But others swiftly picked up on the sexual themes and possibilities of the vampires need to feed and hypnotic powers. Stoker's original Dracula was not initially seen in sexual terms, even by Stoker who described him as a repulsive, grey, dried-out, rat-like figure closer to Max Schreck's alien Nosferatu than Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee's coldly suave Dracula.
By that time Bram Stoker's 1897 novel and later play "Dracula" gave the name "Vamp" to describe a predatory person who sucks the life from it's victim and then discards them. However the Vamp was a specific product of Victorian Era Britain and America where the prim and proper Victorians existed alongside the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the 1850's, Gothic and Sensation writers of the 1870's & 80's and early Art Nouveau schools of the Gay Nineties. The archetype of the female seductress luring men to their doom is as old as the sirens and harpies of Hellenic myths to the Biblical Eve, Bathsheba, Jezebel and Salome to actual historical figures like Cleopatra, Messalina and Renaissance figure Lucrezia Borgia and has always been celebrated in art and literature, especially in the Romantic Era. At least until audiences decided she wasn't scary anymore. But Theda didn't really sell beauty or glamour, she sold danger. Audery Munson sold titillation, Clara Kimball Young and Evelyn Nesbitt sold scandal, Alla Namizova, Olga Petrova and Geraldine Farrar sold glamour and sophistication, Mary Miles Minter sold virginal innocence, Olive Thomas was the pretty, perky girl-next-door and Florence LaBadie, a truly timeless beauty, was a wholesome, stunning, girl across the street.
Theda may not have even been the most beautiful of the starlets of the 1910's but that was not what she was selling. She remains the patron saint of every bad girl from Elizabth Taylor's "Cleopatra" to Princess Leia and her gold bikini to any number of Goth Chicks, Suicide Girls and Vampires.
The silver screen skin#
Staring out at us with her raccoon eyes, pale skin and pouting lips, clad in her chainmail bikini, teardrop earrings and festooned with skulls and snakes. This is not really true as by the time she made her first starring role in 1915 there had already been several successful film sirens but while most of them have been forgotten by all except a few film historians, Theda remains.
Theda Bara is known today as the first screen sex symbol. "Some singers indulging in curses, Though sinful, have spendidly sinned īut my would-be maleficent verses, Are nothing but wind."
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