Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows that Vampire lore is all the buzz in almost every media medium. Most recently: Twilight (plus the 3 sequels in both book and movie format); True Blood (HBO); Vampire Diaries (on the CW of all places); Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The Historian (book that loosely follows the history of Vlad the Impaler); Interview with a Vampire; all the way back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There are all sorts of other vampire-related books and such. The common theme for most of these stories involves forbidden love between vampire and mortal. Usually there is some vampire who decides to buck the trend of using human blood for food (for moral reasons of course) and winds up falling in love with the thing he’s supposed to eat. Taking it out of a mythological level, that would be tantamount to a regular person falling in love with …say, a cow.
Alright, so I’d rather not spend most of my time commenting on the specifics of each of these stories. Instead, I find it fascinating to consider why these stories are so appealing. At least to most of the female population. Vampires are always depicted as these extremely sexy, confident, overwhelmingly perfect beings with the drawback of an appetite for blood that is somehow only mildly repulsive in combination with the other things. They have the added bonus of always being extremely intelligent, because they live so long and all. I’m beginning to think it would be hilarious to for once have a vampire depicted as a fat slob who is extremely insecure and has not taken any time to enhance his intelligence over the many years he’s been dead. Its kind of crazy that absolutely without fail ALL vampires are ripped. Does that mean that vampires have discerning tastes and only prefer to drink fit people blood? What if fat people are like junk food?
Okay, sorry, got lost there. What is mind-blowing is how long the vampire legend has been perpetuated. It goes all the way back to Mesopotamia. For the most part through history it has been used as an excuse to get rid of people that didn’t fit the norm of society. Women who didn’t get married due to refusing to be subservient or something like that, were conveniently burned at the stake for being vampires. Sounds a lot like the Salem Witch Trials, something else I found fascinating and will probably talk about another time. Btw, this is a good site to check out on all things Vampire, its pretty much someone’s dissertation on the subject.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~elektra/thesis.html
Somewhat interesting is the fine line drawn between the way a vampire eats, and that of a cannibal. There is not much of a distinction in my opinion. Think about it, cannibals eat humans. Vampires drink human blood. Yet cannibals are not nearly so appealing to modern society. Don’t get me wrong, I am not remotely endorsing a cannibal craze. I’m merely pointing out that Vampire eating habits should greatly diminish the allure of the Vampire.
If anything, vampires have staying power, this much is certain. I won’t lie, it is a form of escapism I enjoy for the most part. Its difficult to explain, so I won’t try much longer. I think it is just really fun to imagine our world is less one-dimensional. That the inexplicable can exist and can defy the laws of nature. Beyond that, its thrilling to imagine that same nature-defying force being a super hot guy that decides he’s in love with me and will go against his very nature to be with me…:) Yep, I’m a fool and I love mythology.