The Burr in the Burgh

You’d have to try pretty hard not to notice that vampires have invaded our popular culture to an astounding degree in recent years.  What’s up with that?  Vampire legends have existed in many cultures for many centuries and there have been quite a few variations along the way.  Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, came out in the mid-19th century but it was not the first, or even the best, vampire novel by any stretch.  Dracula became a stage play and then was translated to film in 1931 by director Tod Browning and starred the iconographic Bela Lugosi.  Probably most of what you think you know about vampires originates with this 1931 Hollywood production.  I’d have to write a pretty big book just to summarize all the vampire films that have followed since.

So what is the appeal?  To get to the answer of that question, we first have to realize that the vampire is a very malleable cultural symbol indeed.  It takes many shapes and can carry many meanings.  So the appeal will vary.

Nowadays, you may not realize this but the biggest demographic of vampir-o-philes is adolescent girls.  A lot of the young adult books, television shows and movies about vampires today emphasize the romantic element.  So for this group, the vampire represents love and secrecy and mysterious suitors.  There is also something about girls being attracted to tortured men they are never supposed to have.  These are the newer hipper version of harlequin bodice-rippers.

In many familiar expressions, vampire stories are more directly about sex.  Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel and the films derived from it utilize the vampire mythology as a metaphor.  Instead of explicit depictions of sex acts, there is another form of physical intimacy, an intimacy both frightening and appealing.  Please forgive my language, but with the vampire there is bodily penetration and a powerful, though dangerous, exchange of fluids.  Big surprise that writers and filmmakers have used this to their pecuniary advantage.

Sometimes social justice is the theme du jour.  Vampires are highly adaptable metaphors for any marginalized group.  Thus vampire stories can be thinly veiled social commentary about racism, homophobia, et cetera.  The hit HBO series True Blood fits into this category neatly.  It is a supernatural civil rights dramedy where the vampire scenarios represent the contemporary homosexual political agenda.  Set in the Deep South, filled with bigots and fundamentalists, it offers an updated and slightly modified retelling of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s for racial minorities.

In a similar, yet very different vein, the Swedish novel and film, Let the Right One In, uses the vampire metaphor to dramatize the isolation and loneliness of adolescence.

One of the most theologically enlightened vampire movies (never thought you’d read that sentence dija?) is called The Addiction and stars Lili Taylor.  Here vampirism represents the consuming and controlling nature of original sin.  As one character states, “We are not sinner because we sin; we sin because we are sinners.”

Other times, the vampire effect is explained scientifically as a virus of some kind.  Cf. I Am Legend, 30 Days of Night, & Guillermo del Toro’s recent novel, The Strain.  The power of the themes of contagion and contamination should be cruelly obvious to us as we brace ourselves against threats of bird flu, SARS, H1N1, et al.  You’ll be seeing lots of rampant diseases in television and movies for a while, I predict (even as we have for some time now).

Some of the more perceptive artisans have emphasized the blood motif.  It seems that man has a natural understanding of the significance of blood as it pertain to life and eternal life.  Also atonement.  Certainly the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures attest to this:
•    “The life of a creature is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11).”
•    “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22).”
In this sense, even the most hideous stone-aged animists are more sophisticated than antiseptic modern spiritualities.