I really like Marvel Comics’ old horror magazine Vampire Tales (published from 1973 to 1975), especially Roy Thomas and John Romita Sr.’s Satana The Devil’s Daughter stories. Besides featuring comic book stories the magazine collected essays and editorials, one of the best of which was Chris Claremont’s serialized essay on the depiction of vampires in popular culture. The least interesting feature of Vampire Tales was always the Morbius The Living Vampire stories.
Unlike Dracula and Lilith, who are traditional vampires appearing in Marvel comics, Morbius is not a supernatural being. Morbius gets his “bat powers” from a genetic experiment gone wrong. This puts Morbius in the same Marvel tradition as The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man thusly negating the cultural legacy and lore of the vampire. In many ways this remove from established myth and folklore is the weakest aspect of the character.
The film Morbius (2022) makes this conundrum abundantly clear as the filmmakers attempt to draw on a filmic legacy of vampires without being able to openly embrace that legacy. In Morbius “living vampires” fly like wizards in the Harry Potter franchises, dress like Angel (1999-2004), and summon a colony of bats like in Batman Begins (2005). There is no sense of terror or the Gothic or even the macabre in Morbius. Vampirism in Morbius has been gentrified to fit the mold of the Marvel cinematic universe; pulling away from weak source material in favor of the familiar and commercial.
There’s an even broader lack of aesthetic character to Morbius than just the defanging of vampirism. Morbius feels like a film made in the mid-2000s as a direct reaction to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) in how it follows every dramatic beat of that earlier film. Yet this devotion to narrative mediocrity is what makes Morbius better than the films of the Disney MCU which is void of any of Raimi’s interests in character and high camp. Morbius is trash but at least it’s trash that doesn’t smell as bad as Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
In director Daniel Espinosa’s hands Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona and Jared Harris all give solid performances. On a technical level it is the editing, screenwriting and special effects that do a disservice too Morbius. All in all Morbius could have learned a thing or two about imbuing superhero science-fiction with an air of the Gothic from Stephen Norrington’s Blade (1998).
