Sucking the Life Out of Horror

The Vampire as Walking Death

The walking plague.  Disease incarnate.  The Vampire.  For centuries demons lurked in the darkness, feeding on human blood.  They were the corruption of values, the scourges of life.  In essence, they were our collective fear of death and disease.  From the succubus to the werewolf, our fears were made manifest in the form of blood sucking demons.  After the horror of the atomic bombs leveling Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese did the same with atomic energy by embodying it in the form of Godzilla.  We take our fears and reshape them to give them form and substance, to make them controllable.  The fears are still monstrous, but despite their enormous power, these personified fears can be overcome, if only in story. 




So it was for centuries with humanity striving to control and defeat its fears.  And then came Stoker.  Bram Stoker combined numerous myths and legends into his Dracula, but the end result changed the face of fear.  Stoker's Dracula was still a monster, but he was a suave, debonair monster.  He was charming and seductive.  Stoker, no doubt stoked by repressive Victorian sexual repression, imbued in Dracula the very sexual appeal that was to be avoided in mortals of his time.  This was part of the popularity of the novel as the blue balls and neglected clitorises of the day were doubtless screaming for any avenue of relief.  The analogy of the vampire's animal magnetism and forceful partaking of blood to the blatant sexuality of the seductive power and brute force of the male protagonists of the modern Harlequin bodice rippers should not be lost on even the most dull witted.  Stoker's vampire was the taboo subject of the Victorian era.  His vampire was a metaphor for our sexual desires that polite company was to avoid.  In creating a timeless masterpiece, Stoker had unwittingly laid the foundation for the death of the vampire as lurking fear.

Ever industrious Germany tried to set the vampire back on track with the unlicensed Dracula film adaptation Nosferatu.  Unlike the sinister sexiness of Count Dracula, there was nothing tragically romantic about Count Orlok.  The German vampire was ghoulish, creepy, horrific.  This was a walking plague.  Nosferatu was fear.  The vampire had a chance, however fleeting, to be spared a fate worse than undeath.  Then Bela Lugosi came to derail the poor creature yet again. 

The Beginning of the End.  The Seductive Vampire

Lugosi was the quintessential Dracula that Stoker had created.  He captured perfectly the essence of seductive evil, and despite changing the horror of the vampire, still managed to keep the vampire evil.  Had lesser writers left well enough alone, we would still have this iconic terror to rely on.  Much to the shame of the human race, this was not to be the case,  Those inferior scribblers and actors that followed would continue to degrade this royal horror until the vampire was nothing more than a common joke. 

Since the 1930's, the vampire has been trivialized, marginalized, humorized, humanized, eroticised, sensualized, sexualized, and disturbingly, disgustingly, sparkled.  The vampire, once a source of nightmare, has become the laughingstock of horror.  A good yardstick for cheesiness can be found in the subculture that a story creates, and the measuring stick of the vampire subculture uses meters rather than feet.  At one time these Limburger reeking mockers actually ingested blood, and for that we can give them some credit.  Granted, they were unaffected by sunlight, garlic, or the crucifix, and equally granted was that the consumption of blood imparted no immortality, but at least they went through the motions much like overweight civil war reenactors go through the motions of pretending to fight battles.  And on the plus side, driving a stake through their heart would still kill them.  This tactic works equally ell on psychic vampires. Try it and see for yourself!

Michelle Belanger: Psy-Vamp, or Pudgy Attention Seeking Twat with Bad Makeup?  You Be the Judge

The decline of the blood drinking poseurs corresponded with the rise of a very real fear; HIV. Bloodborne pathogens sent these ass-clowns scurrying faster than a silver bullet can drop a werewolf.  Lacking their last soiled shred of credibility, the sanguine slurping shams turned to colored beverages like clamato.  Vamfakery had almost outlamed itself with the ingesting of snot flavored V8 juice, but some few pathetic poseurs realized that they could drag the name vampire down even lower.  Enter the 'psychic vampire'.

Psy-vamps pretend, quite possibly even believe, that they feed upon some form of undefined, indeed unproven, human energy field.  Their flighty fantasy has stolen other concepts of psy-vampiry used to describe those exasperating people that try your patience and leave you feeling drained.  I'm sure that you have encountered this type of person before, but in case you haven't, vampire poseurs would be a perfect example of someone that twists facts and mixes them with fantasy to the point that they make you want to upend them, slit their throats, and wash the nonsense from your body in a Bathory bath.  Not only will these idiots claim to feed on fictitious energy, some of them think the rest of us are gullible enough to believe it when they claim that vampires were always of the psychic variety.  Playing on human ignorance fostered by lack of interest, these moronic dolts cite Kirilian photography as 'proof' of their psychic snacking.  Ignore the fact that Kirilian photography is showing nothing more than the interaction of moisture and electricity, or that its use for photographing alleged spiritual energy was thoroughly debunked and even mocked as with a photo titled 'Electrograph of the Antipathy between Two Vienna Sausages' that was circulated during the heyday of Kirilian photography claims.  These tidbits of knowledge are boring and quickly forgotten, and so Kirilian photography makes a perfect staple for pseudo scientists and occultists to fall back on.  Never mind that psy-vamps see no extension of life and are able to present only the most spurious of alleged evidence.  Never mind that, despite their claims of psy-vamps being the real deal there being only historical tales of blood drinking vampires.  Never mind reality, because blood is too dangerous to play with and clamato is too nasty to drink.  Lets all pretend that people are batteries to be tapped.

Now, my dear readers, we have lost the glory that was the vampire.  We have lost it to commercialism, talentless hormonal authors, feces flinging crazy poseurs, and most frighteningly, to glitter.  Terror has become a boyfriend, fright has become flaccid posing.  Evil has become, dare I utter that disgusting word, sparkly. 

There are a few good and just people that are attempting to resurrect the vampire.  Producer, director, author, and all around badass Guillermo del Toro has released a vampire apocalypse trilogy that reinvents and re-empowers the bloodsucker.  Guillermo's vampires go back to their roots, a foul pestilence that is anything but romantic.  His vision of vampires turns the clock back two hundred years and places the vampire back on its pedestal as a revolting disease to be feared. 

How To Kill A Vampire:  Make Him Sparkly

Perhaps del Toro and other visionaries will win this fight.  But it will take the efforts of all of us to make this happen.  We must stand up and say "Oh, hell no!" when faced with a sparkling vegetarian vampire boyfriend.  We must roll our eyes when confronted with sappy vampire romance.  We must point our fingers and laugh uproariously when introduced to a 'psy-vamp' poseur.  We, the patrons of the wicked and vile, the defenders of the genre of horror must do our part by not shelling out a single penny to the grab-a-buck hacks or pandering for a second the delusional wannabe vamps if we wish to preserve the true spirit of horror.  It is easy to shrug the vampire off as another lost cause, but in losing the vampire, we lose a bit of that frightful thrill that makes us feel all the more alive.  We lose a touch of our humanity.  We lose a dollop of our imagination.  We lose a time honored piece of what makes Halloween a special and magical night for us all.