On the male side, we've got what is essentially ground zero for eroticized representations of horror. Though there is a certainly sickly perversity to Stoker's original novel, the literary Dracula is not a very seductive figure. He is, for the most part, an acutely felt absence (with the exception of perhaps Godot, few title characters appear so rarely in their own work). When he does appear, he is often unappetizingly ancient or inhumanly monstrous. There's a single scene, the transfusus interruptus scene with Mina, that truly suggests the hussied-up revenant that we now equate with the Count. And, appropriately, the man most responsible for that paradigm shift was Lugosi. His courtly manners, the early modern evening wear, the accent, the stare: Lugosi, single-handedly, nearly buried the rodent-like Nosferatu image and almost managed to permanently impress upon our minds the image of vampires as slumming Euro nobility here to sweep the ladies off their feet.
And yet, the story has the roles reversed. Lugosi is one who is all scratched up. He's sheepish about the whole thing. Our vampire is the blushing innocent. Bow, in the realm of Hollywood legend anyway, is the insatiable one. She's the home-breaker, the predator, the dominant one.
I previously dismissed whether or not we should worry about the story being real. I suggested that the value of the story was that it was real in some metaphorical sense. Perhaps I was wrong. Or right for the wrong reasons. The story is only real in a metaphorical sense. It only means something to us if we forget Bow and Lugosi and embrace fakeness. It's a story that is only good if it is fake.
Barring Internet Rule 34 (if it exists, there's porn of it), evil is not particularly seductive. When it rears its pathetically ugly head in real life, evil tends to be relentlessly banal, messy, uncouth, and blunt. Con men turn out not to be the dapper gents of The Sting, but a couple of barely literate spammers robbing defenseless grandmas of their med money. Serial killers don't engage in philosophical discussions about the Jungian personality theories; instead they spin elaborately embarrassing second hand sci-fi fantasies about creating armies of sex-zombie Asian rent boy slaves. When John Gotti's son got rolled by the Feds, he wasn't caught giving high powered lawyers offers they couldn't refuse. He was using his mob muscle to extort Big Macs out of the register crew of a local Mickey Dee's. Death camps weren't full of whip-wielding vixens; instead they were run by armies of semi-anonymous functionaries roughly as sensual as your garden variety civil servant.
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