 1960s and 1970s, which have a similar social milieu (and emphasis on set and costume design) but add black-gloved, masked murderers who slash their way through the wealthy, superficial characters.

CHAPTER 19: THE PARTY

Dorian Gray: the Italian actress Maria Luisa Mangini (1936–2011) took the name of Wilde’s character (who passed briefly through the
Anno Dracula
series in ‘Vampire Romance’). Her credits include Fellini’s
Le notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria
(1957), Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Il Grido
(1957) and (as Antiope) the sword and sandal
La regina delle Amazzoni/Colossus and the Amazons
(1960).

Dr Hichcock. Dr Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is the villain of a key title in the Italian horror movie cycle of the early ’60s, Riccardo Freda’s
L’orribile segreto del Dr Hichcock
(1962), aka
Raptus, The Horrible Dr Hichcock
and
The Terror of Dr Hichcock
. ‘The candle of his lust burnt brightest in the shadow of the grave,’ shrieked the posters. Mrs Cynthia Hichcock is played by Barbara Steele, who also appears as Mrs Margaret Hichcock, wife of Dr John Hichcock (Elio Jotta), in a follow-up
Lo spettro
(1963).

Lex Barker, a former screen Tarzan, is in the crowd in
La dolce vita
. In 1959, Gordon Scott was the official ape-man, starring in
Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
; soon, he would play Maciste (in
Maciste contro il vampiro,
1961), Remus, Zorro, Coriolanus, Hercules and others in Italian-made muscleman movies.

Mrs Honoria Cornelius and Colonel Maxim Pyat recur throughout the multiverse of Michael Moorcock. From Mike, I learned that every novel should have a party scene; this guest-list is a tribute to him.

CHAPTER 20:
OPERAZIONE PAURA

The chapter title comes from the 1966 Mario Bava film, also known as
Curse of the Dead
and
Kill, Baby, Kill.

CHAPTER 21:
CEMETERY GIRLS

The chapter title comes from the US re-release title of Javier Aguirre’s
El gran amor del conde Dracula
(1974), in which Paul Naschy plays Dracula.

CHAPTER 22:
THE MAGIC SWORD

The chapter title comes from the 1962 Bert I. Gordon fairytale film, which features Maila Nurmi (Vampira) in the role of Hag.

CHAPTER 24: C
ADAVERI ECCELLENTI

The chapter title comes from the 1978 Francesco Rosi film, also known as
Illustrious Corpses
.

CHAPTER 26: MR WEST AND DR PRETORIUS

Dr Pretorius is played by Ernest Thesiger in James Whale’s film
Bride of Frankenstein
(1935), scripted by John L. Balderston and William Hurlbut. The version who appears in the
Anno Dracula
series was created by Paul McAuley in the stories ‘The Temptation of Dr Stein’, ‘The True History of Dr Pretorius’ and ‘Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple’.