Inspirations - State of Decay

It's the Vampire one. That's Vampires like the ones in folklore and horror stories, rather than aliens who feed on blood, like Haemovores, Plasmavores or Saturnyns. State of Decay claims that the universe was inhabited by a swarm of vampire creatures in its infancy, and they were wiped out by the Time Lords under Rassilon. They could only be destroyed by staking through the heart, and great bow ships were constructed which could fire steel shafts into them. All were killed, but when it came to counting the bodies, one was missing. This was the Great Vampire, their leader. Despite this incident claiming all but one of the creatures was destroyed, instructions were left in all TARDISes as to what to do in the event that Time Lords encountered them again - implying that more than just the Great Vampire might have survived. The Doctor talks of there being legends of Vampires on every inhabited world. They may have infected others before their extinction. Rassilon's crusade took place long before life existed on Earth, yet Vampire legends can be found on every continent, going back hundreds of years.
One of Britain's earliest Vampire stories comes from the North East of England, and involves a medieval monk who was said to have been more of a devil than a saint. He was said to be a drunken womaniser, who seldom obeyed the rules of his order. After he died stories began to circulate of him having been seen in the community around his monastery, and it was reported that he attacked people and drank their blood. His corpse was exhumed and was found to have little signs of decay. Rather, he looked more healthy than in life, and the mouth was blood-stained. The body was removed from its grave and burned, and the post-mortem sightings ceased. Similar tales abound from all over Europe, as well as the Far East.
The word "Vampire" comes from the Serbian Vampir, which exists in other Slavic languages. In the late 1720's, when Austria took control over Serbia, Austrian officials wrote a report on their new territory, which recorded the practice of villagers exhuming corpses to kill Vampirs.
The word first appears in English in the travel volume Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from 1745.
In early European folklore, Vampires could be anyone. They weren't just people who had led dissolute lives, though being evil in life meant that you were more likely to become a Vampire after death. If someone was suspected of being likely to return as one of these revenants, their corpse was staked to the ground, so that it couldn't climb out of its grave. Stones were also rammed into the mouth so they couldn't bite people. In some instances, bodies were buried face down, so that they would go the wrong direction when they tried burrowing their way out. All of these burial practices have been uncovered by archaeologists.

The Vampire of popular fiction - epitomised by Count Dracula - owes its origins to the same Year Without a Summer which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Staying at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816 with Lord Byron and the Shelleys was Dr John Polidori. He was Byron's personal physician. He had ambitions to be a writer himself. His contribution to the horror story competition from whence came Frankenstein was a tale called The Vampyre. This was about an aristocratic Vampire named Lord Ruthven. A young man named Aubrey meets Ruthven when he appears from nowhere in London society. He agrees to travel with the nobleman to Rome and Greece, where Ruthven has a series of affairs, after which the young women die. Only after Ruthven dies does Aubrey realise the link. A year and a day after his death, Aubrey is shocked to find Ruthven is still alive. He becomes engaged to Aubrey's sister, but she is found dead on her wedding night, her body drained of blood, and Ruthven disappears.
Polidori clearly based Ruthven on Byron. He is himself the Aubrey character, following the peer of the realm around Europe. Byron was well know for destroying lives as he went along - at least their reputations.
At the villa, Byron poured scorn on Polidori's story. In 1819 the young doctor published his short story in expanded form and it immediately caused some controversy. Not for the content, but for its authorship. The publishers elected to claim that it was by Byron himself, and everyone believed this as Lady Caroline Lamb had already included a character based on Byron in one of her novels, giving him the name Ruthven. It took some years before the story was properly credited to Polidori. However, he died at the age of only 25 in 1821, taking his own life by cyanide after suffering from depression and struggling with gambling debts.

Between 1845 - 1847, the story of Varney the Vampire, or A Feast of Blood, appeared in a series of "penny dreadful" pamphlets. It proved very popular. As the authors were being paid by the line, it eventually ran to 232 chapters. To pad it out, Varney travels all over Europe until its climax in Naples, where the vampire commits suicide by jumping into Mount Vesuvius after repenting his evil ways. Varney is another aristocratic Vampire - Sir Thomas Varney - who became a Vampire after siding with Oliver Cromwell and later murdering his son. This is the first popular Vampire story to have the creature described as having sharp fangs.
You can see where all this is taking us. Come 1897 Dubliner Bram Stoker is publishing his novel Dracula. He has obviously read Polidori's story and, since he worked in the theatre, was probably aware of Varney, as it had been adapted for the stage many times.
Stoker managed the Lyceum Theatre and knew noted thespian Sir Henry Irving well. Irving is supposed to be the inspiration for the look of Count Dracula, and it is believed the Count was always destined for Irving to play in a stage adaptation. Some of the story is set in Whitby, on the North East coast of England. The town is noted for its ruined Gothic abbey overlooking the harbour. Stoker spent his holidays there often. He wrote the book as a response to a particular brand of novel which was popular in England at the time - the "alien invasion" genre. That's alien as in foreigners. There was a xenophobic feeling at the time that the Empire would be undermined by the many foreigners settling to London. Because of the use of allegory, so many people these days don't realise that they are actually reading stories arising out of racism.
During his researches for the book, Stoker came across accounts of Vlad Tepes, AKA Vlad III Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, as he is more popularly known. He was a Transylvanian nobleman who helped defend his country from the Ottoman Turks, and is regarded as a hero in his native land - though one who had some imaginative means of disposing of his enemies. Impaling people on huge wooden stakes was his favourite, but on one occasion he had the turbans of some Turkish envoys nailed to their heads when they naturally refused to remove them in his presence. Dracula can mean either devil or dragon. Vlad provided a useful real life historical character from Eastern Europe to act as background to Stoker's fictional Count.

