Chi abita a Milano, o ci può capitare nel fine settimana, è invitato venerdì 21 novembre alla presentazione di THE DARK SCREEN, which I wrote the preface. The event will be held at Atelier Gluck (Via Gluck, 45), 20.30. The authors will intervene and Angelica Tintori Franco Pezzini, the writer Ben Pastor Gargoyle Books publisher Paolo De Crescenzo - and, of course, to the undersigned. If you're ever nearby, come and say hello.
Here, courtesy of the publisher, my preface.
They changed the face? Historically, sales to the Social Summit of the myths of the empyrean horror, Dracula and his descendants have always distinguished themselves as particularly adept at shape-shifting creatures. But their ability to transform into wolves, bats or even in the night breeze is insignificant compared to redefine its role in maintaining social ladder always dominant. As we in Europe are also disrupted the memory of the privileges granted by the titles, the vampires have been able to change, if not the face, at least in uniform, never miss the reins of power in decades.
It is, in all probability, a fundamental question of vocation: characters such as Baron Frankenstein and Professor Griffin dedicate their lives to their scientific projects (the creation of life and invisibility), and rarely is venture outside of their laboratory. Figures like Frankenstein's creature, Creature from the Black Lagoon wolf or man (and, for that matter, even Mr. Hyde, the result of experiments of another eminent scholar like Dr. Jekyll) are in fact victims of their own feral nature or extent of their intellectual . Not to mention the zombie, the proletariat of the world horror, that only in the strength of their numbers are actually a desperate power. Instead, Dracula and his successors are the result of an environment, the feud between management and challenging campaigns, has always preferred the role of the strategy: they are, by nature, planners, instructors in the seduction and manipulation of weak minds . And when you link, without hesitation, often for no less than food than those of other monstrous creatures perhaps equally famous, but behave with the coolness of the consumed elegant chess player, typically using force only when things start to go wrong. 
Before a murderess, and an almost irresistible seducer, Dracula is basically a political element and this is explained, since the title of a film on the whole misunderstood as They changed the face of Corrado Farina in this film, as well as in the following Innocent Blood, American John Landis (published more than twenty years later) it is evident that the progeny of Dracula has learned to wear double-breasted of economic and political power or the cast of the mafia bosses - a category, the latter, which, as we know, was able in turn to change the face and uniform, mixing irreversibly to the first - and has been able to carve out new space, consolidating his power and actually increases the flow dramatically. Already in the early seventies, the protagonist of They changed the face is a powerful businessman who has almost absolute control over key sectors of industry, which has long spread its tentacles over banks and insurance , which owns newspapers and television and, while not exposing first person is the owner of certain political parties. Almost four decades later, the paradox proposed by the film was largely achieved by the reality, in our and other countries, as they develop global logics of profit and allow a relentless oppression concentration of the wires that move the lives of nations in the hands of an increasingly small number of powerful puppeteers.
Farina's film ends with the final triumph of John supervampiro Nosferatu, sealed by a quote Marcusian, while the vampire mafia Innocent Blood John Landis seem to end up defeated by the alliance between a vampira dotata di un’etica rigirosa e un poliziotto infiltrato nel clan: nel finale pirotecnico, dopo che tutta la sua banda è stata sterminata, anche il boss Sal Macelli viene fermato da una pallottola ben piazzata. Eppure il lunghissimo discorso che il capoclan pronuncia nel finale, mentre il suo corpo arde senza consumarsi, non sembra affatto un congedo: “Io sono il Potere, e tu non sei che una cacatina di mosca”, ruggisce verso il poliziotto che lo tiene sotto tiro, e l’impressione che dà non è quella di un essere in preda a un insensato delirio di onnipotenza. Il tono, invece, è quello di qualcuno che sa bene di aver perduto solo una battaglia. E che la guerra proseguirà con un esito scontato, perché the propagation of the vampire race is part of their nature, neither more nor less than their willingness to rise from the ashes each time. If there are exceptions (but merely satirical film: for all the interesting and include Zora the vampire, 2000, in which Dracula Conte by Toni Bertorelli is a very deprived and low - seven years before 'admission of Romania into the European Union - the humiliation of having to enter Italy as an illegal non-EU), many more are confirmations of the general rule. Even when talking about vampires apparently marginalized by society as Lost Boys by Joel Schumacher, where the real leader of a group of young bloodsucker turns out to be a much respected member of the local community. The only form of power difficult to reconcile with nature seems to be vampire, for reasons easy to understand, the religious - but it can sometimes be tempted to an uneasy alliance. I think the cardinal played by Maximilian Schell in John Carpenter's Vampires (but inspiration is a novel by John Steakley) which, doubted and the long wait for an eternal life-style Christian, likes (and ill him incoglie) safety non-tangible and immediate death.
But notice the ramblings: If the vampire filmography is ocean, teeming with changes sometimes heretical (in the good The darkness approaches using a blood transfusion to restore a victim of the fatal bite his human nature!), approaches that give up the element fantastic (and we quote for all the Wampyr Romero) or on the contrary, taking the path of science fiction (the three films inspired by unfaithfully I Am Legend by Richard Matheson - originally released in Italy under the title The vampires in the same year in which went out the 'self-titled film by Riccardo Freda , and go to know whether it was the publisher of the book to steal the title of the film to distributors or vice versa), is no doubt that, pace of Le Fanu and Polidori and other more or less illustrious predecessors, the central work of the whole vampire mythology is the Dracula of Bram Stoker's novel that most cited actually read (as it happens from time to vast majority of the true classics), but also a reference point for all the mythology, despite the betrayals, both literal and substantial, committed almost all its film versions. Curiously enough, therefore, that no one had yet taken the initiative to start from there to read in an analytical groped everything from Stoker was born in over one hundred and ten years of film history (an age that, look look, overlaps quasi perfettamente a quella del libro, che fu pubblicato la prima volta pochi mesi dopo la prima, storica, manifestazione pubblica dell’invenione dei Lumiére). 
Ci hanno pensato, finalmente, Franco Pezzini, Angelica Tintori e Paolo De Crescenzo con il libro che tenete nelle mani. In questo lavoro davvero monumentale, l’opera di Stoker non è solo la pietra di paragone di tutti i film che ne sono stati tratti: diventa invece il filtro attraverso cui ciascuno di quei titoli può essere analizzato in modo approfondito. Perché è evidente che ogni deviazione o modifica rispetto alla fonte originale ha avuto una sua ragione precisa nel contesto storico in cui è stata decisa - e proprio per this can be, in a careful, extremely significant. Not only that since every new adaptation of Dracula becomes, somehow, part of a single charge, the same variations tend to become a source to turn to a more complex overlay of references, inspiration and plagiarism, influence each other. For the authors of The Dark Screen , Stoker's novel has become the guiding star in the exploration of an impressive amount of evidence: dozens and dozens of plots minutely described, dissected to collate and compare them with the original . Coming at the end, to steal a term used more frequently in geologia, un appassionante carotaggio che sonda in profondità la ormai secolare stratificazione delle versioni, rivelando costanti e variazioni di una produzione cinematografica sterminata.
Il risultato è uno strumento inestimabile e davvero unico per inseguire il mito del vampiro attraverso le sue mille trasformazioni. Se Dracula e i suoi accoliti hanno cambiato faccia e, oggi più che mai, continuano a succhiarci il sangue, The Dark Screen è il manuale fondamentale per aiutarci a riconoscerli. E, se in noi alberga ancora un po’ della grinta di combattenti valorosi come il professor Van Helsing, tentare di riorganizzare la resistenza.
Alberto Farina
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