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THE ENDURING LURE OF THE VAMPIRE:
SADOMASOCHISTIC SUBTEXTS IN BOSTMODERN AMERICA

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THE ENDURING LURE OF THE VAMPIRE:
SADOMASOCHISTIC SUBTEXTS IN POSTMODERN AMERICA

By

Amanda 2. McGuire

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT

THE ENDURING LURE OF THE VAMPIRE:
SADOMASOCHISTIC SUBTEXTS IN POSTMODERN AMERICA

By

Amanda Z. McGuire

The vampire legend exists in nearly all cultures around the world, and has permeated
contemporary American culture at all levels—appearing in fiction, nonfiction, music,
film, television, advertising and lifestyle—both in the mainstream, and the underground.
This thesis explores the evolution of the vampire mythos from its initial appearance in
English literature through its current incarnation in contemporary American culture, and
examines a variety of explanations as to why the vampire has appealed and continues to

appeal to audiences even in our most rational, scientific of ages.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
THE EVOLUTION OF THE VAMPIRE MYTHOS ......................................................... 7
Early Vampire Narratives ............................................................................................... 9
Into the Postmodern World ........................................................................................... 16
Turn of the Twenty-First Century ................................................................................. 38
REASONS FOR ENDURANCE ...................................................................................... 58
The Vampire Archetype ................................................................................................ 62
Postmodern America ..................................................................................................... 67
The Quest for Identity ................................................................................................... 77
Forbidden Desires ......................................................................................................... 86
Transcending Reality .................................................................................................... 99
Conclusions ................................................................................................................. 1 09
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 110

iii

INTRODUCTION

The vampire has always existed. All world cultures have some form of blood-
sucking demon which plagues the living, from ancient Asia to Africa to Europe to the
Americas. Clive Leatherdale notes that “legends of the dead returning to drink human
blood have been found in nearly every culture where records have survived” (18). James
Ursini and Alain Silver also comment that “vampires and vampire-likephenomena are
prevalent in almost every recorded culture” (18). John L. Flynn agrees that
“superstitions, myths, and legends about the vampire can be found, with divergent
variations, in almost every culture in the world” (2).

The vampire has haunted us throughout the ages, and continues to haunt us in modern
times. Martin Riccardo notes how between 1970 and 1978, Madame Tussaud’s Wax
Museum in London conducted an informal survey on who its patrons hated most.
Coming in fifih behind four major real-life political figures (Adolf Hitler, Idi Arnin,
Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-Tung) was Dracula, demonstrating “the deep impression
which the vampire image can make on the human psyche, and the strong response it can
evoke” (Riccardo, Vampires Unearthed 3).

In contemporary America, the vampire has taken hold, becoming a permanent,
pervasive part of our culture. Riccardo notes that “the vampire image has become a part
of Americana; indeed, a part of Western Civilization” (Vampires Unearthed 3).
Vampires have been instilled in our psyches ever since we were children, from Count
Count teaching us our numbers on Sesame Street, to the stories our parents read to us at
bedtime, to the cereal we ate at breakfast time (Count Chocula). There are a large

number of vampire stories, television shows and films directed specifically at children,

including Mercer Mayer's Critters of the Night series, Mel Gilden’s Fifth Grade Monsters
series, cartoons such as Count Duckula (1988-93) and live action films such as the recent
The Little Vampire (2000). So it is no wonder that by the time we reach adulthood, we
understand the vampire so well.

Walter Kendrick comments on the pervasiveness of vampires in American culture:
They are everywhere: in books, films, and TV, in advertising, in toys and games
for all ages, in children’s breakfast food. No American child (even one lucky
enough to escape Count Chocula) can grow up without learning what a vampire
is—an undead creature, uncannily both living an_d dead, that rises from his coffin
in the after-midnight hours to drain our blood and to make us his own. (xvi-xvii).

Vampires have appeared on television in everything from the wildly popular Dark
Shadows which featured the vampire Barnabas Collins as a major character (1966-71,
revived for one season in 1991), to select vampire episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-
65), Night Gallery (1970-73), Kolchajk; The Night Stalker (1974-75), Tales from the
Darkside (1984-88), Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-90), Monsters (1988-90) and fig;
X-Files (1993-2002), to dedicated vampire series such as Dracula: The Series (1990-91),
Forever Knight (1992-96), Kindred: The Embraced (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(1997-) and Angel (1999-). Vampires have also recently appeared on the daytime drama,
Port Charles (1997-).

Vampires have been a constant element in popular film since Universal Studios first
introduced American audiences to Dracula in 1931. Flynn comments on the ubiquitous
nature of the vampire in films:

The novel Dracula, for example, has been adapted for the silver screen more times
than any other book and has inspired countless imitations, sequels, parodies, and
spoofs. The words vampire and Dracula have become synonymous with sexual
seduction, power, and domination, and are an integral part of our daily

vocabulary. The vampire film continues to be a lively and prominent form of
entertainment—fifteen or so were in production at the beginning of 1992. (1).

 

In addition to new releases, older vampire movies continue to be available to vampire
enthusiasts through both television (vampire films appear most frequently around
Halloween, but can also be seen throughout the year) and video rentals. Vampires have
also been a popular element in the adult film market, first appearing in the 19705 in films
suck as Dracula Sucks (1979), and more recently in take-offs on popular mainstream

vampire films, including Muffy, the Vampire Layer (1992) and Intercourse with the

 

V_am_p_ir§ (1995).

The vampire has been present in literature since the mid-eighteenth century,
beginning with poems such as Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s “Der Vampir” (1748),
Gottfried August Biirger’s “Lenore” (1773), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Bride
of Corinth” (1797) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1798), eventually
developing into the prose of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), James Malcolm
Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre (1845), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and

finally, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), all before the dawn of the twentieth century. In

 

contemporary America, the literary vampire seems to have found a permanent home.
Ursini and Silver comment that “today vampire literature is being produced at a rate
which is little short of astounding” (48).

Vampires have made their way into other elements of popular culture as well,
appearing in advertisements for hotels, jeans, sunglasses, laxatives, cheese, trash bags,
potato chips, milk, and vegetable juice cocktail. They appear in Broadway plays,
musicals and full-scale ballet productions. They are prominent players in comic books,
afier being banned from 1954 to 1971, and are featured in many video games. Vampires

seep into American lifestyle through role-playing games such as Vampire: The

Masquerade (White Wolf Game Studio, 1992), as well as through alternative music and
the Goth club scene. Beyond the recent proliferation of vampires in popular culture,
there has also been a plethora of academic work done on the vampire in literature,
history, psychology and anthropology.

The Internet has also become a source of new life for vampires. Thousands of Web
sites provide resources for new vampire fans to quickly get up to speed on the vampire
legend and its history in fact and fiction, including the full text of public domain vampire
literature such as Varney the Vampire and Carmilla. E-mail discussion lists and posting
boards provide opportunities for people to share their thoughts on vampires with other
like-minded individuals, to develop friendships and expand their interests. The peer-to-
peer technology introduced by Napster also allows people to easily exchange vampire-
related files, including everything from a favorite Bu_ffy clip to a commercial-free version
of last week’s episode of _A_ng§l to the full movie version of BM (2002, no longer
available in theaters; but not yet available on video).

Vampire fiction and film exceeds the boundaries of the horror genre into which critics
such as Noél Carroll classify it, extending into romance, comedy, western, musical,
ballet, animation, and mystery. Vampires have been featured not only as monsters, but
also as heroes, lovers, detectives, aliens, and scientific anomalies. Vampires not only
refuse to die, they refuse to be pigeonholed. Comedies are often seen as an indicator of
saturation—when we have seen too much of a good thing, it is time to mock it. And yet
we have seen vampire comedies come and go in the late seventies (Love at First Bite
(1979)), the eighties (Once Bitten (1985) and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989)),

and again in the mid-nineties (Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and A Vampire in

Brooklyn (1995)), and yet the vampire theme has not grown stale. New stories continue
to be brought to life in fiction, film, on stage, on television, in music, in comic books, and
in art.

Nina Auerbach notes that “in the United States especially, Dracula has been one
constant in the volatile twentieth century. . .by appearing immutable, he has survived this
most fickle of centuries” (112). And on into the next, it would appear, as Dracula 2000,
yet another variation on Stoker’s novel, appeared in theaters at the beginning of the new
century, followed by Shadow of the Vampire (2000), The Little Vampire (2000), IE
Forsaken (2001), BLade_II (2002) and Queen of the Damned (2002), as well as new
vampire fiction which continues to be published every year. A new Broadway musical is
also in the works for Fall 2002—a musical adaptation of Roman Polanski’s Dance of the
Vampires (1967). Despite frequent claims made after each wave of vampire fiction and
film that the vampire craze is “dead,” new vampire stories continue to emerge. The

vampire is here, its presence is growing, and it shows no signs of stopping.

In our scientific, rational world, why is there still such an interest in vampires? The
explanation may be grounded in the very world we live in. In our world where science
reigns, people continue to die from incurable diseases. In our affluent country, people are
starving and living on the streets. In our postmodern age, there are no certainties. There
is inexplicable violence destroying not just isolated individuals but thousands of lives in
one fell swoop. We, or the ones we love, could die at any moment. Our environmental
resources are quickly being tapped to feed our nation’s inexhaustible hunger for power.

We don’t know what our future will be, and there is no clear path for us in life, no clear

roles for us to play. Gender and sexual distinctions have all been blurred. So how do we
forge our identities?

The decline of belief in organized religion makes us question what we have been
taught—is there really something wonderful that awaits us after death (whether that be
heaven or reincarnation)? Or do our bodies simply stop, lefi to rot in the ground? What
do we have to look forward to? Despite our professed lack of belief in the supernatural,
even in contemporary American society there are things which we cannot explain, and so
always, at the back of our minds is the suspicion that something more must exist, whether
that something be gods, monsters, or both.

Now is a time for questioning the definition of what it means to be human. We may
now be willing to believe in the supernatural, not as something horrific, but as something
other-than-human, to be accepted and acknowledged for what we can learn from it.
Perhaps now we can see these monsters as more like us, and therefore not so impure, and
not so horrific after all. Of all the monsters that have become a part of our popular
culture, vampires are the most dangerous, because they can be mistaken for one of us.
The vampire walks among us, bearing a perfectly beautiful human form—exotic,
alluring, immortal and deadly. Perhaps we enjoy imagining that something different
could exist, and thrive within our society without anyone knowing about it. Perhaps we
like to imagine that we, too, could get away with acting out our forbidden desires without
punishment or even disrespect. Perhaps we simply want to live forever, love forever, or

at least not fear for our lives.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE VAMPIRE MYTHOS

Spawned in folklore, only in fiction and film does the vampire take its now-familiar
form. What was once a singularly unpleasant piece of folklore has mutated through
twentieth century fiction and film into something approaching a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
What began as a smelly, evil walking corpse returning from the grave to harass and have
sex with its family members evolved into the handsome, sophisticated seducer offering
its victims forbidden pleasure. The contemporary vampire is now portrayed in many
different ways—sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes desirable, sometimes
undesirable, but always a force to be reckoned with. From its earliest to its most recent
incarnations, the vampire has always played a sexual predator, whether the sexual
predation is merely a guise by which to lure its victims, or a means of satisfaction for the
vampire itself.

While sexuality has always been a component of the vampire myth—hinted at in the
earliest literary vampire works such as The Vampvre (1819), Varney the Vampire (1845),

and Cannilla (1872), made undeniable in Dracula (1897), and brought vividly to life in

 

Hammer Films’ rendition of the vampire in the 19508 and 6OS—today vampirism has
come to signify new forms of sexual freedom. A simple explanation for vampires’
connection with sexuality could be the fear of sexually-transmitted diseases such as
syphilis, and more recently, AIDS. But there is much more than fear inherent in the

vampire’s appeal. Terry Heller states that in Stoker’s Dracula, a recurring theme is “the

 

repression of infantile sexuality in favor of genital sexuality and reproduction” (79)—

facing the forbidden in order to reject it, not accept it. However, in more recent vampire

narratives, this forbidden sexuality is fully embraced by both vampires and humans alike,
in a celebration of sexual freedom where nothing is taboo.

The first vampire texts—The Vampyre, Varney the Vampire and M—were
focused around the vampire as a central character. But in Stoker’s novel, the focus turns
much more to the effects the vampire has on those around him, and the battle to defeat
him and restore normalcy. Vampire stories in the mid-twentieth century followed
Stoker’s lead, but as the sexuality of the vampire became more and more overt, interest in
the vampire himself grew, and the stories have become much more focused on who the
vampire is, and how he feels, how he experiences immortal life. Suddenly the vampire is
able to prevail, or even be treated as a hero (in fiction such as Fred Saberhagen’s _T_’h_e
Dracula Tap_e (1975), Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976-), Chelsea Quinn Yarbo’s
Saint-Germain series (l978-), Suzy McKee Chamas’ The Vampire Tapestry (1980), and
Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992); television shows such as Forever Knight (1992-96)
and flggl (1999-); and films such as Innocent Blood (1992), Interview with the Vampire
(1994), The Addiction (1995) and Queen of the Damned (2002)). More recently, we
have seen a return to Stoker’s conception, as vampire hunters emerge as newfound heroes
of the nineties in Bqu the Vampire Slayer (film, 1992; television series, 1997-), Jo_hr_1
Carpenter’s Vampires (1998), M90998, W 2002), and The Forsaken (2001).
While in Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing is presented as a man who can battle Dracula with
his wits and scholarly know-how, in more recent vampire narratives we have vampire

hunters who combat the vampire with sheer physical strength, or elaborate weaponry.

Early Vampire Narratives

David Ska] notes that “prior to the Romantic revolution of the early 18005, the
p0pular image of the vampire was that of walking, predatory carrion” (13). Polidori’s
1819 novella The Vampyre changed that image forever. The Vampxre introduces the
concept of the vampire as seducer, defiler, and abandoner. Lord Ruthven is a gentleman
on the surface, but a libertine and vampire underneath. The women’s attraction to
Ruthven is easily understood, since he is a suave gentleman accepted into the upper
echelons of society. Polidori’s story inspired numerous stage adaptations which helped
to instill this conception of the vampire into the popular culture.

Polidori introduced the literary vampire to the upper classes, theatrical adaptations
introduced them to a wider audience, but it took Rymer’s serial (V_arney the Vampire,
1845) to introduce the vampire to the masses. Rymer’s vampire is no gentleman. He
takes his victims by force, with imagery clearly mimicking a_rape scene:

Her beautiful rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The glassy
horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous satisfaction—
horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed's edge. He forces it back by
the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his
fang-like teeth—a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. (30).
Vamey’s female victims are repulsed by his fearsome nature, and yet simultaneously
attracted, so that his attacks become sexual initiations at the same time. Vamey is the
first vampire who can transform his victims into his own kind, a premise that becomes
central to most vampire stories later on, and is central to their popularity as well—so that

fans may dream of becoming more than they are through an encounter with one of these

unearthly creatures.

In Carmilla, the female vampire is still a sexual predator, but her victims are other
women. Carmilla befriends her victims before she vampirizes them. Loving the victim is
an essential component for her, but in loving them, she must consume them entirely,
reveling in “the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love” (Le F anu 89). Carmilla claims
Laura as her own saying “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for
ever” (90).

Laura is immediately conflicted about how she feels towards Carmilla, feeling
“drawn towards her,” but also repulsed, though “the sense of attraction immensely
prevailed” (87). Later, Laura describes the conflicting sensations she experiences when
Carmilla holds and kisses her:

I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and
anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts
about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into
adoration, and also of abhorrence. I know this is a paradox, but I can make no
other attempt to explain the feeling. (90).
Laura exhibits the combination of fear and desire which is a critical component of the
vampire myth. There is something irresistibly attractive about the vampire, but also
something deeply disturbing.

Although Laura never openly accepts Carrnilla’s amorous advances during the day,
William Patrick Day notes that at night she welcomes the “unconventional love and
sexuality offered to her by Carmilla” (Day 87). Day proposes that “Laura represses her
memory of these moments. . .not because what occurs is horrible, though it is, but because
she wants it to continue” (87). Despite the fear and disgust inextricably linked with her

attraction to Carmilla, and the dreadful nature of Carrnilla’s nighttime visits, Laura

cannot turn away her vampire lover.

10

Stoker’s QM (1897) brings the implied sexuality of earlier vampire literature to
the forefront, setting the stage for all vampire stories that were to follow. Gail Griffin
comments that in _D_rac_ulp, “for the first time vampirism is linked with stifled, obsessive
sexuality, all the more urgent because forbidden” (Griffin 139). Clive Leatherdale notes
how “a comprehensive search of the novel unearths the following: seduction, rape,
necrophilia, paedophilia, incest, adultery, oral sex, group sex, menstruation, venereal
disease, voyeurism—enough to titillate the most avid sexual appetite” (145-46). Maurice
Richardson summarizes M as “a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic
all-in wrestling match” set in “a sort of homicidal lunatic’s brothel in a crypt” (427). .

Christopher Bentley notes that “Stoker’s vampires are permitted to assert their
sexuality in a much more explicit manner than his ‘living’ characters” (26). Dracula
himself is overtly sexual, and the women become sexual predators as soon as they
become vampires. But the human characters also become willing victims (whether
consciously or unconsciously) to the vampires, irresistibly attracted to their forbidden
sexuality. Jonathan Harker undergoes “an agony of delightful anticipation” (41) as
Dracula’s vampire brides descend upon him. Although Lucy is in love with, and engaged
to Arthur, she still is drawn repeatedly to Dracula—fighting her way outside to get to
him. And Mina cannot resist the allure of Dracula even when her husband is asleep in
bed next to her.

Jonathan describes the emotions and sensations he experiences as one of the female

vampires approaches him:

11

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the
lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There
was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as
she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal.... Lower and
lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and
seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the
churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot
breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does
when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer—nearer. I could feel the soft,
shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard
dent of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a
languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with a beating heart. (Stoker 41-42).

He is afraid that she may penetrate him with her teeth, yet longs to feel her bite. The
female vampire takes the role of aggressor, penetrating her prey, while Harker plays the
submissive victim. This encounter is described in sexually explicit terms tinged with
masochistic desire. Jonathan’s first observation of the vampire women demonstrates the
ambivalence he feels towards them—intense fear and intense desire, simultaneously:
“There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same
time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss
me with those red lips” (Stoker 41). He experiences both “deadly fear” and “burning
desire,” conflicting emotions which are “crucial to vampire sexuality” (Leatherdale 147).
The vampire’s power and sensuality appeals to us, but there is something deeply wrong
with them, a stench of death.

Heller discusses what Jonathan could find so appealing about these vampire women:
What do the ladies offer in exchange for Harker’s self? Not mere sexual pleasure,
but forbidden sexual pleasure. While Harker’s society prescribes monogarny,
they offer promiscuity—or at least polygamy. While Harker’s society prescribes
heterosexual relation with clearly differentiated gender roles, they offer the
elimination of gender roles. While his society prescribes genital sexual contact,
they offer at the least oral and possibly polymorphous sexual contact. The sexual
alternatives the ladies promise, when taken together, suggest infantile sexuality:

undifferentiated sexual pleasure orally centered, sometimes called polymorphous
perversion. (78).

12

What appeals to Harker can be seen as the same thing that appeals to modern
audiences—the vampire offers a life without boundaries, with limitations. Even the well-
respected, well-behaved Mina cannot resist the vampire’s kiss, confessing in her journal:
“I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (Stoker 308).
Mala brought the vampire to the forefront of our consciousness, bringing with it
our unconscious fears and desires. Over 100 years later, it is still relevant. The novel
itself remains in print, its story continues to be remade and readapted and expanded, and
audiences flock to see it in its latest form (in films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

and Dracula 2000; fiction such as Yarbo’s Sisters of the Night trilogy (1998-),

 

Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000) and Elrod’s Quincey Morris, Vampire (2001); and
television such as Dracula: The Series (1990-91) and an episode of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (“Buffy vs. Dracula,” 2000)).

Stoker set the precedent for the female vampires that were to follow—wanton, lustful
creatures who want to suck other parts of men’s bodies just as much as their blood.
Stoker also set the precedent for the dynamics of power now inherent in the vampire
myth—of power through dominance (as seen in Dracula) as well as power through
submission (as we see in Mina’s ability to turn Dracula’s psychic link with her against
him). However, the male vampire as envisioned in Stoker’s Dracula has not stood the
test of time. The foul-breathed, hairy-palmed, beak-nosed nobleman who pursued Lucy
and Mina only to gain power over their men would become a handsome, gentle seducer,

offering eternal love to his chosen bride.

