In the 1930s, the American illustrated press were as obsessed with vampires as movie stars. There were several successful periodicals - Weird Tales, Spicy Vampire Stories - devoted almost entirely to their social activities. To look through these magazines, as the child Andy did, is to understand what it is to learn that a party is going on after your bedtime, to which you cannot possibly secure an invitation. Literally, you had to die to get in. In Vienna, Budapest, Constantinople, Monte Carlo and private estates and castles scattered in a crescent across Europe, vampire kings and queens held court.

Young Andrew clipped photographs and portraits from the magazines and hoarded them for the rest of his life. He preferred photographs, especially the blurred or distorted traces of those who barely registered on cameras or in mirrors. He understood at once that creatures denied the sight of their own faces must prize portrait painters. He wrote what might be called 'fan letters' to the leaders of vampire fashion: the Short Lion of Paris, Herbert von Krolock, the White Russian Rozokov. His especial favourites among the undead, understandably, were the child-vampires, those frozen infant immortals Noel Coward sings about in 'Poor Little Dead Girl'. His prize possession as a boy was an autographed portrait of the martyred Claudia, ward of the stylish Short Lion, considered a paragon and an archetype among her kind. He would later use this image - a subscription gift sent out by Night Life - in his silkscreen, Vampire Doll (1963).

In his fascination with the undead, Andy was in the avant-garde. There were still very few vampires in America, and those American-born or -made tended to flee to a more congenial Europe. There was a vampire panic in the wake of the First World War, as returning veterans brought back the tainted bloodline that burned out in the epidemic of 1919. The lost generation new-borns, who all incubated within their bodies a burning disease that ate them up from the inside within months, were ghastly proof that vampires would never 'take' in the New World. Congress passed acts against the spread of vampirism save under impossibly regulated circumstances. J. Edgar Hoover ranked vampires just below communists and well above organised crime as a threat to the American way of life. In the 1930s, New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey led a crusade against an influx of Italian vampires, successfully deporting coven-leader Niccolo Cavalanti and his acolytes. In the South, a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan viciously curbed a potential renaissance of interlocked vampire hounforts in New Orleans and throughout the bayou country.

America, like Julia Warhola, considered all vampires loathsome monsters. Yet, as Andy understood, there was a dreadful glamour. During the Depression, glimpses of the high life lived in another continent and by another species, seemed enticing. The Hungarian Paul Lukas was the first Hollywood actor to specialise in undead roles, from Scaface (1932) to The House of Ruthven (1937). A few real vampires, even, made it in the movies: Garbo, Malakai, Chevalier Futaine.

With the rise of fascism and the Second World War came a trickle of vampire refugees from the Old World. Laws were revised and certain practices tolerated 'for the duration', while Hoover's FBI - constantly nagged by America's witch-hunters Cardinal Spellman and Father Coughlin - compiled foot-thick dossiers on elders and new-borns alike. As Nazi eugenicists strived to cleanse his bloodline from the Reich, Dracula himself aligned with the Allies, and a vampire underground in occupied Europe co-operated with the liberating forces.

When the War was over, the climate changed again and a round of blacklistings, arrests and show-trials - notably the prosecution for treason of American-born and -made vampire Benjamin Lathem by Robert F. Kennedy - drove all but those who could 'pass for warm' back to Europe. That was the era of the scare movies, with homburg-hatted government men taking crucifix and stake to swarthy, foreign infiltrators: I Married a Vampire (1950), I Was a Vampire for the FBI (1951), Blood of Dracula (1958). Warhol was in New York by now, sketching shoes for ad lay-outs or arranging window displays for Bonwit Teller & Co, making a hundred thousand dollars a year but fretting that he wasn't taken seriously. Money wasn't enough for him; he needed to be famous too, as if under the curse described by Fritz Leiber in his short story 'The Casket Demon' (1963) - unless known of and talked about, he would fade to nothingness. Like America, he had not outgrown his vampire craze, just learned to keep quiet about it.

In 1956, the year Around the World in 80 Days took the Best Picture Oscar, Andy took an extended trip with the frustratingly unforthcoming Charles Lisanby -Hawaii, Japan, India, Egypt, Rome, Paris, London. Throughout that itinerary, he saw vampires living openly, mingling with the warm, as adored as they were feared. Is it too much to suppose that, in a maharajah's palace or on a Nile paddle-wheeler, spurned by Charles and driven to abase himself before some exotic personage, he was bitten?

Vampires show up in the 1950s fashion drawings, if only through coded symbols: ragged-edged batwing cloaks draped over angular figures; red lipstick mouths on sharp-cheeked black and white faces; tiny, almost unnoticeable, fangs peeping from stretched smiles. These in-jokes are self-criticism, a nervous admission of what had to happen next. To become 'Andy Warhol', the illustrator and window-dresser must die and be reborn as an Artist. Those who accuse him of being concerned only with his earnings - which, to be fair, is what he told anyone who would listen - forget that he abandoned a considerable income to devote all his energies to work which initially lost a lot of money.

Shortly before the Coca-Cola Bottle and Campbell's Soup Can series made him famous, and in a period when he feared he had recovered from one 'nervous breakdown' only to be slipping into another, Warhol did a painting - synthetic polymer and crayon on canvas - of 'Batman' (1960), the only vampire ever really to be embraced by America. Though justifiably eclipsed by Lichtenstein's appropriations from comic strip panels, 'Batman' is an important work in its own right, an idea seized but abandoned half-finished, the first flash of what would soon come to be called Pop Art. Like much from the period before Warhol hit upon repetition and manufacture as modes of expression, it seems incomplete, childish crayon scribbles across the cowled Bob Kane outline of the classic vampire vigilante. Exhibited at the Castelli Gallery, the work was the first Warhol piece to command a serious price from a private collector -an anonymous buyer on behalf of the Wayne Foundation - which may have encouraged the artist to continue with his personal work.

