Vlad

Vlad (a.k.a. Scott Vladimir Licina) is a rock musician and during the 1990s led the Dark Theater, a rock band based in Chicago. He claimed to be an indirect descendant of Vlad the Impaler by way of a young woman Vlad had raped. Vlad also claims to have been born, for the first time, in the year 1431. He believes that the soul is passed from body to body after death and that it is possible, through the act of blood-drinking, to retain memories and characteristics from one lifetime to another.

Vlad drinks blood regularly (but not daily), an act he began as a child. He drank his first blood, that of a wounded playmate, when he was six. Whenever he got into fights as a kid, he bit and drank some of the blood of the person he was fighting. Later, he was able to find women who agreed to his extracting and drinking some of their blood. He consumes a diet consisting primarily of rare beef.

At an early age, Vlad was trained as a symphonic musician. He originally played the horns, but was lured into rock as a teenager. He began to play the electric guitar and in the early 1980s began playing with several Chicago-area heavy-metal bands. As early as 1983 he laid plans for his own band and wrote the lyrics of what would become its first songs. Then in 1988 he founded the Dark Theater, for which he writes the lyrics and music and does the arranging. He developed a stage setting designed around traditional stage masks, with a notable addition—a set of vampire fangs. The original Dark Theater was actually a performance art group and consisted of two members, Vlad and Adservo Magus. Magus was replaced by a live band in 1989, and with the addition of drummer Brad Swinford in 1990 the group was ready to record its first album, Matters of Life and Undeath. Keyboardist Krimm B. joined the group during the recording sessions for the disc. Two videos, Vampire’s Dance and In the Shell soon followed. The Dark Theater followed up the album with Kaliedoscope Whirls in 1992 and TDT in 1993.

Vlad and his wife, Lynda, who replaced Krimm B. on keyboards in 1992, founded and head Screem Jams Productions, a marketing and promotion company. Screem Jams promotes several up-and-coming artists, musicians, and writers as well as the Dark Theater’s appearances around the country. In 1991, Screem in the Dark, the band’s fan club, was launched. The club publishes a quarterly fanzine, Screem in the Dark, which features vampire fiction, reviews, art, and updates on the Dark Theater. Screem Jams also merchandises a variety of Dark Theater products, CDs, cassettes, videos, clothing, and posters and has sponsored the Vampire Circus events, multimedia extravaganzas featuring vampire oriented entertainment. Screem Jams may be contacted through their Internet site, http://www.screemjams.com/.

In the mid-1990s, Vlad became associated with the newly formed Chaos! Comics which had developed a new vampire character, Purgatori. In 1996, Chaos gave Purgatori her own comic book miniseries, and Vlad composed a CD inspired by the series, Purgatori: the Vampire Myth, which appeared in 1997. Similarly he composed a score inspired by Ray Garton‘s novel, Live Girls, a graphic version of which Chaos put into production, though the company failed before it appeared. In the meantime, Vlad had become friends with Fauve, a graphic artist working with Brainstorm Comics, and in 1998 was brought into the story line of Bethany the Vampfire, Fauve’s comic series for Brainstorm. Vlad went on to become a popular performer at Vampire-related events and in the centennial year of 1997 appeared at the Dracula event staged by the Whitby Dracula Xocity in Whitby, England, and at Vampira, the centennial event in London. He was the featured musical guest the Dracula ‘97: A Centennial Celebration held in Los Angeles, August 14 to 17, 1997. Meanwhile in the new century, his interest in comics came to the fore and he landed at Fangoria Magazine as the editor of a new line of horror comics, and the ringmaster of a new blog site “File Under Comic Killers,” for the Internet comic news site, http://www.newsarama.com/.

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