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Life & Arts

'Castlevania' offers a bite of gothic culture

My 8 Bits

Jason Poland

Vampire-hunting can be a tricky business, but thanks to Romantic literature, goth culture and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we're all a little more informed about our Transylvanian blood brothers and sisters.

Like cops, they're not allowed inside your house unless you invite them, and also like cops, they can be killed by hammering a wooden stake through their hearts. 

The public's fascination with vampires and gothic horror sinks its teeth into every facet of culture and has sucked the color from their once rosy consumer cheeks. Books, movies, music, cartoons, the Internet, fashion and even fetishes all have healthy gothic subcultures -- as healthy as their low red blood cell count can allow for, anyway. Just a black-and-red stroll through Hot Topic or Torrid in the Galleria can tell you that much, and a walk down Montrose can reveal what pale-faced Renaissance Festival-goers do with leather and chains after dark. 

But if you're looking for something more gothic than Friday night at Numbers, go no further than Castlevania on your Nintendo Entertainment System, and see what happens when vampire hunters and leather whips get together. The world is a vampire.

While a whip wouldn't be my first choice when combating a supernatural nocturnal bloodsucker, Simon Belmont is trying a different approach. According to what vampire belief you prescribe to, it varies as what will actually harm the undead. Some like to use garlic and some the crucifix (which in this game kills every enemy on the screen), but Simon prefers the sting of the whip. In 40 lashes or more, he'll have Dracula screaming the safety word. 

Some other tricks in this vampire hunter's bag include holy water, of course, flying daggers, axes, boomerangs, a stopwatch that freezes time and roast beef; it's what's for dinner.

During his sadomasochistic quest, Simon will encounter an all-star cast of gothic vamps sprung from the inky pages of Romantic and Gothic literature and mythology. Zombies, vampire bats, floating snake-haired medusa heads and jangly-boned skeletons are just some of the ghoulies he'll face. Besides Dracula, he'll also whip Frankenstein's monster. (Not to be confused with Frankenstein, who was the doctor who created him. In British literature classes and costume stores everywhere, this misnomer persists, and it needs to end right now, people. It may take ever so slightly longer to say, but do it for Mary Shelley's sake.)

As to the origins of gothic culture and all that is pale and ghastly, we need to look no further than Mary Shelley and her Victorian and Romantic contemporaries. Drug culture, disease and fashion had much to do with the look we now call "goth." To combat tuberculosis outbreaks, doctors began to frequently prescribe a drug called Laudanum. The opium-based painkiller, an alcoholic tincture often sweetened with sugar, was also used for colds, headaches, meningitis, cardiac diseases and even spoon-fed to cranky babies who often died mysteriously in their nurse's care. The pale look and tendency to faint associated with tuberculosis became something of a trend during this time and women would emulate the effects by taking arsenic to pale the skin -- slowly poisoning themselves to death.

Even more women used Laudanum to pale their complexions and ease the pains of menstruation. Shelley herself used Laudanum, along with other poets and writers of the time -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll (who would've guessed Carroll used drugs?). 

The monsters Simon battles in Castlevania were born from the late night opium-laced ghost stories that Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dr. Polidori and Claire Clairmont concocted during their stay at Villa Diodati, a Castlevania in Switzerland during that dark and stormy night in 1816. In the 1986 Ken Russell film Gothic, we see a side of Mary Shelley that few freshman English classes discuss. During these nights of horror tales, the participants engaged in sadomasochistic slumber party activities that any whip-wielding vampire hunter would be proud of.

Although playing Castlevania won't substitute for reading Dracula and Frankenstein for your Horror Literature final, the whips and monsters in its gothic halls have always had a place in the dark minds of gothic ghost-tellers everywhere. Mix in a little Laudanum and S&M for best results. You know what they say: The creeps come out at night.

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