During an explosion of creativity that began in 1962 and lasted at least until he was shot, Warhol took a lease on a former hat works at 231 East 47th Street and turned the loft space into the Factory, with the intention of producing art on a production line. At the suggestion of assistant Nathan Gluck, Warhol seized upon the silkscreen process and ('like a forger') turned out series of dollar bills, soup cans and Marilyn Monroes. It seemed that he didn't care what his subjects were, so long as they were famous.

When Henry Geldzahler, assistant curator for 20th Century American Art at the Metropolitan Museum, told him he should apply himself to more 'serious' subjects, Warhol began his 'death and disaster' series: images of car crashes, suicides and the electric chair. Straddling the trivial and the serious are his vampire portraits: Carmilla Karnstein (1962), Vampire Doll (1963), Lucy Westenra (1963). Red-eyed and jagged-mouthed undead faces, reproduced in sheets like unperforated stamps, vivid greens and oranges for skin-tones, the series reinvents the nineteenth century genre of vampire portraiture. The vampire subjects Andy chose shared one thing: all had been famously destroyed. He produced parallel silkscreens of their true deaths: impalements, decapitations, disintegrations. These are perhaps the first great works, ruined corpses swimming in scarlet blood, untenanted bodies torn apart by grim puritans.

In 1964, Andy delivered a twenty-by-twenty black and white mural called 'Thirteen Vampires' to the American pavilion at the New York World's Fair, where it was to be exhibited beside work by Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Among the thirteen, naturally, was Warhol's first Dracula portrait, though all the other undead notables represented were women. The architect Philip Johnson, who had commissioned the piece, informed Warhol that word had come from the Governor that it was to be removed because there was concern that it was offensive to the God-fearing.

When Warhol's suggestion that the portraits all be defaced with burning crosses to symbolise the triumph of the Godly was vetoed, he went out to the fair with Geldzahler and another of his assistants, Gerard Malanga, and painted the mural over with a thick layer of undead-banishing silver paint, declaring, 'And that'll be my art.' We can only speculate about that lost Dracula portrait, which none of the few who saw it can describe in detail. Which of the many, many images of the King of the Vampires - then, truly dead for only five years -did Warhol reproduce? The most tantalising suggestion, based on Malanga's later-retracted version, is that for the only time in his entire career as an artist, Warhol drew on his own imagination rather than copied or reproduced from life. Andy lied constantly, but this is the only occasion when anyone has ever accused him of making something up.

Warhol's first experiments with film, conducted in real-time with the co-opted collaboration of whoever happened to be hanging about in the Factory, are steeped in the atmosphere of vampirism. The camera hovers over the exposed throat of John Giorno in Sleep (1963) as if ready to pounce. The projection of film shot at twenty-four frames per second at the silent speed of sixteen frames per second gives Giorno's six-hour night a suggestion of vampire lassitude. The flashes of white leader that mark the change of shots turn dirty sheets into white coffin plush, and the death rattle of the projector is the only soundtrack (aside from the comical yawns and angry ticket-money-back demands of any audience members happening upon the film in a real theatre).

That same year, Warhol shot more explicit studies of vampirism: in Kiss, a succession of couples osculate like insects unable to uncouple their complex mouth-parts; in Eat, Robert Indiana crams his mouth with unidentifiable meats; and Suck Job is an extended (thirty minutes) close-up of the face of a young man who is being nibbled by beings who never intrude into the frame or register on film. For Suck Job, Warhol had arranged with Stefan Grlsc, a real vampire, to 'appear' but Grlsc didn't take him seriously and failed to show up at the Factory for the shoot, forcing the artist to substitute pasty-faced but warm hustlers dragged off the street.

When Warhol turned his camera on the Empire State Building in Empire (1964), it saw the edifice first as the largest coffin in the world, jutting out of the ground as if dislodged by seismic activity. As night slowly falls and the floodlights come on, the building becomes a cloaked predator standing colossal over New York City, shoulders sloped by the years, head sprouting a dirigible-mast horn. After that, Warhol had fellow underground filmmaker Jack Smith swish a cape over Baby Jane Hudson in the now-lost Batman Dracula (1964). Only tantalising stills of Smith with a mouthful of plastic teeth and staring Lon Chaney eyes, remain of this film, which - as with the silver-coated 'Thirteen Vampires' - is perhaps as Andy wanted it. As with Sleep and Empire, the idea is more important than the artefact. It is enough that the films exist; they are not meant actually to be seen all the way through. When Jonas Mekas scheduled Empire at the Filmmakers' Co-Op in 1965, he lured Warhol into the screening room and tied him securely to one of the seats with stout rope, intent on forcing the creator to sit through his creation. When he came back two hours later to check up on him, he found Warhol had chewed through his bonds - briefly, an incarnation of Batman Dracula - and escaped into the night. In the early sixties, Warhol had begun to file his teeth, sharpening them to piranha-like needle-points.

From 1964 to 1968, Andy abandoned painting - if silkscreen can be called that - in favour of film. Some have suggested that works like Couch (1964) or The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1965) are just portraits that move; certainly, more people caught them as an ambient backdrop to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable than endured them reverentially at the Co-Op. Movies, not films, they were supposed to play to audiences too busy dancing or speeding or covering their bleeding ears to pay the sort of attention demanded by Hollywood narrative.

