Vampires might be big business at
the moment, but the very mention of the word is sure to start eyes rolling. They
have been everywhere for too long. But given that recent output has put the vampires’ ball firmly
in the court of teenage girls, are we done with them? All that drippy, angsty
sex-play; all that teenage heartbreak?
Do not fear. Or rather, do, because they're still dead scary.
We have not
had enough of the vampire, and we never will- our thirst for vampires is, like
the monster’s fabled bloodlust, a thirst that can never be slaked.
The reason is
simple: vampires are future-proof.
If, as monster
scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states, “…a monster’s body is a cultural body… the
embodiment of a cultural moment”, then a monster has to symbolise something that “rises above the common and
singular fear of death” to become something more all-encompassing; something
that goes to the heart of who we are and how we live.
If this is
what we require of our monsters, vampires will rise from the ashes of our
broken society at every turn of our twisting future, for they are the perfect foil upon which to mould our
anxieties, fears and collective loathing.
Vampires have
always been sexual, way before True Blood
and Edward Cullen; think Carmilla and
Christabel, written in 1872 and 1792. There is no escaping their sexual connotation: their act is at
once oral and penetrative, involving blood-letting suggestive of both sexual
maturity and the act of defloration. Our collective psyche will be forever
branded with the image of the tuxedo leaning suggestively over a pale maiden,
her lace whirling in the night’s wind as the twin phalluses of a gaping maw
reach for her exposed flesh... But this reductive anachronism is not all, not
nearly all; it is merely the foundation stone of an extraordinary and ever-evolving
dynasty.
Some choice
examples of twentieth century cinema: Near
Dark, Lost Boys, Interview with the Vampire, Blade. To suggest that these
films portray the same villain- or embody the same fear- is to miss the
richness at the heart of the vampire’s fluid cultural threat.
Arguably the
finest vampire film of all time, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark explores a specific aspect of vampirism; it’s blood-borne
nature. In 1987, diseases of the blood were a common anxiety as the threat of
AIDS swept across the world. Bigelow’s vampires are not pale, slicked
aristocrats, they are urban nihilists; forced to eke out a living on the
fringes of society, hiding fearfully from retribution and judgement. And just
to make sure that the poisoning of innocent farm-hand Caleb’s blood is a clear
enough subtext, his father cures him by performing a transfusion in his garage.
Curing his blood disease! Could anything more accurately reflect the fears and
hopes of a world under of AIDS’ looming threat?
Now a
question: could this have been achieved with the zombie’s mindlessness? From
the moment Bill Paxton’s Severen starts a bar brawl during Near Dark’s breathless opening, the answer is no. For this, we need
the vampire’s sentience, will, self-loathing and drive.
Interview with the Vampire and The Lost Boys are outstanding examples
of vampire tales that make use of vampires’ fabled abilities for their own dual
ends: secondly to represent their cultural targets- but firstly to mess with
their audience.
Everyone
knows, or thinks they know, how vampires roll. So when events take a turn and
the vampires start to move, we- the audience, the reader- think we know what
we’re going to do: They can’t cross
water, ok, let’s get over this stream and into this barn… they can’t go past
mirrors, or see their own reflection, or something... Don’t you have to scatter
seeds? Or steal a sock? Cos vampires are like, pernickety, right? They have to
count the seeds, and they’ll spend forever looking for the sock… And garlic!
Loads of garlic… or is it just anything that smells? I don’t know, but shit-
holy water, right? Let’s hit the church, man! I’ll drive!
So, as in The Lost Boys, when the vampire walks in
(uninvited, don’t they have to be invited? Jesus Christ, what are the rules
here?) smiles at you and says “Garlic don’t work, boys…” what do you do? You
thought you knew. You had a plan.
But the rules
change. Vampire writers have a huge, dripping bag of rules they can play with, choosing
with care which wet, stinking morsel to throw at their audience, misdirecting,
falsely-securing…
There are no
rules.
Can werewolves
call on that arsenal of trickery?
Interview with the Vampire and The Lost Boys make an interesting
comparison- near contemporaries that each make use of the vampire’s ability to
fly. But while Interview’s vampires soar
upwards, arms outstretched in a grand celebration of their power, The Lost Boys plunge headlong off a pier
into choking smoke, fatherless boys throwing themselves with reckless abandon
in an act of suicide; a rejection of their powers and their society.
Same power,
different application, another twist of the cultural foil; hedonism vs. the
absent patriarchy of the post-Reagan years. And for Near Dark’s blood poisoning, see Blade’s injections of serum; fighting off the call of his rotten
blood, as the drug-user keeps his own wolves from the door.
Fluid cultural
threat.
For current,
drip-free vampire tales we can turn to graphic fiction; Jonathan Ross’ Turf and Stephen King’s American Vampire. These are razor sharp,
gripping stories in which American vampires eviscerate their leeching European
overlords. So here, the vampire tells the story of the birth of America, and in
King’s Skinner Sweet (a candy-cane-chewing-cowboy-outlaw dragged into
Hollywood’s roaring twenties) we have a stunning anti-hero who, all by himself,
banishes the limp heartache of Edward Cullen into the crypt of shame.
The birth of a
nation explored through vampirism. And these are the same monsters that deal so
cleanly with hard drug use, with AIDS, with post-patriarchy, with aesthetic
celebration?
With our
current financial malaise, our victimhood at the hands of greedy bankers, gluttonous energy giants and
heartless politicians who scoff at austerity as they slice up their suppers of
baked swan, surely somebody, somewhere, is currently dragging cracked knuckles
across a story featuring a Patrick Bateman-esque ruthless power broker,
embodying this cultural moment, this shared loathing, feasting on our current misfortune?
And whatever
happens next- whichever cultural anxiety plagues us in ten years, in twenty-
the vampire will shift slightly in the shadows and return in a new form, a new
shape, to scare us once again.
Don’t worry,
they’re not dead, they haven’t faded into lovelorn retirement to lick the
wounds on their broken hearts.
They’ll never die.
That’s one of the rules.
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