I don’t want to talk about the man behind the candle.  Seriously, don’t even look at him, forget he’s even there.  And, believe me, I know how hard it is – it’s Bela Lugosi, you’re thinking, for gum’s sake.  Yes, this is true.  The man in the Wayne Newton ruffled shirt and cravat (why don’t men in movies wear cravats anymore?) is Bela DRACULA Lugosi himself, in fine post-career-highpoint fettle as Count Mora in Tod Browning’s MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935).  It’s a neat movie, maybe even classic by now, a remake of Browning’s silent (presumed) classic (presumed because nobody alive today has seen it) LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927), which had starred Lon Chaney (penciled in for the lead in DRACULA before cancer took his life in 1930).  Atmospherically shot by future multiple Academy Award nominee and winner James Wong Howe, the movie is only so-so as horripilating entertainment but every frame of it could be hung on a museum wall.  And the jewel in this creepy crown is Carroll Borland, pictured above and slightly behind the guy I would prefer that you ignore for the time being.

Carroll Borland was a 20-year-old Berkley student and movie extra who got her big break in MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, playing Count Mora’s daughter Luna.  (Allegedly, the fledgling actress had played a minor role in a stage production of DRACULA starring Lugosi and had impressed herself upon him to the point where he brokered her effective big screen debut.)  In MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, Borland has no dialogue throughout (save for a line at the very end) and limited screen time but remains nonetheless a startling and beguilingly necro-erotic figure in her gauzy burial gown, her complexion the color of milk, with gimlet cat eyes and a disconcertingly lush mouth that draws you in, spider-to-fly-like.  In the role of Luna, she is at once little girl and ancient harridan, part poppy, half harridan, a naif to whom all hooved satyrs knelt.  You see her softness, her plumpness, and yet you sense there are razors within the tulle.  To gaze into her eyes is to know at once she’d slice you to ribbons and laugh at your flesh unraveled into a bloody coil around your ankles.  That’s half the attraction, I think… and maybe more than half.

I got to see Carroll Borland in person a few months before her death in February of 1994.  Near the end of her life, she was an amusingly brassy older broad who wasn’t trying to play the Lady of Mystery nearly sixty years after the fact.  She was squat and kind of homely and seemed like she knew a lot of dirty jokes.  No longer threatening, you wanted to kiss her on the cheek.  Apparently she made up a lot of stuff about her relationship to Lugosi over the years, claims that were discounted over time.  But I don’t hold that against her; she’d had the experience of her lifetime and she wanted to preserve it, compound it, magnify it, re-live it.  Now over 70 years past the making of MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, she is in her own right as legendary as her beloved costar.  They say that cartoonist Charles Addams patterned the character of Morticia Addams after Borland’s Luna; years later, another Hollywood hanger-on, Maila Nurmi, went to a costume party dressed as Morticia and wound up becoming the enduring cult figure Vampira, whose interpretation of the character had a lot to do with Carolyn Jones’ look in the role on the short-lived but undying ABC sitcom THE ADDAMS FAMILY.  Vampira and Morticia have inspired a lot of Goth makeovers over the years but we have Luna to thank as a sort of undead Germaine Greer, paving the way for her sisters in graveyard earth.  What comes around goes around, I guess.  Especially with vampires.