In the last Blog for A, we talked about cyborgs, and discussed a range of metal men (and women) that included the Terminator, Vic Stone aka Cyborg of the Teen Titans, cylons (particularly Number Six) and the Bladerunner replicants.
In the end, though, in picking a favorite cyborg, I’m going retro, like one of our commentators, who noted:
I have to go with the old-school. Steve Austin is the Man. I just rewatched the first two seasons on DVD, and I was actually amazed at how well the show holds up as entertainment. (though it’s also amazing how many old shows’ plots could have been derailed by someone having a cell phone)
Mail us to claim your winnings, Ryk E. Spoor!
Some of the more popular articles on this site lately have involved vampires, most notably the Twilight and True Blood pieces. So, let’s open us this week’s Blog for a…and ask: What do you want to see in your vampires? Are they dangerously suave or clumsily seductive? What differences in vampire mythos really bug you?
Have you seen the Youtube clip of Buffy versus Edward?
I know we’ve been lax about putting up Blog for A… lately, but look for new ones in July!
Barnabus from Dark Shadows.
Or even Frank Langella’s version of Dracula. Both had intense screen presence, we diabolical, imposing, and iconic versions of vampires we got from the likes of Bram Stoker.
But you know what is really terrifying? Max Schreck from Nosferatu. Why? Because he was actually a vampire. That’s right, Count Orlock was played by an actual vamp. It says so in the Biopic for Schreck “In the Shadow of the Vampire” starring Willem Defoe.
But seriously, aside from the bad filtering, the silly sped-up film with the horses, and the cheesy early-film method of acting, Max Schreck reins supreme for vampires.
But I want to talk about why vampires are now stupid. Before, they had limitations. They were driven only for the need to feed (note Maverick and Goose doing high-fives). They couldn’t come in unless they were invited. They used their creepy powers of seduction during the night and were hard as hell to kill. Of course you could repel them with crosses and holy water and such, but Anne Rice came along and totally ruined them.
Vampires became sensitive, eroticized, misunderstood magic people with dubious sexual preferences (odd too, since they couldn’t actually get it on, they had to rely on chugging each other’s blood). After that vampires became less restricted to folklore or cannon. They wore crosses, shopped at Hot Topic, solved mysteries (Moonlight), and even that nerdy tot from Jerry Maguire got in on it (the Littlest Vampire). Now vampires were adorable too.
“Twilight” is the latest nail in Max Schreck’s Legacy coffin. Vampires don’t erupt in a fountain of grave-scented dust when they touch sunlight. They glitter like they are covered in some 13 year old girl’s makeup they bought at Claires. And here, I thought it was bad enough when Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt went for that smokey-eye look in the 1990′s.
Vampires are now like multi-class DnD characters in Stephanie Meyer’s world. Some can jump. Some can smell really far off. Like to Arizona! Some can climb, others can look really pale, but all can smile and titter at some really clever inside joke ALL THE TIME! Vampires are no longer predatory beasts with strange sensuality or a twisted craving for blood. Nope, they have simply become those rich assholes from High School nobody liked, but showed up to all the parties and drove the nice cars. Even though everyone else in school wrote “Douchebag!!” under their yearbook picture, these kids have grown up to be confident that their life was like a John Ford film and they got to throw their fist in the air as the Simple Minds played “Don’t You Forget About Me” on the last day of detention.
Vampires are many things, in many cultures, but NEVER are they just douchebags.
I loved the Buffy/Edward video clip! That was incredible!
I need my vampires to creep me out. That’s it. If they want to be alluring or badass or whatever else on the side, that’s fine. I never really bought into the whole vampires as sex symbols thing. I don’t think that cold, dead people are very attractive ;0) I need them to give me that cold sense of growing terror first and foremost. My favorites include: Nosferatu, Stoker’s Dracula, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.
