A New Breed of Vampire: Cinema Suicide’s Bryan White on the 21st Century Bloodsucker
by Bryan White | Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Back in the 90s I was fairly obsessed with vampire mythology. I played the White Wolf game, I read the books, I watched the movies, I listened to gothy music. Then at some point I grew some balls and put the crypto-gay undead of Anne Rice behind me. Sixteen years later, they still don’t seem all that attractive to me but I have a degree of respect for the monster in some of the higher forms of media that they happen to live in. Yes, I could probably still sit down and read the hell out of Interview With The Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. Bram Stoker’s Dracula will always be a classic work of high gothic horror and the F.W. Murnau and Tod Browning interpretations on film are just as effective now as they were then. And hey! My favorite Muppet on Sesame Street is The Count.
Being the analytical horror buff that I happen to be, a guy who believes that the cultural value of the genre is much higher than most are willing to appraise it at, I have a tendency to see the trends and think about them on a deeper level. For a while, I was pondering the popularity of zombies until all of a sudden I couldn’t help but notice that I was surrounded by the high drama of waifish vampires once again. My wife, Denise, obsessively burned through the now-iconic Stephenie Meyer Twilight series and then picked up on the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse novels now on television under the title True Blood. Since she was neck-deep in the undead, vampires became a regular topic of conversation as I sought to find my way to the bottom of this fashionable new wave of vampire fiction. The staggering success of the Twilight feature and a trip through the young adult section at Barnes & Noble only cemented my suspicion that vampires were here to stay, at least for a while. But upon examination, I’m unable to deny that this is a new breed of vampire. One that I’m unfamiliar with, entirely.
The horror genre, as a whole, has always been a reflection of our culture and times. Going back to the earliest examples of the genre, it has rarely ever been a random play on fear. To boot, the vampire has always been based on whatever is relevant in society. The earliest examples of vampire folklore were used to explain away high mortality rates in infants or to perpetuate the mythology of a particularly despicable person in the community. Bram Stoker’s version of Dracula wasn’t exactly a racist work but reflected Victorian attitudes toward foreigners. The vampire of the 80’s and 90’s was a metaphor for AIDS/HIV. Beginning with the Tod Browning film Dracula, the vampire became a highly sexualized creature, an expression of a secretly kinky desire to submit and be dominated in a time when it was absolutely not cool to even so much as fantasize about that sort of thing. So given all of this horny metaphor, what the hell is the deal with the contemporary example of the vampire? A creature so frustratingly celibate that it seems to have skipped many stages of evolution and tossed out the adult Peter Pan fantasy to stay young and sexy forever.
In preparation for this article, I power-read Twilight. I’m already a fan of HBO’s True Blood, itself a unique take on vampires, but I figured if I was going to address the latest version of the vampire properly, I was going to have to dig into the phenomenon of a generation and wrap my head around what draws teen girls and women alike to Stephenie Meyer’s series of novels. The end result was that I couldn’t immediately pick it out. I suspect that that has more to do with the books being written for sixteen year old girls and not a thirty-something guy so I consulted heavily with Denise, who insists that they’re compelling as all get-out but readily admits that they’re about as sappy as teen romances go.
Bella Swan, protagonist of the Twilight series represents every girl that the book was meant to be read by. She is alienated, seemingly wise beyond her years and completely uninterested in the good looking, outgoing boys who do everything in their power to woo her. She’s a misunderstood outcast from the get-go. Edward Cullen, the vampire, is the only person in the school who seems to understand her. You read that right. The vampires in Twilight go to school. As a matter of fact, my disbelief in this aspect of an already shaky story was expressed to Denise in the following words, “The fuckin’ vampires go to school!?” Say it to yourself in a shocked, incredulous tone and you get the drift. Meyer spends many, many pages dragging her feet on the plot in favor of pounding into your head just how impossibly beautiful Edward Cullen is. In the end, what you get is a watered down version of Buffy and Angel, a star-crossed teen romance that doesn’t necessarily need the vampire angle to work. Bella and Edward could have just as effectively been Capulets and Montagues. It may just have something to do with writing for a younger audience but Meyer’s Cullen vampires don’t kill humans, they’re “vegetarian” vampires which suggests that they periodically go out into the forest and hunt animals to feed off of. The crux of their drama, however, is the constant angst about never being able to fully be a part of human society and love human beings. It’s a popular theme in vampire fiction and one that doesn’t necessarily make much sense to me. The vampires also wander around in broad daylight, dismissing the living by night concept as pure mythology.
