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.
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