Everything Undead Is New Again: Are Vampires Still Vicious?

By Kai Shuart

So, I’m just going to get down to the nitty-gritty: I love me some vampires. They’re violent, they’re sexy, and they’re transgressors of any religious, sexual, or social mores a mortal can think up. And they have the power to give that power to anyone they see fit.

But I am a vampire snob. Don’t come across my way with any of that Stephenie Meyer weak sauce; give me Eli from Let The Right One In, Anne Rice’s Lestat, Cassidy from The Preacher comics, Buffy’s Dru or Spike, or even Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows (a callous hedonist turned vicious killer vampire turned tortured hero . . . yeeeah, with all due respect to Joss Whedon, the archetype didn’t start with a certain billowy-coated King of Pain). To me, a vampire is first and foremost a killer, and a gleeful one at that. Well, we should all take pride in our work . . .

Twilight vs. 30 Days Of Night

I couldn’t help but wonder, though: why does each successive interpretation of what a vampire is and what a vampire does seem so tame compared to the early pop culture incarnations set forth by people like Bram Stoker and F.W. Murnau? This is a monster whose father was Vlad the Impaler, one of the bloodiest, most sadistic dictators who ever walked the face of the Earth; and whose mother was Elizabeth Bathory, a woman who threw orgies and bathed in virgin’s blood because she believed it kept her youthful. Now they sparkle? All snark aside, I had to ask how this shift took place.

Upon consideration, I think part of this comes from a very human need to make friends with what scares us. The thinking goes that if we somehow forge a connection with the monsters (both literal and figurative) that keep us awake at night, the monsters will eventually overcome their natures and spare our lives. This is exactly how the romances play out in modern vampire lore: Twilight’s Edward can smell Bella’s blood a mile away, but doesn’t do the deed because he loves her so much. (This is me. Retching.) In True Blood, there’s something in Sookie Stackhouse’s blood that drives vampires crazy, but Bill Compton protects her from some of his more primal cohorts. To be fair, there’s a lot of this dynamic between Oskar and Eli in the book Let Me In, but at least there’s a question of whether protecting Oskar wasn’t just a by-product of Eli procuring a meal.

The fact that vampires have grown significantly less vicious and amoral as time has gone on could also be because it plays into the rather marketable notion that a good woman can reform a bad boy. Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer has many, many positive points, even that great show is guilty of this. In the third season, Angel is somehow brought back from the hell dimension to which Buffy sent him after his reversion to his evil Angelus form. In this form, he psychologically tortured Buffy through attacking—and in the case of Jenny Calendar, killing—Buffy’s allies.

After Angel’s return, Buffy finds him in an extremely feral state. But what does our heroine do? Instead of thinking that maybe she was a bit justified in killing her former lover and sending him to hell, she is convinced that the Angel she loved is still in there somewhere. Because of this, she makes it her mission to tame him through regular visits during which she feeds him, reads to him, and does Tai Chi with him.

A final reason for these shifting interpretations of vampires could be the political climate. The massively popular Twilight series was first published during the Bush administration, a period in which everything seemed oriented towards conventional sexual mores. Sure enough, Bella and Edward don’t have sex at all until they’re lawfully wed.

By contrast, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was released in 1976, within a much more liberal environment that was likely influenced by the attitudes of the previous decade. This could account in some small part for the fact that a story that features Lestat, a sybaritic, gleeful killer vampire who makes no bones about how much he enjoys being a vampire, sold so well. Also, Rice was much less squeamish about the homoerotic elements of her story. For example, as melancholy as he is, Louis finds a “companion” in fellow vampire Armand. It’s not explicitly stated that the two are lovers, but there is certainly ample room for that interpretation.

Regardless of whether these shifts have come about due to political climate, human nature, or the marketing of gendered relationship roles, one thing is for certain: I will keep taking my vampires straight up. Fortunately for me and other like-minded individuals, a much more animalistic interpretation of the vampire has recently been coming into prominence, quite possibly in response to the vampire’s role as the dark, sexy, forbidding romantic figure.

Vampires in the film and comic 30 Days of Night, with their ghostly faces and mouths full of razor-sharp teeth, have a purely animal instinct to kill rather than seduce their prey, and they certainly don’t worry about how killing people affects the state of their immortal soul. Proving that everything comes full circle, this seems to be reverting to the much earlier pop culture incarnations of vampires, borrowing the gnarled claws and batlike visage from Murnau’s Nosferatu.

Will this interpretation eventually overtake its sparkly, more tween-friendly counterpart? Time will tell, but I for one really hope so . . .