Dracula Sucks
Notes on the 1978 adult adaptation of the Count
The information I have on Count Dracula is limited. I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s novel. I am familiar with the iconic Bela Lugosi image: the pale complexion, the red cape, tuxedo, and the medallion. I know he has fangs used to drink the blood from his victims’ throats. I’d seen The Monster Squad countless times. That movie is anything but countless as Dracula leads a hoard of Universal Monsters. I am familiar with Max Schreck’s grotesque Orlok with his long talon fingers lurching over Greta Schröder’s Mina Harker. Several years back, I saw Murnau’s 1922 film for maybe the second time. I had already been a few rum and Cokes deep before the screening with live organist accompaniment. I think I’d previously seen it with some friends in high school with the Type O Negative. I was probably drinking Keystone Light back then. I’ve just never been interested. I grew up watching the monsters of 70s and 80s horror. Dracula just seemed tame by comparison.
Based on the above images and years around them, I’d already constructed an idea of the character. He’s a sexually fluid lecher lusting after women but he’ll top for men. That’s about it. Dracula, and vampires more broadly, should be constantly horny. Their bloodlust is a symbol for sexual expression, an insatiable desire for penetration (fangs and throats) and fluid transfer (blood, natch). Anyone who’s taken a high English course could tell you that.
So, here I am, stone sober, armed with nothing more than the iconographic knowledge of the world’s most famous vampire as I sit down to watch an X-rated adaptation. I am a newbie to Dracula and adult film. Dracula Sucks is almost a who’s who of 1970’s adult cinema. Jamie Gillis stars as the titular Count. Supporting cast includes names such as Annette Haven, John Holmes, John Leslie, Kay Parker, Serena, and Paul Thomas, among others.
Jamie Gillis is more subdued here than in films like Through the Looking Glass or Roommates, though it works. He’s still a creep while putting on his best Bela Lugosi impression. Gillis’ Dracula is smooth, cool. He gets by luring women with a mysterious, quiet demeanor. In this iteration, we find Dracula sucking necks, tits, and clits. Gillis had plenty of practice. He’d starred in loops “dressed as Superman, Dracula, and others, but mostly they were just two people fucking.” The tagline says: “This time the Count is not just going for the throat!” Oh, does it deliver. Gillis is probably one of the few men of the era who could jerk off on a tit and immediately suck the cum-covered nipple. Refractory period be damned. They sent a pervert to play a pervert.
The film opens with sleepless Richard Renfield arriving at a sanitarium, which is located inside a castle, to overcome his nightmares. These nightmares intensify and he is soon drawn to Dracula’s tomb, where he awakens the Count and a harem of vampiric ladies. Renfield is summarily bitten and committed to servitude. Renfield is a non-sex role but the teeth to the throat are penetration enough to make the queer submissive dynamic obvious.
Claiming to have purchased a nearby property, Dracula is invited into the sanitarium to meet his upper class neighbors. So, the fun begins. As a guest in the sanitarium, Dracula and his fellow vampire ladies embark on a sexual feeding frenzy. This is the sleazification of Bram Stoker’s story the world needed in 1978. Dracula hypnotizes a urinating woman and bites her neck on toilet. Cut to: we see her still seated, neck punctured, dead, and apparently dripping with cum. Biting and sucking the neck was already the sexual innuendo but this is porno. Every symbol needs a literal counterpart.
As with my knowledge of Dracula, I went into this movie knowing of John Holmes only from legend. There was that Quentin Tarantino monologue in Reservoir Dogs. Mark Wahlberg’s penis in Boogie Nights. Val Kilmer played him in that movie I didn’t see. You can know a lot or a little about John Holmes but nothing prepares you for truly seeing, bearing witness to, John Holmes. The man was a generic anomaly. As I type this on my phone, my eyes wander from my typing thumbs to my forearm, and I wonder, “Was John Holmes penis even bigger than that?” It’s as if Marshak is aware of exactly how long the viewer would be awestruck by Holmes’ member. As soon as the feeling passes, the woman he’s fucking reveals herself as a vampire and takes a bite of his penis like a Wawa hoagie. FYI: Hoagiefest ends July 27th if you’re in the Mid-Atlantic, Florida, or anywhere with a Wawa.
