The Groovy Undead: Barnabas Collins, Count Yorga, and Dracula AD 1972

Here, in this neon-drenched cinematic world of the early ‘70s, where high collars and frayed jeans coexist, where echoes of 19th-century fog are but fleeting remnants against the electric hum of disco, there stalks the creature of the night—torn between its primal hunger and the glittering absurdity of its own existence. The vampire, like a record skipping off the turntable, endlessly repeats its own undoing. No longer the seductively classical monster of our grandfather’s gothic imaginations, this creature is urban, sharply tailored, and haunted by a psychological terror that's far more terrifying than any mere bloodlust.

Let’s examine these three skeletal sentinels of the groovy undead: Barnabas Collins, Count Yorga, and the perennially stylish Dracula AD 1972, in a world where the ancient powers of the night have had to update their wardrobes and demeanor to cope with the chaos of a post-Flower Power world.

Barnabas Collins: The Reluctant Mod Vampire

First up is Barnabas Collins. There is something inherently perverse about Barnabas—a creature thrust into the world of 20th-century America against his will, out of sync with the world around him. A man out of time, desperate to cling to the remnants of an earlier, more elegant age, but forever trapped in the decaying body of a monster. The gothic soap opera Dark Shadows made sure to let us know Barnabas wasn’t just any vampire. He wasn’t the cool, charismatic, seductive monster of past films. No, he was a tortured, awkward, sometimes charming, and often repellent figure who could never truly escape the curse of his immortality. He was the ultimate tragic figure wrapped in polyester and lace, as much a product of the 1970s as he was of the Victorian nightmare. His attempt to be a moral man—desperate to avoid draining the blood of innocents, yearning for human connection—was nothing short of a sick joke in the wake of a decade that had rewritten all the rules.

Here was a vampire, a creature that should have been, by all rights, an untouchable symbol of aristocratic grace, but in the world of Dark Shadows, he was a victim—of his curse, of time, of history itself. Barnabas was a grotesque reminder that the 1960s’ dream of free love and liberation had failed, leaving behind a generation that was both liberated and hopelessly trapped.

Count Yorga: The Anti-Vampire

Next comes Count Yorga, who, to paraphrase Nietzsche, stands as the Übermensch of vampires in a landscape where blood-draining is no longer just for noblemen with ancient accents. He is, by all definitions, the vampire of the late '60s and early ‘70s—a perverse update for a time when “cool” and “alien” intersected in a haze of psychedelics and existentialism. Created by the low-budget genius of Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and The Return of Count Yorga(1971), this version of the undead is thoroughly modern—he drives a car, wears sharp clothes, and seduces his prey with the kind of detached coldness that would make you believe he was a refugee from the ‘60s counterculture itself, just a little too fed up to fight the system anymore.

This is a vampire who speaks with authority, a creature not beholden to some grand, tragic destiny. Yorga is as unfettered by moral ambiguity as the whole generation was. He moves through the streets of Los Angeles with a sort of terrifying indifference to the consequences of his actions. The ‘70s vampires, like Yorga, were not simply drawn to the shadowed corners of the world for refuge. They made the night their domain, offering no promises of redemption or remorse. In Yorga, there is no room for either grace or Gothic despair. It’s a colder, more cynical brand of undead existence.

Dracula AD 1972: The Aristocrat Goes Punk

Ah, and finally, we come to the grandest of them all, the debonair, bloodthirsty aristocrat himself: Dracula. But not the Dracula of your Victorian novels or even the Bela Lugosi films. No, this is Dracula AD 1972, a slick update of the Count into a world that no longer offers him the cushy luxuries of aristocratic control. Instead, he is thrust into the gritty London of the early '70s, where bell-bottoms, motorbikes, and radical youth movements reign supreme.

What director Alan Gibson offers in Dracula AD 1972 is the cinematic equivalent of a rejected album cover from the Velvet Underground. Dracula is a man out of time, no longer a symbol of the decadence of high society, but a rock-and-roll casualty wandering through a society more interested in the next hit than the next burial. His pursuit of power has been distilled into an exercise of cultural relevance: he must contend not with creeping fog, but with the cynicism of the modern world. A fossil in a scene he no longer understands, and like any aged relic, he resists the oncoming tide of new blood. And the irony is not lost: he, the Count, once feared and revered, now nothing more than a tired icon in a world that sees him as little more than a quaint anachronism, a figure that evokes nothing more than the disinterested flick of a wrist.

And yet, Dracula AD 1972 is strangely prescient. Here is the undead aristocrat as a shadow of things past, a desperate, exhausted figure trying to squeeze life—eternal life—from a society that has passed him by. He is the ultimate counterpoint to the youth of the time: like them, he no longer believes in the values of the old order, but he also lacks the energy to remake the world in his own image.

In Conclusion

These vampires, these creatures of the night, speak not just to the darkness that lurks outside our windows, but to the even darker recesses of our modern, post-psychadelic, disillusioned selves. They are relics and rebels, trapped in the amber of time. The groovy undead—Barnabas, Yorga, and Dracula—are at once the product of a world that can’t decide whether it wants to cling to the past or dance toward some unspeakable, disorienting future. A future that, frankly, doesn’t need them. And that’s the true horror. In the ‘70s, the real terror isn’t in the bite, the blood, or the long black capes. It’s in realizing that even monsters are doomed to be left behind, irrelevant in a world that’s already moved on.

Groovy, huh?