True Blood, coincidentally, or The Southern Vampire novels, or the Sookie Stackhouse novels, depending on who you talk to follow a similar trend. Where the Cullens of the Twilight books seek to integrate into human society in a covert way, True Blood‘s vampires have “come out of the coffin” and are a regular part of the world. They “live” among humans and sustain themselves by drinking a synthetic blood substitute. There are, of course, renegades who won’t mainstream but the books and show explore themes of racism and homophobia by way of the fantastic. Sookie is a young, very naive waitress in a southern dive bar. She is also telepathic and constantly hears the thoughts of everyone around her. Because of this, she is alienated from the rest of society until she meets Bill Compton, a vampire dating back to the end of the Civil War, whose thoughts she cannot hear. Obviously they fall in love.
The recurring theme here is alienation and that deeply romantic fantasy of finding the one person who understands you. Both Twilight and the Sookie books ride on this, to such a degree, in fact, that the vampire elements almost being secondary to romantic fantasy. Both series have one foot firmly planted the in the melodrama of any given Harlequin Romance novel. For pages upon pages, they almost forget that there are vampires running around. The Sookie novels are actually whodunnits but True Blood, the series, expands the scope and manages to forget that it’s a murder mystery until the final three episodes of the season. For the most part, it examines the social ramifications of vampires coexisting with humans. There’s also an abundance of nudity and sex scenes which seems to go against my claim that these new vampires aren’t operating the on the same sexual level as those in the past. The difference being that the last evolution of vampires was subtle. It was all about suggestion and innuendo, whereas the Alan Ball produced vampires seem to be knocking boots all the time in explicit detail. The main characters, however, struggle with the usual will he or won’t he bite her dilemma.
So why is it that common vampire themes today seem to be less about vampires and more about human alienation with vampires lurking on the periphery? In the past, vampires have represented submission and domination, disease, eternal youth, power and a range of other marginally deviant fantasies. Contemporary vampires seem abstinent, though. They are at peace with what they are, which is a dramatic twist on past vampire novels and movies, yet are unwilling to bring those they love into their world, beautiful and young forever. Many vampire fans of the past, in love with the fantasy of immortal and pretty, aren’t finding that element any more. To boot, vampires have become hardly predatory. There have been flirtations in the last ten or so years in the form of Blade and 30 Days Of Night, but these vampires are often so disposable that the action plays out more like a zombie movie. Certainly, vampire fiction has always appealed to those feeling as though they exist outside of the mainstream, themselves alienated and the protagonists of popular vampire novels and movies struggle with alienation as well, but they’re vampires. The key difference today is that our main characters are humans feeling as though they are on the outside, in love with the dead, the only people who seem to understand them. I trace this back to themes popularized by Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
I’ve been trying not to bitch about the fate of the vampire, but the thrill, the danger and the sexy have been taken right out of the monster. Gone is the suave styling of Bela Lugosi, or the lethal seduction of Catherine Deveuve. The current monster seems to be all about holding hands and spending hours staring into each other’s eyes. Twilight seems to flirt with the very fundamentals of the oft whispered domination themes in vampire novels, with Bella seemingly always under Edward’s thrall, constantly swooning, constantly in trouble, needing his help and finding rescue in his arms, still unable to look away from his eyes, which are probably the most commented upon aspect of his appearance in the book. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we get terrible video game style riffs from the Underworld crowd who speak in terse cadence with an ambiguously European accent.
For those disillusioned by the tame nature of the current beast, I present a few alternatives.
Midnight Blue: Sonja Blue Collection
A collection of the first three Sonja Blue books in the splatterpunky series about a half vampire killing machine out for revenge. Not at all for the faint of heart. Collins pulls no punches and gleefully describes the violent mayhem in the most explicit of detail.
Guilty Pleasures
The overarching Anita Blake series isn’t pure vampire, but the book to kick it off is. Anita is a necromancer in a parallel version of St. Louis. Part of her profession has her chasing down vampires as well.
Lost Souls
If the pulpy strains of Anita Blake get you down, and frequent disembowelment of Sonja Blue is a little too much, there’s Poppy Z. Brite, a traditionally gothic take on vampires that is a distinct departure from the Anne Rice formula.
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