The Vampire: Sex and Death

The Vampire belongs most obviously to the Autumnal season, to the dying of the year, and thus is a Halloween figure, one of the archetypal monsters of Death. But the Vampire is also a figure of Sex, an emblem of long, warm, restless nights, when the moon is too bright and the chains are too tight. Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker, which has become perhaps the ur-text of the Vampire, though literary vampires existed long before – The Vampyre 1819 by John Polidori, Varney the Vampire 1872, and Carmilla 1872 Sheridan le Fanu) basically begins on the eve of St. George’s Day (April 23).

Vampires have ‘developed’ throughout my lifetime. In Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (book 1972, miniseries 1975) the Vampire is still the traditional walking corpse (obviously based on the vampire from Nosferatu 1922), owing much of its fear to the stench and decay of death, its secrecy and the night, and its compulsion and need to feed and slay, and it still feared the power of good.

In 1977 this concept was dealt a blow with Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, with its thinking vampires, still driven by bloodlust but able to control it and even to turn their need into a good, ‘slaying only the evil-doer.’ Their bloodlust could be assuaged with animals. It didn’t hurt that they were all rich and good-looking. Any fear they had of religious symbols was only lingering shame and guilt from their mortal lives, a concept perhaps carried over from Richard Matheson’s 1954 I Am Legend, a book which has been adapted into a movie a least three times with a ‘sci-fi’ explanation for a sudden plague of vampire-like creatures.

This concept of glamorous vampires was furthered by the 1987 The Lost Boys. Its allure was the idea that the powerless teen culture could suddenly be in the driver’s seat by cutting themselves off from the rest of humanity, especially morally. The same temptation allured Evil Ed, a marginalized nerd, into becoming the monstrous stooge of a vampire in Fright Night (1985). The Lost Boys slogan “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire,” became the mantra of a generation.

The Nineties saw the continued development of the Anne Rice vampire ‘mythos’ and its influence on the growing Gothic subculture and its rejection of mainstream ‘normality’. The 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula removed the bestial revenge motif from Dracula’s pursuit of Mina Harker and turned it into a story of the immortal pursuit of a lost love. How romantic.

But it was in 2008 that the final ‘nail in the coffin’ to the vampire legend was finally hammered in. The book and later the movie Twilight (2005, 2008) came out and the series developed throughout the Twenty Teens. Gone was the idea of the demonic corpse haunting the shadows, these vampires glittered in the sun like a high schooler’s notebook. These vampires were stronger, faster, more beautiful, and immortal to boot. Why, mere humans deserved their place one step down in the food chain. To have a vampire interested in you was the greatest compliment.

You can see the idea of the soul and peril to the soul slowly draining out of vampire fiction. As long as the mind is merely a function of the body, the ‘transhumanism’ of the vampire is simply an evolutionary leap, and the peril becomes one of power and its misuse. One way or another the vampire has made the Faustian bargain, his soul for the world. ‘What profits it a man to gain the world and lose his soul?’ ‘The world, my boy, the world!’ Like Ellie Dunne in Heartbreak House, many see the idea of a soul as an old-fashioned concept, humanity a condition that should be transcended physically, even at the cost of shedding a few old values of right and wrong. As Count Dracula says dismissively in the 1977 BBC adaptation, “Oh, souls? What of souls. What I want is life.”

But life is exactly what vampires don’t have, neither can they create life. Rather, they make a string of victims to keep them company through the ages, victims who can neither grow nor change but which simply follow the vampire down its own destructive path. Kids, before they become teens, still fear the vampire, perhaps with the fear of the coming unknowable experience with pubescence. Vampires, traditionally, don’t and can’t have sex. They exert a kind of glamorous fascination to trap their ‘donors’, or failing that, resort to what is plain old ‘rape’, the violent taking of what they want. Sex without the possibility of kids, another adolescent dream, as well as irresistible charm. What Leonard Wolf referred to in A Dream of Dracula (1972) as ‘energy without grace’, or Stephen King more plainly as a 'zipless fuck’ in Danse Macabre (1981). Stephenie Meyer in her Twilight books removed this last objection to this concept of vampires with her series culminating with Bella’s baby, an unprecedented new breed produced by her love with Edward Cullen, the vampire. The last hurdle had fallen; there were no more drawbacks to vampires in this conception, only fantasies of power and sex.

With the constant whittling away at the parable of the vampire, it loses most of its power as a cautionary tale and bloats itself into a romantic phantasia, a power trip, an imaginary self-aggrandizing quest for ever-increasing control over others, or at least escape from the restraints of traditional morality and mortality. But in the dark, in the restless dusk of the spring night, there is still fear – and craving – lurking in the shadows.