13

David J. Hogan notes that F .W. Mumau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922),
the first film adaptation of Stoker’s novel, depicts the vampire as “totally devoid of
sexual appeal” (138). Whereas Stoker’s Dracula was on the surface a well-dressed, if not
handsome, nobleman, Count Orlok is much more animalistic. He has pointed ears, long
claw-like nails, protruding, rat-like teeth, bushy eyebrows and a bald head. Like his
outward appearance, his inward nature is also animalistic—he acts on primal desires for
carnal gratification. While most twentieth-century vampires attack only victims of the
opposite sex, Count Orlok does not discriminate. He looks at Hutter with eager
anticipation, and when Hutter cuts his thumb, he pounces upon him to suck the blood
from his wound. Hutter awakes the next morning unsure of what has occurred, but
closely examines an apparent bite on his neck. The next night, Orlok makes a more overt
attack upon Hutter, entering his bedroom uninvited, descending upon Hutter as he cowers
in his bed. Hutter’s wife somehow senses this, awaking in a flight, calling out her
husband’s name.

When Ellen finally meets Count Orlok, she is fully aware of who and what he is,
having read about vampires in the book she found among her husband’s things: “Nobody
can save you unless a sinless maiden makes the vampire forget the first crow of the
cock—If she was to give him her blood willingly.” She makes her choice. She feels the
vampire coming to her, and throws open her bedroom window to invite him in, sending
her husband out of the room. Orlok enters and bends over her, but it is not a romantic
embrace. F ixated on his victim, he does not notice as the sun begins to rise. The vampire
is destroyed when the first rays of the sun stream in through the window. Hutter returns

in time to embrace his wife one last time before she dies as well.

14

The 1931 film version of Qraau_la, while not the first vampire film, was the first
vampire film to appeal to a mainstream audience. Browning’s adaptation (starring Bela
Lugosi) presented the vampire as a “suave fiend” (Hogan 138), reaching back to the
image of the vampire introduced by Polidori, and implanting a new conception of the
vampire in the popular mind. Auerbach notes that while the Count in Stoker’s novel was
“not essentially lovable, nor. . .especially erotic,” Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula “allows
the twentieth century to steep him in desire” (1 15). J. Gordon Melton notes that
Browning’s Dlacpla “established the image of the male vampire which is still
predominant today—the mysterious, European gentleman, with a dark hidden agenda”
(Vampires on Video 64).

The “horror” in this film is “kept to a minimum,” which, when compared to later, and
especially the most recent vampire films, makes this material seem “very tame” (Flynn
37-38). Lugosi’s vampire has no fangs, there is no blood and gore, there is no color, and
there is little passion. And still, Dracula is shown to have an “irresistible sexuality”
which is contrasted against the “repressed sexual urges of Victorian morality” (Flynn 39).
Surprisingly, Universal Studios never expected the Count to be sexually attractive, only
fearsome, and only realized the appeal of the vampire “ after the film was released, and
letters poured in from female fans” (Melton, Vampires on Video 64). The sexual appeal

of the vampire would not soon be forgotten.

15

Into the Postmodern World

In the 1960s, “hazy memories of Stoker’s novel collaborated with the insistent
repetitions of Hammer movies to turn Dracula, originally a highly particularized, even
innovative creature, into a weighty archetype, The Vampire” (Auerbach 130). The
stereotypical male vampire can be seen as a “Byronic figure, seductive, erotic, possessing
a hypnotic power which makes its questionable charms seem irresistible to its victims”
(Ursini and Silver 54) who, as Gregory A. Waller notes, “seems perpetually about to
caress and violate the beautiful, reclining body of a mesmerized, and in some fashion
willing, virginal young woman” (21). Hammer Films further established the image of the
male vampire as sadistic seducer and the female vampire as sexual predator that would be
forever engrained in American culture. Later vampire narratives would begin to
challenge or play with these conventions, but they could never be erased.

The emergence of Hammer Films’ series of vampire movies (beginning in 1958 with
The Horror of Dracula) had a major impact on the way the vampires were viewed and
understood by audiences. The sexuality that was merely hinted at in earlier films became
overt—women swooned in ecstasy, openly enjoying the animalistic bite of the vampire.
Hammer Films produced 16 vampire films between 1958 and 1974, films which
“enriched and elevated the vampire movie above (and beyond) its B-film level” (Flynn
83). Color is a new element in the Hammer films—night becomes deep blue, and blood
becomes bright red. But color isn’t the only innovation. Hammer did away with comic
relief, and focused in on the grisly details. Hammer’s vampire has fangs, and we see him

bite into his victims. We see the blood, we see the rage in the vampire’s eyes, the ecstasy

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in the eyes and form of his victims. Hammer openly explored the relationship between
vampirism and sexuality, between sadism and masochism.

Ursini and Silver note that in the Hammer Dracula films, “the psycho-sexual aspects

 

of the vampire myth were explored to an unprecedented depth” (123):
“Desire” and “obsession” became the key words as Thanatos and Eros were
intermingled in victim and oppressor. .. The Lucy of the Hammer grappla awaits
her deadly leman in bed, breathless and eager. Even the quintessentially
Victorian Mina has her repressions dissolved as Dracula bestows kisses and
caresses on her before indulging his vampiric thirst. (124).
Horror of Dracm was the first film to dare to show a victim eagerly awaiting the
vampire’s visit, and making it easier for him to gain entrance. Once Lucy is sure she is
alone, she opens her window, removes her crucifix, and lies down on her bed, fondling
the vampire bites on her neck in eager anticipation for a return visit. Hammer’s Dracpfi
films firmly established the fantasy of the submissive female victim wanting to be taken,
and appearing to be experiencing orgasmic pleasure as the vampire drained her blood.
Lane Roth states that “vampirism and evil, in the context of Horror of Dracug, are
metaphors for subversive sex” (250). Dracula’s “female victims are enraptured, not
repelled, by his salacious savagery” (Lane. Roth 251), getting something from him that
their prim and proper men could never offer—and this is the true allure for the vampire—
forbidden pleasure. This pleasure is apparent not just for the victims, but also for the
vampire: “when he bites a young lovely’s throat he is not merely feeding, but
experiencing (and inducing) a moment of orgasmic ecstasy. We can almost feel the
vampire’s lips brushing tentatively upon our throats” (Hogan 145-46).

Flynn notes how “when Dracula approaches his victims, they actually enjoy, rather

than resist, his neck biting,” recognizing “the vampire’s movements” as “foreplay, and

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what woman can resist such attention?” (Flynn 86). But in addition to Dracula’s powers
of seduction and sensuality, there is also “an air of tragic melancholy” about him (Flynn
86). Dracula is portrayed as an inherently lonely figure, looking for love and
companionship. He becomes a figure of evil when his beloved has been destroyed, at
which point he seeks vengeance on not just the perpetrator, but on that man’s loved ones
as well. As Hogan notes, “for the first time, Dracula was portrayed as an enraged lover”
(Hogan 147).

In the years following the release of Horror of Dracula, more vampire films began to
feature explicit sex and violence. Flynn comments that “the vampire, though still cloaked
in ritual and superstition, took on an air of sadism and erotic sensationalism. Violent
practices and sexual relationships of every kind in the human (and not so human)
experience were explored” (Flynn 128). In Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968),
not only do victims long for the vampire after he has first bitten them, but actually
“_s_ali_pit_ his bite” (Hogan 149). Hogan notes that “there is a fine moment of twisted
eroticism when blonde heroine Veronica Carlson lies with radiant expectation upon her
bed as the vampire approaches, lithely twisting her body to aid his angle of approach”
(Hogan 149). James F. Iaccino comments that “Dracula himself also seems to engage in
some loving foreplay each time he comes to her bedchamber” (65). Ursini and Silver
also observe that “the responses of the young women in Taste the Blood of Dracula
unmistakably suggest orgasm” (82).

Hammer’s vampire films not only establish the image of the male vampire as sadistic
seducer, but also confirm that of the female vampire as a sexual predator. Films such as

The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1970), Twins of Evil (1971) and

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Countess Dracula (1972) juxtapose images of nudity with bloodletting, and subversive
sex with vampirism, setting up the expectation that female vampires are all about sex——
they will suck their lovers dry, in more ways than one.

In The Vampire Lovers, “Carmilla is an irresistible sexual juggernaut whose comely
victims succumb to their own suppressed desires; they become vampires willingly, loving
it” (Hogan 155). Lust for a Vampire. the sequel to The Vampire Lovers, “probably
represents the apex of the English-speaking sex-vampire” (156), according to Hogan. In
this film:

Girls whisper, giggle, and play coy sexual games with each other while Mircalla
moves through them like International Harvester. A male teacher is vampirized,
and a lovely student (Pippa Steel) is bitten on the throat and breasts. When
Mircalla pauses in her fiendish work, blood streams from her fangs and across her
bare breasts. The image must surely be one of the most startling in cinema
history. (157).

Unlike Carmilla in the original film, Mircalla vampirizes both male and female victims

alike. Twins of Evil was the third film in the series, with vampire twins attacking both

 

men and women in a small town. Countess Dracula turned to a different story for its
inspiration, the historical tale of Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in Virgin’s blood in an
attempt to keep herself young. In the film, the Countess takes both young men and
women as her lovers, “hoping to tap their youth and innocence” (Flynn 103).

Many later vampire narratives would return to this conception of the female vampire
as a voracious sexual predator—beautiful, seductive, and deadly—as well as to that of the
male vampire as the ultimate seducer. Now that the varnpire’s kiss had become openly
erotic, and vampirism and sex inextricably linked, it is not surprising that at this same

time “vampires became the focus of sofi- and hard-core pornographic films” which

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“utilized vampirism simply as a gimmick to link coupling (and tripling) scenes together”

(Flynn 163) and to introduce sadomasochism as part of sexual play.

The daytime drama Dark Shadows (1966-71) was the first successful attempt to
introduce a new vampire with his own unique personality, style and history. Barnabas
Collins awakes in a new century still pining for his lost love (who took her own life when
she learned he had become a vampire, refusing to join him in that existence). He
becomes convinced that Maggie Evans is a reincarnation of his beloved Josette, and
attempts to convert her into his vampire bride. This theme of the vampire as an immortal
lover seeking his lost love in the face of another woman would be repeated again and
again throughout vampire narratives in the years to come.

Iaccino comments that Barnabas Collins “was more man than monster because he
suffered from that most human of emotions, unrequited love” (66). Barnabas is not the
only one who suffers from unrequited love in this story. Dr. Julia Hoffman discovers in
the bloodstream of Bamabas’s victims a common “destructive cell” which she is able to
eliminate. She takes Barnabas as a patient to attempt to cure him, and falls in love with
him in the process. But he only has eyes for the reincarnated vision of his beloved.
When Julia lashes out at him out of jealousy, he attacks and kills her in return, destroying
his only hope for a return to humanity, and “signifying that the vampire is forever
doomed” (Iaccino 67). Although Barnabas was actively seeking escape from his undead
existence, he could not escape his murderous nature. This is another theme that would

continue to be explored in later vampire narratives.

20

Vampire narratives of the 19705 took the conventions that had been established by
Stoker, Hammer Films and Dark Shadows and began to weave them into the mythos that
we have today. The vampire as sadistic seducer introduced by Hammer merged with the
immortal lover introduced in Dark Shadows, and created the soulful, passionate, powerful
vampire we see in the 1973 and 1979 film adaptations of M as well as in the more
humanized vampires that emerged in the fiction of Saberhagen, Rice and Yarbo.
Previously, the vampire was often a catalyst for sexual awakening and fulfillment, but not
for love. Romantic portrayals of the vampire focus both on the emptiness that only
perfect love can fill, and the fantasy that this perfect love can last forever.

Dan Curtis’s M (1973) was the first film to tie the concept of reincarnated love
to the Dracula story. This film paints a picture of the vampire not just as a seducer, but as
an ever-faithful immortal lover whose love will never die. When Van Helsing kills the
vampirized Lucy, Dracula embraces her mutilated corpse and cries. Auerbach explains
the emergence of weeping vampires as the “sensitized new men wishful feminists of the
19705 constructed” (136), becoming a different form of wish-fulfillment fantasy, not of
forbidden sex, but of eternal love. Where Christopher Lee’s Dracula unleashed his
victims’ sexuality, Jack Palance offers them devotion. The vampire becomes sexual,
sensual, and completely, utterly loyal—what more could a woman want?

Frank Langella’s Dracula, in the 1979 film adaptation directed by John Badham, took
the role of the weeping vampire a step further. Langella’s Dracula is a firlly sensual,
sexual, man, looking for a woman to share his immortal life. Flynn comments that
Langella’s Dracula “ resembles a latter-day Valentino and brings a romantic elegance to

the role” causing women “to swoon rather than cringe in terror” (205). Iaccino notes that

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Langella’s Dracula “sends women like Mina Van Helsing into repeated swoons and
projects such a strong lust for life that other females are instantly drawn to him,
abandoning their fiance's for the excitement and thrills he alone can provide” (69).

The women in this film, no longer portrayed as victims, become empowered by the
sensuality and lust for life which Dracula instills in them, and “embrace vampirism with
rapture as the sole available escape from patriarchy” (Auerbach 140). Lucy is po_t_ a
reincarnation of a lost love, but a thoroughly modern woman who the Count falls in love
with of her own merits. She is confident and self-assertive, frankly expressing her desire
for the vampire, and her desire to join him in his immortal life. Her transformation scene
is full of erotic tenderness, which Iaccino also describes as “perhaps the most sensual
vampire scene of all time” (70), culminating in an unbreakable bond between the two,
sealed in blood. This portrayal of vampirism as an escape from the trials and tribulations
of everyday life carries through much of the fiction and film in the eighties and nineties,
and has become part of the popular mythos and appeal of the vampire.

In Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975), Dracula gets the opportunity to speak in
his own voice, an opportunity denied him in Stoker’s many-voiced novel. Dracula
reveals himself to be both intelligent and humane, tormented by idiots, and deeply in love
with Mina. Rice’s Interview with the Vampireemerged in 1976, presenting a first-person
portrayal of a very different kind of vampire. Rice’s vampires, while sensual and erotic,
are not capable of genital sex. However, they still have great love affairs, as seen
between Louis and Lestat, Louis and Claudia, and Louis and Armand. Erotic love in
Interview is always tainted with a hint of impropriety—whether homosexual, incestuous,

or pedophilic. But these vampires exist beyond the rules of society. Louis tells the story

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of his life as a vampire, describing the torment he has suffered, the moral anguish he has
experienced, and the sinister underworld of vampires that exists. Unlike the vampires
presented by Stoker and Hammer, Louis has never lost his human soul, and does not
accept the necessity of taking human life in order to feed his own.

The eponymous hero of Yarbo’s Saint-Germain series (first appearing in 1978) is
another vampire who does not take human life in order to sustain himself. He takes only
as much blood as is needed for him to survive, and often takes it from a willing lover or
from a stranger who knows only pleasant dreams as a result. This vampire longs for
intimacy, but not for phallic sexuality. Like Rice’s vampires, traditional sexuality no
longer plays a role in the life of Saint-Germain, but he is still highly erotic. As Auerbach
comments, “Yarbo’s many sex scenes make vampirism a celebration, not only of
nonviolence, but of a sexuality richer and more variable than penetration” (149). This
intimacy sustains him just as much as actual blood drinking does, and seems to echo
Carmilla’s intense emotional bond to her victims. Yarbo provides a deeply feminist
perspective on sexuality, looking for the lover who can look beyond his penis to find
other ways to more intimately pleasure a woman. In addition to sexual gratification,
Saint-Germain also offers women freedom from oppressive situations when he can, and
as in Badham’s Qrac_ul_a, that freedom is usually found through becoming a vampire.

These works set the stage for the vampire narratives that were to come, questioning
which is the greater evil, the vampire or the humans? By the end of the 19705, the
vampire was thoroughly embedded in popular American culture, not just as a B-movie
icon, but as an element of credible literature and film, a relevant metaphor for our ever-

changing times. Carroll proposes that the reason horror fantasy in general became so

23

mainstream in the 19705 was that movie-goers at that time were the “first post-war
generation raised by TV” and that “their affection for horror, to a large extent, was
nurtured and deepened by the endless reruns of the earlier horror and sci-fi cycles that
provided the repertoire of the afternoon and late-night television of their youth” (3).
However, it wasn’t just movies on TV that developed viewers’ awareness and

understanding of vampires. Supernatural series such as The Twilight Zone (1959-65),

 

Night Gallery (1970-73), and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974—75) featured vampires
among other monsters and things that go bump in the night, bringing the vampire into
contemporary contexts, blending in with more commonplace fears.

In the 19705, the vampire also began to evolve into forms that were quite different
from the predominant conception. In ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Stephen King brought the
vampire myth back to its roots in folklore, showing vampires as mindless walking
corpses, and vampirism not as a select club, but as a virus that spreads like wildfire.
Even the appearance of the head vampire in the 1979 television miniseries (unlike the
book) looked back to an earlier representation of the vampire—that of Count Orlok in
Nosferatu (1922).

Nosferatu made another reappearance in the late seventies in Werner Herzog’s
remake, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). In this film, the tragic loneliness of the
vampire is much more apparent, as is the determined sacrifice of Lucy to save her
husband and her town. As in the previous version, the Count is an omnivorous sexual
predator, first slaking his thirst on Jonathan, but soon turning his interest to Lucy. Count
Dracula demands that Lucy give him some of the love she gives to Jonathan, because

“the absence of love is the most abject pain.” Lucy at first I'CfUSCS, even though Dracula

24

tells her that if she submits, she will have her husband back. But after watching the
townspeople around her die of the vampire’s plague, and realizing that even Dr. Van
Helsing will not help her, Lucy determines to lure the vampire to her, and keep him with
her until the cock crows. As opposed to the earlier version, this scene is not as simple as
the vampire biting her and it is morning. Instead, the scene is much more drawn out. We
see Dracula pull up Lucy’s nightgown, and grab her breast in an awkward attempt at
sexuality before he finally drinks from her. He tries to pull away after drinking his fill,
but she pulls him back to her, sealing her own fate and his. Finally, the sun rises, and he
collapses to the ground, not fading into nothingness as in the earlier version, but
remaining as a very real, very tragic figure of loneliness and despair.

Another tragic vampire who seems to have no supernatural power of seduction, but
has the power to destroy is George Romero’s Mini (1977). Martin longs for the fantasy
of women waiting for him in ecstasy to take their blood, but they will not allow this while
conscious, so he must drug them before he undresses them, and since he has no fangs, he
must gain access to their blood with a very unglamorous razor blade. Martin will drink
from male victims, but only out of desperation—one man is taken in the woods, stabbed
in the throat with a sharp stick; another is taken in an alley, slit down the arm with a piece
of broken glass. But neither type of scene, no matter how Martin intends it, can be seen
as romantic. Martin brings the vampire into the mundane, unsupematural modern world.

It is never made clear in the film whether or not Martin is psychotic, or if he really is
a vampire. He thinks he is, as does his cousin Cuda, and both he and Cuda refer to
Martin being 84 years old, though he looks no more than 20. Whether or not Martin is a

vampire, the film makes it clear that “there is no magic” in the world. Cuda welcomes

25

Martin into his home by saying “Nosferatu. Vampire. First I will save your soul. Then I
will destroy you. I will show you your room.” For Cuda, vampirism is a family curse
(there have been “nine such accursed in the family”) and it is now his turn to bear the
family shame by housing Martin. Cuda is very concerned with keeping up appearances
and maintaining an impression of propriety. He makes Martin attend church with him,
gives him a job at his store, and instructs him to never take his victims from within their
town, though he is perfectly aware that Martin will have to take victims from somewhere.

Despite his acceptance of Martin into his home, Cuda never fully accepts Martin as a
family member, and never loses his fear or hatred of Martin for what he is. In response to
Cuda’s fear, Martin plays upon the stereotypes of what a vampire must be—walking
around in the mist with a black cape, white makeup, and cheap plastic fangs. Cuda tries
to defend himself by thrusting a crucifix in Martin’s face. Martin laughs at him, telling
him it’s just a costume. “I am your cousin, Martin” he tells Cuda “You see,” he says,
biting into one of the garlic bulbs and touching the cross that Cuda has set out to repel
him, “It isn’t magic. Even I know that. It isn’t magic.” Even an exorcism can’t change
what Martin is.

Martin discusses his nature and his actions at length with a radio DJ, commenting on
the misconception of vampires presented in the movies: “Vampires always have ladies.
Sometimes lots of ladies. Well, that’s wrong, too! If the magic part was real, and you
could make them do whatever you wanted to, well, that would be different. In real
life. . .in real life you can’t get people to do what you want them to do.” The film dispels
the myths of power and seduction, showing only a sad, frightened boy whose only

attempt at love leads ultimately to his death.

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When Martin’s willing lover—a sad, bored housewife—takes her life in the same
way that Martin had often staged the death of his victims (by slitting her wrists in the
bathtub), Cuda assumes Martin is responsible. Since he thinks Martin has violated his
one rule—never anyone in the town—he dispatches him in the manner of a vampire,
driving a stake into his heart. This ending provides no clear proof as to whether or not
Martin was a vampire, since a stake to the heart would kill either man or vampire.

