He wrote THE book on Dracula
Donald Glut, author of The Dracula Book AND OH MY GOD SO MUCH MORE connects the dots between dinosaurs, aliens, and vampires.
To enter Donald F. Glut’s house is to enter a museum. The first thing you see is the floor-to-ceiling signed movie stills, illustrations, headshots and posters. They aren’t a collection, but rather keepsakes from the impossible number of projects he’s been involved with in his life. The number of signatures is challenged only by the amount of classic horror movie memorabilia that fills the house.
The second thing you notice are dinosaurs. So many dinosaurs. More dinosaurs than appear in Jurassic Park or the Smithsonian combined. Although Don Glut has dealt with a myriad of fantastic subjects over his career, dinosaurs have been his first and most enduring love.
Whatever you think you’ve accomplished in your life, Don Glut has you beat. Written both Archie and Captain America comics? Check. Recorded film scores? Check. Written and edited a set of encyclopedias? Check. Did I say ENCYCLOPEDIAS? Check. Directed and produced gothic erotica? Check. Created a key Gen X action figure? Check. Adapted The Empire Strikes Back to novel? Check.
But more specific to this blog, he’s written two books on vampires and made no less than five films capitalizing on the vampire legend.
Although fictional vampires have never left the screen since their first introduction (a debatable moment), few people still cower in fear of actual night-stalking revenants. But have we evolved past that fear? I asked Don this question directly and he had a an intriguing answer.
Belief in vampires was rejected in areas of learning, in the cities, and even by the Church. “So why,” I asked, “did people keep believing in vampires despite the overwhelming evidence against them?”
“Some people just aren’t going to accept science. Look at today,” he waves to the displays of Pteradons and Velociraptors that make it hard to find a wall, “there’s people today who don’t believe in dinosaurs. Maybe they can’t believe it or don’t want to or can’t find a reference to them in the Bible.”
But what about the fear that gave rise to vampire mythology? It’s still here, Don says, just in a different form. “I think alien abductions are the new vampire scare.”
Leave it to a guy who worked on Vampirella to connect aliens and vampires.
“No alien ever abducts a research scientist from their lab. It’s always — pardon me — hillbillies,” he says, reaching for the closest modern equivalent to rural Transylvanians. “Both involve some sort of penetration. In both cases it can be sexual — if unwanted — and in both cases something is extracted.” He doesn’t say it explicitly, but certainly in both the cases of an alien abduction and a vampire bite, the victim is left somehow diminished. In the folklore, victims of vampire attacks were weakened at best, stricken ill at worst. Alien abductees are often left traumatized in a different way.
Don Glut doesn’t seem to be diminished, even at his age. And while some hack blogger might make an analogy between the dinosaurs that fill Don’s home and Don’s stubborn refusal to embrace CGI, Netflix, or e-readers, I see him not as a fossil but as a crocodile: a survivor that is still a threat if you catch him on his home turf.
Don Glut is currently in post production on a Frankenstein-inspired film to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s book. There may even be a vampire appearance in his new film, he winks. “I’ll never retire. I want to die on set between ‘action’ and ‘cut’!” he cracked to me.
“Hopefully it’s a good take,” I joked back. He didn’t laugh. Only then did I suspect that his crack wasn’t a crack at all. Like Dracula and the dinosaurs, Donald F. Glut plans to die on the job.
Toothpickings is a blog that you can read. It is generally about vampires.
Image credits: My own taken inside Donald Glut’s home, Shutterstock, Universal Pictures
