WARNER HOME VIDEO
OUR VISCERAL RESPONSES to horror tales have a lot to do with wider social unease. That goes without saying. Vampires, for example, are creepy because they remind us of what it's like to catch a venereal disease. They put their lips to your neck and suck, a sensuous, erotic act, only to then mix fluids and contaminate you with the vampire virus.
Roman Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers, fresh out on DVD, does something more. Polanski funnels his own personal trauma into the material, routinely thought of as comedic, and then gives it a unique historical breadth. Like almost all of his work, it alludes, albeit obliquely, to his having been orphaned in Holocaust-era Europe. Cloaked as a vampire-film spoof, Fearless Vampire Killers is really a carefully mounted dread fest.
The story follows Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran), vampire hunter and elderly, eccentric kook, and his meek assistant Alfred (Polanski) as they trail kidnapped village girl Sarah (Sharon Tate) to the castle of Count Von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne), himself a vampire about to host an annual blood-sucker's ball.
There are no heroes in this movie. Not Abronsius, who in mid-chase in the vampire's lair stops to inspect a rare species of bat on the nearby wall. Nor Alfred, who gets his chance to kill Von Krolock and blows it. Standing stake-in-hand above the coffin-bound Count, he is too panic-stricken to budge.
In the most revealing scene, one villager turns up dead with a punctured neck. Abronsius tries warning the other villagers. Nobody pays heed. They all sense a vampire threat is near, but are paralyzed with fear and denial. The film is a nod to an historical catastrophe—a look at what happens when discrimination and death come knocking at your door and you fail to act decisively. It's no coincidence that the vamps are distinctly Aryan and their prey, Yiddish-chatting villagers with names like Yoyneh Shagal.
The film ends with Abronsius and Alfred making their getaway with Sarah. Only what they don't know is, she's gone vamp. As they head out into the world, a narrator intones that they carry with them the seed of a future vampire-spread.
Some critics speculate that this parodies Polanski's usual doomsday endings, but quite the opposite. Vampires, like other Polanski antagonists, in Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, are madmen hell-bent on stamping out a part of humanity and remaking the world. There's evil in Fearless Vampire Killers. And it's genocidal.
