I credit Bela Lugosi and Universal's classic horror franchises with the popularization of the vampire. There had been prior vampire movies, but Lugosi brought something to the creature. I've heard some say it was sexuality but I'm not from the thirties and I'm straight, so… If you've seen the movie, a creepy charisma is clearly evident. I don't mean to detract from the source material. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula is a classic. It's a little clunky to read, but again, that was a different era in books. If Universal's movie adaption had failed, I'm not so sure we'd have vampires on Sesame Street or on cereal boxes. I don't think my horror DVD collection would be so chock full of vampire variations.
When I was about seven years old, I insisted on dressing as a vampire for Halloween. I had a love/hate relationship with scary movies at that age. I loved to watch them on Saturday afternoons with my dad during the Saturday Thriller Double Feature, but I hated having watched them later that night. A vampire seemed like a cool costume. It was one of those classic plastic jobs with the picture of whichever character you were supposed to be on a colorful smock. The mask was that classic white-faced vampire with the hairstyle that came to a point on it's forehead, the one that never actually appeared in a movie but somehow became iconic. It was probably the cape that actually sold me. I wore the costume with pride that Halloween.
Like my love/hate feelings on horror movies at the time, I didn't much care for the costume residing in our house afterward. I didn't even like it when my parents hid it in the attic. I knew it was up there, and it scared me.
It didn't help that there was a guy in our neighborhood that built a fake coffin that he propped up in his front yard every year on Halloween night. He'd dress like a vampire and jump out every few minutes. As a kid, even when you know things are make-believe, your imagination often wins out in the wee hours of the night.
It was also around that time that I was in a supermarket checkout lane and I read a tabloid headline that claimed a real vampire had tried to abduct a young lady in Boston. The police had tried to arrest the monster, but he had eluded capture. Because I didn't understand that tabloids weren't actual newspapers, you can understand my terror.
What I'm getting at is, vampires used to be scary. I certainly never wanted to be a vampire as a kid. The supposed benefits to being undead were lost on my young mind. To me vampires were just soulless blood suckers.
Thanks to Anne Rice, vampires gained some humanity in the seventies and eighties. She played up the 'immortals with a conscience' angle. She made them alluring in a new way. Up until that point vampires had been metaphors for powerful men and night time, often bedroom oriented, activities, but Rice seemed to beg the question, don't you want to be that powerful man having the night time rendezvous? What if you could choose to only attack evil people, or better yet, animals? She had a great series of ongoing novels with evolving characters and plot lines. They really were well done.
This brings us to our current vampire craze. As a horror fan, I can hardly complain. I may not be thrilled with every aspect of it, but vampires are clearly popular right now.
My wife is in love with more than one series of vampire novels. I have to praise the Twilight series for that. I prefer the books that inspired the Tru Blood cable show.
I'm not so sure Twilight does much for the vampire as a monster, horror icon. Stephenie Meyer has taken most of the fright and bite out of her monsters and left them with all of the benefits, immortality, strength, speed, glitter skin.
Don't get me wrong. I get it. The series is really more about the somewhat plain teenaged girl winning the undying affections of more than one man. She's elevated to such high importance that huge, war-like battles are fought because of her. In a lot of ways it's a great and wonderful thing for those that enjoy it.
As a horror, vampire fan, Twilight leaves me cold so far. Vampires that walk around in the daylight are nothing new, but I don't get the glittering. Their bodies being hard as stone but burning like dry kindling is kind of confusing too. Racially specific werewolves? Teenaged girls causing monstrous (or is it monster full?) turf wars centered on small Alaskan towns where everyone wears grey and paints their houses varying shades of grey?
I'm not sure if Lugosi and Stoker would be proud or perplexed.
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