The Post Modern Vampire
I am part of a email discussion list for “fans of vampiric lore and fiction”, and have been for quite some time now. Recently there has been some discussion on the modern fictional vampire, essentially a “tiger or pussycat” debate relating to the relatively recent transformation of the vampire from a “purely evil” villain to a cypher/totem for the “angsty-goth” ethic.
One poster on the list (who has been on the list roughly as long as I have, which is about 15 years… [hey man, I've been on the net since before the net was the net, knowumsayin'?]) posted a truly excellent commentary on the state of the post modern vampire, and with her permission, I am presenting it here for your reading pleasure.
Two notes: if it seems to start abruptly, that’s because I excised a sentence or two of out-of context lead in; in addition, all formatting, footnotes, and [bracketed text] are my additions.
Let’s jump right in. I give you, gentle reader, my very first Guest Blogger, “the SealWyf“:
Vampires, to have any psychological depth at all, have to have something to do with death.
More specifically, they have something to do with the death of loved ones, and the fear and guilt we bring to them. In a primitive society, this will include the anxiety of dealing with the corpse. Here’s the person you loved, and now they are a decaying lump. The beloved has become something disgusting. You want them back… but what if they really did come back, decay and all? Add [vampire lore scholar] Paul Barber’s* observations on the behavior of actual human bodies, and you get the basis of the folkloric vampire.
Now our dead are sanitized for us. You may see them (briefly) in the hospital, but then the professionals take over and they are delivered back to you as a wax doll or a bag of something that looks suspiciously like Portland cement. (So little left of a man….) So the physical horror of the corpse is no longer such a part of our life. But the rage, the guilt, the longing, the regret, are all still there. Perhaps moreso — we no longer send them off with a wake.
That’s not to say you can’t add more layers to the basic emotion. I’ve always maintained that Dracula is about the consent to evil*. (Mina and the Count being the axis of that particular reading.) [Anne] Rice’s Interview is about the loss of a child (her own, the model for Claudia), but also about being alien. (That’s a theme she treated in her non-vampire works as well.) Layers work. Life is complex, and we are complex enough to handle it. A one-note song is boring.
But once you remove death-anxiety from the vampire story, the emotional core is gone. It becomes thin and hollow, hip and cute and shallow and pointless. (”Mosquitoes with a back-story“, as James Lileks would say.)[...]
Been there. Done that. Got the Miskatonic U. tee-shirt.
* Paul Barber is a noted scholar of vampire lore and legend, probably best known for his seminal work, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. SealWyf is referencing Barber’s discussion in that book of how the physical processes of decomposition and death, such as the tendency for blood to pool in the body cavity, or of hair and fingernails to continue to grow after death, contributed to the formation of vampire superstitions..
* In college I wrote an research paper on a very similar theme, entitled something like “Evil as a Seductive Force in Dracula“. Sadly I no longer have a copy of the complete work; but I did recently find a partial draft, which I may clean up and post later.