Love at First Bite (1979) plays with the conventions of the vampire film in a different
way. The vampire still believes himself to have all the powers of seduction he has
always been ascribed, and yet when brought from Transylvania into modem-day New
York City, he discovers he is horribly unhip. He falls in love with a modern, feminist
woman who is not so ready to swoon the moment he walks into the room. Yet she still
succumbs to him. When he bites her, she bites back—interpreting his biting as a form of
kinky sex. This is one of the first vampire narratives to end in a romantic, happy ending,
as the vampire and his bride fly away together, transformed into bats.

In The Vampire Tapestm (1980), Charnas presents a vampire who is a non-human
species—not immortal, not supernatural, just a predator that is made to look like us.
Weyland is not looking for love, never falls in love, and cannot transform anyone else
into a vampire to be his companion. But this does not bother him. He is not lonely or
tragic. He is simply a hunter. Katje de Groot, an African huntress who recognizes
Weyland’s vampiric nature early on, observes how people are drawn to him, and
comments: “For overcivilized people to experience the approach of such a predator as
sexually attractive was not strange the great cats were all beautiful, and maybe beauty

helped them to capture their prey” (41 ). Weyland is continually compared to the great

27

cats—a tiger, a lion, a leopard, a lynx. The lithe, sultry predator, who looks so appealing,
but will tear your throat out if given the chance.

Weyland is weakened in three ways—first by gunshot, then by starvation, and finally
and mostly fatally, by psychotherapy. Weyland is shot and wounded by the huntress
when he attempts to drink her blood, and in his injured state is captured and sold to
Roger, a curious New Yorker who intends to showcase the vampire for profit. Roger
brings an ex-girlfriend over to be the vampire’s first human meal in his new home. The
experience for her is orgasmic:

She put out her hand as if to push the vampire’s head away, but instead she began
to stroke his hair. ...Until he finished, she sat enthralled, whispering, “Oh, wow,”
at dreamy intervals. When the vampire lifted his drowned, peaceful face, she said
earnestly to him, “I’m a Scorpio; what’s your sign?” (68).
Even the non-human predator produces a state of ecstasy in his victims, lulling them into
complacency as he feeds.

Roger’s nephew, Mark, witnesses the feeding, and afterwards becomes the reluctant
caretaker for the vampire. Weyland eventually uses the boy’s sympathy against him to
escape, drinking from the boy to save himself from starvation. He leaves the boy alive,
allowing Mark to reflect: “To have someone spring on you like a tiger and suck your
blood with savage and single-minded intensity—how could anybody imagine that was
sexy? He would never forget that moment’s blinding fear. If sex was like that, they
could keep it” (110). Mark, young enough not to have experienced adult sexuality, sees
the vampire’s attack as anything but attractive. But adult women, and some men,

continue to be attracted to Weyland, even when they are completely aware of his animal

nature. Not unlike more traditional vampires, there is something seductive about

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Weyland, whether he tries to exert that power or not. Even his therapist, polished
professional that she is, cannot resist.
Charnas’ vampire is the first to undergo therapy, and to have his animal nature
threatened by the human qualities his therapist helps him uncover. Although Weyland
comes to Dr. Landauer under the pretense that he is hoping to rid himself of his delusions
of being a vampire (in order to be reinstated at the college he fled after being shot), their
conversations grow more and more real, until his therapist realizes the validity of his
supposed delusions: “He was drowning her in more than she had ever expected or for that
matter wanted to know about vampirism” (137). As she begins to wonder whether what
he’s telling her is fantasy or reality, she also questions her own sanity and
professionalism: “What kind of therapist becomes an accomplice to the client’s fantasy?
A crazy therapist, that’s what kind” (139). And she quickly finds herself both attracted to
and terrified of the man/monster she cannot define. And she notes to herself—“How
come this attraction to someone so scary?” (139). Trying to understand her attraction to
Weyland, Dr. Landauer postulates:
In feeding (woman in taxi), utter absorption one wants from a man in sex—no
score-keeping, no fantasies, just hot urgency of appetite, of senses, the moment by
itself. ...All springs from, elaborates, the single, stark, primary condition: he is a
predator who subsists on human blood. Harmony, strength, clarity,
magnificence—all from that basic animal integrity. Of course I long for all that,
here in the higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of my life! Of course he draws me!
(161).

However, Weyland, unlike traditional vampires, is not interested in sex. As he explains

to Dr. Landauer, “My sex urge is of low frequency and is easily dealt with unaided—

although I occasionally engage in copulation out of the necessity to keep up appearances.

I am capable, but not—like humans—obsessed” (142). He uses sexuality simply to lure

29

his prey, whether male or female—to him it does not matter. He receives no satisfaction
other than satiating his hunger to feed.

Eventually, the vampire begins to fear for his animal integrity as the therapy threatens
to make him too human, make him feel too much compassion for his prey. He plans at
first to kill his therapist, faking a suicide, so that there will be no trace left of all he shared
with her. But she convinces him not only to let her live, but also to have sex with her.
The doctor’s fantasy is consummated as the vampire admits his desire for her, and
willingly comes to bed with her.

Another example of the vampire as non-human species emerges in The Hunger (novel
1981, film 1983). Miriam Blaylock is the last of her kind and, unlike Weyland, she longs
for companionship. Also unlike Weyland, Miriam can convert her lovers into creatures
almost like herself, creatures who can live and love for centuries, but not forever. The
gender of her lover does not matter—she begins with a male lover, and ends with a
female one, and we are shown the endlessly aging bodies of all the lovers who have come
before, both male and female. It is with her lover that she will roam the streets, killing
and basking in blood. She is a serial monogamist, always hoping for the love that will
truly last forever.

A more recent appearance of the altemate-species vampire is in Dance of the Damned
(1988). The male vampire is handsome, seductive, and preys on those who he feels seek
death. He chooses an exotic dancer at a strip club as his next victim, feeling her pain and
desperation as she dances. He tells her about his life as a vampire, and she tries to teach
him about the daylight world that he has never seen. At first, she seems willing to die,

saying goodbye to her son, and returning home with the vampire. But when the time

30

comes for the vampire to take her, she finds a renewed interest in life, and sacrifices him
to the sun in order to survive.

The eighties also saw a return to the traditional vampire—a supernatural sexual
predator who subsists on human blood, is susceptible to sunlight and holy symbols, casts
no reflection, and who can turn others into creatures like itself. The seductive gentleman
vampire resurfaces in Fright Night (1985), To Die For (1989), and Bram Stoker’s
lea (1992); the wantonly sexual female vampire returns in Once Bitten (1985),
@0986), Fright Night Part II (1989) and Bordello of Blood (1996).

In F right Night, the seductive vampire awakens the latent desire in the modern
woman—Amy was too much of a prude to have sex with the man she loves, but when
seduced by the vampire she becomes a sexual creature of the night. The hero is a
vampire-film aficionado, who recruits the host of his favorite television show to help him
expose and destroy the vampire that lives next door. A new concept introduced by this
film is the reversibility of vampirism—Amy becomes human again after Charley destroys
the vampire. A5 in many vampire films, the vampire sees in Amy a long-lost love, and in
the end, he appears as devastated in losing her again as he is in losing his own life.

Both To Die For and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were marketed as love stories—To Die

 

fio_r’s alternate title was Dracula: The Love Stopl, and the tagline for Bram Stoker’s
PM was “Love Never Dies.” Both paint a picture of the vampire as a monster, but a
monster with a heart, who can love the right woman passionately and devotedly for all
time. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the love between Dracula and Mina is portrayed as so
strong that it can overcome any obstacle put in its path by life or death. Dracula crosses

“oceans of time” to find the reincarnated soul of his beloved wife in Mina. He offers her

31

“life eternal, everlasting love.” Though she willingly accepts his offer to be his immortal
bride, this film does not allow vampirism to be a happy ending, and instead, Mina uses
her love for the vampire to free his soul, decapitating Dracula with her own hand. Bram
Ma’s Dracula is also one of the most graphically erotic portrayals of the Dracula story
to date, notably in Harker’s interaction with the three female vampires at Dracula’s
castle, Dracula’s attacks upon Lucy, and Mina’s drinking from Dracula’s chest. Io_I_)_i§
liq; also contains erotic love scenes between Vlad and the only woman he has ever loved
in his lengthy life. He doesn’t want to transform her into a mindless servant or even to
drink her blood—he simply wants to love her. But he can’t change who he is, and
ultimately sacrifices himself in order to save his beloved from becoming like him.

In Once Bitten, the seductive and beautiful Countess needs the blood of a virgin to
sustain her youthful appearance, and in modem-day Los Angeles, this is becoming
increasingly difficult to find. She resorts to singles bars, and brings home the geeky
Mark. After Mark has been bitten by the Countess, his skin grows paler, he begins to
dress in black, wear sunglasses, and slick his hair back—so that when he shows up at a
Halloween party, his “vampire” costume wins first place—even though he didn’t
consider himself to be in costume. As in Love at First Bite, the Countess must drink
from her victim three times before the transformation is complete. The Countess’s plans
are foiled when Mark and his girlfriend have sex moments before she takes the final bite.
The movie ends with a grandmotherly-looking Countess (having lost her youthful looks)
deploring the state of a world in which it is so difficult to find a virgin.

Other female vampires of the eighties and early nineties become nothing more than

flat representations of the femme fatale. Fright Night Part 11 presents the sister of the

 

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vampire from the first film as a beautiful, mysterious vampire who seduces Charley
despite his knowledge of vampires and previous experience in fending them off. Vamp
features Grace Jones as a queen vampire who is also the headlining dancer at a strip club;
she feeds off of the club’s enthralled male patrons. In Bordello of Blood, the vampire
queen Lilith is a powerful, evil seductress who runs a brothel where she and her vampire
cohorts entice then victimize their clients. Once the men have given in to their desires,

they must pay with their lives, or at least their blood and their humanity.

It was also in the eighties that Rice returned to her world of vampires, with T_h§
_V_ampire Lestat in 1985, followed by the Queen of the Damned in 1988, and many more
novels in a regular succession, which together are now known as The Vampire
Chronicles. Rice’s vampires evolve into being objects not just of sympathy, as Louis was
in Interview with the Vampire, but of admiration, and even envy. Skal comments on how
Rice presented her vampires “not as nightmares but as objects of glamorous
transcendence and desire” (198). Auerbach notes that Rice presents vampirism as “a
select club, a fraternity of beauty and death whose members are expected to be handsome
and refined enough not to imitate each other throughout eternity” (154). This image of
vampirism permeated American culture in the late twentieth century, contributing to
people’s desire to become a part of this select club, to find everlasting friendship,
everlasting acceptance, not just love and sex.

The idea of becoming a vampire as a way of finding an adoptive family was a
dominant theme in many vampire narratives emerging in the late twentieth century, from

Near Dark (1987) to The Lost Boys (1987) to Brite’s Lost Souls (1992), all of which

 

33

focus on vampires who are perpetual teenagers—emphasizing their carefree, rock and roll
lifestyle along with their sense of brotherhood and community. But becoming a vampire
is not as simple as joining a country club—more like a street gang, prospective members
must prove their valor and worth before being admitted. Accepted members find a place
to belong, but stepping outside of that protective group is seen as suicide, or reason to be
killed.

In Near Dark (1987), a young man meets a young woman, and they kiss. She bites
him on the neck ever so slightly before running away, and soon we discover that she is a
vampire, and that small bite has turned him into one as well. Rather than leave him
sizzling on the road as the rising sun begins to react with his newly vampiric self, Mae
and her band of vampire hooligans pick up Caleb and bring him along with them.
However, Caleb is not so easily transitioned into the vampire lifestyle, and the other
vampires are not so quick to welcome him. He must prove that he is worthy of joining
them, and murder is the price of membership. But Caleb is unable to take a human life,
and instead drinks from Mae’s wrists after she has fed in order to sustain himself. Mae
hides this from the other vampires, who would turn Caleb out if they knew the truth.
Eventually Caleb is able to break away from the vampires and return home, where his
father is able to reverse Caleb’s vampirism through a blood transfusion (the first time in
vampire literature where this is done successfully). Now that he has turned against them,
the vampires come to wreak revenge on Caleb and his family. But Caleb and Mae are
both able to escape, and now Caleb brings Mae into his world, using his own blood to
perform a transfusion on her. He rescues her from her life of transience and vampirism,

but also takes away her dreams of immortality.

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The Lost Boys (1987) shows its vampires to be no more than rebellious teens on the

 

surface—they wear leather, drive motorcycles, and are always looking for trouble—who
just happen to drink blood as part of their rebellion. The vampire lifestyle seems to be
counter-culture alternative, a way to be cool and on the edge. The night that Michael first
becomes tainted by vampire blood, he buys a leather jacket, and awakes the next morning
wearing an earring. Here, the male vampires seduce Michael more than the woman he is
falling for—he is drawn in by their power and wants to be part of the gang. Although it
is Star that leads him to the vampires, it is David’s blood that he drinks, and David’s
blood that turns him into a vampire.

The advertising campaign for The Lost Boys included the tagline: “Sleep all day.
Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.”—appealing to the
teenage party-hardy sensibility. In addition, the film featured a loud rock—and-roll
soundtrack, featuring popular “alternative” bands such as INXS‘and Echo and the Bunny
Men. The cast also included the familiar faces of Jamie Gertz, Jason Patric, Corey Haim,
Corey Feldman, Alex Winter and Kiefer Sutherland, all of whom had already starred in
other popular teen films. The Lost BQIS made it cool to be a vampire, but still, in the
end, the evil vampires were destroyed.

Interestingly, the king vampire presented in The Lost Boys is far from being a lady-
killer; instead, on the surface, he seems meek and nerdy. In order to convince Lucy to
become his eternal bride, he doesn’t attempt to mesmerize her with his seductive charms,
but instead, tries to convert her children into vampires so that she will have no choice but
to join them. Her youngest son joins forces with some of the local vampire-hunter-

wannabes, and defeats the vampires before his mother must submit. It is important that

35

the good guys in this film, Michael and Star, are able to overcome their still-new
vampiric nature while the vampires who delight in killing are destroyed. Vampirism is
reversible for someone who has drunk the blood of a vampire, but not yet killed.

In Lost Souls (1992), Brite’s vampires are pleasure-seeking partiers who drink
alcohol, do drugs, eat candy, and “could walk in sunlight as their great-grandfathers could
not” (Brite 5), though they prefer the night. In addition to the vampires’ alternative
lifestyle of drinking, drugs, and murder, conventional boundaries of sexual morality are
also constantly crossed. Jessy seduces and has sex with her father. Nothing expresses his
openness to having sex with anyone of either gender—for fun, for money, or simply for a
ride—and later becomes the regular lover of his biological father, Zillah. And all the
vampires regularly have sex with each other and partake in drinking each other’s blood as
part of their lovemaking.

The trio of Zillah, Twig and Molochai consider themselves to be a family—an
incestuous, murderous family, but still a family: “They stood together, naked and
embracing, the three of them as much a family as anyone could be, anywhere, ever”
(Brite 83). When the half-vampire, Nothing, meets them, he immediately claims Zillah,
Twig and Molochai as “his new family,” saying that with them is “the only place where
he had ever felt truly accepted” (Brite 154). They appear to be no more than vampire
wannabes—“they wished they had fangs but had to make do with teeth they filed sharp”
(Brite 5)—but as Nothing soon learns, they are not just pretending. When Nothing
realizes that these three actually are vampires, he must make the choice as to whether or
not he wants to join them. And in order to join them, he must prove his loyalty by

ripping out the throat of his childhood friend with his bare teeth. Although Nothing cries

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throughout the entire experience, he knows that “the taste of blood meant the end of
aloneness” (Brite 158).

Vampires in all of these narratives begin to face moral dilemmas—to kill or not to kill
in order to survive, in order to belong. In Interview with the Vampire, Louis chooses not
to kill, and is able to survive first on rats, and later on partially-drained humans. In Nga;
Dark, Caleb chooses not to kill, and survives first by drinking from Mae, and is later
returned to his human state through a blood transfusion. In The Lost Boys, both Michael
and Star abstain from killing and ultimately are returned to their human state after the
head vampire is killed. In Lost Souls, Nothing chooses to kill but finally redeems himself
by helping his human friends escape the wrath of his fellow vampires. This type of moral
dilemma continues to pervade all contemporary vampire narratives, even those that
define the vampire as evil by nature.

As the question of the nature of the vampire persists, vampires who are not at all evil
begin to emerge, appearing both as heroes and as lovers. Nancy Collins’s Sonja Blue
books (first appearing in 1989) tell the story of a vampire who is also a vampire killer. In
P.N. Elrod’s The Vampire Files series (first appearing in 1990), Jack Fleming is a
vampire and the hero of these stories set in 19305 gangster-ridden Chicago. The vampire
romance has even appeared as a subgenre in itself, typically involving a sympathetic male
vampire and the woman who loves him. Occasionally these focus on the vampire
somehow getting cured to achieve a happy ending, but more recently, both films and
novels are beginning to show vampirism as an acceptable alternative to being human and
include people becoming vampires as an element of a happy ending. Examples of novels

with this type of ending include Cheryln Jac’s Night’s Immortal Touch (1995) and

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Amanda Ashley’s Embrace the Night (1995). In some vampire fiction, the vampire is
explicitly portrayed as the ultimate lover—granting intense sexual fulfillment in
exchange for blood—most notably in books such as Jacqueline Lictenberg’s Those of Mj

Blood (1988), Elaine Bergstrom’s Shattered Glass (1989) and Susan Petrey’s Gifts of

 

Blood (1992).

Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Riccardo comments that “the 19905 have ushered in what seems to be an absolute
explosion in vampire interest” (Riccardo, “Brief Cultural History” xix). In addition to the
continued proliferation of vampires in fiction and film, many television shows have also
addressed vampires, including two separate episodes of the popular series The X-Files

(1993-2002) as well as dedicated vampire series such as Dracula: The Series (1990),

 

Forever Knight (1992-96), Kindred: The Embraced (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayg'

 

(1997-) and ingal (1999-).

In the late 19905 and early 20005, vampires are no longer easily defined. While the
basic characteristics tend to remain—drinking blood to sustain an abnormally long life——
the depiction of the vampire and description of its origins vary greatly. There are
romantic vampire stories, erotic vampire stories, pornographic vampire stories; portrayals
of vampire as evil, vampire as tortured but loveable soul, vampire as another species,
vampire as extraterrestrial. In an age with many themes, the vampire can represent them
all—an addiction, a weakness, a desire, a need, a longing. But there is always an
emptiness within us that the vampire can somehow fill, which is why these fictions

continue to be published, these films and shows continue to be produced, and audiences

38

continue to flock to them. No matter how bad the plot, the acting, or how many times the
same basic stories have been told, they still appeal to us.

In general, contemporary vampire narratives can be grouped into two constructs—
Vampires-Are-Evil (where we cheer for the heroes who destroy them) and Vampires-
Are-People-Too (where we identify with the vampires as creatures with human needs and
emotions who wrestle with their own nature). Interestingly, even in narratives that would
seem to clearly draw the line between what is evil and what is good, there is still a
blurring of distinctions. The heroes who fight the evil vampires are not without reproach,
and often face difficult decisions about which vampires they should and should not
destroy. And as we begin to identify with the humanized vampires, we begin to lose our
identification with our own human selves, being pulled deeper and deeper into the fantasy

of power, submission and immortality.

Veronica Hollinger notes that an aspect of postmodernism is a “nostalgia for lost
certainties” (203). The Vampires-Are-Evil construct can be seen as a harkening back to a
more innocent time when good and evil were more clearly defined, and evil could be
easily identified and destroyed. While humans in postmodern America are often
paralyzed by our options, the evil vampire is capable of action. Its evil nature allows it to
cut through the clutter—its only need is to feed, to survive. Morality no longer plays a
role; human emotion no longer plays a role. It takes what it wants, what it needs, no
questions asked. Hollinger also notes that, for the vampire, believing oneself to be evil is
“a kind of m justification for the killing which is necessary to sustain vampiric life.

The fact that one is Evil is its own justification for the performance of evil acts” (203).

39

Evil vampires have most recently been explored in John Steakley’s Vampire$ (1990,
adapted for film as John Carpenter’s Vampires in 1998), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film

1992, television series 1997-), The Addiction (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996),

 

BM; (1998, Bladafl 2002) and The Forsaken (2001). Destroying the evil vampires
should be a simple choice, but even these narratives show that the choice is never so
simple. The modem-day vampire hunters are not ideal figures themselves—yes, they are
taking out the evil vampires, but does that necessarily make them good? And when their
friends and loved ones become the enemy, the choice is not always black and white.

Jack Crow—the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed vampire hunter for hire in Vam ire —
originally sought revenge against the vampires who destroyed his family. Now he’s
working for the Vatican, but that doesn’t make him a saint. He is a ruthless killer of evil
vampires, until one bites his best friend and partner. Although he knows his friend will
soon become the enemy, he makes the decision to let him go.

From Dusk Till Dawn brings two criminal brothers, Seth and Richard Gecko, and
their hostages to a roadhouse run by vampires. As soon as the sun sets, the vampires
show their true faces and feast upon their patrons. Richard is turned into a vampire, and
Seth must bring himself to destroy his brother in order to save himself and the other
remaining humans. Kate Fuller, a hostage-tumed-ally of the brothers, must kill her own
father when he becomes a vampire.