By now, 'Andy's vampire movies' had gone beyond a standing joke - Eight hours of the Empire State Building!! - and were taken seriously by genuine underground filmmakers like Stan Brakhage (who considered silent speed the stroke of genius). The Filmmakers' Co-Op regularly scheduled 'Warhol Festivals' and word got out that the films were, well, dirty, which - of course - pulled in audiences. Suck Job was about as close to vampirism as even the most extreme New York audiences had seen, even if it was silent, black-and-white and slightly out of focus. Isabelle Dufresne, later the supervamp Ultra Violet, saw Suck Job projected on a sheet at the Factory, and understood at once the strategy of incompletion, whereby the meat of the matter was beyond the frame. In Dead for Fifteen Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol (1988), Ultra Violet writes: 'Although my eyes remain focused on the face of the young man receiving the suck job, my attention is constantly drawn to the empty space on the sheet below the screen. I am being visually assaulted and insulted at the same time. It is unnerving: I want to get up and seize the camera and focus it downward to capture the action. But I can't, and that's where the frustration comes in.'

Ultra Violet also reports that during that screening some Factory hangers-on present relieved the frustration by nibbling each other, drawing squeals of pain and streaks of quick-drying blood. Such tentative pretend-vampirism was common among the Mole People, the night-time characters Andy gathered to help make 'his' movies and turned into his private coven in the back room of Max's Kansas City nightclub.

With no genuine undead available, Andy made do with self-made supervamps, who showed up on film if not at rehearsals: Pope Ondine (who drew real blood), Brigid (Berlin) Polk, Baby Jane Hudson (who had once been a real-live movie star), Gerald Malanga's muse Mary Woronov, Carmillo Karnstein, Ingrid Supervamp. Brian Stableford would later coin the term 'lifestyle fantasists' for these people and their modern avatars, the goth murgatroyds. Like Andy, the Mole People already lived like vampires: shunning daylight, speeding all night, filing their teeth, developing pasty complexions, sampling each other's drug-laced blood.

The butcher's bill came in early. The dancer Freddie Herko, who appears in Kiss (1963) and Dance Movie/Roller Skates (1963), read in Montague Summers' The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) that those who committed suicide spectacularly enough 'without fear' were reborn as 'powerful vampires'. Just before Hallowe'en 1964, Herko danced across a friend's Greenwich Village apartment, trailing a ten-foot Batman/Dracula cloak, and sailed elegantly out of a fifth-floor window. Having skim-read the Summers and not bothered to form a Pact with the Devil, an essential part of the immortality-through-self-slaughter gambit, Herko did not rise from the dead.

When he heard of Herko's defenestration, Warhol was almost irritated. 'Gee,' he sighed, 'why didn't he tell me he was going to do it? We could have gone down there and filmed it.' Herko was just the first of the Warhol death cluster, his personal disaster series: Edie Sedgwick (1971), Tiger Morse (1972), Andrea Feldman (1972), Candy Darling (1974), Eric Emerson (1975), Gregory Battcock (1980), Tom Baker (1982), Jackie Curtis (1985), Valerie Solanas (1989), Ondine (1989). And Warhol himself (1968?). Only Andy made it back, of course. He had to be the vampire they all would have been, even Valerie.

In 1965, the term 'vampire movies' took on another layer of meaning at the Factory, with the arrivals of Ronald Tavel, a playwright hired to contribute situations (if not scripts) for the films, and Edie Sedgwick, a blueblood blonde who was, in many ways, Andy's ultimate supervamp. Movies like The Death of Radu the Handsome (1965), with Ondine as Vlad the Impaler's gay brother, and Poor Little Dead Girl (1965), with Edie as the vampire Claudia, run to seventy minutes (two uninterrupted thirty-five minute takes, the length of a film magazine, stuck together), have intermittently audible soundtracks and mimic Hollywood to the extent of having something approaching narrative. Were it not for the incandescent personalities of the supervamps, the beautiful and the damned, these efforts would be more like 'zombie movies', shambling gestures of mimesis, constantly tripping up as the immobile image (Andy had the most stoned Mole Person handle the camera) goes in and out of focus or the walk-on 'victims' run out of things to do and say.

Ondine, Edie and a few others understand that the films are their own shot at vampire immortality. With dime store plastic fangs and shrouds from the dress-up chest, these living beings cavort, preserved on film while their bodies are long in the grave, flickering in undeath. For Andy, the film camera, like the silkscreen or the polaroid, was a vampire machine, a process for turning life into frozen death, perfect and reproducible. Hurting people was always so interesting, and left the most fabulous Rorschach stain patterns on the sheets.

Edie cut her hair to match Andy's wigs and took to wearing imitations of his outfits, especially for photographs and openings. They looked like asexual twins or clones, but were really trying to model themselves on that most terrifying denizen of the world of darkness, the old vampire couple. R.D. Laing's study Helga and Heinrich (1970) suggests that, after centuries together, vampire couples mingle identities, sharing a consciousness between two frail-seeming bodies, finishing each other's sentences as the mind flickers between two skulls, moving in on their victims in an instinctive pincer movement. If one partner is destroyed, the other rots in sympathy. Edie would probably have gone that far -she did eventually commit suicide - but Andy was too self-contained to commit anything or commit to anything. He saw her as the mirror he didn't like to look in - his reflection reminded him that he was alive, after all - and would often play the mimic game, patterned after Harpo Marx, with her, triumphantly squirting milk from his mouth or producing a walnut from a fist to show he was the original and she the copy. When he said he wanted everyone to be alike, he was expressing a solipsist not an egalitarian ideal: everyone was to be like him, but he was still to be the mould.