In 1922 German director FW Murnau adapted Dracula for the cinema as Nosferatu. The name comes from Romanian word nesuferitu, which means "the insufferable one" - i.e. the Devil. The problem was that the story was patently based on Dracula, but Murnau had not secured the rights from Stoker's widow. He lost a court case and all copies of the film were recalled to be destroyed. Luckily not all were burned, and we can still enjoy what is undoubtedly one of the scariest horror films ever made today.
Some time later we had a stage adaptation of the novel, which ran in London and on Broadway. Quick question: which actor has played Count Dracula more than any other? It's not Lugosi or Christopher Lee but English actor Raymond Huntley. He played the Count in hundreds of performances of the play, in England and in the USA. Bela Lugosi did take on the role in New York later, and when he found out that Carl Laemmle Jnr was going to film the story for Universal Studios, he begged for the part. It had been destined for Lon Chaney, but the Man of  Thousand Faces died as the film was being prepared. Lugosi was initially rejected for the part, but won it in the end. It became his signature role, but also doomed him to typecasting and eventual poverty and drug addiction - and Ed Wood Jnr.
Universal rather squandered the character, apart from the underrated Son of Dracula, preferring to concentrate on the Frankenstein Monster and Larry Talbot's Wolfman (the only Universal monster to be played by the same actor throughout the cycle of films - Lon Chaney Jnr).
The Count had to wait until 1958 for his triumphant return from the grave, this time in full-blooded colour and with Christopher Lee donning the cape for Hammer Studios.

We've already said something about the genesis of this story, back when we looked at the inspiration behind Horror of Fang Rock. To recap, Terrance Dicks contributed a Vampire-themed story for Season 15, the first to be produced by Graham Williams. He had seen Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes mine the horror genre for stories, including his own Frankenstein-inspired The Brain of Morbius. However, the BBC were about to embark on a lavish adaptation of Dracula, starring Hollywood actor Louis Jourdan as the Count, and Frank Finlay as Van Helsing. This was to be a faithful adaptation of the novel - indeed it remains the most faithful screen version to date - and would be broadcast over three consecutive nights in the run up to Christmas, 1977. The BBC upper echelons decided that a Vampire themed Doctor Who story might be construed as taking the mickey out of such a prestigious production, so Williams was told to pull Dicks' scripts. he quickly came up with Horror of Fang Rock instead, and there is a nod to the abandoned story by having a character named Stoker in the replacement. Fast forward three years and Christopher H Bidmead has found a dearth of scripts on taking up his new Script Editor post. He finds some old submissions, and Dicks' story is the only one salvageable in the time available. He doesn't like it, but JNT tells him to proceed with getting it ready. Dicks made the necessary changes to fit it to the new season - changing Romana for Leela, adding Adric, and setting it in E-Space. Dicks includes many of the themes you expect from screen Vampires. We have the aristocratic blood-drinkers - a King, a Queen and their Chancellor - who bleed the peasantry dry in more ways than one. They exhibit fangs when attacking their prey. Their castle doesn't have any windows but Aukon is seen to visit the village in daylight - so one aspect of the mythos is unused - that Vampires are destroyed by sunlight. At one point Romana cuts her finger on a broken glass, and the Queen - Camilla - goes to suck the wound. This is a direct lift from Dracula, where Jonathon Harker cuts his finger and the Count claims sucking the wound is a more hygienic way of treating it. Camilla gets her name from Carmilla, the 1872 novella by Irish writer J Sheridan Le Fanu. This is another of the works on the road to Dracula, introducing the female of the species in the form of the undead Mircalla Karnstein. The Karnsteins got their own trilogy of films from Hammer - The Vampire Lovers, Lust For A Vampire and The Twins of Evil. The Great Vampire is despatched by a stake through the heart, in the form of a scout ship with a sharp nose cone. Once dead, the Three Who Rule crumble to dust, as all long-lived Vampires are wont to do when they perish.

The director chosen for the story was Peter Moffatt, who had known producer JNT from other productions such as All Creatures Great and Small. Moffatt was initially reluctant to do a Doctor Who but the friendship with JNT won him over. He was sent the script and loved the Gothic horror trappings. Bidmead, meanwhile, set about changing the look and feel of the story to better match his vision of the series. When Moffatt received the updated scripts he was horrified. All the Gothic imagery had been stripped out, replaced with high tech science. He contacted JNT and said he wasn't going to do it any more, as he didn't like the changes. JNT ordered Bidmead to put back everything he had taken out and return it to the version Moffatt had originally agreed to.
As we said last time, this was Matthew Waterhouse's first story in production order. He arrived during a period of hostility between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. Baker simply ignored him, whilst Ward gave him a telling off when he insisted on wearing his costume to lunch against the wishes of the costume department - an unprofessional thing to do, which cemented his lack of experience in her view.
Moffatt was proved right in insisting on the original Dicks treatment of his story. In the DWM 50th Anniversary poll State of Decay was the highest ranking of the three E-Space stories, sitting in the top half of the poll overall.
Next time: a lesson in French New Wave Cinema, as we take in the works of Alain Renais and Jean Cocteau whilst bidding adieu to Romana and K9...