I agree with Clint about Max Schreck in Nosferatu. The teeth, the nails, the stalking shadows on the wall – CREEPY. The version with the Type O Negative soundtrack is also really cool. I saw a stage production of Stoker’s Dracula at the college near my house one time and Lucy’s “Bloofer Lady” scene sent chills up my spine. I loved it :0) The troupe there did an amazing job. I wish I had a video of the performance. I would love to see a film of The Historian but I’m also afraid that it would get all mucked up in translation. Now I have something to re-read tonight though…
Vampires should be scary. They suck your blood, and they kill. They’re not cuddly, they don’t mope, they’re not just misunderstood victims of a rare disease or genetic condition, and they don’t have sex. Most of all, their skin does not sparkle in the sun. They should be dangerous.
Hmm … one thing that I still find interesting is how there’s basically one vampire model (based on Dracula) which has become popularized. Many of the stories about vampires from other parts of the world, and other types of vampires, rarely get mentioned.
My favourite vampire stories are more bizarre and obscure, like the vampire who has his shroud stolen and chases the thief to get it back, the vampire obsessed with counting grains or breans, the vampire woman who comes out of her tomb to feed her newborn baby so it will not die, etc.
And of course, Carmilla. Poor Carmila doesn’t get the credit that’s due to her and she is only pre-Dracula, but also hyper-sexy in a way that most of the cute vampires ala Twilight can not compete with.
While the original vampires of Western myth were more like the modern zombie but tougher, within the current general category of vampire I like to take what I consider a “golden age” point of view, where many vampires are nasty evil but have PANACHE, and where some may be redeemable or even basically good. Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula, Langella’s portrayal of Drac, and even the Dracula seen in Van Helsing have a … PRESENCE that even the Rician vampires don’t seem to manage, and the later derivations don’t even approach. There’s no majesty in Lestat (we won’t even discuss the Twilight abominations), and honestly not much in the Buffyverse vamps either.
(I admit that my bias is rather fixed, given that I sort of committed myself to a particular perception of vampires when I wrote _Digital Knight_)
I find the current trend to humanize every sort of monster a bit disturbing. Vampires are just intelligent predators that feed on humans.
I particularly enjoyed the BBC series, Ultraviolet. Hit exactly the right tone for my tastes.
I came by this topic on your twitter. Couldn’t help but put some thoughts together.
I can’t stand vampires anymore. The expurgated version of Dracula was one of the first novels I read in elementary school, those glow-in-the-dark plastic teeth were the coolest thing in the world in 3rd grade, and I watched Blade an embarrassing number of times in high school. But there came a time when that fiction became dominated by too much trash and pseudoscience for the monsters to be scary or intriguing anymore. I’m afraid they’re reaching the point werewolves and mummies did before them – there may be no good new ideas for them anymore.
All that is wrong with the modern vampire is not any one element or author’s fault. However, many of the modern vampire’s problems arose from secular influences. There is a pathetic strain running through Horror that sees them tearing through walls, surviving bullets to the head and lifting cars as realistic, but being afraid of crosses as not. I’m not Christian but I could see what very ham-handed writers were trying to do to the Fantasy. They wanted to remove what they didn’t believe from the mythos, but unwittingly insulted the entirely implausible fiction. Suddenly magic was yanked out and there was no cool shapeshifting, no good explanation for the fear of the sun, and the psychic “familiar” phenomenon turned into psychic pseudoscience (when it was explained at all). Theclever variations on vampire tropes, like why or how stakes were supposed to work, were dwarfed by a general half-hearted apology for it being fiction, and fiction that apologizes for itself insults both the story and the audience. What the secularization of the vampire did, mostly by accident, was sever the Fantasy creature’s connection to the world. It was like taking night and the moon away from the werewolf. Satan’s overplayed in fiction, but vampires need some mysticism. That they once were one with the night gave them a mythological power they lack altogether today.
