A Question of Representation

If there is one thing that Ramsey Campbell has harped on about more than anything else over the decades since he read the book, it is a photographic representation of what the vampire looked like after being exorcised. The image appears on page 142 of the first edition of The Highgate Vampire.

This representational picture gets Ramsey Campbell agitated and excited like nothing else. He regards it as his coup de grâce in his mission to dismember and destroy Seán Manchester's book.

Nota Bene: Dictionary definition of the word representation — one that represents; such as an artistic likeness or image, ie a substitution. (Ramsey Campbell, please note).

Seán Manchester took the image from an old copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland which he had hung onto for sentimental reasons. In the early 1960s, he had a robust and friendly correspondence with the magazine's editor, Forrest J Ackerman, which, a quarter of a century later, led to him requesting use of the magazine's image for his foray into telling the full and unexpurgated account of his Highgate Vampire investigation. Permission was granted and the picture appears in the 1985 edition bearing the caption: "A representation of the vampire in its final moments of dissolution."

"It is nothing of the kind," protests Ramsey Campbell. "It is an early makeup by Dick Smith for an American television production of Dorian Gray, and perhaps that is why it has vanished from the reprint." It was dropped by Seán Manchester in the revised and significantly expanded edition of The Highgate Vampire, which, as Campbell of all people should know is not a "reprint," with good reason. It was no longer necessary to provide a dramatic and sensational picture to illustrate what the vampire looked like in its final moments because the expanded edition, unlike the first edition, contained multiple images from a strip of 35mm film of the actual vampire decomposing. 

The first edition published a rather dark and obscure image from the same roll of film, but so close  to the case itself (closed three years prior) it was considered imprudent to reveal anything too stark for very obvious legal reasons. Farrant's trials at the Old Bailey were still relatively fresh in people's minds. However, one thing is clear about the pictures of the representation and the real thing. They are very different. The captions leave the reader in no doubt that they are not one and the same.

Having provided the address on YouTube where the Dick Smith makeup process can be found, Campbell proceeds to nit-pick about how one of the genuine images in the 1991 edition is "balder" and "has been superimposed onto a different background." Quite what that would achieve is not explained, but the sequence on the original 35mm roll shows the exorcised vampire disintegrating.

Once again, Campbell overlooks the fact that the images themselves have been viewed by all manner of people, and television production companies inspected the film in negative. This was done when Seán Manchester was interviewed for an hour long programme in the UK, and also for a documentary film made by a foreign television company. They had no quibble over the background and understood from the book's narrative exactly what was happening, which explained why everything was changing from frame to frame. Campbell, of course, dismisses all things supernatural.

He ends his penultimate paragraph, his coup de grâce, with this sarcastic salvo:

"But enough, I should respect Seán Manchester's aversion to publicity."

This about a man who, unlike Ramsey Campbell himself, has long since ceased to permit interviews or partake in the media; indeed, a man who shuns publicity now it no longer serves a purpose.