Warhol and Ronnie Tavel made Veneer (1965), arguably the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films (1973), Stephen Koch reports: 'Warhol handed Tavel a copy of the novel with the remark that it might be easier to compose a scenario based on fiction than one spun out of pure fantasy. He had acquired the rights to the Stoker book for $3,000, he said; it ought to make a good movie. And so it did. It's not hard to guess why Warhol was impressed by Dracula. (I should mention in passing that, contrary to the myth he propagates, Warhol is quite widely read.) The book is filled with the sexuality of violence; it features a tough, erotic vampire dandy joyously dominating a gang of freaks; its theme is humiliation within a world that is simultaneously sordid and unreal; it is a history which at once did and did not happen, a purposeful lie. Finally, there is the question of class... I think Warhol participates very deeply in America's best-kept secret - the painful, deeply denied intensity with which we experience our class structure. We should not forget that we are speaking of the son of semiliterate immigrants, whose father was a steelworker in Pittsburgh. Within the terms of his own intensely specialised mentality, Warhol has lived through American class humiliation and American poverty. And Dracula, although British, is very much about the sexuality of social class as it merges with spiritual domination.'

Casting Edie as an ephebic silver-haired Dracula (Drella, indeed), Gerard Malanga as a whip-wielding but humiliated Harker and Ondine as a sly Van Helsing, Warhol populated the Factory's Transylvania and Carfax Abbey (the same 'set', black sheets hung with silver cobwebs) with lost souls. Well before Francis Ford Coppola, Warhol saw that the problems in filming the novel could be sidestepped by force of will. Indeed, he approached the enterprise with a deliberate diffidence that all but ensured this would not be a 'proper' film. Ronnie Tavel at least read half the book before getting bored and typing out a script in his usual three days.

Since shooting consisted of a complete run-through of the script as a performance, with breaks only when the magazine ran out, Tavel considered that there ought to be actual rehearsals and that the actors should stoop to learning their lines. Too fearful of confrontation to disagree, Warhol simply sabotaged the rehearsals Tavel organised and even the shooting of the film by inviting the press and various parasites to the Factory to observe and interfere, and sending Malanga off on trivial errands or keeping him up until dawn at parties to prevent him from even reading the script (as in the book, Harker has the most to say). Koch, again: 'The sense that making a film was work - that it should involve the concentrated attention of work - was utterly banished, and on shooting day the Factory merely played host to another "Scene", another party.'

Stoker's intricate plot is reduced to situations. Harker, in black leather pants and Victorian deerstalker, visits Castle Dracula carrying a cross loaned to the production by Andy's mother, and is entertained, seduced and assaulted by the Count (Edie's enormous fangs keep slipping out of her mouth) and his three gesticulating vampire brides (Marie Mencken, Carmillo Karnstein, International Velvet). Later, in Carfax Abbey, Harker - roped to the Factory couch - watches as Dracula fascinates and vampirises Mina (Mary Woronov) in a tango that climaxes with Mina drinking Campbell's Tomato Soup from a can Dracula has opened. with a thumb-talon and which he declares is his vampire blood. Van Helsing appears, with his fearless vampire hunters - Lord Godalming (Chuck Wein), Quincey Morris (Joe Dallesandro), Dr Seward (Paul America) - dragged by Renfield (a young, ravaged Lou Reed), who is leashed like a bloodhound.

Crucifixes, stakes, whips and communion wafers are tossed back and forth in a bit of knockabout that makes some of the cast giggle uncontrollably and drives others - notably, the still-tethered Malanga - to furious distraction. In Tavel's script, as in Stoker's novel, Van Helsing's band corner and destroy Dracula, who was to be spray-painted silver and suffocate, but Ondine is distracted when a girl who happens to be on the couch for no real reason - she seems to be a set-visitor straying into frame - calls him a 'phony', and Ondine ignores the King Vampire to lash out at this impertinent chit, going for her face with his false fingernails. Ondine's methedrine rant rises in a crescendo, peaks and fades: 'May God forgive you, you're a phony, Little Miss Phony, you're a disgusting phony, get off this set, you're a disgrace to humanity, you're a disgrace to yourself, you're a loathsome fool, your husband's a loathsome fool... I'm sorry, I just can't go on, this is just too much, I don't want to go on.' The camera, handled this time by Bud Wirtschafter, tries to follow the unexpected action, and for a few brief frames catches the ghost-white face of Andy himself hanging shocked in the gloom; the removal of this slip is perhaps the only proper edit in any Warhol film made before the arrival of Paul Morrissey. Van Helsing, inconsolable, stands alone and the film runs on and on, as he reassembles himself.

Edie, fangs spat out but still regally and perfectly Dracula, gets Wirtschafter's attention by tossing the soup can at him, spattering the lens, and commands the frame, hands on hips, for a few seconds before the film runs out. 'I am Dracula,' she insists, the only line of dialogue taken directly (if unintentionally) from the book. 'I am Dracula,' she repeats, sure of herself for the last time in her life. Stoker had intended to inflict upon Dracula the defeat he eluded in reality, but Edie has dragged Warhol's Dracula movie back to the truth. In the Factory, Drella bests the squabbling Vampire Slayers and reigns forever.

It is easy to overstate the importance of Nico to Warhol's late '60s work. She was, after all, his first 'real' vampire. Croaking, German and blonde, she was the dead image of Edie, and thus of Andy. Nico Otzak, turned some time in the '50s, arrived in New York in 1965, with her doll-like get Ari, and presented her card at the Factory. She trailed the very faintest of associations with Dracula himself, having been a fringe member of that last party, in Rome 1959, which climaxed in the true death of the Vampire King. 'She was mysterious and European,' Andy said, abstaining from any mention of the v word, 'a real moon goddess type.' Like Dracula, she gave the impression of having used up the Old World and moved on, searching for 'a young country, full of blood'.