In place of magic, now vampirism is a disease – presumably because we’re terrified of STD’s instead of witches these days. But the result is something downright insulting to the ill. I suffer from a neuromuscular syndrome and have mentored a couple of chronically ill girls. Disease does not make you immune to bullets or render you capable of biting through body armor. Reducing vampirism to infectious superpowers is ridiculous, made worse when so many don trendy clothes and black trench coats. They’re the vapid Matrix posers of Fantasy.
The modern zombie does a much better job of expressing the mental and physical degradation of disease, and their far broader potential for infection allegories and apocalypse stories has helped them completely overtake the popularity of their undead brethren. Zombies, popularized in film during the nuclear age, have beaten vampires to the punch. It’s not even a contest. Even in prose, Max Brooks’s World War Z blows away every piece of vampire fiction of the decade on narrative and literary levels.
Then there’s what vampires have actually done in their new pseudoscience domain.
Since Carmilla’s lesbianism and Dracula’s creepy harem, vampires have always had sexual themes. Some directors used those to probe rape and homosexuality when the political climate was less tolerant in visual arts. But Post-Anne Rice, vampires are insipidly horny. Twilight’s teen angst romance and True Blood’s constant banging do little to remedy this. Not to insult the author of a recent blog entry around here, but neither Twilight’s hesitance towards pre-marital sex nor True Blood’s fascination with as much pre-marital sex as possible is interesting. Not with vampires. Not without them. Contrary to popular belief, sex is not mature – kids have sex all the time, and most sexual vampire fiction shows a distinctly adolescent fascination with rutting. That’s certainly part of why I detached from it. I remember when I first turned against the idea of the vampire – reading Rice’s The Vampire Armand, with a slave begging his master not to whip his thighs as he was “disciplined.” Vampire sexuality rapidly descended into the prurient and titillating, which is to say, it became trite. That’s the coffin where vampire sex has laid to rest.
I miss the coffins. Damn, do I miss the coffins. They could be hokey, but at least hokey is the attempt to feel authentic. Somebody who sleeps in a coffin is way more interesting than someone who sleeps on satin sheets, even if a supermodel joins him. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was the last truly great piece of vampire fiction I can remember, giving us a town too full of its own trivial drama to realize the layers of evil unfolding around them. King wanted modernize the vampires he loved so much, and so while he had them handling land deeds and swarming in a school bus, he kept the stake, the cross, the coffin, the transformations and familiars. He maintained the regal air of the father vampire while sowing the notion of the local, lesser child, and in doing so maintained the dread of infection and the bravery of the hunt. He also had broader vision than most Horror writers, also including a creepy abstract version of the classic haunted house to play influence over his classic critters.
For vampire fiction to live it had to outgrow the Dracula model King used, but it didn’t grow into anything compelling to a mind that grew up with it. Buffy and her quirky crew lived on their rapport. Fans watched for the characters, not their challenges, and “Vampire Slayer” quickly became an inaccurate title as they wound up stabbing Frankenstein-rip-offs, giant snakes and demons. Hence why they started just calling her “The Slayer” instead. The current Supernatural is much more entertaining to me, in no small thanks to its openness about a wider variety of baddies going bump in their nights. Those shows are carried by the cast and the characters they make. The Fantasy is a backdrop, and it can be a pretty shallow one.
Where it wasn’t founded on ensembles, popular vampire fiction mutated into exaggerations of old tropes. How many movies have riffed off the classic black and white Nosferatu and Dracula? Anne Rice exaggerated the sexual element to titillate readers. True Blood is now telling a white trash town drama story, plus things that bite and the people who hate them. The 30 Days of Night comics are just Salem’s Lot again, turned much bloodier (and in the film they might as well be werewolves). Marvel Comics dusted off Blade to make an action hero out of the Van Helsing model. Unsurprisingly, Van Helsing himself exploded as an archetype, and then an actual character, including a film bearing the name (and bearing no resemblance to Stoker’s good doctor).
