Creatures of Appetite: The Vampire
Humans have always made sacrifices to appease that which we fear. Want to avoid an angry God’s wrath? Give them the best of your crop and livestock. Don’t want a monster to ravage your village? Leave some sort of offering outside the gates so that it leaves you in peace. Eating and horror are intertwined and have been since humanity began telling stories. Most, if not all of the monsters we fear are creatures of appetite. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, succubi, incubi, creatures from black lagoons, cat people, leprechauns, witches, demons . . . all of them bite, all of them consume, all of them covet, and all of them take what they crave.
When we eat while watching these movies, we are engaging in a ritual as well. We pair the adrenaline rush of watching the action on the screen with the sweet dopamine rush of our salty and sweet snacks.
This series will take you on a journey through our favorite fears, and films that center around food; films featuring iconic meal scenes, or even where the food itself is the menace. We’ll even be recreating some of the meals, and making new recipes that I think would keep us safe from any monster, even the ones that live inside all of us.
The first Creature of Appetite we will be digging in to is one that has fascinated us for thousands of years:
The Vampire.
Nosferatu, Dracula, Creature of the night, Wampyr, Bloodsucker, Subspecies. Call it what you want, but the image is universal: An undead being that forever thirsts for blood, stalking its prey through the night, taking form of fog, wolves, rats, and the iconic bat. Seducing their victim with their dark powers. Fangs protruding, sinking into the soft flesh of a neck, a wrist, a thigh; blood welling and spilling down, the vampire drinking its fill, draining the vessel like it’s your first Capri Sun after you’ve been running through the sprinkler on a hot summer day.
To me, vampires are a sad creature; despite all their allure it seems to be a difficult and very lonely existence. Your only companionship would be other creatures like yourself, or bonding with your prey. If you find humans whose company you enjoy, they are in constant danger should your bloodlust arise; and humans don’t live forever and will age and eventually die, leaving you alone once again.
Compound that lonely truth with the fact that you can’t even take solace in a hot, steaming bowl of macaroni and cheese because food will sit and rot in your undead guts instead of providing pleasure and nourishment, and what’s there to live for?
So, what’s a vampire to do? Ah-ha! Let’s fix a lavish meal and watch a human eat every morsel. This is what the count does when Jonathan Harker arrives at his castle.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula opens with Mr. Harker traveling through Budapest and Hungary to reach Wallachia and eventually Transylvania, the home of our titular vampire, Count Dracula. Before he reaches the castle, Harker fills his journals not about the meals he experiences. As a proper Englishman in his time, I can only assume the man had never had even the first speck of black pepper; the way that he waxes about the “paprika chicken” he is fed multiple times along the trip leads me to think that the poor man had never tasted anything that ever electrified his palate. Before you even meet the titular fanged fiend, there are upwards of twelve different dishes mentioned, making Harker one of the original food bloggers.
When he arrives at the castle, the Count bids him welcome, and presents him with a fine dinner of roast chicken, cheeses, salad, and Old Tokay- better known as Tokaji; a Hungarian white wine known for its complex aroma and flavor notes of flower essence, peach, plum, honey, quince, caramel, almonds, and hazelnuts. This is an interesting choice, as Tokaj is mentioned in writings as far back as the 1600s, so surely not only does the count have exquisite taste in food, but a well-stocked wine cellar. We see in every Dracula film from the original 1931 masterpiece, every Hammer iteration, and even in Francis Ford Coppola’s love letter to our eternal Dracul, Harker sets upon the feast as his host watches keenly, making suggestions as to what to taste next, refusing offers to join with various excuses.
“I never drink... wine”
That iconic line is so loaded with tension and innuendo. Just what do you drink then, good sir? We of course will find out. But; the commonality of these feasts is this: The vampire cannot themselves indulge in the pleasure of food and drink, so watching human beings eat their fill is a form of indulgence. It is voyeuristic and predatory; it is base and carnality in a very pure form. Trading one appetite for another. Much as we flavor our meals with spice and ingredients, do vampires flavor us with food? Would a vampire remember a favorite recipe from his old life and prepare it for a potential victim in the hopes that when he sinks his teeth into the tender flesh of that straining neck, he may taste his past in the living blood?
The sexual subtext isn’t so much subtext, either; there is arousal in the indulgences, again pleasures of the flesh that the undead are denied, simply due to the physical nature of the beast; dead flesh cannot rise, dead flesh cannot sing; dead flesh cannot warm to the touch, no matter how much it desires. The starving gaze, staring as the sliver of cheese passes from the fingertips between the teeth, touching the tongue; the lips closing as the jaw works; the eyes closing and the soft moans and sounds of delight that signal a delicious bite come forth… all of this richly living experience is denied our vampiric companion.
Dracula feeds Harker again and again during his stay in the castle, until Harker breaks the one rule against wandering around certain corridors, and Dracula’s Brides have their way with him. Once bitten, he is contaminated, and cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of a bite of roast or sip of brandy; nor can Dracula again get his hunger sated by watching him chew, swallow, and digest. The blood alone remains.
Vampires are creatures of multiple appetites, yet they can only truly revel in the blood, and are always ready to feed.
Stay hungry. We have so many more appetites to satisfy.
Read more within the Museum of Macabre Media on Monsters, Madness and Magic: Demon Swords, Warships, and Warriors: A Lovecraftian Love Letter to ‘80s Radness