In flack, the title character gets his power from being part-vampire—he is infected
by the evil he must hunt. Part of his quest is to find the vampire that killed his mother,
though he eventually discovers that she has become a vampire herself, the lover to her

killer. Blade cannot see any goodness in her vampire nature, and destroys her. In the

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sequel (W, 2002), Blade must team up with the vampires to fight off an even more
evil foe.

In The Forsaken, Nick was infected by the vampire he is chasing. He is chasing the
vampire not to save humanity, but only to save himself from becoming one of them. As

in The Lost Boys, if Nick destroys the leader, he will save himself. One interesting twist

 

in this movie is that Nick takes drugs in order to slow down his transition into a vampire,
a new concept in the vampire mythos.

J 055 Whedon first introduced the deceptively-named Buffy the Vampire Slayer to
moviegoers in 1992. Beginning with a playful premise that brought moderate laughs but
not much success in the film version, Buffy is a blonde cheerleader turned savior-of-the-
world. In the film, she comes off as a superficial and uncaring bimbo, reluctantly
fulfilling her destiny. The television series takes a more insightful approach, presenting
Buffy herself as an intelligent, strong-willed as well as physically strong woman, who
fights not only vampires and monsters, but also her own internal demons. She must
explore questions of whom she can and can’t kill (it’s OK to kill vampires and demons
since they have no soul; but it’s not OK to kill vilely evil humans who rape and kill
women, including your friends). Buffy also must question whether or not all vampires
deserve to be killed—what if they repent their past crimes? What if they were your
friends? Although Buffy in general refuses to kill humans, she does attempt to kill fellow
Slayer Faith in order to save her boyfriend’s life (only by drinking the blood of a Slayer
can he be saved from a mystical poison). However, when given the choice between

saving the world and saving her boyfriend, she makes the choice to send him to Hell.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer combines the themes of Vampires-Are-Evil and Vampires-
Are-People-Too, continuing to destroy the evil vampires while bringing major vampire
characters to the forefront, and allowing the audience to glimpse their past—including
both their mortal as well as their vampire lives—to see how they became the creatures
they are today. All of the vampires on m, according to the show’s internal
mythology, are inhabited by a demon that allows them to live on once their body has
died. Vampires on m have always been innately evil, with the one exception of
Angel, who was cursed with a human soul so that he would feel remorse for all the
humans he had slaughtered. However, as the show demonstrates again and again, these
vampires still have very human feelings, weaknesses and desires, most notably
demonstrated in the character of Spike.

Spike was once one of the most notoriously evil villains on the show, killer of two
previous Slayers, and bent on adding Buffy to the list. He is undeniably evil, and yet
throughout the second season, we see him treat his beloved Drusilla with tenderness and
devotion. In the fourth season, he has a behavior-modifying chip implanted in his brain
that prevents him from doing physical harm to any human without inducing great pain in
himself. This prevents him from acting out his evil intentions—but it cannot explain the
love he develops for Buffy, his former enemy, and his brotherly treatment of her younger
sister. The show made the question of his nature even more uncertain at the end of the
sixth season, where Spike attempts to rape Buffy to make her love him, and afterwards is
unable to believe what he has done—had he been a monster, he would have gone through

with it no matter what Buffy said or did to stop him; had he been a man, he would never

42

have tried. But what is he? He leaves Sunnydale intent on making himself more fully
one or the other.
Buffy herself often struggles with the line between what’s right and wrong—who she
should and shouldn’t love, who she should and shouldn’t kill. In “Lie to Me,” she
discovers that a friend who had betrayed her was suffering from a terminal illness that
would have killed him in less than six months. She struggles with her emotions,
wondering if she can really blame him for wanting to become a vampire. She tells Giles,
“Nothing's ever simple anymore. I'm constantly trying to work it out. Who to love or
hate. Who to trust. It's just, like, the more I know, the more confused I get.” She asks
Giles to tell her if it ever gets any easier, and when he asks if she wants the truth, she
says, “Lie to me.” Giles’ facetious response is very telling:
Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad
guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we
always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives
happily ever after. (“Lie to Me”).

But that is never the truth, and nothing is ever so simple, especially in the Buffyverse.

One major rule in the Buffyverse is that although a Slayer can kill any evil creature
without a soul, she can never harm a human. Buffy has often faced off against apparently
human nemeses in Ted, her mother’s abusive boyfriend (“Ted”), and Kathy, her college
roommate (“Living Conditions”), both times being justified in her hatred (Ted turns out
to be a robot, and Kathy, a demon). But Buffy willingly attempts to take the life of her
fellow Slayer Faith in order to save the life of her dying boyfriend (“Graduation Day, Part

One”). Apparently she learns her lesson, as despite the deeply evil nature of Warren, a

very human villain in season six, she will not kill him.

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In a time when successful vampire films seem to be based on little more that
throbbing techno soundtracks and special effects, the most intelligently-rendered on-
screen vampires have appeared on the small screen. The deep themes and metaphorical
explorations of high school and young adult traumas on Buffy the Vampire Slayer have
generated not just a teenage following, not just a nostalgic-adult following, but also a
following among academics. With two collections of critical essays published this past
year, and an online journal dedicated solely to “Buffy Studies,” it is clear that this is more
than just another teenage drama.

The Addiction also makes an interesting statement on the nature of evil as it relates to
the vampire. There are no heroes in The Addiction. There are no fearless vampire
hunters. There are only vampires and victims, and the vampires are victorious in the end,
closing the film with a final feast of blood, spreading their disease to more victims, who
will in turn become vampires, feasting on victims of their own. The protagonist of the
film is a philosophy graduate student who is bitten by a vampire and soon becomes one
herself. Already focused on the nature of human evil, Kathleen begins to explore her
own capacity for evil as a vampire, as she attacks strangers, friends and professors alike
to sate her thirst. She discovers that evil is the most addictive drug of all, which becomes
the focus of her doctoral dissertation. She concludes “We are not evil because we do

evil. We do evil because we are evil.”

Jules Zanger notes that in many contemporary vampire narratives, vampires have lost

their “metaphysical and religious status,” so that they are no longer portrayed as agents of

pure evil as Stoker’s Dracula was, but instead as “merely ethnic, a victim of heredity” or

44

as “a member of a secret society or subversive political association” (19). And since
contemporary vampires are often native—born Americans, “this new, demystified vampire
might as well be our next door neighbor, as Dracula, by origin, appearance, caste, and
speech, could never pretend to be” (Zanger 19). This construct of Vampires-Are-People-
Too provides a metaphor for our own internal struggles, exploring our lack of certainties
in its blurred lines between right and wrong, life and death, love and hate.

In addition to its ambiguous moral status, this type of vampire is also given other
more human traits. Instead of just lurking and killing, these vampires have hobbies, and
sometimes even a job. As Zanger notes “the new vampires can be art lovers or rock stars
or even police detectives” (22). And like humans, the new vampires have a wider range
of emotions than just hunger and hatred: “the new communal vampire can now
experience tensions, love affairs, elective affinities, rivalries, betrayals. . .this communal
condition permits them to love, to regret, to doubt, to question themselves, to experience
interior conflicts and cross-impulses” (22). In other words, the contemporary vampire
becomes much like us. Like us, but nearly invulnerable, and not subject to our rules for
right and wrong.

This humanized conception of the vampire is prominent in most contemporary
vampire narratives, from Yarbo to Elrod to Collins to select characters on Bufiy the
Vampire Slayer. Previous vampires may have been compelling, possibly even desirable,
but it was more difficult to imagine ourselves in their shoes. Once we learn to see the
“other” as other-than-evil, we can enjoy having it incorporated into a sympathetic

character. And this mixing of not-me yet like-me is attractive—the vampire provides the

45

reassurance that we can all have some “other” in us and still be OK. So we learn to
embrace the vampire, first as a friend, and eventually, as a lover.

The problem with becoming the lover of a vampire is that his victims must make
themselves entirely vulnerable to his will—he may kill them or immortalize them as he
sees fit. The pleasure of making yourself vulnerable to a vampire can be seen as similar
to the exhilaration one might experience from bungee-jumping or skydiving—I can see
the ground rising up to meet me as I plummet ever faster down—yet in those instances,
you have a support structure keeping you safe. When you bare your neck to the vampire,
it’s like jumping from the plane without a parachute, and just hoping the ground is soft
where you land. In this, the act of submission to the vampire can be seen as inherently
masochistic.

Burton Hatlen notes that when the women in Stoker’s Qipc_ula “give themselves to
their demon lover. . .their passivity is gal, and that the end result of their sexual
encounters with the Count is death,” and hence Lucy and Mina’s sexual response to the
Count is “deeply masochistic.” In fact, Hatlen contends that “al the sexuality in DIM
is sado-masochistic” (124).

Hatlen goes on to state that “the book not only equates vampirism with sexuality, but
it also equates sexuality with sadomasochism” (125). He explores this further:

In [Count Dracula], our sexuality confronts us as irreducibly alien, irreducibly
“other.” We can re-possess this sexuality only violently, by ecstatically
surrendering ourselves to the dark hunger for death. . .insofar as Count Dracula
incarnates our lost sexuality, he becomes the shape not only of our most terrible

fears but also of our deepest desires. He is the other that we cannot escape,
because he is part of us. He is the other that we loathe a_rfi love. (Hatlen 125).

 

The sadomasochistic nature of relationships in Dracula can be witnessed in all the sexual

encounters in the novel. Jonathan Harker deliciously awaits being violated by the

46

vampire brides. Lucy and Mina do not resist the visits from the Count, though they seem
to find them frightful (Leatherdale notes that Lucy’s demise was really a “masochistic
self-destruction as she repeatedly yielded herself to Dracula” (152)). Arthur Holmwood
savagely stakes then beheads his fiancée in a scene that is clearly a metaphor for the
violent deflowering of a virgin. Most vampire stories only thinly veil the
sadomasochistic themes inherent in the vampire myth, but they are blatantly obvious to a

modern reader of Dracula (though Stoker would never have admitted placing them there).

 

Joan Gordon would object to the equation of vampire sexuality with sadomasochism,
proposing instead that in a “feminist rethinking of the traditional power structure” (230),
there is “power in the giver of nourishment as well as in the taker” (233), so that vampiric
feeding can be seen as “exchange rather than hierarchy” (234). While this is an
interesting proposal, it does not explain the fear that is always mingled with desire as the
vampire approaches its victim, and the violence which is inherent in so many vampire
stories—is this really part of an equal exchange?

Later vampire narratives have addressed the theme of sadomasochism more
explicitly. In The Vampire Tgxsg, a therapist finds herself becoming sexually aroused
at the idea of her patient feeding off a female victim, and later goes to bed with him,
though she openly admits her fear of him. More recently, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has
openly explored sadomasochistic pleasure in sexual relationships, usually experienced
only by vampires, but also by the Slayer Faith, and in the sixth season, by Buffy herself.

In The Vampire Tapestry, on hearing the vampire’s description of a successful hunt,

Dr. Landauer is disturbed to not only find herself empathizing with the vampire instead

47

of his victim, but also sexually aroused. Later she dreams of herself in the place of the
victim he described:
He put his hand not on my neck but breast—I felt intense sexual response in the
dream, also anger and fear so strong they woke me. . .I am not food, I am a person.
No thrill at languishing away in his arms in a taxi while he drinks my blood—
that’s disfigured sex, masochism. (158).
She rejects her fantasies and feelings, and yet she continues to experience them. Despite
her rationalization, her insistence that she does not long for this “disfigured sex,” she
eventually gives into her desires, rationalizing them once again, but still, ultimately,
sleeping with the vampire.

Dr. Landauer propositions Weyland at the moment when he has threatened her life.
He is shocked and immediately assumes her to be a masochist, asking “Are you one of
those who come into heat at the sight of an upraised fist?” Still in denial, she replies,
“My life hasn’t twisted me that badly, thank God,” yet she admits her fear to him, saying,
“if you’ve known all along how scared I’ve been, you must have sensed my attraction to
you too” (174). She admits her combined fear and desire for him, yet does not make the
connection that there is an inherent masochism in acting on that combined set of
emotions. This is not some moderate fear of what might happen if she were to
proposition a client, but an outright fear for her life.

Vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are portrayed as having voracious sexual
appetites, and sadomasochistic tendencies. In the first season of the show, Angel argues
with his former lover and fellow vampire, Darla, and ends up shoving her up against a
wall. She is pleased with the direction their conversation has taken, and says, “That's

good,” but Angel continues to shove her against the wall. She doesn’t mind, responding,

“You're hurting me. That's good, too” (“Angel”). In the second season, the characters of

48

Spike and Drusilla are introduced, a vampire couple who are regularly shown to engage
in rough, yet loving courtship.

When Spike and Drusilla have a fight, he tells her sweetly, “I don't want to hurt you,
baby,” then as she continues to resist him, he slaps her, punches her in the face, and
corrects himself, “Doesn't mean I won't” (“Becoming, Part 2). Later this same interplay
is repeated when Spike is now fighting the Slayer, who he has fallen in love with. Spike
has Buffy pinned against a wall. He chuckles, and she punches him in the face. He
punches her back, then lifts her up to look her in the eyes, saying, “I wasn't planning on
hurting you.” He then again corrects himself, “Much.” Their fighting continues,
growing more and more intense as Buffy throws Spike up against the wall, the plaster
visibly breaking, a large hole left behind him from the force of the impact. Buf’fy slams
him up against another wall. Spike is amused, asking, “You afraid I’m gonna...” Buffy
cuts off his sentence with a passionate kiss. She slams her hand into the wall, creating
another hole to get her arm around Spike’s neck. Her other arm reaches down, and an
audible sound of a zipper is heard. Their battle culminates in sexual gratification
(“Smashed”).

This is the first, but not the only sexual encounter for the Slayer and the evil vampire.
Their escapades continue—always brutal, always purely sexual. In the following
episode, when Spike tries to tell her they have something, Buffy replies, “Get a grip. Like
you're God's gift.” But Spike knows the truth: “Hardly,” he says, “Wouldn't be nearly as
interesting, would it?” It is the evil in him that appeals to her, the danger. As Spike later
tells her “I may be dirt but you're the one who likes to roll in it, Slayer. You never had

it so good as me. Never” (“Wrecked”).

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Margaret Carter notes that in contemporary vampire narratives, becoming a vampire
is often seen “as a happy ending—or, sometimes, the inauspicious beginning of an altered
life that proves, after all, to be happy” (31). Once we have accepted the vampire into our
communities, and into our beds, recognizing vampirism as an acceptable lifestyle choice,
we may begin to see the merits of that lifestyle, and to desire it for ourselves. We may
embrace the other so fully that we become him.

Vampire narratives have recently begun incorporating the concept of the vampire
wannabe—a human who may have never met a real vampire, but who longs to become
one based on what he or she has learned about vampires through fiction and film. In
Interview with the Vanppire, the boy who has recorded Louis’s story begs to be made a
vampire, even though his entire tale was one of pain, horror, and finally, despair:

“Don’t you see how you made it sound? It was an adventure like I’ll never know
in my whole life! You talk about passion, you talk about longing! You talk about
things that millions of us won’t ever taste or come to understand. If you were
to give me that power! The power to see and feel and live forever! Give it to
me! Make me a vampire now!” (Rice, Interview 343).
When Louis fails to grant his wish, and punishes the boy with a non-fatal, non-
transforrnative bite—the boy runs off in search of Lestat, who might be willing to change
him instead.

In The Vampire Tapestry Alan Reese, a self-proclaimed Satanist, attempts to leash
the power of the vampire for himself. He tries to coerce Weyland into agreeing to a
“partnership,” where he would play god in a “Church of Blood” to Reese’s high priest
(272). In the vampire, Reese sees the possibility for a “long life, secret and secure in the

strength of the predator” (276). Weyland turns Reese’s desire for the forbidden against

him, offering Reese the opportunity to become like him (which in Charnas’ universe is an

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impossibility), and as Reese leans down to drink from the vampire’s bloody wrist, the
vampire attacks, taking his revenge slowly and painfully.

In Lost Souls, the vampire Christian allows his victims to think he will turn them into
vampires after they die, so that they let him drink their blood in a rapturous ecstasy that
brings them to orgasm—the “little death”——at the same time it brings their actual death:

“Are you a vampire? Make me into one, too,” said the boy. “Please? I want to
be one. I want to walk at night with you and fall in love and drink blood. Kill
me. Make me into a vampire too. Bite me. Take me with you.”
He clasped the boy more tightly, and their bodies locked together in a final wash
of ecstasy, Christian’s belly warming and filling, the boy beginning to die. The
boy’s sperm flooded warm over Christian’s fingers. ...if the boy had died
thinking he would rise again as one with Christian, that could not be helped. It
was kinder to let the children die believing as they did. (Brite 66-67).
Also in Lost Souls, Jessy is the ultimate vampire wannabe, having long been obsessed
with vampires and having dreamed of becoming one. Her father recalls that passages in
her stacks of vampire novels were often circled in blood, and that he found razor blades
between the pages of Dracula. Jessy seduces her father in an incestuous parody of the
vampire Lucy’s plea to Arthur: “I need your blood, Daddy. I’m hungry. Your Jessy’s
hungry. Come to me.” (Brite 79). She seduces him, has sex with him, cuts his throat and
drinks his blood. She ultimately does meet a real vampire in Zillah, and becomes his
lover, but cannot become a vampire. Instead, she is killed by her own half-vampire child
as it tears its way out of her womb.

On Buffy the Vampire SlayerLa group of vampire wannabes gathers at a place called

“The Sunset Club,” sharing in their reverence of what they perceive to be the beautifully

tragic life of the vampire. A wannabe calling herself Chantarelle explains her perspective

on vampires, “They who walk with the night are not interested in harming anyone. They

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are creatures above us. Exalted!” The group awaits the coming of the vampires in eager
anticipation. Chantarelle says excitedly, “We're going to ascend to a new level of
consciousness! Become like them. Like the Lonely Ones.” The vampires arrive and the
room turns to mayhem as the vampires feast on their now fearful victims. When faced
with the reality of Buffyverse vampires, their awakening was anything but inspirational.
(“Lie to Me”).

The vampire wannabe is a creature not just based in fiction. In reality, there are many
who long for what they see the vampire offering—power, immortality, freedom from
moral and social constraints, freedom from sickness and injury, all the time in the world
to do whatever it is you’ve always wanted to do, as well as admission into a secret society
where you’ll always be accepted for who you are. Charnas explains that audiences
identify with the vampire “50 that we can feel as powerful as he is. That way we can say:
‘Who me, a victim? No way. I’m the baddest, I’m worse than Freddy the Slasher, so
nobody dares mess with me’” (“Meditations in Red” 59).

The Internet provides a safe mechanism for living out this fantasy. Thousands of
Web sites are devoted to items of vampiric interest for those who want to play vampire—
how to drink blood from your lover, how to create your own fangs, how to order custom-
made fangs and contact lenses. Chat rooms, news groups, and e-mail listservs build
virtual communities of would-be vampires, who gather offline to indulge their shared

interests. Live-action role-playing games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and local

 

vampire-interest clubs also serve a similar purpose. Within these realms, people can

adopt a vampire persona without modifying their real identity.

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In e-mail discussion groups, chat rooms and on posting boards, vampire fans select a
new name for themselves, and often construct an entire fictional character around that
name, which they use when engaging in online conversations, or when writing individual
or communal fiction. The Vampyres discussion list, which has existed in many forms
and on many different servers since 1990, is one of the longest-running vampire
discussion groups in existence, and includes vampire aficionados of a wide range of ages,
nationalities and interests. Some are teenagers, some young adults, some middle aged or
older. The majority of list members are American, though Canadians play a large part,
and there are a scattering of other nationalities represented. There are those who simply
are interested in vampires as a pastime, those who write vampire fiction, and those who
have a more academic interest in vampires. But what is common to most list members is
the practice of adopting an online “persona” which they use to sign their messages, to
participate in “virtual parties” and shared online fiction (called "‘fluft”).

In writing either in or out of “persona,” list members create for themselves a freedom
from criticism (“that’s not my opinion, it’s just my persona’s!”), a freedom commonly
associated with the vampire. Trevor Holmes points to the case of one particular list
member, Anne Fraser, whose primary persona (she has many, all male) is an older, gay
male vampire named Baron Gideon Redoak. The ability to present oneself as another
person gives authors the opportunity to think, feel and express themselves not only as
another gender, but also as another sexual preference, and another type of creature
altogether. Holmes notes that in this context, “vampires are sources of self-invention and
the very much patstaging of the problematics of gender identification and sexuality”

(188).