The last vampire story to make me give a damn was the anime, Hellsing. It kills me as a writer and voracious reader that it was a cartoon I liked instead of a book. But the Japanese took the tropes of shapeshifting, night, the bite, the familiar, the dungeons and the legacy of Stoker, and built something visually cool and disturbing. Their Alucard had distinct style in the way he dressed, the way he moved, and the way he dealt with the modern vampire punks (inadvertently punishing many of the crappy stereotypes of modern vampire fiction). Along the way he got a busty, blonde sidekick who somehow managed to go the whole series without getting bent over HBO style.
Yesterday I got my haircut by a young woman who was reading Stephanie Meyer’s Eclipse. I asked her to tell me about the series – just to listen to somebody who genuinely enjoyed reading. Meyer is not for me. Sentence-by-sentence she simply can’t hold me, sparkly vampires are too silly, and at 27, I may be too old for Romeo and Juliet with fangs. Even my friends who enjoy younger-targeted fiction feel they’re too old for this. ‘Vampire sparkles’ are a joke amongst us. But I was happy for the haircutter, because she was excited to read something, and that will always be a gift, no matter how trashy the writer (and there are worse than Meyer). The funny thing, and sad thing, is that in ten minutes she didn’t describe any character, plot or variation on vampires. For ten minutes she only had variations of “It’s good,” and that she hoped there would be a fifth book. Speaking the allure of vampires, she was equally enthused to read The Host, which she described as being about robots who take over the world.
That’s where I am as a lover of the creepy and the fantastic. If, in our world of remakes, somebody could do something cool with the vampire without insulting its legacy, I’d be game. Since Salem’s Lot it seems like my favorite vampire stories have all been riffs – Shadow of the Vampire being a movie about making a vampire movie, and Christopher Moore and other authors straight-up mocking the lore in print. Those were fun, but they walked no new paths. There is no prose equivalent of Hellsing. Even I’ve written a couple of short stories in attempts at novelty in the neck-biters. I’d like to like them again. I’d love for an author to give me a good reason.
When I’m going for creepy vampires I would have to say that my favorite’s would be from Steven King’s, Salem Falls. I like the idea that all of the vampires who have been changed are gritty and savage. I’m not a big fan of the suave vampire. I think it’s kind of boring.
However, when we’re talking vampires in media entertainment then Buffy is the queen. It doesn’t even matter that the vampires are inconsistent and with all of their power they can’t even manage to kill the human members of the Scooby gang.
For me, Buffy is a television version of comfort food.
Err.. Salem’s Lot. Grrrr.
Oh, ditto Salem’s Lot, absolutely! That book scared me so badly.
Random thought here on the origins of vampire sex appeal:
So vampires only come out at night, right? And back in the day, everyone was pretty much at home and in bed in the evening, so it would make sense that vampires had to be really sexy because otherwise, why would you invite them into your house, unless you were hopped up on lust? You wouldn’t let some random zombie looking undead into your house after hours, but a sexy vampire? Maybe…
So fast forward to modern times – people are up and out of the house at all hours of the night now – concerts, working the night shift, partying, whatever – so theoretically there are enough people outside during the vampire’s normal feeding hours that he or she would not have to wait to be invited in to a house. The vampire could just pick their prey off outside of a late night ball game or a show or something.
So does that mean that vampires don’t have to be sexy and alluring anymore, because they don’t necessarily need to get invited in to people’s houses in order to feed and therefore survive?
Thanks for posting that Buffy/Edward video-it was way better than the Twilight movie!
My thing with vampires, with any type of creature, is that it must have limitations and weaknesses. The all powerful are not interesting; what is interesting is seeing how people/creature work around and with their limitations. That is why I don’t like many of the modern vampires, not the trashy romance aspect.
I think that the vampire genre had been done to death, no pun intended but then again that is what people like to read. Creating the modern vampire was thinking outside of the box and going with the change of times. But one of the most popular stories (I won’t name the series, see if you can figure out), has an actual Weathering Heights sort of feel to it in where Catherine and Heathcliff love each other beyond all reason but they really should not be together. Their longing for each other is unhealthy and obsessive.