In Edie: An American Biography (1982), Jean Stein definitively refutes the popular version, in which the naive, warm American is supplanted by the cold, dead European. Edie Sedgwick was on the point of turning from vampire to victim before Nico's arrival: she had made the cardinal error of thinking herself indispensable, a real star, and Andy was silently irked by her increasing need for publicity as herself rather than as his mirror. She had already strayed from the Factory and towards Bob Dylan's circle, tempted by more serious drug habits and heterosexuality. Edie was justifiably miffed that the limited financial success of the films benefited only Andy. His position was that she was rich anyway -'an heiress', one of his favourite words - and didn't need the money, though far less well-off folk did as much or more work on the films and silkscreens for similarly derisory pay. Edie's self-destruction cannot be laid entirely on Andy and Nico - the Dylan crowd hardly helped, moving her up from amphetamines to heroin - but it is undeniably true that without Warhol, Edie would never have become, in the British expression, 'dead famous'.

With Nico, Andy finally had his vampire. At the back of their association must have been the possibility - the promise? - that she would turn him, but for the moment, Andy held back. To become someone's get would have displaced him from the centre of his life, and that was insupportable. When he turned, a circumstance that remains mysterious, he would do so through anonymous blood donation, making himself - as usual - his own get, his own creature. Besides, no one could seriously want Nico for a mother-in-darkness: for the rest of her nights, she drew blood from Ari, her own get, and this vampire incest contributed to the rot that would destroy them both.

Andy was especially fascinated by Nico's relationship with mirrors and film. She was one of those vampires who have no reflection, though he did his best to turn her into a creature who was all reflection with no self. He had her sing 'I'll Be Your Mirror', for instance. 'High Ashbury', the oddest segment of ****/ Twenty Four Hour Movie (1966), places Ondine and Ultra Violet either side of an absence, engaged in conversation with what seems to be a disembodied voice. There are signs of Nico's physical presence during the shoot: the displacement of cushions, a cigarette that darts like a hovering dragonfly, a puff of smoke outlining an oesophagus. But the vampire woman just isn't there. That may be the point. Andy took photographs of silver-foiled walls and untenanted chairs and passed them off as portraits of Nico. He even silkscreened an empty coffin for an album cover.

Having found his vampire muse, Andy had to do something with her, so he stuck her together with the Velvet Underground - a band who certainly weren't that interested in having a girl singer who drank human blood - as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the club events he staged at the Dom on St Mark's Place in 1966. Amid so much black leather, he dressed Nico in bone-white and put an angelic spotlight on her, especially when she wasn't singing. Lou Reed bought a crucifix and started looking for a way out. The success of the EPI may well have been partially down to the wide cross-section of New Yorkers who were intrigued by Nico; most Americans in 1966 had never been in a room with a vampire, a real vampire. Andy knew that and made sure that, no matter how conveniently dark the rest of the packed club was, Nico was always visible, always the red-eyed wraith murmuring her way through 'Femme Fatale' without taking a breath. That song, of course, is a promise and a threat: 'Think of her at nights, feel the way she bites...'

As the Velvets performed, Warhol hid in the rafters like the Phantom of the Opera, working the lights and the projectors, cranking up the sound. Like Ulysses, he filled his ears with wax to get through the night. Behind the band, he screened his films. Often, as his real vampire paraded herself, he would show Veneer, trying to project Edie onto Nico as he projected himself upon them both.

Everybody agrees: between 1966 and 1968, Andy Warhol was a monster.

Valerie Solanas was the founder and sole member of the Society for Killing All Vampires, authoress of the self-published SKAV Manifesto. In bite-sized quotes, the Manifesto is quite amusing - 'Enlightened vampires who wish to demonstrate solidarity with the Movement may do so by killing themselves.' - but it remains a wearisome read, not least because Solanas never quite sorted out what she meant by the term 'vampire'. Of course, as an academic, I understand entirely the impatience she must have felt with what she considered irrelevances like agenda-setting and precise definitions of abstruse language. In the end, Solanas was a paranoid sociopath, and the vampires were her enemies, all whom were out to get her. At first, she didn't even mean nosferatu when she referred to vampires, but a certain type of patriarchal oppressor. At the end, she meant everyone else in the world.

She is in one of the little-known films, I, Vampire (1967) - mingling briefly with Tom Baker as the vampire Lord Andrew Bennett, and Ultra Violet, the wonderfully named Bettina Coffin and a Nico-shaped patch of empty screen. She had various grudges against Andy Warhol - he had lost a playscript she sent him, he wouldn't publish her book, he didn't make her famous - but no more than any one of a dozen other Mole People. Billy Name has said that he was never sure whether he should kill himself or Andy, and kept putting off the decision. Oliver Stone's Who Shot Andy Warhol? is merely the culmination of thirty years of myth and fantasy. It bears repeating that the conspiracy theories Stone and others espouse have little or no basis in fact: Valerie Solanas acted entirely on her own, conspiring or colluding with no one. Stone's point, which is well-taken, is that in June 1968, someone had to shoot Andy Warhol; if Valerie hadn't stepped up to the firing line, any one of a dozen others could as easily have melted down the family silver for bullets.

But it was Valerie.

By 1968, the Factory had changed. It was at a new location, and Warhol had new associates - Fred Hughes, Paul Morrissey, Bob Colacello - who tried to impose a more businesslike atmosphere. The Mole People were discouraged from hanging about, and poured out their bile on Andy's intermediaries, unable to accept that they had been banished on the passive dictate of Warhol himself. Valerie turned up while Andy was in a meeting with art critic Mario Amaya and on the phone with yet another supervamp Viva, and put two bullets into him, and one incidentally in Amaya. Fred Hughes, born negotiator, apparently talked her out of killing him and she left by the freight elevator.

