Liberated by His Bite
Andrew Delbanco, 19 September 1996
In the early Sixties, when I was ten and first saw Tod Browning’s classic vampire film Dracula (1931) on television, I was impressed that the Count could walk past a mirror and cast no reflection. This optical trick seemed more than just another peculiarity, like his revulsion at sunlight or garlic or crucifixes, marking him as a member of the vampire species. There was a hint of otherworldliness in that blank mirror, a confirmation that he belonged to the ‘un-dead’ (a phrase I later encountered in Bram Stoker’s novel). It was the one thing in the movie that struck me as truly frightening.