Of course, every great Dracula needs its Van Helsing. Reggie Nalder takes on the role in Dracula Sucks. I’d seen him in Blue Ice, another Phil Marshak movie, where he portrayed a Nazi. Nalder has such a naturally strange look about him that, had he been open to partaking in sex on screen, he could have been Dracula. He has such a unique craggy face that it would have given Harry Dean Stanton a run for his money. IMDB tells me he’s worked with directors like Fellini, Hitchcock, and Phil Marshak. Interesting tidbit: Nalder portrayed a vampire in Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot. With Nalder, Gillis, and Thomas sharing the screen, it becomes clear there is more humanity and natural charisma in yesterday’s B-actors than so many of today’s A-listers. Yeah, I said it!
As in mainstream cinema, these sounds of pleasure augment the realist effect of what in cinema is the hierarchically more important visual register, lending an extra level of sensory perception to the pleasures depicted. But because of increasingly common post-dubbing, these sounds are not invoked with the same realism as sound in the mainstream feature. Many sexual numbers, especially of early hard-core sound features, were, and still are—like the musical numbers of musicals—shot "mit out sound." Sound is recorded elsewhere and added later in the "mix."
—Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and 'Frenzy of the Visible’
Budgets do become obvious in films like Dracula Sucks. I mean, there’s a scene of a guy falling out of tower that is the most obvious dummy I’ve ever seen. It’s clear they had one location and a short amount of time to shoot. There is also the issue of sound. During the sex scenes and kill scenes, there doesn’t seem to have been much, if anything, recorded at all. Instead, there are fragments of radio shows and PA announcements dubbed over. While this is likely done out of necessary, it also reads like an experimental creative choice. These sounds add more atmosphere to the scenes, in a way eroticizing them more than dubbed moaning. A film for perverts is still an artistic endeavor. It made me think a lot about choices made under duress for a project to work.
While Dracula certainly claims his fill of women, but who he truly hungers for is Mina Harker, the virgin wife of Jonathan Harker. Mina is played by Annette Haven, who is absolutely stunning. She has an angelic, porcelain beauty that gives the impression of coy innocence. Jonathan Harker, played by Paul Thomas of Jesus Christ Superstar fame, is an effete coward struggling to gain (regain?) his wife’s desire. Despite being married three years, the two have still not consummated. Ultimately, Mina chooses Dracula over her husband. Once again, it is not enough for Dracula to have his pick of women. He asserts himself by forcing Harker to fellate him. Though the oral is simulated, I remember thinking it must have been a brave move to perform a widely viewed gay scene in the 70s. I have a possibly inaccurate perception of the adult industry that it is difficult to move between categories. I’d imagine one might be insecure about being perceived a certain way. I guess we’re all insecure about being perceived anyway. In the end, in a film with very few actual sex scenes, we see the climactic (yup) scene where Count Dracula claims Mina Harker in the crawl space containing his coffin. As they both reach orgasm, the stone doorway is opened by none other than Van Helsing bearing a cross, and the sunlight pours in, destroying them. “At least her soul is saved,” Helsing laments the death of Mina. It’s overtly clear, sexuality is darkness. Religion and purity is the light. The two are forever in opposition, unable to coexist. Even now, there is something critical to be said about Christianity versus innate sexual desire. There’s plenty of Eastern philosophy disavowing allowing ourselves to be consumed a singular object of desire. The ultimate hedonist, this representation of sexuality, perishes against that which seeks to control his desire.
In the end, simply by categorization, this is still a horny movie for perverts by perverts. There’s a urination scene, multiple lesbian scenes, garters and lace, an incest scene, nurses, maids, hissing vampires, and plenty of oral. Something for everyone. We are all perverts. As far as I’m concerned, Marshak’s Dracula is Hedrix’ “Watchtower” to Browning’s Dylan. It’s the sleazoid update for the grimy 70s. Timeless as a piece of music, an iconic character released into the world to be revised and repurposed by other artists in their image. What a sentient in the era of IP and remakes. And yet, if you’re just looking for hardcore porn, it might seem tame by 2025 standards. For this is also the age of quantity, content creation, where more focus is on generating headlines to garner clicks than a sexually charged piece of art. Nowadays, I imagine one might look at Dracula Sucks the way I might have looked at Tod Browning’s Dracula as a teenager. I never saw the magic in the originals some of my cinephile friends did. In 1978, Dracula Sucks probably felt like a piece of counterculture cinema. To some of us, it still does.