It was a big story for fifteen minutes, but just as Andy was declared clinically dead at Columbus Hospital news came in from Chicago that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Every newspaper in America remade their front pages, bumping the artist to 'and in other news...'

Kennedy stayed dead. Andy didn't.

Now Andy was really a vampire, we would all see finally, doubters and admirers, what he had meant all along.

It has been a tenet of Western culture that a vampire cannot be an artist. For a hundred years, there has been fierce debate on the question. The general consensus is that many a poet or a painter was never the same man after death, that posthumous work was always derivative self-parody, never a true reaction to the wondrous new nightlife opened up by the turning. It is even suggested that this symptom is not a drawback of vampirism but proof of its superiority over warm life: vampires are too busy being to pass comment, too concerned with their interior voyages to bother issuing travel reports for the rest of the world to pore over.

The tragedies are too well known to recap in detail. Poe reborn, struggling with verses that refuse to soar; Dali, growing ever richer by forging his own work (or paying others to do so); Garbo, beautiful forever in the body but showing up on film as a rotting corpse; Dylan, born-again and boring as hell; the Short Lion, embarrassing all nosferatu with his MOR goth rocker act. But Andy was the Ultimate Vampire before turning. Surely, for him, things would be different.

Alas, no.

Between his deaths, Andy worked continuously Portraits of Queens and inverted Tijuana crucifixes. Numberless commissioned silkscreens of anyone rich enough to hire him at $25,000 a throw. Portraits of world-famous boxers (Muhammad Ali, Apollo Creed) and football players (OJ. Simpson, Roy Race) he had never heard of. Those embarrassingly flattering likenesses, impossible to read as irony, of the Shah, Ferdinand and Imelda, Countess Elisabeth Bathory, Ronnie and Nancy. And he went to a lot of parties, at the White House or in the darkest dhampire clubs.

There's nothing there.

Believe me, I've looked. As an academic, I understand exactly Andy's dilemma. I too was considered a vampire long before I turned. My entire discipline is reputed to be nothing more than a canny way of feeding off the dead, prolonging a useless existence from one grant application to the next. And no one has ever criticised elder vampires for their lack of learning. To pass the centuries, one has to pick up dozens of languages and, in all probability, read every book in your national library. We may rarely have been artists, but we have always been patrons of the arts.

Among ourselves, the search has always been on for a real vampire artist, preferably a creature turned in infancy, before any warm sensibility could be formed. I was tempted in my reassessment of Andy's lifelong dance with Dracula to put forward a thesis that he was such a discovery, that he turned not in 1968 but, say, 1938, and exposed himself by degrees to sunlight, to let him age. That would explain the skin problems. And no one has ever stepped forth to say that they turned Andy. He went into hospital a living man and came out a vampire, having been declared dead. Most commentators have suggested he was transfused with vampire blood, deliberately or by accident, but the hospital authorities strenuously insist this is not so. Sadly, it won't wash. We have to admit it; Andy's best work was done when he was alive; the rest is just the black blood of the dead.

He had written his own epitaph, of course. 'In the future, everyone will live forever, for fifteen minutes.'

Goodbye, Drella. At the end, he gave up Dracula and was left with only Cinderella, the girl of ashes.

The rest, his legacy, is up to us.

APPENDIX TWO.

'WELLES'S LOST DRACULAS'

BY JONATHAN GATES.

First published in Video Watchdog No 23, May-July 1994.

Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939 having negotiated a two-picture deal as producer-director-writer-actor with George Schaefer of RKO Pictures. Drawing on an entourage of colleagues from New York theatre and radio, he established Mercury Productions as a filmmaking entity. Before embarking on Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles developed other properties: Nicholas Blake's just-published anti-fascist thriller The Smiler With a Knife (1939), Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and Stoker's Dracula (1897). Like the Conrad, Dracula was a novel Welles had already done for the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio series (July 11, 1938). A script was prepared (by Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and, uncredited, John Houseman), sets were designed, the film cast, and 'tests' - the extent of which have never been revealed - shot, but the project was dropped.

The reasons for the abandonment of Count Dracula remain obscure. It has been speculated that RKO were nervous about Welles's stated intention to film most of the story with a first-person camera, adopting the viewpoints of the various characters as Stoker does in his might-have-been fictional history. Houseman, in his memoir Run-Through (1972), alleges that Welles's enthusiasm for this device was at least partly due to the fact that it would keep the fearless vampire slayers - Harker, Van Helsing, Quincey, Holmwood - mostly off screen, while Dracula, the object of their attention, would always be in view. Houseman, long estranged from Welles at the time of writing, needlessly adds that Welles would have played Dracula. He toyed with the idea of playing Harker as well, before deciding William Alland could do it if kept to the shadows and occasionally dubbed by Welles. The rapidly changing political situation in Europe, already forcing the Roosevelt administration to reassess its policies about vampirism and the very real Count Dracula, may have prompted certain factions to bring pressure to bear on RKO that such a film was 'inadvisable' for 1940.

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, published in This is Orson Welles (1992) but held well before Francis Ford Coppola's controversial Dracula (1979), Welles said: 'Dracula would make a marvellous movie. In fact, nobody has ever made it; they've never paid any attention to the book, which is the most hair-raising, marvellous book in the world. It's told by four people, and must be done with four narrations, as we did on the radio. There's one scene in London where he throws a heavy bag into the corner of a cellar and it's full of screaming babies! They can go that far out now.'

Throughout Welles's career, Dracula remained an idee fixe. The Welles-Mankiewicz script was RKO property and the studio resisted Welles's offer to buy it back. They set their asking price at the notional but substantial sum accountants reckoned had been lost on the double debacle of Ambersons and the unfinished South American project, It's All True.