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Readers also incorporate the vampire characters from film, fiction and television into
their lives through writing their own “fan fiction”, continuing or varying the storylines
initiated in their favorite narratives. These fans make the characters their own, and forge
their own identities out of those characteristics of the vampire, or vampire slayer, they
would most like to embody. Fiction is written, posted, shared and read, but never
formally published, further demonstrating the ephemeral nature of the vampire identity.
While most vampire fans understand the vampire as a fictional construct that is fun to
explore in their fantasy lives, others long for the fantasy to be real. Disturbed individuals
(many of them teenagers) believe emphatically that vampires do exist, and that becoming
one will make everything better—it will give them power and popularity, and provide
them with an eternal group of friends and family who will always stand by them, never
growing older or dying, and defending them to the death. They have built up a vivid
fantasy in which being “turned” equals instant and everlasting beauty, invulnerability to
all injuries and illness, and finally being “cool.”
On the Vampyres discussion list, a common topic is the e-mails that members often
receive in response to their vampire-centric Web sites, from people begging to be turned
into a vampire. For example, Elizabeth Miller posted a message to the list asking for
advice as to how to respond to the following message:
I would give up everything to become one [a vampire]. I have nothing to live
for!! I want to be a vampire. Cursed to roam this planet. That is the only thing
that would bring me pleasure. My life is worth nothing and I want to die.
(Miller, n. pag.).

Somehow, someone who is suicidal longs for immortality, seeking to end his or her

human life and be born into a new existence, one without limitations, one where they

would have a new family, and new powers, and never have to be afraid.

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Beyond those who long to become vampires, or those who adopt fictional personas
which allow them to pretend to be vampires, are those who claim to 3 “real vampires.”
For some, this means that they regularly engage in drinking human blood, but they do not
imagine themselves to be immortal. Others, more frighteningly, truly believe themselves
to have special powers, as well as folkloric weaknesses, and avoid daylight and other
legendary banes at all costs.

Leatherdale notes that “in many societies blood is held to be an aphrodisiac, and it is
not uncommon to find people who derive sexual satisfaction from shedding blood” (149).
We can see evidence for this in the predominance of “blood sports” as part of the BDSM
lifestyle (bondage, domination, and sadomasochism). It is taken to further extremes by
those who actually believe themselves to be vampires, gaining power as well as
sustenance during these “feedings.”

Riccardo devotes an entire chapter of his vampire bibliography to studies on human
blood-drinking, stating that “this phenomenon of individuals having an overwhelming
urge to ingest blood does exist and is well documented” (Vampires Unearthed 101).
Riccardo notes that such self-described vampires often do no harm to their victims since
they use voluntary “donors,” and that “because they keep their activities low-key, the
extent of this kind of blood-drinking is unknown” (101).

Many research groups have been founded to study these “real vampires,” including
the Vampire Research Center in New York, founded by Stephen Kaplan, and the
Vampire Research Society in London, founded by Sean Manchester. Kaplan has been
conducting an annual vampire census since 1981, and has interviewed hundreds of self-

described vampires over the years. Fewer than 100 of these met his qualifications for

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what a modern “vampire” should be——-“they need regular quantities of blood, they believe
that the blood will prolong their life and help them remain youthful, and they often find
the blood and its consumption to be sexually arousing” (Melton, Vampire Book 634).
Sadomasochistic and sexual behavior is often closely tied to the bloodletting, but
otherwise, many of these people live “normal” lives.

“Real vampires” are often associated with what Melton labels “the new gothic

movement” (Vampire Boofik 264). According to Melton, this new gothic movement was

 

born out of rock bands such as Bauhaus, Siouxie and the Banshees and Sisters of Mercy,
whose music “articulated an explicit nonconforrnist stance vis-a-vis the dominant
establishment” and “opposed narrow sexual mores and traditional established religions”
(265). Melton notes that “those enthralled by the new gothic culture found the vampire
the single most appropriate image for the movement” (265) and that “the gothic
subculture has created a space in which self-designated vampires can move somewhat
freely and mingle without anyone questioning their nonconventional habits” (635).
Whether blood drinkers or not, many Goths dress in dark clothing and pale makeup,
wearing custom-made fangs or modifying their teeth, and participating in alternative
forms of sexual expression such as sadomasochism, bondage and blood fetishism.
Despite their unusual sexual practices and overall lifestyle, most self-described
vampires stay hidden within their underground world. The ones who do make headlines
tend to be more mentally disturbed, not being interested in or able to find willing donors,
they resort to attacking and often killing others to drink their blood. Criminal vampires in

the United States have included Salvatore Agron (convicted in 1959), James Brown

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(arrested in 1967), Richard Chase (arrested in 1978), James P. Riva (arrested in 1980),
and Jerry Moore (arrested in 1982).

Criminal vampirism can be seen to involve not only sadism, but also aspects of
necrophilia and cannibalism. However, those “real vampires” who take their blood from
willing donors may not have sadistic inclinations at all, but may instead simply be
looking for intimacy and love. Drinking someone’s blood can be seen as the most
intimate of all lovemaking, reenacting the nourishing relationship of mother and child.
This act is much more incestuous in nature than it is sadistic. The donor is also not
necessarily masochistic, but can be seen as sharing in the fantasy of intimacy by sharing

his or her own life fluid.

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REASONS FOR ENDURANCE

Glen St. John Barclay proposes that “there is nothing the world needs less than a new
vampire story” (57), since “perrnissiveness has made the vampire story obsolete” (38).
So why do new vampire stories continue to be published and produced? Why do
American audiences keep clamoring for more? Barclay states that the vampire legend
“does not fascinate because it responds to anything in human experience, or because it
tells us anything about the nature of existence” (57). So why does it resonate across so
many cultures? Why does it continue to appeal to generation after generation of
American audiences—especially now, in a time when we are questioning everything and
to be horrified, all we have to do is turn on the news? If we are not turning to the
vampire for sheer stimulation, then what is it about the vampire that continues to enthrall
us?

The vampire myth clearly addresses deeply-rooted longings and fears, since it exists
in all cultures and continues to pervade contemporary American culture even in an age
where rationalism and science rule. But what aspects of the vampire myth appeal to us?
Immortality, immorality, sexuality, omnipotence? And which deeply-rooted longings
and fears does it appeal to? Masochistic submission? Sadistic domination? Fascination
with evil? The mystical significance of blood? All of these factors have been discussed
at length in criticism both specific to the vampire mythos and to horror in general.

Flynn notes that “romanticism, power, sexuality, and visions of immortality” are “all
key elements of the vampire myth” which together “have provided (and continue to
provide) endless fascination for the general public” (Flynn 5). Heller comments on how

the horror thriller “gives a brief license to the culturally forbidden, allowing it to take

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form in monsters” (85). Ursini and Silver state that the appeal of the vampire is that he
offers “sexual pleasure” to his victims in exchange for their blood, appealing to the
“death wish of its prey” so that “the dramatic interplay between the vampire and its lover
becomes a fusion of basic human instincts, not just self-preservative libidinal but also
self-destructive” (55).
Leatherdale postulates that “Dracula reminds us of the dark side of ourselves: that in
each of us there is a hidden, repressed, ferocious quality that we recognize in him” (224).
And if we don’t recognize aspects of ourselves in him, then we still want to be like him,
or with him: “Many men would like to be able to seduce mg him: many women would
like to be seduced py him” (Leatherdale 224). The vampire becomes, in essence, an
embodiment of what people would like to become. Power without limit, able to seduce
any man or woman you please, never having to be afi‘aid of sickness or of death, and
always being young and beautiful. A change in your diet and sleeping habits seems a
small price to pay in exchange.
Flynn notes how the vampire, personified by Dracula, can be seen as a kind of role
model for readers who are frustrated with their role in society:
Dracula remains unchanged in a changing society with no conscience or remorse
for his actions. He knows only what he wants and satisfies those desires without
any consideration for the consequences. He is the embodiment of evil without
guilt, power without restraint, and sexuality without conscience. And in essence
we secretly admire his ability to resolve or ignore problems with which we have
difficulty in dealing. (Flynn 5).

Dracula has no fear—no fear of change, no fear of rejection, no fear of reproach, no fear

of attack. He can do everything that we cannot, and has all the time in the world in which

to do it. He is free from the constraints of time and its effects on the human body such as

aging and ill health, and free from the constraints of society.

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Vampires can be seen as appealing to two parallel desires: the desire to be all-
powerful, all commanding, all-taking; and the desire to be taken over by something that
overwhelms you both physically and spiritually. Neither is healthy, but both are ever-
present sentiments in our society. The vampire not only attacks, but also seduces. His
victims don’t just moan in pain, but also in pleasure. This sadomasochistic pattern and
fascination with the forbidden is a key element that differentiates vampire fiction and
film from horror or Gothic fantasy in general.

Vampire stories where the vampire is evil are the most sadomasochistic in nature,
where the victim longs to be taken against her will, degraded and defiled by the vampire.
But there are many stories, including romances, where the vampire is the hero. He
becomes more humanized, and more anguished by his inclinations to evil. The appeal of
this vampire is simpler—here is a creature that is immortal, lonely, devastingly
handsome, repentant and soulful. He has lived lifetimes and has attained immeasurable
knowledge. He has a viewpoint that spans across history. The reader longs to know and
comfort this wounded animal.

One possible explanation for the development of the humanized vampire is that since
we see so much horror on the news each day, we’re fairly jaded by the time we get to the
big screen or other media that might offer us “horror” stories. How can fictional
monsters compete with the real-life terror of bombings, anthrax, AIDS, high-level
corruption, and drug wars? It is more intriguing to see how these creatures with a
tendency towards evil try hard to be good in an ever and ever more jaded society.

Hollinger questions why a humanized vampire has developed in contemporary

vampire fiction, and postulates: “Perhaps there is no room for an inhuman other, nor any

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need of one, in a human world that can provide its own apocalypse” (209). Perhaps in
these times we all need something to believe in—the power of redemption, the ability to
surpass our current meaningless human existence into something more glorious, filled
will new sights and sounds, and limitless possibilities. Perhaps we are searching for
something not available to us in our current cultural order, the forbidden pleasures that
cannot be easily found in our daily lives; whether sexual, sensual or otherwise
experiential.

Another possible explanation is that our society has become more and more accepting
of the “other”——of phobias, handicaps, dementias, addictions and alternative lifestyles.
There is an increasing recognition of the importance of civil rights and cultural diversity,
and many traits traditionally considered character flaws are now seen as treatable
illnesses (alcoholism and other forms of drug abuse, compulsive gambling). We as a
culture are more willing to come to terms with the “other” within ourselves and others—
the “other” being anything we don't consider to be desirable or at least normal. This
lights the way to humanizing the “other” who looks like us, and yet is not—the vampire.

But why have they always existed? Why do they continue to exist? What is it that
makes vampires appealing to us here and now? Critics have proposed everything from
the existence of shared archetypes in the collective unconscious, to the ever-present fear
of death, to the postmodern state of society, to a quest for identity in an era of blurred
boundaries, to a desire for sexual power, to a desire to regress to an infantile existence, to

a desire for spiritual transcendence. The real answer may be that all of these are true.

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The Vampire Archetype

Lawrence Alloway notes that “attempts to account sociologically for monster films

9”

always makes them symptoms of ‘a sick society (123), as researchers try to correlate
peaks in the popularity of monster films to political events. However, “sociological
explanations of this kind fail to recognize the historical fact that there has always been a
spontaneous human taste for monsters, for the more-than or less-than human” (123-24).
The explanation for our interest in vampires does not lie simply in the state of our
society—it runs much deeper—it is in our innermost thoughts, an ever-present element of
our conflicting fears and desires.

The predominance of the vampire myth throughout the world, throughout history, can
be seen as evidence of its archetypal nature. It cannot just be coincidence that nearly
every culture the world over has a legend of a creature that comes at night to drink the
blood of its people, most often returning from the dead. The vampire image must reflect
deep psychological issues that resound in all human beings. As Melton notes, “there is

something about the vampire that we already understand intuitively—with the knowledge

coming from deep within our psyche” (Vampire Book 493).

 

Sigmund Freud uses the term “uncanny” to refer to the pleasurable yet fearsome
sensation evoked by some horror narratives, which presumably is what keeps us coming
back for more. He defined the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back
to what is known of old and long familiar” (“The Uncanny” 220). Freud states that “an
uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed
are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been

surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (249). Perhaps the enduring appeal of the

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vampire is that it produces this uncanny experience in two ways: first, by reviving
infantile complexes such as oral sadism and masochistic submission and second, by
appealing to primitive fears that the dead may come back from the grave to infest the
living. Freud explains why these primitive fears continue to haunt us:
It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development
corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed
through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still
capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as
‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental
activity within us and bringing them to expression. (240-41).
The image of the vampire can been seen as a vestige of our primitive selves, traces of
which pervade all mankind. Whereas our ancestors may have once believed that
creatures such as the vampire existed, and had a mortal fear of them, our ambivalent
feelings of fear and desire for the vampire can be seen both as remnants of those
primordial fears, and a nostalgic longing for the simplicity which we have lost.

This conception of consistent memories shared across humanity, across cultures, is
similar to C.G. Jung’s conception of the “collective unconscious.” Jung proposes that all
mythologies are based in “archetypes,” primordial types of images that have persisted
throughout all of human history within the “collective unconscious” that all humans
possess. Jung notes that “whereas the contents of the personal unconscious are acquired
during the individual’s lifetime, the contents of the collective unconscious are invariably
archetypes that were present from the beginning” (A_io_r_r 6). Within the collective
unconscious, there are universal archetypes we all share, images that haunt us all.

Iaccino comments that “all archetypes have positive and negative aspects. They

contain paradoxical elements of good and evil, divine inspirations as well as hidden fears

of the dark side” (4). The persona archetype is the face we show the world. Iaccino

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describes the persona as “a deception that the human uses to convince others that he can
conform to society and be an upright and law-abiding citizen. . .the person’s real ‘face’
remains hidden underneath and may never have a chance to be fully expressed ” (6).

Our persona is our public-facing self, but there are desires and needs that are not

socially acceptable, and must be hidden:
There is another side to us, “one who wants to do all the things that we do not
allow ourselves to do, who is everything that we are not”. . .that shadow side of
our personality, reflecting those uncontrollable animal impulses that we try to
keep in check and hide from others as much as possible. (Iaccino 6).
The vampire can be seen as an expression of the shadow archetype, which conveys those
aspects of the self that our conscious self is unable to recognize. The shadow archetype
“personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is
always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly—for instance, inferior traits of
character and other incompatible tendencies” (Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious and
Individuation” 284-85). The shadow is composed for the most part of repressed desires
and uncivilized impulses, morally inferior motives, childish fantasies and resentments,
but also contains positive qualities such as creativity and freethinking.

Jung notes that “the shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to
live with it in some form” (“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” 20). Confronting
your shadow is the first step in the process of individuation that Jung saw as the goal of
life—harmonizing the various components of the psyche, and striving toward integrity of
the innermost self. Jung notes that in order to become conscious of the shadow, one must
recognize “the dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (_Am 7). While some

amount of suppression of the darker side is essential for social order, total repression of

the shadow leads to its unbridled growth in the unconscious. Acknowledging the

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existence of darker qualities in ourselves helps us control them, and leads to mental and
physical well-being.

Flynn notes that “man chose certain archetypes and symbols to deal with those
universal questions” of “the nature of life and death, good and evil, science and faith” (3).
The vampire itself can be seen as an emerging archetype, a symbol of our attempts to
come to terms with our conflicting desires and create a single identity. The vampire
represents not only death but also a rebirth into a new way of being, free from social and
moral constraints. The vampire exists only in darkness—a clear symbol of the
unconscious. Healthy integration of the vampire archetype requires a willingness to
embrace the totality of our being, to own this shadow aspect and transcend the duality of
light and dark, love and hate, good and evil.

Many aspects of the vampire myth resonate with deeply-held fears and beliefs,
including the fear of death and the mystical significance of blood. These are a part of the
vampire archetype that is engrained in the human psyche. Leatherdale recalls primitive
beliefs that “absorbing blood was absorbing life—and soul” (16) and of blood as “the
only possible bridge between the two disparate universes” of life and death (17). The
concept of the life-giving qualities of blood is found even in the Bible: “Whoso eateth my
flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life” (John 6:54). Christ gave his own blood so
that his followers could have eternal life, and contemporary Christians maintain their
connection to Christ and their faith by drinking his blood in a sacred ritual. The
symbolism of blood within the vampire myth can be seen as echoing the significant role

which blood has played not only in Christianity, but also in much more ancient religions.

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Melton notes that “vampire narratives express in complex form the fascination—both
natural and unnatural—which the living take in death and the dead” (Vampire Book 492).
Julia Kristeva agrees that the concept of “death infecting life,” a critical component of the
vampire myth, is a prime example of the in-between state of being which is the true
source of horror (4). Kristeva discusses the nature of a corpse: “It is something rejected
from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as fi'om an object.
Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (4).
The vampire crosses the boundaries between living and dead, human and animal. In its
uncanniness, the vampire appeals to us, draws us in, and literally engulfs us, in its cape,
in its mouth, in its fangs. Kristeva emphasizes the attraction, as well as the horror, of the
undifferentiated, observing that “many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if
not submissive and willing ones” (9), having fallen in love with death. Such an abject
object may beckon to us, but must be cast away in order for life to continue.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike explains to Buffy how every Slayer has a death
wish:

“Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later it's gonna catch you. And part
of you wants it. Not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but because you're just
a little bit in love with it. That final gasp. That look of peace. Part of you is
desperate to know: What's it like? Where does it lead you? Every Slayer has a
death wish. Even you.” (“F 001 for Love”).
This fascination with death is not confined to the fictional world, but is an essential part
of the audience’s attraction to images of death and life-threatening danger in film and
fiction.

Morris Dickstein proposes that “the fear of death is the ultimate attraction of all

horror films” (69). Dickstein sees horror films as “a safe, routinized way of playing with

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death, like going on a roller coaster or parachute jump at an amusement par ” (69).
Kendrick discusses how “icons of horror” such as “vampires, zombies, mummies,
werewolves, mad scientists, and cobwebby vaults. . .embod[y] the invasion of life by
death.” He sees “fear of death [as] their sole source of power” and therefore, this source
is “bottomless” (Kendrick 221). Freud has noted how children create games around what
they fear as a way of subduing those fears and gaining control, moving from a “mash/g
situation” where they have no control to “an active m_rt” where they can achieve mastery
over their fear. (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 16). Similarly, in consuming vampire
narratives, we may be exposing ourselves to what we fear in order to gain mastery over it.
We long to believe in a life after death, that we ourselves can continue, but we fear
the price that immortality would cost us. This is why the vampire both attracts, yet
repels; this is why we long to give in, yet resist. This is why, for most people, we can
enjoy participating in the vampiric existence vicariously through fiction and film, but do

not act on these fantasies in real life.

Postmodern America

Lester Faigley comments on how “our current era” is one of “randomness and
dissolution,” and how, since the 19605, there has been a “growing awareness of
randomness, ambiguity and chaos” (3). This sentiment is expressed in the postmodern
movement in literature, art, philosophy and cultural criticism. Postmodernity is notable
for its destruction of meaning—which leaves those of us living in a postmodern society
searching for identity. Postmodemist thought rejects the concept of the autonomous

individual and focuses instead on an anarchic collective, anonymous experience. There is

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a merging of self and other, subject and object. People no longer want to be confined to
one definition of self—or even to one gender or sexuality.

Jane Flax comments on how postmodern discourses “throw into radical doubt beliefs
still prevalent in (especially American) culture but derived from the Enlightenment” (qtd.
in Faigley 7). Flax lists eight of these beliefs which are called into doubt by postmodern
theory, including “the existence of a stable, coherent self,” the belief that “reason and its
‘science’—philosophy—can provide an objective, reliable and universal foundation for
knowledge,” and that “science, as the exemplar of the right use of reason, is also the
paradigm of all true knowledge” (qtd. in Faigley 8).

Based on Flax’s list of beliefs, Faigley concludes that in postmodern thought, “there
is nothing outside contingent discourses to which a discourse of values can be
grounded—no eternal truths, no universal human experience, no universal human rights,
no overriding narrative of human progress” (8). No wonder so many people feel lost
today. We have major schools of thought telling us that there is nothing to believe in—
no one definition of right and wrong, no one set of standards for how we should define
ourselves within our society.

Faigley notes how “discourses on postmodemity often speak of the fragmentation of
the subject, the loss of faith in science and progress, and a rising awareness of
irrationality and chaos,” attributed to “major economic and cultural shifts” (9). The
decentered flux into which postmodernism launches us can be debilitating. With no clear
definition of our selves or our purpose in life, we are left floundering, struggling to find

ourselves.

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We now live in an age where there are no limits on the amount and variety of things
we can buy, religions we can try, and people we can be. American society used to be
defined by the similarities in the way we dressed, what we ate, what we read, what we
watched on TV. But now we have a multitude of options, and are defined more by our
differences than our similarities. Instead of a small selection of broadcast television
channels, we have cable and satellite dishes offering us hundreds of choices of live feeds,
as well as videos we can rent. Our choices in music have expanded from what we could
tune into on the local radio station, to hundreds of stations to choose from via satellite
radio systems. Clothing and food from all over the world is easy to come by in our
stores, or available to purchase online. The Internet provides instant access to
information on any topic, and just about any product you could ever desire is available
for easy purchase or download. And it has become socially acceptable, even trendy, to
experiment with different religions from around the world. As Faigley notes, “the world
has become a bazaar from which to shop for an individual ‘lifestyle’” (12).

