Feature writing

From Broadway musicals and West End hits to the silver screen, bloodsuckers are back in a major way. Lock the door, grab some garlic, and let us explain why.

Let the blood run free! A rabble-rousing group of vampires are amassing to sink their teeth into our deepest fears and desires. On the London stage, Cynthia Erivo has been appearing in Dracula (playing the title role and 22 other characters) in an epic one-woman production, her production opening at the same time as Luc Besson’s big-screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, starring Caleb Landry Jones in the title role.

A musical version of The Lost Boys, directed by Michael Arden and inspired by Joel Schumacher’s famed 1980s hit movie, is bringing leather, bared flesh, and its own original score to Broadway this spring, in the wake of Blood/Love, a very loud and proudly raunchy “vampire pop opera” playing through May off-Broadway. Also in May, a stage adaptation of vampire coming-of-age thriller Let the Right One In will open at Britain’s National Youth Theatre; in the same month the third season of Interview With the Vampire—now renamed The Vampire Lestat—will debut on AMC.

What makes these defiantly undead bloodsuckers our monster of choice right now—and can The Lost Boys break the “curse,”as Playbill put it, of there never yet being a successful vampire musical on Broadway?

For the Tony Award-winning Arden, who is also the co-lighting designer of The Lost Boys, the cultural endurance of vampires is “tied to our greatest fears and largest desires, the fear of death. The vampire represents the unknown, a dark, evil, but sensual, titillating, exciting life, and this idea of our desire to live forever—it’s why I put on my Kiehl’s products this morning.

“We want to slow down time, to stretch out time, which vampires are able to do in ways humans can’t,” Arden tells T&C. “Everyone, at a certain point, has to come to terms with their own mortality. And then, for some vampires the idea of an endless life is also horrifying. What a great paradox! These provocations are why I love theater.”

Dane Laffrey, the musical’s scenic designer, says the popularity of vampires has always “spoken to something primal, cutting against the status quo, while also expressing something hidden and unseen in our own culture and our own desires—alongside our fascination with immortality and our longing for community.”

In its story of brothers Michael and Sam Emerson (to be played on Broadway by L.J. Benet and Benjamin Pajak), their divorced mom Lucy (Shoshana Bean), and the vampires who attempt to co-opt Michael into their gang (led by Ali Louis Bourzgui’s David), The Lost Boys is fundamentally about family, Laffrey says. “Michael is at this turning point, or precipice, in his life. He has to choose between two versions of family.”

In London, director Kip Williams who is overseeing Erivo’s Dracula, has conceived something akin to his award-winning production of Sarah Snook’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—in both shows, the actors play all the characters in the story.

“I’m fucking petrified. I really am. I’m very scared,” Erivo told her Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey in Wonderland magazine of the scale of the task at hand. “But I’m also like—I don’t know, is this sadistic of me—but I’m really excited about it as well. It’s absolutely nonsensical and insane.”

Going to see The Picture of Dorian Gray, Erivo said, “I thought, ‘This is either going to make me run in another direction or really confirm that I have to do this.’ I went to see Sarah Snook, and I was like, ‘Oh shit.’”

Williams and Dracula’s creative team are “really inviting audiences to actively participate rather than passively observe,” producer Michael Cassel tells T&C. “This isn’t Dracula as a neat, contained gothic story; it’s Dracula as a psychological and theatrical experience.”

He adds, “With Cynthia embodying not just Dracula but so many voices within the world, the line between monster and human, observer and participant, begins to blur as an intentional result. Audiences are asked to sit with discomfort, with contradiction, and with the idea that identity is fluid, fractured, and constantly evolving. Ultimately, I think the hope is that people leave the theatre not just entertained, but provoked thinking about power, desire, fear, and the parts of ourselves we’d perhaps rather not acknowledge.”

Laura Westengard, assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York, tells T&C that we turn to the gothic in popular culture, including vampires, to mitigate trauma. Westengard, author of the book Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma, says, “Sometimes we turn to metaphors to talk about traumatic or difficult experiences. In whatever era they appear, vampires become a reflection of that cultural moment’s anxiety.”

In this sense, the resurgence of vampires in this moment might be a response to the global experience of COVID, or the rise of authoritarianism and increased global conflict.

“We’re living in a period where the idea of ‘the monster’ feels very close to home,” says Cassel. “Vampires sit at this intriguing intersection of fear and fascination. They’re predators, but they’re also tragic figures, oftentimes lonely. Right now, that duality resonates deeply. We’re questioning who holds power, how it’s maintained, and what happens when it’s abused. Theatre, in particular, allows us to confront those questions live, collectively, in the same room.”

Arden says he has “always had a vampire thing, although I didn’t know The Lost Boys until I got approached to do it on stage.” As for so many vampire fans, it was Anne Rice’s fiction that sparked his interest. “I read Interview with the Vampire in middle school and was absolutely obsessed with it. It was heavy reading. The question it asks—how does one live a life if mortality is not part of the equation?—is a fascinating one, because it reveals a tremendous amount about human nature and desire, and the tendencies and choices we make. That’s part of the reason why vampires make for an especially fertile area of drama.”

Vampires can be both feared and desired. When they first came into the public consciousness in the 19th century, Westengard says, the public was only supposed to be terrified by them. But modern vampires got sexier (Buffy, Twilight, True Blood) and more complex, and queer audiences in particular began to see vampires as independent-minded, subversive icons and heroes.

Vampires have endured in pop culture because “they’re endlessly adaptable, and dare I say, relatable,” says Cassel. “Every generation reshapes them to reflect its own anxieties. There’s the obsession with youth and immortality, yes, but also questions around consent, control, nurture versus nature, and moral responsibility. Vampires force us to ask: Are we born monsters, or do we become them?”