When Schaefer, Welles's patron, was removed from his position as Vice-President in Charge of Production and replaced by Charles Koerner, there was serious talk of putting the script into production through producer Val Lewton's unit, which had established a reputation for low-budget supernatural dramas with Cat People (1942). Lewton got as far as having DeWitt Bodeen and then Curt Siodmak take runs at further drafts, scaling the script down to fit a strait-jacket budget. Jacques Tourneur was attached to direct, though editor Mark Robson was considered when Tourneur was promoted to A Pictures. Stock players were assigned supporting roles: Tom Conway (Dr Seward), Kent Smith (Jonathan Harker), Henry Daniell (Van Helsing), Jean Brooks (Lucy), Alan Napier (Arthur Holmwood), Skelton Knaggs (Renfield), Elizabeth Russell (Countess Marya Dolingen), Sir Lancelot (a calypso-singing coachman). Simone Simon, star of Cat People, was set for Mina, very much the focus of Lewton's take on the story, but the project fell through because RKO were unable to secure their first and only choice of star, Boris Karloff, who was committed to Arsenic and Old Lace on Broadway.

In 1944, RKO sold the Welles-Mankiewicz script, along with a parcel of set designs, to 20th Century Fox. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck offered Welles the role of Dracula, promising Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland for Mina and Lucy, suggesting Tyrone Power (Jonathan), George Sanders (Arthur), John Carradine (Quincey) and Laird Cregar (Van Helsing). This Dracula would have been a follow-up to Fox's successful Welles-Fontaine Jane Eyre (1943) and Welles might have committed if Zanuck had again assigned weak-willed Robert Stevenson, allowing Welles to direct in everything but credit. However, on a project this 'important', Zanuck would consider only two directors; John Ford had no interest - sparing us John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond and John Agar as brawling, boozing fearless vampire slayers - so it inevitably fell to Henry King, a specialist in molasses-slow historical subjects like Lloyd's of London (1936) and Brigham Young (1940). King, a plodder who had a brief flash of genius in a few later films with Gregory Peck, had his own, highly developed, chocolate-box style and gravitas, and was not a congenial director for Welles, whose mercurial temperament was unsuited to methods he considered conservative and dreary. The film still might have been made, since Welles was as ever in need of money, but Zanuck went cold on Dracula at the end of the War when the Count was moving into his Italian exile.

Fox wound up backing Prince of Foxes (1949), directed by King, with Power and Welles topping the cast, shot on location in Europe. A lavish bore, enlivened briefly by Welles's committed Cesare Borgia, this suggests what the Zanuck Dracula might have been like. Welles used much of his earnings from the long shoot to pour into film projects made in bits and pieces over several years: the completed Othello (1952), the unfinished Don Quixote (begun 1955) and, rarely mentioned until now, yet another Dracula. El conde Dracula, a French-Italian-Mexican-American-Irish-Liechtensteinian-British-Yugoslav-Moroccan-Iranian co-production, was shot in snippets, the earliest dating from 1949, the latest from 1972.

Each major part was taken by several actors, or single actors over a span of years. In the controversial edit supervised by the Spaniard Jesus Franco - a second-unit director on Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1966) -and premiered at Cannes in 1997, the cast is as follows: Akim Tamiroff (Van Helsing), Micheal MacLiammoir (Jonathan), Paola Mori (Mina), Michael Redgrave (Arthur), Patty McCormick (Lucy), Hilton Edwards (Dr Seward), Mischa Auer (Renfield). The vampire brides are played by Jeanne Moreau, Suzanne Cloutier and Katina Paxinou, shot in different years on different continents. There is no sight of Francisco Reiguera, Welles's Quixote, cast as a skeletal Dracula, and the Count is present only as a substantial shadow voiced (as are several other characters) by Welles himself. Much of the film runs silent, and a crucial framing story, explaining the multi-narrator device, was either never filmed or shot and lost. Jonathan's panicky exploration of his castle prison, filled with steam like the Turkish bath in Othello, is the most remarkable, purely Expressionist scene Welles ever shot. But the final ascent to Castle Dracula, with Tamiroff dodging patently papier-mache falling boulders and wobbly zooms into and out of stray details hardly seems the work of anyone other than a fumbling amateur.

In no sense 'a real film', El conde Dracula is a scrapbook of images from the novel and Welles's imagination. He told Henry Jaglom that he considered the project a private exercise, to keep the subject in his mind, a series of sketches for a painting he would execute later. As Francis Coppola would in 1977, while his multi-million-dollar Dracula was bogged down in production problems in Romania, Welles often made comparisons with the Sistine Chapel.

In 1973, Welles assembled some El conde Dracula footage, along with documentary material about the real Count Dracula and the scandals that followed his true death in 1959: the alleged, much-disputed will that deeded much of his vast fortune to English housewife Vivian Nicholson, who claimed she had encountered Dracula while on a school holiday in the early '50s; the autobiography Clifford Irving sold for a record-breaking advance in 1971, only to have the book exposed as an arrant fake written by Irving in collaboration with Fred Saberhagen; the squabbles among sundry vampire elders, notably Baron Meinster and Princess Asa Vajda, as to who should claim the Count's unofficial title as ruler of their kind, King of the Cats. Welles called this playful, essay-like film -constructed around the skeleton of footage shot by Calvin Floyd for his own documentary, In Search of Dracula (1971) - When Are You Going to Finish el conde Dracula?, though it was exhibited in most territories as D is for Dracula. On the evening Premier Ceauescu withdrew the Romanian Cavalry needed for Coppola's assault on Castle Dracula in order to pursue the vampire banditti of the Transylvania Movement in the next valley, Francis Ford Coppola held a private screening of D is for Dracula and cabled Welles that there was a curse on anyone who dared invoke the dread name.