Having too many choices can lead to paralysis, or to always wanting more, never
feeling fulfilled with the selection you have made, because there are so many other
options available to you. Faigley comments that “the desire to consume is predicated on
the lack of a stable identity” (13). With so many options for who we can be, it is hard to
ever know who we really are. This leads to a kind of “cultural schizophrenia” (F aigley

13), which paralyzes us.

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Most critics mark the beginning of the postmodern era as “somewhere between the
late 19505 and the early 19705 (F aigley 9), when the transition from modem to
postmodern ideals was most likely due to “a shift from the manufacture of traditional
economic products to the production and distribution of knowledge” (Faigley 9). Carroll
discusses how the lifespan of the postmodern movement roughly corresponds to that of
the current horror cycle, which may not just be a coincidence. The horror genre
increased in popularity just when “the international order set in place at the end of the
second world war seems to have fallen into unnerving disarray,” a disarray which
includes “not only the demotion of the global power of the United States” but also
“internal tensions” such as the “unending spectacles of political scandals, widely
publicized business scams, economic altercations of all sorts including the oil crises and
recessions, the debt crisis, the claims for enfranchisement of heretofore disempowered
groups such as women and minorities” (Carroll 212). Our nation, our culture, and our
population are in chaos.

Carroll notes that “predictably as the verities of the American Imperium falter, an
overwhelming sense of instability seizes the imagination in such a way that everything
appears at risk or up for grabs” and “relativism, both conceptual and moral, is a probable
response at the level of thought to such social instability, while horror fiction, with its
structural commitments to the fragility or instability of standing cultural norms, becomes
a ready pop-artistic symbol for feelings that ‘the center cannot hold’” (212). In horror
fiction, we are presented with a metaphor for our own situation, for our own feelings of
instability. Carroll explores those aspects of horror which demonstrate the presence of

our postmodern anxieties:

7O

...the sense of helplessness and paralysis it engenders in its characters, the theme
of the person-as-meat, the paranoia of its narrative structures, all seem to address
an uncertainty about living in the contemporary world which is made more urgent
since within memory—or the illusions of memory—there is the belief that there
was a time, not so long ago, when things seemed stable and a sense of certainty
prevailed. (213-14).
Horror in general, but vampires in particular, seem to fill a need that has emerged in
postmodern America. The two different constructs of the vampire that exist in
contemporary narratives—vampires as evil to be destroyed versus vampires as
sympathetic creatures with human emotions and needs—both address the unique needs of
postmodern America. The Vampires-Are-Evil construct simplifies our complex world,
distinguishing good from evil, allowing the evil vampires to be eradicated, and the good
humans to walk away into the sunrise. The Vampires-Are-People-Too construct more
directly addresses the chaos that we are facing, providing a metaphor for our own internal
struggles, and evidence that we can overcome them.

The dissolution of distinctions and the perception of life and identity in flux merge
perfectly with the concept of the vampire, who is neither living nor dead, who appears
human yet is not; who both destroys and preserves as he attacks; and who does not
conform to societal standards. As Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger note:

At this present postmodern moment, it seems that even our monsters have become
transformed, as the boundaries between “human” and “monstrous” become
increasingly problematized in contemporary vampire narratives. For this is one of
the functions of our monsters: to help us construct our own humanity, to provide
guidelines against which we can define ourselves. Even the stock horror vampire,
one of the most prolific figures in popular culture, is never simply a vampire; the
roles played out by this figure shift as our desires and anxieties adapt to particular
cultural/political moments. (5).

The vampire can accept multiple definitions, a fluctuating identity of dead but alive, evil

but good, masculine but feminine. Vampire narratives embrace the chaos of the

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postmodern world, delighting in what Anne Williams calls “the rejected ‘otherness’ that
the Realists and the Romanticists had defined their favored literary modes against; the
supposedly irrational, the ambiguous, the unenlightened, the chaotic, the dark, the hidden,
the secret” (8).

Gordon and Hollinger discuss the plethora of themes addressed in contemporary
vampire narratives, and how those themes are a clear statement on the postmodern state
of our society:

Such themes suggest our current anxieties about the dissolution of boundaries
between the private and the public, the individual and society, one social group or
nation and another, ourselves and our environment. How apt that the vampire
reflects such border anxieties, since it penetrates boundaries by its very nature—
between life and death, between love and fear, between power and persecution.
And how apt that it thrives in this postmodern milieu of dissolving borders,
between the virtual and the real, between private and public personae, in the
breaking down of cultural and national boundaries, while a plague transmitted by
the penetration of bodily boundaries—and often through blood—sweeps the
world. (7).
The vampire is the other, he is irrational, he is ambiguous in that he spans categorical
definitions, he brings chaos, and brings forth our darkest, most deeply hidden secret
desires. Vampires are by definition creatures of the margins. It is no wonder that our
interest in them peaks in such a time of decentering, unmarginalizing the marginalized.
The instability of the once-secure world around us makes us feel more personally
vulnerable, which may explain why the vampire story, which shows us both attacked and
empowered simultaneously, has become so popular. The sadomasochistic themes
inherent in the vampire myth may appeal to our sense of instability—as we try to grab

control through domination, or give up control altogether through masochistic

submission, and let others define ourselves for us.

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Contemporary vampire narratives break down the conventional boundaries between
human and monster and good and evil, as the vampires become much more heroic and
soulful than their human counterparts. Many postmodern vampires are thrown into moral
conflicts, questioning their very nature, trying to determine whether they are evil as a
result of their nature, whether or not they are subject to the rules of God and man, and
how they will live their lives. Hollinger sees that the first-person portrayals of vampires
in such texts as Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975) and Rice’s Interview with the
Vampire (1976) are “an inevitable result of the postmodern exercise of decentering”
(200). The vampire, the marginal figure, becomes the focus of the text in the postmodern
world, as well as the focus of our attention. Our interest now is not in the wreckage that
the vampire leaves in its wake, as was often the case in nineteenth century vampire
stories, but the experience of being a vampire—an experience many readers long to know
for themselves.

In Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the postmodernist thought behind the nature of the
vampire becomes apparent. Rice’s vampires wrangle with questions of their own innate
goodness or evil. First Louis in Interview with the Vampire fights against his vampiric
impulses, attempting to survive on rats instead of on human blood. Then in The Vampire
Lpspat, we see Armand and his “Children of Darkness” adhere to ancient rules that
command vampires to act as agents of Satan, living among the dead, and never daring to
enter a church. In (been of the Damned, the absolute origins of the vampire are brought
to light, and the original vampire Akasha awakened. In Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat
tests his own immortality, and in Memnoch the Devil, Lestat travels to Hell to find the

true meaning of good and evil.

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Does being a vampire by necessity make one evil? The vampire Armand led a
generation of vampires to believe that they were so evil that they had to live in
graveyards, stay off holy ground, and fear holy symbols. It gave them a definition of
who they were. When Lestat and his mother/lover Gabrielle come into town, they throw
those conventions to the wind, and these vampires must question their history and rituals.
Hollinger discusses the key differences between Armand and Lestat in The Vampire
L_es_ta1. Armand is “the modernist,” sticking to the conventional belief that vampires are
evil; Lestat is “the ironic postmodernist,” challenging conventions, and refusing to live
his life by any preset rules. For Armand, “absence is paralysis;” when he comes to
understand that there is no truth in the old rules, he does not know how to move forward
(Hollinger 203). He despairs, and begins killing off his followers, forcing them into the
fire, since he can no longer lead them in a world he no longer understands. But for
Lestat, his “existentialism is also a celebration of the absolute freedom that arises from
the suspension of revelation” (Hollinger 203), and he can thrive.

This grappling with identity issues is an appropriate theme for postmodern America,
as we attempt to come to terms with who and what we are, and where we are going. New
definitions of identity are emerging, and the concept of the vampire begins to seem more
and more appealing. Vampires, like us, are shown to have identity issues, yet they have
the power, the strength, and the time to overcome nearly any obstacle. As Margaret
Carter notes, “contemporary writers present vampires as admirable because of the very
traits for which nineteenth-century authors vilified them” (30) — for being different, for
not adhering to social norms, for disobeying moral and religious codes. In postmodern

society, we stress the individual’s right to choose just about any path that they would

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prefer to take, so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. So if a vampire
wishes to exist by subsisting on donated blood rather than stolen, what right have we to

stand in his way?

Carroll explores the question of why the horror genre emerged when it did, and
comments that “the emergence of the horror genre—especially in the form of the Gothic

novel—overlaps with the period that cultural historians call the ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘The

9”

Age of Reason (55), an age in which reason was elevated, and all that was supernatural

denounced as figments of the imagination. Carroll hypothesizes that

It may be thought that the horror novel represents something like the underside of
the Enlightenment. Where the Enlightenment valorizes reason, the horror novel
explores emotions, indeed particularly violent ones from the point of view of
fictional characters. . .or it might be conceived of as a kind of explosion of that
which is denied. (56).

Similarly, we can see vampire narratives in today’s society as an expression of that which
is denied to us, an extemalization of our forbidden desires and inner demons.

Day’s exploration of why the Gothic fantasy appealed to nineteenth-century readers
further illuminates how horror narratives allow us to scare out our own ghosts and wrestle
with our demons:

In the space between the worlds of religion and myth and science, between
romance and realism, between soul and psyche, between inner and outer life,
nineteenth-century readers saw the source of their anxiety and fear, that is, in the
failure of religious, scientific, and philosophical systems to create a sense of
wholeness and unity in the self and in the world, which would have allowed
individuals to define their own existence. The Gothic fantasy occupied this empty
space, filled it through parody of these systematic visions that did not quite
account for the world, and turned the anxiety and fear in that cultural gap into
pleasure, articulating and diffusing the anxiety and fear that called it into
existence. (10-1 1).

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Similar to the existence faced by nineteenth-century readers, contemporary audiences no
longer trust in religion, in science, in government or business. The decline of religion has
led to a disbelief in the concept of the afterlife, something that we used to take comfort
in, which eased our fear of death. Now we no longer have that cushion to break our fall.
Science can no longer be seen as our savior when it cannot cure our most frightening
diseases (such as AIDS and cancer), and instead offers up even greater horrors (such as
human clones and artificial wombs). Small terrorist groups can bring down our largest
buildings, and our government appears defenseless against them. There is very little to
believe in anymore, and much to fear. Vampire narratives can be seen as a way of
displacing our fears of the natural world (terrorists, bombings, anthrax, AIDS) onto a
supematural enemy against which we have a well-established arsenal of defenses—
crosses, holy water, garlic, a stake through the heart, decapitation. We can protect
ourselves against the known evil; it is the unknown evil we have greater cause to fear.

9“

Auerbach notes that traditional vampires clearly defined abilities and disabilities
assured us that if we studied hard we could conquer the unknown and kill undeath” (106).
Theoretically, this would give us less reason to be afraid of vampires. However, in

contemporary vampire narratives, it always seems that at least one of the traditional

methods of dispatching a vampire will fail. In ‘Salem’s Lot, any cross-shaped object can

 

repel a vampire if the wielder believes in it, but if the belief is not there, then no matter if
the cross is consecrated, it will have no effect. This concept of belief is also applied in
From Dusk Till Dawn, where a disillusioned preacher must find his faith in order to bless

the water the group uses to fight off the vampires. We can see this lack of efficacy of

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religious symbols against the vampire as symbolic of contemporary America’s lack of
belief in the power of religion to protect us from harm or save our immortal souls.
Contemporary American culture has made death the last great taboo. Once death was
seen as a comfort—we were at last at peace, on our way to a wonderful afterlife. That
comfort has been taken away through the decline of religion, and the insistence of science
to prolong our lives at any cost—through machines, artificial organs, cryogenics, even
cloning. The vampire offers release from both life and death. Freedom from fear of
death, but also freedom from fear of living—of aging, of dying, of disease, of human
limitations. As Mina says to the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—“Take me away

from all this death.”

The Quest for Identity

The image of the vampire, in its blurring of distinctions, can be seen as representative
of the process of self-definition which we must all go through to become individuals,
distinguishing between the me and not-me. It also presents us with a fantasy for what we
could become, or may simply serve as an outlet to experience the forbidden desires the
self-we-have-become will not allow. By observing vampires, we create guidelines for
how we can define ourselves and, as Gordon and Hollinger suggest, “construct our own
humanity” (5).

Williams discusses how the development of identity has changed over time:

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In the earlier world “identity” came from the family one belongs to, a structure
that both manifests and reinforces the concepts and hierarchies supposedly
reiterated in every order throughout the universe, whether social, political,
theological, or physical. In the newer and contradictory discourse, “identity”
evolves in and through the desiring selfs exploration of the world, in the dynamic
established between self and other, in a difficult negotiation between the pull of
inner desire and outer “reality.” (95).
In postmodern America, our identity is no longer defined by our family, or even by our
role in society. Instead, we must define it for ourselves as we experience the world. The
consumption of vampire fiction can be seen as a method of exploring and developing the
self, of crafting an identity, so that the separation between self and other, between me and
not-me, is occurring not just in infancy, but throughout adolescence, and even adulthood.
Readers engage with the vampire text to gain a deeper understanding of who they are.
They see in the vampire, who casts no reflection, a reflection of themselves—a reflection
of their own self-doubts, and their own longing for control.

Kristeva proposes that the sensation of horror harkens back to that original childhood
trauma of separation from the mother. This separation begins a definition of the self that
continues throughout our lives. The need for distinction between the me and not-me
leads to a reliance upon clear categorization, so that creatures like the vampire, who defy
the clear boundaries of living/dead and good/evil, call to mind that original battle for
definition and distinction. As Williams discusses, “the things we experience as ‘horrible’
evoke that early anxiety about materiality and the borders of the self: between ‘me’ and
the ‘improper/unclean’ . . .horror marks a threat to the bodily integrity of the ‘1’” (75).

The fear of the vampire is the fear of this immateriality—the fear of what lies beyond

death, the fear of what lies beyond our definition of self, no matter if the “other” is also

desirable.

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Heller discusses how the creation of self can be seen as a giving up of forbidden
pleasure:
Psychoanalysts affirm that we begin to construct our identities by forming a
concept of an “I” as separate from everything else. . .we must give up much that is
part of us, for example, the desire to possess our mothers wholly or the continuous
pleasure of passively receiving various stimulations. We gladly give up these
things to become persons, but nevertheless we continue to long for what we have
lost in the process. The forbidden images of the horror thriller offer us disguised
forms of what we have given up, allow a controlled play with these images, and
assist in a repetition of the original repressions by which we gave up those parts
of ourselves. (194).
The images of the forbidden that are presented in vampire fantasies present us with
forbidden potentials and desires that are not currently part of our selves, but nevertheless
enticing. The pleasure of the horror thriller, according to Heller, is to exercise the choice
of becoming a self again, deciding which elements we will and will not incorporate into
our identity. But there is also pain associated with this process, the pain of having to
deny ourselves those forbidden pleasures which are not consiStent with the self-image.
Vampire fantasies can be seen as compensating us for giving up the forbidden as part of
our self-forrnation. We are able to re-experience those pleasures that are morally
inappropriate, which we cannot accept as part of ourselves—pleasures such as oral
sadism, masochistic submission, and sadistic domination.
Day probes the reasons why Gothic fantasy continues to thrive today, spawning new
stories, and new variations on old myths. Day proposes that:
Though the shape of anxiety and fear has changed, these emotions are not gone,
nor have their sources changed. To have dealt with nineteenth-century anxiety
about identity and sexuality does not mean we have come to terms with these
problems; I do not think we can argue that we have solved the problems of

identity and sexuality all that much better than the people of the last century.
(Day 166).

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Despite the advances we have made in science and in society, we still have much to
fear. Despite our more permissive age, there is still much that is forbidden to us. We are
unsure of who we are, and where we fit in. This alienation can lead to a craving not only
for acceptance, but also for power over those who have rejected us. Both men and
women who feel themselves looked down upon or disrespected may long to be in control,
to be able to take whatever they want instead of waiting for it to be given to them. By
engaging with a text that shows us someone who feels like we do—lost and alone, unable
to fit into any well-defined group—yet has power to effect the world around him, we can
feel empowered as well. Vampires offer us different ways to establish our identity—
through power granted to an individual, or through the power of a group which one is
accepted into.

Buffy the Vampire Slam shows Spike’s transition from weak, sobbing, scorned
human to self-confident, braggart vampire. Drusilla finds him in an alley after he has
been rejected by his beloved, and offers to give him “something glowing and glistening.”
She asks him if he wants it. Having no idea what she is offering, he replies, “Oh, yes!
God, yes.” Drusilla’s face changes to her more animal form—yellow eyes, crinkled
brow, and a mouth full of terrible fangs. She bites into Spike’s neck, at which he
exclaims “Ow! Ow! Ow!” but soon his cries of pain subside into moans of pleasure. As
Spike explains to Buffy, “Becoming a vampire is a profound and powerful experience. I
could feel this new strength coursing through me. Getting killed made me feel alive for
the very first time. I was through living by society's rules. Decided to make a few of my

own” (“Fool for Love”).

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A lack of love and commitment in real life, either within one’s family, or in sexual
relationships, can lead to an intense longing for a deep commitment in one’s fantasy life.
Another strong appeal of the vampire is the concept that vampires mate for life, or at least
for several lifetimes. This idea is conveyed in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, The Hunger,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in most vampire romances. The male vampire not only
offers the female victim immortality, but will also always be there to protect her. His
strength is beyond that of mere mortal men. And he has had centuries to perfect his
sexual expertise.

Just as “intimacy and friendship” (Auerbach 14) were the lures of the early literary
vampires such as Lord Ruthven and Carmilla, today the appeal of vampires is not just
power, sexuality and immortality, but also the sense of being admitted into an elite club.
The vampire provides a new family for those with unhappy family situations. Readers
are turning away from the families who raised them, and looking to establish their
identities with a family of their own choosing. Since a vampire (according to most
accounts) is not born, but created by active choice of another vampire, a vampire’s family
is hand-selected. The vampire can choose who its farme is, not be forced to get along
with the family it was born into. The concept is portrayed in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles,
The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Brite’s Lost Souls, and more recently, on Buffy the Vampire
Ska/gr. The act of becoming a vampire allows one to create blood ties with someone who
is not actually your kin. The act of creating a new vampire, giving undead life to a child,
is both destructive and nurturing at the same time. The vampire drinks its victim’s blood,

but then offers its own blood in exchange to complete the process.

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The vampire myth also allows us to envision simplified sex roles which, in our
postmodern age, we may find appealing. As we venture forth into the twenty-first
century, the roles of women and men in our society have become unclear. Men have
typically been the breadwinners of a family, but now that women have entered the
workplace, men are expected to excel not just in the office, but also at home. After the
feminist movement, women are expected to be aggressive and powerful, to ask for what
they want, on top of maintaining the responsibilities of hearth and home. Men and
women alike must assert their dominance in the workplace, in society, and in
relationships in a constant battle to prove their worth. This added pressure for both men
and women can cause them to fantasize about being able to stop fighting, to let go, to
have someone else take control.

James Twitchell discusses the appeal of the vampire to women, questioning, “Why
should the female audience respond to the role of victim?” Why would she want to give
in to a greater power, to submit herself to a situation where she doesn’t know if she will
live or die? Twitchell asks, “Does her passive, even conspiratorial, role support a
chauvinist view of rape, in which the raped secretly encourages the raper?” He provides
the answer, “it may indeed be supported by this myth” (114).

The vampire myth can be seen as the ultimate women’s fantasy. Flynn discusses how
Stoker’s Count Dracula is “the quintessential vampire and symbol of romanticism,
immortality, sexuality, aggression, and power,” appealing to women’s desire for
romance—“his Old World charms and mysterious sexual allure cause heart flutters in
Mina Murray, Lucy Westema, and other women he encounters” (4). But the myth is not

so simple, the fantasy not so safe. As Flynn notes, “the charm and sexual allure are

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merely illusionary. Dracula intends to feed upon his female conquests, and to satisfy his
needs fully, he must dominate them completely, body and soul” (4). By giving into the
vampire, his victims are giving up themselves entirely, completely, dangerously and
irreversibly. Flynn comments that “Bram Stoker’s novel brilliantly explores that
unknown territory of the soul where love, imagination, and mutual satisfaction become
sex, fantasy, dominance, submission, and degradation of spirit—all central to our
understanding of the vampire mythos” (4).

For men, the appeal of the female vampire may be not only the danger and passion
that such a creature offers, but also the fact that she is the predator. Leatherdale mentions
that in Victorian times, “many men must have felt burdened by their sexual
responsibilities, and would have wished, like Harker, to simply lie back passively and
soak up the pleasure” (158). They often acted on these wishes, or openly indulged the
fantasy, as Leatherdale notes, “Victorian prostitutes frequently pandered to male
masochism. . .and underground pornography often catered for masochistic activities, such
as flagellation” (158). Today, both men and women may long for this release. And if
they aren’t so open as to turn to prostitutes or pornography to fulfill their fantasies,
vampire narratives offer a socially-sanctioned enactment of those fantasies that they can
experience vicariously.

