Dracula as a sci-fi Western? Not as weird as you think

Director Chloé Zhao’s recently announced genre mash-up actually makes sense — when you look at the history

FRESH FROM THE success of Nomadland,

filmmaker Chloé Zhao is set to sink her teeth into another badlands character study: a futuristic sci-fi Western spin on Dracula. “I’ve always been fascinated by vampires and the concept of the Other they embody,” Zhao said in a statement. Surprising news, perhaps — but not unprecedented. The Count has graced a few saloons in his time; in fact, Bram Stoker’s boy is both an opposite and a curious kind of kindred spirit to the traditional Western hero.

Vampires are no strangers to jangling spurs, appearing in everything from 1959’s classical

Curse Of The Undead to 2014’s postmodern

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. And Dracula himself faced off against the West’s most infamous outlaw in the 1966 flick Billy The Kid Vs. Dracula, which likens John Carradine’s devilishly dapper Drac to the Western’s archetypal dandy (a model that Carradine helped hone in 1939’s watershed Western Stagecoach).

Dandies are wealthy, well-dressed and wellgroomed, their femininity placing them in opposition to the clear-cut masculinity of classic Western heroes. It’s a role that Dracula, with his high collar and highfalutin demeanour, was born to play. Carradine’s son David would later adopt the mantle of Big D in 1989’s Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat, albeit under a nom de guerre. Here, having become too famous, ‘Count Mardulak’ has fled deep into the West

— a common move for Western characters looking to escape suspicion.

Like the cowboy, the vampire is a vagrant. Western heroes never settle down, always roaming the plains, and vampires can’t rest either — their hunger necessitates movement, as in Near Dark’s roving doom-brood. Both are cursed to wander. But Dracula has an advantage. Part animal, he embodies the wildness that the Western’s townships continually attempt to tame.

Through vampires, filmmakers can circumnavigate the Western’s often problematic depiction of Native Americans. Zhao could go for the throat here. Like the American pioneers, the Count is a pale-skinned European immigrant whose descent on foreign soil brings bloody results. Might Dracula do to the white man what the white man did to the Native Americans?

Zhao’s project will be future-facing. Thankfully, science fiction, too, overlaps with the Western, both being thematically concerned with the taming of frontiers and all the colonial crimes that entails. Between these explorations of masculinity, sexuality and fearful frontiers, we’d say Zhao is onto something. Who’s thirsty?