Barry Atwater did not give us Lugosi's Dracula, or Lee's Dracula; which were both, in the sense of origination, Stoker's Dtacila. And Stoker, I suggest here, was guided by two previous literary vampires, Polidori's Ruthven and LeFanu's Carmilla, both of which assisted him in what I also suggest was his ultimate literary purpose with Dracula---to create a monster that could adequately compete with The Monster, Mary Shelley's greatest fictional creation, Victor Frankenstein's botched experiment. That Polidori's effort, emerging from the same Byronic ghost story challenge that nineteen year old Mary answered also, now influenced what is considered, by many, to be the most classic vampire treatment, is one of those literary coincidences that scholars love to debate. (Personally, I dissent from the common opinion of Stoker's novel: Robert Aickman's great short story, "Pages From A Young Girl's Journal" is a far better treatment of the vampire mythology.) Stoker, with the help and precedents of Polidori and Ruthven, further pushed the vampire from its cruder depiction in other literatures, either mytholigical or literary.
I say all that to say this: that Atwater cuts through the Polidori/LeFanu/Stoker complex to reach back to a less British, perhaps more Greek and Slavic, version---in which the vampire does not strive for the pretense of nobility (Lugosi's performance seemed to channel that) but for the fictive reality of the feral crudity that distinguished the vampire before Stoker dressed one in a tuxedo, as if it had attended a lodge meeting before going out to feed upon the living. It is the feeding upon the living---with the parasite's ferocity raised exponentially by a factor of the Undead---and the typical bully's victimization of the bullied, but raised from the usual environment of the playground or the gym class to the less restricted supernatural. Unlike the depictions of Polidori and LeFanu, and Stoker in their wake, the seductiveness attributed to Ruthven, Carmilla, and Count Dracula, is absent from The Night Stalker, who is no longer the patient seducer but the impatient rapist raised to the level of that supreme rapist (metaphorically), Jack the Ripper. Then, when. Skorzeny suddenly realizes that he is no longer in control, and that he is about to be dispatched by a wooden stake in God's own sunlight as it illuminates a silver cross and the extermination of the evil that is Skorzeny, we see the bully's bravado deflated: Skorzeny whimpers because, in some way, he *enjoys* imposing death and destruction upon his victims. Atwater, I think, gives Skorzeny an authenticity that Lugosi's and Lee's Draculas do not possess, because they did not inherit, through Stoker, from Polidori and LeFanu. Skorzeny's vampiric inheritance comes from the Greek and Slavic tales, unmitigated by their English step-cousins; and Atwater brings this out in so successfully horrible a manner as to be, at least to this viewer, more convincting than either Lee or Lugosi (and I gladly admit that opinion is not shared by many at all). Perhaps the closest comparison would be Max Schreck's performance as Count Orlock. I also understand that Skorzeny, and Orlock, are, literally, the verbal constructs of their respective scriptwriters; but, viewing the movie, we are not reading a script but watching the interpretation of that script by the performers. Whether Atwater brought his own nuances to the part, or they were Matheson's, or, more practically, some combination of both, it is Atwater who brings Skorzeny to undead life, and then to undead death, before our eyes; totally bypassing those seducers, Ruthven, Carmilla, and Dracula (and their contemporary descendants, the vampires of the Twilight series and its lesser knockoffs), to be a plague bearer, like Orlock, like the wurdelak and others of that sort, and with a greater honesty toward the vampiric personality than two English and one Irish writer accorded it.
I say all that to say this: that Atwater cuts through the Polidori/LeFanu/Stoker complex to reach back to a less British, perhaps more Greek and Slavic, version---in which the vampire does not strive for the pretense of nobility (Lugosi's performance seemed to channel that) but for the fictive reality of the feral crudity that distinguished the vampire before Stoker dressed one in a tuxedo, as if it had attended a lodge meeting before going out to feed upon the living. It is the feeding upon the living---with the parasite's ferocity raised exponentially by a factor of the Undead---and the typical bully's victimization of the bullied, but raised from the usual environment of the playground or the gym class to the less restricted supernatural. Unlike the depictions of Polidori and LeFanu, and Stoker in their wake, the seductiveness attributed to Ruthven, Carmilla, and Count Dracula, is absent from The Night Stalker, who is no longer the patient seducer but the impatient rapist raised to the level of that supreme rapist (metaphorically), Jack the Ripper. Then, when. Skorzeny suddenly realizes that he is no longer in control, and that he is about to be dispatched by a wooden stake in God's own sunlight as it illuminates a silver cross and the extermination of the evil that is Skorzeny, we see the bully's bravado deflated: Skorzeny whimpers because, in some way, he *enjoys* imposing death and destruction upon his victims. Atwater, I think, gives Skorzeny an authenticity that Lugosi's and Lee's Draculas do not possess, because they did not inherit, through Stoker, from Polidori and LeFanu. Skorzeny's vampiric inheritance comes from the Greek and Slavic tales, unmitigated by their English step-cousins; and Atwater brings this out in so successfully horrible a manner as to be, at least to this viewer, more convincting than either Lee or Lugosi (and I gladly admit that opinion is not shared by many at all). Perhaps the closest comparison would be Max Schreck's performance as Count Orlock. I also understand that Skorzeny, and Orlock, are, literally, the verbal constructs of their respective scriptwriters; but, viewing the movie, we are not reading a script but watching the interpretation of that script by the performers. Whether Atwater brought his own nuances to the part, or they were Matheson's, or, more practically, some combination of both, it is Atwater who brings Skorzeny to undead life, and then to undead death, before our eyes; totally bypassing those seducers, Ruthven, Carmilla, and Dracula (and their contemporary descendants, the vampires of the Twilight series and its lesser knockoffs), to be a plague bearer, like Orlock, like the wurdelak and others of that sort, and with a greater honesty toward the vampiric personality than two English and one Irish writer accorded it.