Day explores the nature of relationships in Gothic fantasy:

The relationship between self and Other is defined by the struggle between the
impulse to domination and the impulse to submission. ...The pattern of all
relationships in the Gothic fantasy, then, operates on the dynamic of
sadomasochism. One asserts one’s power either by inflicting or enduring pain, or
both. ...The heroine accepts domination, accepts the position of masochist,

because the assertion of her identity, tied up as it is with the qualities of passivity
and respectability, demands she accept this role. (19).

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In contemporary vampire narratives, and in contemporary American society, the female
is no longer required to be the victim, and the male is no longer required to be the
aggressor. In the postmodern vampire mythos, gender no longer matters. The vampire
always plays the role of sexual dominant, whether male or female, and the Victim always
plays the role of sexual submissive, whether male or female. The vampire holds
undeniable power over all it desires, draining the life of its victim until the victim
becomes bound to it for all eternity. The victim is overwhelmed by the overt sexuality of
the vampire, and submits even though this will mean losing his/her own identity.

The audience may identify either with the victim (secretly desiring to succumb to an
all—powerful, voracious, dangerous sexual force), or with the vampire (secretly desiring to
be the aggressor, taking victims by force). The moment of the vampire biting its victim
can be seen as the crystallization of sadomasochistic tension—the victim experiences
pleasure in being taken against her conscious will, the vampire experiences pleasure in
taking from the victim against her conscious will—and the clear symbolism of blood
flowing from victim to vampire in a transference of sexual power. In becoming the
vampire’s victim, the victim may also become a vampire, and thus a sadist instead of a
masochist. Day sees this apparent contradiction as an inherent part of “the
sadomasochistic pattern,” in which “the self is both sadist and masochist, both dominated
and dominator, at once submissive and assertive” (19). Both tendencies lurk within us
all.

Day’s description on the tensions facing men and women in the nineteenth century

can easily be applied to the tensions facing early twenty-first century America:

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The very way in which these people lived posed the questions, What does it mean
to be a man or a woman? What does it mean to be part of a family? without
providing any clear answer. We can see that both these problems share a
common focus and a common axis upon which their answers must turn: sexuality.
An essential part of being human is defining one’s relation to the other sex; a
central part of being human is defining one’s own sexuality. ...Perhaps the great
age of Victorian repressions and willful blindness about the reality of sexuality is
based on the anxiety caused by modern culture’s inability to generate an effective,
humane way of expressing sexuality in the mechanistic, technological, capitalist
world. (Day 83-84).

These same problems plague us today. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing us is
that, in an age of permissive sex, it is far too easy to be sexual, and more and more
difficult to truly be intimate with another person. The vampire fantasy, and the vampire
lifestyle, presents another opportunity for intimacy—sharing blood.
Day discusses the Gothic fantasy as a variation on the romance, where the hero or
heroine descends into the underworld in search of lost identity. The key difference is that
in the romance, the hero or heroine emerges from this experience refreshed, but in the
Gothic fantasy “there is no ascent from the underworld”:
The hero never recovers his true identity. Once in the demonic underworld he
becomes subject to endless transformation and metamorphosis, his identity
permanently and completely fragmented in a world of cruelty and terror. ...The
vampire is the most striking image of a human being fully transformed by the
descent. Both more and less than human, it reappears from beyond the grave, the
walking, if not precisely living, representation of the Gothic world. ...The
descent into the underworld leads to the rejection of human identity and
embracing of the monstrous. (Day 7).

Once we accept the underworld into our reality, we lose touch with our human identity.

This can be seen in those individuals who take the vampire myth too seriously, and

accept it as a part of their life, their identity. Like the hero in the Gothic fantasy, their

identity may be “permanently and completely fragmented in a world of cruelty and

terror” once they have embraced the monstrous, and rejected their humanity.

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Christopher Craft comments on how the “interfusion of sexual desire and the fear that
the moment of erotic fulfillment may occasion the erasure of the conventional and
integral self informs both the central action in _Qrpppla and the surcharged emotion of the
characters about to be kissed by ‘those red lips’” (167). Craft equates the basic fear of
loss of life to a loss of the “conventional and integral self” which clearly relates to why
contemporary readers would find this so fascinating. We work hard to build up a life for
ourselves, a professional and social reputation. But that doesn’t mean that everything we
desire can be a part of the image we have created for ourselves. The fear of the vampire
is the fear of losing respect and dignity by giving in to what we desire. The powerful do
not always want to be in control, the passive do not always want to be told what to do.
The vampire fantasy allows either player to switch positions and imagine themselves as
swept away by all-consuming passion, or sweeping someone else away. In our fantasies,
we can live out the experiences which would be socially unaCceptable in our day-to-day

lives. Vampire fiction and film give us this outlet.

Forbidden Desires

Freud believed that “all human experiences of morbid dread signify the presence of
repressed sexual and aggressive wishes” (qtd. in Melton, Vampire Book 492). In a
society built on monogamy and family, there will always be an enormous surplus of
sexual energy that cannot be expressed, and as such, must be repressed. According to
Freud, whatever is repressed must always strive to return, in whatever form. The morbid
dread we feel for the vampire can be seen as evidence of the vampire as a representation

of these repressed sexual and aggressive wishes.

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Many critics have postulated that vampires represent repressed sexual wishes. Phyllis
Roth states that “vampirism is a disguise for greatly desired and equally strongly feared
fantasies” (59). George Stade comments that “Dracula is the symptom of a wish, largely
sexual, that we wish we did not have” (vi). Similarly, Ursini and Silver note that:
In a totemic sense these undead represent the arch-need of man to purge himself
of his severest repressions, they are tokens through which vicariously the most
sacred of taboos may be violated and sins that cry to heaven for vengeance
committed. They rise up out of men’s hidden fears arfi desires, glorying in their
repulsive appetites and endowed with an epic quality like that of Milton’s
striding, primordial Death. (55).

Leatherdale also postulates that the real source of terror in the vampire story comes not

from the story itself, but “from inside the human mind” (168):
The pea] monster resides within us, the readers. People create for themselves the
monsters they fear out of their unconscious and repressed yearrrings and anxieties.
Fear of sexual punishment and of death mean that—because sexual expression is
linked to the body, which will eventually die—fear and sexuality come into
common focus. Sexual repression in the mind becomes metamorphosed,
transforming itself into visions of fiightfiil beings. (168).

While the images generated by sexual repression are in fact frightful, underneath their

horrific surface, we still long for the dark pleasures they represent.

Robin Wood notes that “the question has been raised as to whether Dracula is really

 

about sexuality and sexual repression, or whether it is instead about the human fear of
death, compensated for in the vampire’s immortality.” Wood concludes “if it is about the
former, it must be also about the latter, ” appealing to “the Freudian theory of the conflict
between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle” to prove this point:
We are born with the Pleasure Principle—the naive expectation of the immediate
and unqualified satisfaction of our desires—and our development grows out of the
collision between this and the Reality Principle, the realization that our desires

cannot all be totally and immediately gratified. The ultimate, irresistible reality,
the ultimate and final interruption of pleasure, is plainly death. (369).

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The vampire demonstrates absolute triumph of the Pleasure Principle—over social
restrictions and moral restraints, and finally, over death.

Freudian psychoanalysis points to sexual perversion as the root of the vampire myth,
and subsequent interest in the vampire. Among the perversions accounted for in
vampirism is incest. One interpretation of the vampire attack is a version of the primal
scene-—the parents having sexual intercourse is envisioned as the father attacking the
mother. The desire to see this scene repeated in vampire fiction and film can be seen as a
desire the child may have had to trade places with the sarne-sex parent—the son taking
the place of the father, the vampire, and the daughter taking the place of the mother, the
victim—playing out what Freud sees as the first and most prevalent sexual fantasy in
human life. These early sexual feelings lead to repression and denial as the child learns
to control its forbidden desire for the parent, but the feelings reemerge at a subconscious
level later in life, and may be vicariously fulfilled through consuming vampire narratives.

Vampires can be seen as symbolizing the fearsome aspects of mature, adult
sexuality—what awaits the adolescent as he or she emerges from the innocence and
nai'veté of childhood. Early on in our lives, the vampire may appeal to our experiences
with burgeoning sexuality, when all sex seems forbidden and strange. Sexual desires
seem beastly in their gross physicality, and frightening in that they cannot be controlled,
yet once explored, are liberating in the euphoria they induce. The movement from
childhood to adulthood is paralleled in the victims’ progression from innocence to sexual
predation. Later in life, the vampire comes to symbolize the forbidden forms of sexuality
which we should not desire, but do, now that “normal” adult sexuality has become not

only permissible, but commonplace.

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In postmodern society, when most sexual taboos have been admitted into the
mainstream, vampires still embody the few taboos that remain. Heterosexual fornication
has lost the stigma it once had, and deviant sexuality must take its place as the taboo.
Vampires in the postmodern age become gender ambivalent, gay or bisexual, and into
kinky, or at least nongenital sex. This association between vampires and deviant
sexuality is not so much about associating deviant sexuality with evil, as it is about
associating vampires with freedom from societal rules.

Freud has noted that “the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their
satisfaction becomes easy” (“Tendency to Debasement” 187):

An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances
to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional
ones so as to be able to enjoy love. This is true both of individuals and of nations.
In times in which there were no difficulties standing in the way of sexual
satisfaction, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilizations, love
became worthless and life empty. (“Tendency to Debasement” 187-88).
This is an excellent statement on the state of affairs today. Now that heterosexual
fornication is no longer taboo, we must find other, more controversial forms of sexuality
through which to get our taste of the forbidden—homosexuality, bisexuality, incest,
sadomasochism—all of which, as Melton notes, are “still considered perverted even by
many who consider themselves otherwise sexually liberated” (Vampire Boopk 269).

The vampire’s attacks have clear parallels to sexual activity. The vampire typically
attacks individuals of the opposite sex, attacking at night, and often approaching its
victims in their beds. The attack is specifically physical—the vampire must press its

mouth directly to its victim’s body—whether on the throat, the neck, the breast, or the

wrist, it is a perverted kiss. For the majority of vampire aficionados, the appeal is

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romantic and sexual. The vampire overwhelms its victim, and that is the most important
aspect of its sexual appeal.
Walter Evans notes that “of all the movie monsters Dracula seems to be the most
attractive to women” (59), commenting that “his appeal is not difficult to understand, for
he embodies the chief characteristics of the standard Gothic hero: tall, dark, handsome,
titled, wealthy, cultured, attentive, mannered, with an air of command, an aura of sin and
secret suffering; perhaps most important of all, he is invariably impeccably dressed” (59-
60). But is its appearance and personality enough to explain the enduring popularity of
the vampire over other monsters such as the werewolf, the mummy, or the Frankenstein
monster? It is not enough that the vampire presents a monster that is simultaneously
human in appearance though corrupt underneath—that has been done before. Skal
observes that while “most monsters take and trample. . .Dracula alone seduces, courting
before he kills” (4). What is unique in vampire narratives is the relationship between the
vampire and the victim.
Andrew Tudor discusses how the threat “posed by vampirism presumes a particularly
intimate relation between vampire and victim:”
Sucking blood from the throat - though it can, and would later, be presented as
both bloody and violent — puts the two parties in an unusually extended and close
relationship. . .and the physical form in which it became conventional to represent
the moment of blood-taking has many of the external signs of the loving and
erotic embrace. There is no need, therefore, to construct elaborate analogies
between blood and semen, as do some psychoanalytic accounts, to establish the
irreducibly sexual character of the vampire/victim relationship. (163).

Tudor points to examples in the 1931 Dracula, where several of the vampire’s

attacks take place when the female victims are lying in bed, “throats bare, arms

lying languidly on the bedclothes, unable and unwilling to resist” (164). Since the

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scenes cut before the vampire bites the victim, what exactly occurs is left even
more open to speculation. Did he only take her blood? Or was there more to it
than that? Also, after each encounter, the women emerge in an “unprecedented
mood of satisfaction and well-being,” as after sexual consummation (164).
Hogan notes that “sexuality, with its connotations of the bedroom, the dark, and
nakedness, places us at our most vulnerable” (91 ). The vampire plays upon all these
fears and vulnerabilities by preying upon its victims at night, in their bedrooms, climbing
into their beds and penetrating their bodies in a very sexual way. The greatest fear,
perhaps, is the element of ecstasy so often portrayed upon the victim’s face—this is what
they most fear, and yet also what they most desire. The audience witnesses the sexual
ecstasy the vampire’s victim is experiencing, and longs for that same release. The
audience sees the sway the vampire holds over his victim, and longs for that same power.
Twitchell discusses our fascination with the vampire myth, focusing on the male
vampire and his female victim:
If you look at the psychodynamics of the sucking within the myth, you will
realize that the woman enjoys it; as a matter of fact, it is highly sexual for both
partners. A rape scene is played out through the gauze of fantasy. There is no
mention of this in the mythography, but it is clear when we study the effects. He
wants her, she may even want him; yet something is terribly wrong something
evil is happening. Hence the audience response to the vampire is wonderfully
oxymoronic: on one hand, the vampire is bad, evil, sucking what he should not be
sucking, being sexual where he should not be; yet it is all somehow very alluring.
(112).

Twitchell makes clear that it is the sadomasochistic nature of the sexuality in the vampire

myth that makes it so appealing—though the audience would never want to admit it.

Twitchell drills down into the core truth of the vampire myth, the unspoken key to the

vampire’s dark appeal: “The myth is loaded with sexual excitement; yet there is no

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mention of sexuality. It is sex without genitalia, sex without confusion, sex without
responsibility, sex without guilt, sex without love—better yet, sex without mention”
(112). At its core, the vampire myth is about the acting out on or submitting to carnal
desire—passionate, violent, ecstatic. And yet the audience is freed from the
responsibility, from the embarrassment, of ever having to admit to wanting to witness or
experience such things. They go for the horror, but stay for the forbidden pleasure.

Riccardo comments on the seductive, sullying nature of the vampire: “The
seductiveness of the vampire only embellishes the evil, for it lures the innocent into the
deadliest of sins. It is the forbidden fruit, the forbidden love, the sensual kiss of death”
(Vampires Unearthed 4). Riccardo notes that “whether or not the vampire is labelled
‘evil,’ the undertones of alluring deadly sensuality will always remain. It is that part of
the vampire image which eternally keeps people coming back for more” (4). Even in
stories with “humanized” vampires, there will always be the element of the forbidden, the
violation of the natural order, if not moral taboos.

Feminist critic Andrea Dworkin comments that vampire sexuality, as presented in

Stoker’s Dracula, sets the stage for “an oncoming century filled with sexual horrorz”

 

...the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act;
slow dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the watching is
sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous,
ruthless, predatory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself
needing blood, someone’s, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by
sadomasochism, bored by the dull thud thud of the literal fuck. (119).

While Dworkin is condemning the state of sexuality today, she is hitting the nail on the

head as to the appeal of the vampire story. Bored with the freedoms they’ve been

allowed to experience in “normal” sex, both men and women want something new to

make it all exciting again. And if they are too tied to tradition to act these desires out in

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their own lives, they can experience them vicariously through watching, reading, loving
the vampire as he descends upon his female victim, offering the ultimate rush of
forbidden pleasure.
Day explores how the Gothic fantasy appeals to its reader:
The exact nature of the Gothic fantasy’s relationship to the reader remains
ambiguous and potentially disturbing. The Gothic makes its appeal to the reader,
not through action, character, ideas or language, but through spectacle. It is
strange and exotic, but its sadomasochistic pattern appeals to the reader’s
fascination with the forbidden, as well as the unusual. (63).
This sadomasochistic pattern and fascination with the forbidden is a key element that
differentiates vampire fiction and film from horror or Gothic fantasy in general. The
vampire is sexy, seductive and supernatural. The vampire, more than any other character
in Gothic fantasy, appeals to us. We don’t just fear the vampire, we desire the vampire,
we desire to be the vampire. The vampire is unique in that on the surface, he appears to
be human—human with good looks, a sophisticated air, seductive charms, and power,
both physical and mental. We fear him because he is stronger and better than us, we
cannot beat him. This is also why we long to either be him, or at least be his chosen
consort.
Devendra Vanna explores the appeal of the vampire, addressing issues which he
believes most scholars are missing—“the covert symbolism of the vampire concept” (19):
The concept of the dead arising from their graves to feed upon the blood of the
innocent and the beautiful is not a macabre but a voluptuous idea. . .his victim has
been lying awake in her bed awaiting his coming. ...She lies in an occult swoon
for her midnight visitor, and awakens in languorous stillness at the break of dawn,
like a sensuous maid after a night of love. ...Evil may be terrible, but it is also
irresistible. Even a loathsome embrace marks the naked cruelty of passion. The

vampire’s embrace may plumb the bottomless pit of damnation; nonetheless, it
ravages the heights of heaven with rage and rapture. (20).

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The idea of the vampire is a “voluptuous idea,” which reveals “the naked cruelty of
passion” and the “heights of heaven.” Varma makes clear the many levels of attraction to
the vampire for a female audience. The vampire seduces our minds as well as our bodies,
pulling us into another realm of existence.

The vampire is the ultimate female fantasy of love and commitment. He has lived
many lifetimes, but never loved, until he finds his one true soul mate, and asks her to
share eternity with him. She is uniquely able to melt the heart of a monster. Being
selected as that special someone means not only will she be loved for all time, but she
also will be beautiful and young for all time, protected from death and disease. Charnas
proposes that the female audience comes to see the vampire as “the distant but dominant
male, the alluring ice-King only awaiting the kiss of life to be rescued from what we
insist on reading as his agonizing loneliness” and to allow ourselves “to indulge in the
victim’s delusionz”

Mine is the kiss that will wake him and release all his powers in positive ways
(perfect love casteth out fear); and how can he help but adore me for liberating
him in this way?—in imagination, without costly error or penalty. The monster is
domesticated, the tiger walks in all his beauty and power tamely by our side, and
we bask in our own glory and in his. (“Meditations in Red” 62).
In this view, the appeal of the vampire can be seen as an appeal of power, both for the
vampire and the victim. To become a vampire is to become all-powerful, but to become
the victim is to control that power, to have that power available to you, on a leash. Every
woman wants to tame the wild male animal.
The emergence of the vampire romance as a distinct genre says a lot about women’s

desire for the dark, forbidden, fearsome stranger. But even in less traditionally

“romantic” vampire stories, this element is still present. In The Vampire Tapestry, a

 

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professional female therapist decides to end her sessions with a vampire by getting to
know his body as well as his mind, demonstrating a “troubling abandonment of
professional ethics [which] erodes her hard-won independent identity” (Auerbach 151).
In Dance of the Damned, the sexually potent exotic dancer still longs to be loved. The
enduring appeal of the vampire story seems to suggest that women want to return to their
submissive roles, no matter what position of professional or sexual power they may hold
in their everyday lives. Williams notes that women’s erotic fantasies tend to focus on
“the sensation of ‘being swept off one’s feet,’ of losing control, but in a context where
such loss is ‘safe’ because of the benevolence of this greater power” (157). This is the
ideal that many women may look for in the vampire fantasy—they are able to submit
themselves to the beast without fear for their life. They can experience all of the ecstasy,
but none of the life-threatening fear.

Skal observes that “the vampire is a spectre that frequently rises at the boundaries of
social, religious and sexual conformity” (12). Vampires can be seen as another example
of a sexual or racial minority, railed against by its opponents through “fearful fantasies of
seduction, transformation, and unholy corruption” (Skal 12). The vampire becomes the
“other,” the other who is attractive to us because he is different from us, because contact
with him is forbidden. Day notes that “we have taken the villain of D_ra_cala and made
him our own, made him. . .one of our images of what we are... an empowering vision of
the self as Other, as Outsider” (146-47). The vampire is not just popular because he
appeals to a primal fear in all of us, but because he also appeals to our desire for ultimate
power, power which we see the “other” as having. Hatlen sees Dra_cula_ as a statement on

sexual politics, demonstrating “our desire (and by ‘our’ I mean middle class whites) to

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‘submit’ ourselves (I am here using the word ‘submit’ in the explicitly masochistic sense
it has acquired in pornographic literature) to—i.e., to be sexually violated by—the ‘dark,’
‘foul smelling’ outsider” (133).

Ernest Jones sees the fantasy/nightmare of bloodsucking as “a regressive mixture of
sucking and biting characteristic of the oral stage of psychosexual development” (qtd. in
Carroll 169). He states that vampirism represents “the more perverse forms of sexuality”
involving sadism and hate. Jones notes that “when the more normal aspects of sexuality
are in a state of repression there is always a tendency to regress towards less developed
forms” (60). The most primitive form of sadism—oral sadism—takes precedence here,
relating back not just to repressed sexual wishes, but to explicitly infantile desires.

