剧情介绍：
Alberto Viale is surprised when his superior cancels his meetings for the day and summons him to his office, several floors above in the 20+ storey monument to capital where he works.
He is still more surprised when his superior indicates that he is only passing on a message from the top floor.
Yet the top floor is itself just the messenger, for Alberto is being summoned to see none other than the boss of the not quite faceless corporation - his portrait is on the wall - namely Giovanni Nosferatu, at his country estate outside la citta.
At this point alarm bells likely begin ringing in the viewer's mind, if not Alberto's: we understand Alberto is Jonathan Harker / Hutter and that Nosferatu is Dracula.
Though a sense of divergence continues as Alberto heads out to the mist-shrouded estate through winding roads, villages seemingly untouched by time and a petrol pump attendant who flees at mention of Nosferatu's villa as if we were in Borgo Pass and the destination Castle Dracula, these same details and the way in which they go unmentioned also helps make clear that we are supposed to understand things this way.
The same can be said of hitch-hiker Laura, whom Alberto picks up and who likewise sees little out of the ordinary, or at least their modern, urban, bourgeois notion of normality - admittedly one that she critiques in her own hippyish, counter-cultural way.
Vampires don't exist today, do they?
Or, as the title indicates, they do.
They have just changed faces, becoming capitalists.
This, crucially, is a change of face somewhat prefigured in Marx. After all, he remarked that "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
Or the feudal master becomes the capitalist master...
Were this Godard, Marx's statement would likely have appeared on an intertitle to Hammer [sic] the point home.
Farina, however, instead continues to update his intertexts as Alberto / Harker arrives at one of those Italian palazzi, already so familiar as Gothic/modern Gothic sites through the work of Bava, Freda, Margheriti and company, and which here looks uncannily like Down Place all'italiana.
Rather than baying wolves, Alberto is confronted by menacing white mini cars, while the Bride of Dracula is represented by Nosferatu's secretary, Corrina, played by Geraldine Hooper. Later to have an equally face-changing role as Massimo, Carlo's lover in Deep Red - i.e. a woman playing a gay man - she here looks eerily like the masked version of Edith Scob in Eyes Without a Face.
Not surprisingly, her entrances have an uncanny quality, as do the way in which advertising slogans are triggered by Alberto's sitting on particular seat or taking a shower. He and we can, of course, easily assimilate these examples of advanced technology as magic without a second thought.
Around about this point Nosferatu himself, played by Adolfo Celi, makes his entrance, as non-threatening as Christopher Lee's in Dracula bu
He is still more surprised when his superior indicates that he is only passing on a message from the top floor.
Yet the top floor is itself just the messenger, for Alberto is being summoned to see none other than the boss of the not quite faceless corporation - his portrait is on the wall - namely Giovanni Nosferatu, at his country estate outside la citta.
At this point alarm bells likely begin ringing in the viewer's mind, if not Alberto's: we understand Alberto is Jonathan Harker / Hutter and that Nosferatu is Dracula.
Though a sense of divergence continues as Alberto heads out to the mist-shrouded estate through winding roads, villages seemingly untouched by time and a petrol pump attendant who flees at mention of Nosferatu's villa as if we were in Borgo Pass and the destination Castle Dracula, these same details and the way in which they go unmentioned also helps make clear that we are supposed to understand things this way.
The same can be said of hitch-hiker Laura, whom Alberto picks up and who likewise sees little out of the ordinary, or at least their modern, urban, bourgeois notion of normality - admittedly one that she critiques in her own hippyish, counter-cultural way.
Vampires don't exist today, do they?
Or, as the title indicates, they do.
They have just changed faces, becoming capitalists.
This, crucially, is a change of face somewhat prefigured in Marx. After all, he remarked that "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
Or the feudal master becomes the capitalist master...
Were this Godard, Marx's statement would likely have appeared on an intertitle to Hammer [sic] the point home.
Farina, however, instead continues to update his intertexts as Alberto / Harker arrives at one of those Italian palazzi, already so familiar as Gothic/modern Gothic sites through the work of Bava, Freda, Margheriti and company, and which here looks uncannily like Down Place all'italiana.
Rather than baying wolves, Alberto is confronted by menacing white mini cars, while the Bride of Dracula is represented by Nosferatu's secretary, Corrina, played by Geraldine Hooper. Later to have an equally face-changing role as Massimo, Carlo's lover in Deep Red - i.e. a woman playing a gay man - she here looks eerily like the masked version of Edith Scob in Eyes Without a Face.
Not surprisingly, her entrances have an uncanny quality, as do the way in which advertising slogans are triggered by Alberto's sitting on particular seat or taking a shower. He and we can, of course, easily assimilate these examples of advanced technology as magic without a second thought.
Around about this point Nosferatu himself, played by Adolfo Celi, makes his entrance, as non-threatening as Christopher Lee's in Dracula bu