Welles's final Dracula project came together in 1981, just as the movies were gripped by a big vampire craze. Controversial and slow-building, and shut out of all but technical Oscars, Coppola's Dracula proved there was a substantial audience for vampire subjects. The next half-decade would see Werner Herzog's Renfield, Jeder fur Sich und die Vampir Gegen Alle, a retelling of the story from the point of the fly-eating lunatic (Klaus Kinski); of Tony Scott's The Hunger, with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as New York art patrons Miriam and John Blaylock at the centre of a famous murder case defended by Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver); of John Landis's Scream, Blacula, Scream, with Eddie Murphy as Dracula's African get Prince Mamuwalde, searching for his lost bride (Vanity) in New York - best remembered for a plagiarism lawsuit by screenwriter Pat Hobby that forced Paramount to open its books to the auditors; of Richard Attenborough's bloated, mammoth, Oscar-scooping Varney, with Anthony Hopkins as Sir Francis Varney, the vampire Viceroy overthrown by the Second Indian Mutiny; of Brian DePalma's remake of Scarface, an explicit attack on the Transylvania Movement, with Al Pacino as Tony Sylvana, a Ceausescu cast-out rising in the booming drac trade and finally taken down by a Vatican army led by James Woods.

Slightly ahead of all this activity, Welles began shooting quietly, without publicity, working at his own pace, underwritten by the last of his many mysterious benefactors. His final script combined elements from Stoker's fiction with historical fact made public by the researches of Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu - associates as far back as D is for Dracula - and concentrated on the last days of the Count, abandoned in his castle, awaiting his executioners, remembering the betrayals and crimes of his lengthy, weighty life. This was the project Welles called The Other Side of Midnight. From sequences filmed as early as 1972, the director culled footage of Peter Bogdanovich as Renfield, while he opted to play not the stick insect vampire but the corpulent slayer, finally gifting the world with his definitive Professor Van Helsing. If asked by the trade press, he made great play of having offered the role of Dracula to Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen or Robert De Niro, but this was a conjurer's distraction, for he had been fixed on his Count for some years and was now finally able to fit him for his cape and fangs. Welles's final Dracula was to be John Huston.

Welles began filming The Other Side of Midnight on the old Miracle Pictures lot, his first studio-shot - though independently-financed - picture since Touch of Evil in 1958, and his first 'right of final cut' contract since Citizen Kane. The ins and outs of the deal have been assessed in entire books by Peter Bart and David J. Skal, but it seems that Welles, after a career of searching, had found a genuine 'angel', a backer with not only the financial muscle to give him the budget and crew he needed to make a film that was truly his vision, but also the self-effacing trust to let him have total artistic control of the result.

There were nay-saying voices and the industry was already beginning to wonder whether still in-progress runaway budget auteur movies like Michael Cimino's The Lincoln County Wars or Coppola's Dracula follow-up One From the Heart were such a great idea, but Welles himself denounced those runaways as examples of fuzzy thinking. As with his very first Dracula movie script and Kane, The Other Side of Midnight was meticulously pre-planned and pre-costed. Forty years on from Kane, Welles must have known this would be his last serious chance. A Boy Wonder no longer, the pressure was on him to produce a 'mature masterpiece', a career book-end to the work that had topped so many Best of All Time lists and eclipsed all his other achievements. He must certainly have been aware of the legion of cineastes whose expectations of a film that would eclipse the flashy brilliance of the Coppola version were sky-rocketing. It may be that so many of Welles's other projects were left unfinished deliberately, because their creator knew they could never compete with the imagined masterpieces that were expected of him. With Midnight, he had to show all his cards and take the consequences.

The Other Side of Midnight occupied an unprecedented three adjacent sound-stages where Ken Adam's sets for Bistritz and Borgo Pass and the exteriors and interiors of Castle Dracula were constructed. John Huston shaved his beard and let his moustache sprout, preparing for the acting role of his career, cast apparently because Welles admired him as the Los Angeles predator-patriarch Noah Cross (Chinatown, 1974). It has been rumoured that the seventy-four-year-old Huston went so far as to have transfusions of vampire blood and took to hunting the Hollywood night with packs of newborn vampire brats, piqued because he couldn't display trophies of his 'kills'. Other casting was announced, a canny mix of A-list stars who would have worked for scale just to be in a Welles film, long-time associates who couldn't bear to be left out of the adventure and fresh talent.

There were other vampire movies in pre-production, other Dracula movies, but Hollywood was really only interested in the Welles version.

Finally, it would happen.

After a single day's shooting, Orson Welles abandoned The Other Side of Midnight. Between 1981 and his death in 1985, he made no further films and did no more work on such protracted projects as Don Quixote. He made no public statement about the reasons for his walking away from the film, which was abandoned after John Huston, Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma in succession refused to take over the direction.

Most biographers have interpreted this wilful scuppering of what seemed to be an ideal, indeed impossibly perfect, set-up as a final symptom of the insecure, selfdestructive streak that had always co-existed with genius in the heart of Orson Welles. Those closest to him, notably Oja Kodar, have argued vehemently against this interpretation and maintained that there were pressing reasons for Welles's actions, albeit reasons which have yet to come to light or even be tentatively suggested.

As for the exposed film, two full reels of one extended shot, it has never been developed and, due to a financing quirk, remains sealed up, inaccessible, in the vaults of a bank in Timioara, Romania. More than one cineaste has expressed a willingness to part happily with his immortal soul for a single screening of those reels. Like Rosebud itself, until those reels can be discovered and understood, the mystery of Orson Welles's last, lost Dracula will remain.