Freud observes that “the first and most important activity in the child's life, the
sucking from the mother's breast (or its substitute)” acquaints him with the pleasure of
sucking. At this point in the child’s life, “the child's lips behaved like an erogenous
zone” and “the stimulus from the warm streams of milk was really the cause of the
pleasurable sensation.” At first, oral gratification is based on the self-preservative “need
for nourishment ,” but “ later makes itself independent of it” as this desire becomes more
sexual in nature (“Three Contributions” 586). Vampirism can be seen as a desire to
return to the “oral” stage when the infant derived intense pleasure from first sucking, then
biting its mother’s breast. The presence of the vampire image in so many cultures can be
seen as demonstrating a latent fantasy in all of us to return to a time when we took our
nourishment when we wanted to, when our demands were met with a simple cry, and if

something didn’t please us—we could act out through our bite.

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Brian Stableford refers to a theory originally proposed by Lloyd Worley, in which
“our continued uneasy fascination with the vampire motif may be rooted in that
experience of vampiric existence which we all have as a result of spending nine months
in the womb and a further nine—or more—obtaining nourishment by suckling” (84).
Being a vampire is an actual, physical universal experience grounded in our fetal and
natal lives. We have all been a vampire, absorbing nutrients directly from our mother’s
womb, drinking in satisfaction from her breast. Many images in the vampire myth can be
seen to echo that state of infantile bliss. The vampire suckles nourishing blood from its
victim (most often from the throat, but sometimes from the breast), as the child suckles
milk from its mother. The vampire must rest in an enclosing coffin, within its own native
soil, as the child slept within its mother’s womb. The vampire’s rage, loud and shrill, is
like the cry of the child who does not get what he wants. The vampire’s mesmerizing
power over his victims is like the control a child exerts over all those around him to bend
to his wishes.

Jones proposes that forbidden desires are represented through fiightful images
because “the representation of the underlying wish is not permitted in its naked form.” A
frightful image, such as the vampire, is used to represent those forbidden desires,
becoming “a compromise of the wish on the one hand and on the other of the intense fear
belonging to the inhibition” (qtd. in Carroll 169). The vampire story enacts a latent
desire for sadistic or masochistic acts in our sexual relationships. Watching such scenes
allows us to vicariously experience forbidden pleasure. And yet, the taboo of watching
such scenes, and experiencing such pleasure, makes us afraid. We cannot act on these

desires, we should not long for these things.

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Carroll discusses Jones’s theories in relation to vampires in particular:

For Jones the nightmare and figures of the nightmare like the vampire—Le, the
very stuff of horror fiction—attract because they manifest wishes, notably sexual
wishes. However, these wishes are forbidden or repressed. They cannot be
acknowledged outright. This is where the horrific, repulsive imagery comes in. It
disguises or masks the unacknowledgeable wish. It functions as a camouflage;
the dreamer cannot be blamed for these images by her internal censor because
they beset her; she finds them fearsome and repulsive, so she cannot be thought to
enjoy them (though she really does savor them insofar as they express deep,
psychosexual wishes, albeit in mufti). The revulsion and disgust the horrific
imagery provokes is the price the dreamer pays for having her wish fulfilled.
(170).

We experience fear in order to mask our desire, in order to make our forbidden wishes

more acceptable.

Heller discusses how Dracula grants wishes for his victims, wishes that are “infantile
and individualistic: dreams of gratification without serious regard for the consequences to
others. Gratifying those wishes gives power to the unconscious that can destroy the
wishing individual” (80). This can be seen as true in many vampire stories. In Fright
Night, Evil Ed becomes a vampire, and talks of how powerful he is, then has to be
destroyed. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a childhood friend of Buffy’s with an incurable
disease becomes a vampire in an attempt to cheat death, but as soon as he rises in his new
vampiric form, she stakes him. The vampire story can be seen as a lesson to society to

not allow our forbidden desires to have free reign, but for many, these same stories are

what drive an interest in the alternative lifestyles they will eventually seek out.

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Transcending Reality

Many critics have noted the relationship between horror and the sublime, an aesthetic
experience in which the primary factor is the presence of transcendent vastness or
greatness that generates a feeling of awe and veneration in the observer. Edmund Burke,
one of the first critics to directly link the experience of terror with the sensation of the
sublime, observes that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and
danger. . .is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which
the mind is capable of feeling” (39). However, Burke notes that “when danger or pain
press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at
certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful”
(3 9). We are not meant to immerse ourselves in the sublime. By its very nature it must
be a temporary experience, or it would overwhelm us. It is sublime because it is
contrasted to our daily experience. If it helm; a daily experience, it would no longer be
exhilarating, only terrifying.

HP. Lovecraft postulates that horror can give rise to delight through the sensation he
describes as “cosmic fear.” Carroll explains that “the literature of cosmic fear attracts
because it confirms some instinctual intuition about reality, which intuition is denied by
the culture of materialistic sophistication” (162). Despite our lack of belief in the
supernatural, even in contemporary society, there are things which we cannot explain,
and so always, at the back of our mind is the suspicion that something more must exist,
whether that something be gods, monsters, or both. Carroll discusses readers’ fascination

with horror narratives within Lovecraft’s construct:

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We seek the morbidly unnatural in horror literature in order to experience awe, a

cosmic fear with a visionary dimension that corresponds to instinctual, human

views of the universe. The morbidly unnatural is a means to awe, and is sought

not for its own sake but for that state which it induces in the audience. (163).
People are searching for spiritual transcendence in a time when they have given up on
God and the Church, and are looking for something else to believe in.

Kirk J. Schneider hypothesizes that human interest in horror stems from the glimpse it
provides us into the infinite. Gazing for a moment upon the infinite is awe-inspiring;
however, being immersed in the infinite draws us over the line from attraction to
repulsion. Schneider summarizes his hypothesis:

(1) classic horror (and by analogy the self/cosmic relation) is both ecstatic and
terrifying; (2) the basis for this condition is infinity (or “the holy”); (3) the further
we pursue the ecstatic, the more we unveil its terrifying context; and (4) the
encounter with this context (as opposed to the denial or passive acceptance of this
context) promotes vitality and social sensitivity. (xii).
People seek out horror for the same reason they indulge in deviant forms of sexuality—
they are attempting to make their lives feel more real, more vital, by exposing themselves
to the infinite. Schneider discusses the concept of infinity as the ability to know “total
surrender” or “total dominance” (1). Vampire narratives offer us this glimpse into
infinity through both the passive victim (total surrender) and the aggressive vampire
(total dominance).

Schneider explains the risks of flirting with the infinite:

Celebration. . .is only the initial phase of what can be. On the other side terror
reigns. Ecstasy is a glimpse of the infinite; terror is full disclosure. Ecstasy is
marked by a degree of comfort, innocence, illusion; terror is ultimately bereft of
these. Ecstasy implies some degree of containment or manageability; terror is
unbridled. (1-2).

We can see that this description translates easily to the consumers of vampire

narratives—there is great delight in reading about vampires, in watching seduction scenes

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play out on the screen or in our minds, but experiencing this in real life would be going
too far over the edge of the cliff, descending into terror. There are some who like to tread
this line more closely than others, those who live the life of BDSM or even envision
themselves to be vampires or vampire donors. However, as Schneider suggests, the
safest route is to taste the infinite, but not take too big a bite.

Schneider explores the value of this glimpse into—and pulling back from—infinity
which horror grants us, explaining: “Classic horror. . .underscores the virtue of paradox.
It teaches us that human potentiality (amazement, excitement, freedom) is the flipside of
human anxiety (revulsion, disgust, discomfort) and that boll; are essential for wisdom”
(100). This can be seen as similar to Jung’s view on the shadow archetype. When the
shadow is recognized, it offers us its positive attributes and puts us on the path towards
individuation. Similarly, by understanding our fears and anxieties, we can better achieve

our full human potential.

A common perspective on horror narratives is that they offer a kind of “safety valve”
through which socially unacceptable inclinations can be released without disturbing the
natural order. As Drake Douglas comments, “perhaps, in some small way, the
imaginative, often violent, world of horror provides us with a psychological safety valve,
a mental expression of the hostilities and urge to violence which we must subdue within
ourselves” (13). But the question is, are these inclinations really released in such forums?
Or do these forums only whet our appetite for the forbidden?

Dennis Giles proposes that the film industry offers the viewer “a well-defended
fantasy” in that while it offers transgressive images, and elicits both fear and desire in its

audience, that desire will be “domesticated” and that fear will be “controlled;” overall,

101

“the industry promises a vision which the viewer knows will be psychologically and
ideologically safe” (39). Barbara Creed discusses how “the horror film attempts to bring
about a confrontation with the abject...in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the
boundaries between the human and non-human” (14):

Viewing the horror film signifies a desire not only for perverse pleasure

(confronting sickening, horrific images/being filled with terror/desire for

the undifferentiated) but also a desire, once having been filled with

perversity, taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out, eject the

abject (from the safety of the spectator’s seat. (10).
Riccardo offers a similar argument, saying that “since the vampire is a villainous figure
that we can hate, we can release the forbidden emotions through its image, and cheer
when the vampire is staked, as the inner evils are crushed” (Vampires Unearthed 3).
John Thomas also asserts that “it is through [the monster’s] destruction by fire, sunlight
or crucifix that we are purged of our own fear of the nonhuman. We must therefore
identify with the victims of the movie monster, and find our release in the monster’s
ultimate dea ” (135).

Heller discusses how what he calls “horror thrillers” allow “the real reader to make a
protected contact with that which should not be,” and “by bringing readers into carefully
controlled contact with symbolic representations of the culturally forbidden and affirming
that control, the horror thriller becomes one of a culture’s instruments of repression” (72).
Heller hypothesizes that consumers of horror fiction are therefore better able to repress

their forbidden desires, having achieved release through fiction, instead of through action.

Heller crystallizes his argument in the conclusion of his book:

102

We can take a kind of illicit pleasure in the mere contemplation of these images,
but ultimately they must be put back. Horror thrillers are fairly careful,
sometimes indeed, elaborately careful, to create and maintain psychological
distance between the real reader and the terrifying images. ...The result is a
highly controlled brush with the attractive/terrifying forbidden within the self.
(193-94).

Day states that “the Gothic reveals to the reader the capacity of fantasy to convert the
fearful, anxious, or dangerous into genuine pleasure,” and has “ a therapeutic value” in
that “it converts tension, anxiety and fear—tensions about desire—into pleasure,” the
final results of which is “the taming of fear and the reassertion of the power of desire”
(63). Similarly, Carroll proposes that:

With the onset of the monster in a horror fiction, a cultural space is opened in
which the values and the concepts of the culture can be inverted, reversed, and
turned inside out. This is presumably cathartic for the audience; it allows the
opportunity for thoughts and desires outside the culture’s notions of acceptability
to take shape. But the condition that permits this transgression of the norm is that,
when all is said and done, and the narrative achieves closure, the norm has been
reconstituted—the ontologically offensive monster has been removed and its
ghastly deeds punished. So the norm emerges stronger than before; it has been, so
to say, tested; its superiority to the abnormal is vindicated; and supposedly
wayward, maybe brooding, thoughts and desires—from the perspective of the
dominant cultural viewpoint—have been, figuratively speaking, lanced. (201).
But in vampire fictions, the monster is not always removed at the end, and its deeds,
whether ghastly or not, are not always punished. And the audience, instead of feeling
relief at being released from this dark fantasy world, is left wanting more. Many
audience members leave the theater still with brooding thoughts, and find ways to
incorporate these darker instincts into their everyday lives, whether through dress, action,
or lifestyle. Instead of “celebrat[ing] the dominant cultural viewpoint and its conception
of the norm” (Carroll 201), vampire fictions question that viewpoint and that conception.

Day discusses how, through the Gothic fantasy, the reader is able to explore the

nature of his or her own identity within the limits of his or her own fear and desire:

103

The reader is drawn into the fantasy just as the protagonist is drawn into the
underworld. The reader experiences the Gothic world vicariously. . .the
protagonist’s identity is redefined by the unbounded possibilities of fear and
desire, and the reader is able to explore their limits. This explains the peculiar
pleasure readers take in the painful and frightening events that occur in the Gothic
novel. We do not experience the genuine fear we would upon encountering a
genuine vampire; rather, we experience a mixture of fear and pleasure. . .which
renders the overall experience enjoyable. (63).
As Day notes, “the reader experiences the Gothic world vicarious y.” We do not have to
go out and become a vampire or be attacked by a vampire in order to understand the fear
and desire that would be inherent in that experience. Vampire narratives explore that for
us, and we experience it through them. Within a fictional universe, “the spectacle of
Gothic sadomasochism and horror” becomes “an externalized, public, and thus mediated,
expression of the reader’s fears and desires” which the reader can experience “from a safe
distance” (Day 64). Day explains in more detail:
Readers can indulge in voyeuristic fantasies of their forbidden desires. Readers
can enjoy what they know ought to be feared and rejected without the danger and
stigma that would come from actually acting out such desires. ...The text
extemalizes and validates their fantasies, for their private, inner desires now
appear in a more-or-less sanctioned form. (69).
Day modifies this statement by saying “Of course, most readers of Gothic fantasy don’t
want to do any of these things anyway; they simply want to fantasize about them” (69),
but that is not true for all readers.

There are those for whom the act of reading or watching a movie is not enough to
express their fears and desires. These individuals take the fantasy one step further, and
act out the roles of vampire and victim in their own lives, whether to a small degree, such
as love-biting, or to the extreme of those who live their lives by night, sleeping by day in

a coffin, and drinking their lover’s blood as part of lovemaking. They have not integrated

the fear, but embraced it, making that fear a part of their reality.

104

Vampire narratives allow the audience to explore their forbidden desires within a safe
context, but what the audience does next is up to them. Will they reject these forbidden
images and go back to their lives? Or will they embrace the forbidden? Day discusses
the relationship between reader and text in the Gothic fantasy:

The reader of the Gothic fantasy goes to it as a means of escape from
conventional reality. . .the Gothic spectacle provides escape through the forbidden
and dangerous. The very fact that the reader can find pleasure in it emphasizes
that the genre offers a more subversive and daring type of escape than that
provided by more benign fantasies... The rejection of conventional values is
central to the tradition, and that rejection is direct and overt. However, after
fulfilling the reader’s need, the fantasy returns him to the real world where those
values operate. In part, it does this simply by ending; when the text stops, fantasy
stops. (Day 72).
Or does it? Beyond the vampire lifestylers, there are those who continue the fantasy
through their own writing. A common phenomenon in the age of the Internet is “fan
fiction,” where fans of television shows such as Buffi the Vampire Slayer continue or
extend the storylines in their own fiction, which they then share with other fans of the
show. Similarly, all the discussion groups and Web sites dedicated to both fictional and
self-styled vampires allow the vampire fantasy to thrive and grow. People don’t
necessarily want the fantasy to end, and instead, find other ways to incorporate it into
their lives, to allow the fantasy to continue.

Critics who see horror narratives in general, and vampire narratives in particular, as
simply a way of reaffirming the natural order are missing a key element. The audience
does not simply identify with the victim out of fear for the monster, but also out of a
desire to Q; the victim. And it is not just the victim we identify with, but also the

monster—we desire to be him, we desire his power. This gets at a much deeper

psychological issue. Vampire aficionados indulge in vampire narratives at every chance

105

they get—their unacceptable inclinations are not being purged, but reaffirmed by these
fantasies. We keep going back for more and more. Each time, our desire may be
temporarily sated, but it will never be purged entirely.

If, as Carroll suggests, horror “employs the abnormal, only for the purpose of
showing it vanquished by the forces of the normal” (199), how can stories where the
vampire is not vanquished be so popular? And what of those narratives that portray the
vampire not as evil, but as simply another kind of creature with unique needs? These
vampires toe the line between good and evil, normal and abnormal, by drinking only

blood from animals (such as Louis in Interview with the Vampire, or Angel on Buffl the

 

Vampire Slap/er) or animalistic humans (as in Innocent Blood), or never killing their
victims, but only drinking blood from willing donors. Contemporary vampire stories
make us question the appropriateness of using the word “monster” to label these
supernatural creatures, who may be seen as simply carrying out a different lifestyle. So
how do these stories reaffirrn the natural order? They do not. Instead they serve to make
us question who the real monsters are, these sympathetic, alienated outsiders, or the
lunatics who only by virtue of their biology are labeled human.

In discussing the relationship of the voyeur in Gothic fiction, Day notes that the
voyeur “is inevitably drawn into an active role” (66). Since the consumer of the vampire
narrative is essentially a voyeur of the activities taking place in the story, we can see that
he, too, will inevitably be pulled in. The longer a reader engages with a text, the deeper
he is pulled into the fantasy world, until the fantasy world becomes indistinguishable

from reality. Day discusses this phenomenon:

106

Enthrallment to the spectacle of one’s own fears and desires. . .means that the
voyeur must always join the spectacle first observed from a safe distance. The
voyeur’s power and pleasure are potentially infinite, as long as distance from the
innermost desires of the self can be maintained. Once that distance is lost,
though, the protagonist becomes a participant in the spectacle, which leads to
fragmentation and destruction of the self. (66).
This is not only an issue applicable to protagonists in a novel, but also to consumers of
vampire narratives who take the fantasy too far. An unfortunate side effect of the
growing popularity of vampire fiction and film in our culture is the predominance of
people who take the fantasy to heart. The news is filled with stories of vampire-related
killings. There have always been a few such cases, noted in newspapers since the
nineteenth century. Now the stories are so common they’re quickly forgotten.

What does this mean for our society? Are our fears and desires allowed to run too
freely? Day comments on what the predominance of Gothic fantasies in our lives can
signify:

First, it signals to the reader the problematic status of pleasure in modern culture.
The need for escapist pleasure suggests its absence in the real world, a world that
inadequately satisfies the desire for pleasure. By its content, terror and horror, the
Gothic tells us that this lack, or failure, in the real world generates the pleasures of
terror in the worlds we imagine. The fact that we have come to enjoy fear is a
sign of the dominance of fear in our everyday lives. (Day 68).
Fear is an ever-present element of our postmodern society, when chaos reigns, and the
news each day is filled with vague warnings that we should be on alert, that at any
moment, our lives or the lives of those we love could be blown away by yet another
devastating attack. The world today does not provide us with the pleasure we are

seeking, only an all-too-real fear. Vampire narratives provide an escape from the

everyday fears with fears that are much more attractive. The vampire is fearful, but also

107

powerful. We know what he wants, and what his attack will mean. We are willing to
exchange our real-life fears for the fantasy he offers.

Day notes that the Gothic fantasy “also calls into question the lines between reality
and fantasy, fear and desire, self and Other that exist in our society” (68); as we become
too immersed in our fantasies, we may identify with the vampire so much that we become
him. The Gothic fantasy “asserts the reality and importance of the inner life” yet “reveals
that life to be a dark and mysterious thing, perhaps essentially unknowable, or knowable
only at our peril” (Day 69). By opening ourselves up to our fantasies, we put our own
identities at risk. “Only in the state of voyeurism can one be safe, but again, that safety is
only an illusion,” because once we complete the novel, or the film ends, we are “expelled
from that world back into the reality from which escape was sought” (Day 69). Day
discusses this further:

The Gothic fantasy begins as a flight from the tensions, fears, contradictions, and
anxieties of everyday life and ends by presenting the reader with an imaginary
world in which they are reproduced in monstrous forms. ...What the Gothic
fantasy finally offers the reader is knowledge that we must escape and the images
of what we are fleeing from, but it offers no more than a temporary resolution of
our problem. It tells us that escape is no escape at all. (Day 68-69).
Day states that “the Gothic imagination returns us to where we started with no final
resolution, for resolutions lie, not in the imagination, but in the world in which the
imagination functions” (192). The vampire story may be a release, but it is not, and
should not be, a resolution.

We need to address our fears and desires, accept them, and incorporate them into our

lives in some way in order to truly escape from then. We must acknowledge the

forbidden desires in order to escape the fear. We must recognize the vampire in

ourselves. We must integrate our shadow. Day notes that the Gothic, “through the

108

images of pain, death, and disintegration” reveals to us “the possibilities of pleasure, life,
and wholeness” (193). This is the positive outcome that vampire narratives offer us, if

the fantasy is not taken too far.

Conclusions

We all have an innate fear of and subconscious belief in vampires, as can be seen in
their presence in all world cultures. This may be evidence both of Jung’s conception of
the collective unconscious and Freud’s conception of the uncanny. The vampire is a
familiar image that we know to fear. But if it is so fearful, why is it also appealing? It
could be simply that the vampire represents repressed sexual desires, and that while we
desire the forbidden pleasures that the vampire embodies, our inhibitions are so strong
that they make us afraid. Yet we cannot completely reject these forbidden desires. The
vampire has resurfaced in postmodern America since he represents some of the last
remaining taboos, and violating taboos can be vitalizing. Sadism allows us to reclaim
control in a chaotic time. Masochism allows us to stop fighting, and give in to a greater

power. The vampire offers opportunity for release—whether vicariously, or firsthand.

109

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