Last night, I went to a cinema near Preston to watch Nosferatu—the latest retelling of the Dracula story.

It’s a good film. It really leans into a dark, misty 19th-century gothic feel and does some interesting things with the ideas and characters of Bram Stoker’s novel.

I’ve always read Dracula as a sort of New Testament inversion. The arch-vampire is an anti-Jesus in several fundamental ways: a blood-soaked evangelist, converting disciples with his fangs, draining them of their humanity rather than filling them with the Holy Spirit. He manipulates their darkest, most human desires—sex, power, and immortality—rather than ameliorating them.

Both Christ and Dracula are tortured by the crucifix. Both have a strange power over death. Both are imbued with ancient, elemental forces beyond human understanding.

The two somehow stand at opposite poles on our collective imaginary landscape, strange mirrors of one another—the ultimate ideal and its twisted antithesis.

Believers drink and eat of the body of Christ and live forever; the vampire drinks and eats of the body of us and does the same thing.

It’s striking how often we seem to return to the vampire as a culture. It’s clearly an enduring archetype—a story that just won’t leave us alone. There’s a major recommissioning of the Dracula tale at least once every year or two by someone, somewhere, as far as I can tell.

It’s almost liturgical at this point. And I think that’s probably because it speaks to something deep within us.

Aside from the ticket price, I’ve played my own part in keeping the mythology alive this December.

You see, keeping a vampire at bay takes serious effort. It requires a consistent regimen of garlic flowers, blessings, prayer, and holy water.

But more than that, it takes psychological resistance.

One of the most fiendishly clever ideas in the vampire mythology—and it’s one that predates Stoker; one that belongs to the wild forests of Bohemia—is that the vampire must be invited in.

Picture me at the end of October: home from a couple of days wandering around Malta, sun-kissed, about 400 days sober, and in great shape. An album in my back pocket, ready to launch, another one on my mind, ready to take on the rest of the year.

Fast forward to New Year’s Day, and I have become a very different sort of creature.

My skin is pale, and my eyes are heavy. I’m sleeping into the afternoons and spending the rest of my days in semi-darkness, spluttering and raw like an onion, unable to shake a strange flu that seems to have been stalking me since late November.

Every evening, for what feels like millennia, I’ve been emerging, temporarily revived, to strum a guitar and sing in dark chorus with other worshippers of the night.

I no longer see the world in its full spectrum of color. Life has become a dull, grey infra-red. I’m operating on wolf vision.

I’m anhedonic, cynical, empty.

I’m Vampiric.

What changed?

Well—I saw the dark shape at the window and invited him in, of course.

Why?

I don’t know. There’s a part of me that always wants to invite him in.

It’s tiresome keeping him out. There’s a sweet temptation in surrender—absolving yourself of responsibility for your own life and getting reckless for a while.

To just have a beer, because it’s nearly Christmas and you’re tired and everyone else is. To take a break from the gym for a few days because you’re a little under the weather and have a hectic period coming up. To cancel those plans because rotting on the sofa feels safe, and you feel like you deserve it.

The problem is that the vampire is insatiable.

Once you let him in, he won’t stop coming.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and that one beer at one gig has become a barely contained flood. You’re drinking at every gig now, because you still feel a little rough from the night before and it’s the only thing that’ll get you back in the mood.

By Boxing Day, it’s become four beers and eight shots poured down you by a pretty barmaid, and you haven’t even finished the gig. You’re still on stage, halfway through Don’t Look Back in Anger, and you aren’t quite sure if you’ve been playing the same chords as the rest of the band for the last half an hour.

And then it carries on after the gig, even though you need sleep, because you know you won’t sleep anyway. So there’s the inevitable taxi ride into a nowhere town at 3 a.m. to the only place left open to meet the other vampires. People who should have gone home long ago but are still searching for whatever it is that none of you are going to find there.

And by 4 a.m., you’re stood in front of a stinking urinal trough, covered in rust and empty polythene bags, watching a dead-eyed zombie in a Represent T-shirt snort cheap coke off his car keys. And you begin to seriously wonder if that might at least bring you back to life for another hour or so.

You haven’t exercised for weeks because you’re always a little under the weather now. Rotting on the couch is no longer a rare indulgence; it’s your default state—like the vampire dissolving back into the putrid earth he must return to at the dawn of each day before resurfacing at dusk to slink back into the gloom.

Fortunately for me, my vampire is a bit of a pushover these days. I no longer fear he has the power to permanently consume me. I know the rituals and routines that will sanctify me against him.

A January week of sober sleep, walking, exercising, and preparing fresh food, and I already feel indescribably human again.

I can feel motivation, ambition, and healthy pleasure returning fast.

But it’s been a timely reminder of what’s always out there, waiting.

Here’s to 2025—another chance to rise again and put old spirits back in the grave.

Keep dreaming,

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Rob

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