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After seeing Sinners this week, I’ve found myself thinking about vampires here and there. Now, vampires are not my favorite type of monsters or horror tale, for me that goes to the ghost story. In fact, most vampire movies leave me cold. I am in that minority that actively dislikes The Lost Boys and count myself among those who read Interview with the Vampire in hardback and had no interest in any other book in the series.
What I do find fascinating is the way the vampire is used by so many creators with so many different attributes.
Until Stoker came along and published Dracula in 1897, the nature of vampires varied a great deal by regional folklore. Stoker in his research gathered the aspects he liked and wanted, discarded many others, and created the template that so many others would follow or deliberately shatter.
Vampires are the dead reanimated. This makes them cousins to the post-Romero interpretation of the zombie and a more distant relation to the traditional version. In modern culture I have seen the two as opposite sides of the same coin. Vampires, as we often depict them in movies today, are the ultimate expression of individuality, iconoclasts surviving and preying upon a larger society that they no longer are a part of. Zombies are the unnamed, undifferentiated great mass, they are the faceless crowd where absolutely no one is special.
Vampires feed on blood. In folklore this is often shown as an unending hunger with the beasts when located in their graves or tomb bloated from their gorging. This is not sexy and is rarely if ever shown in film. By the time Buffy the Vampire Slayer arrived in the cultural scene blood had been reduced to a mere nutrient with any animal’s blood sufficing to meet a metabolic need that remained inexplicable.
Vampires are destroyed by sunlight. This is not found in Dracula where the count walks about in the daylight but with greatly reduced abilities. Count Orlok’s destruction with the rising sun in Nosferatu set the standard followed by countless films with his gentle fading eventually giving way to explosive detonations in Near Dark. Sinners settled for simple combustion.
Vampires cast no reflection. This is another classic aspect and one that gets upgraded to the contemporary times with the creatures often not appearing in video or film. The British limited series Vhad a secret agency hunting the vampires using pistols that had small video screens attached to allow for rapid identification of their targets.
Vampires must be invited into a space. This aspect comes and goes. Some creators use public spaces like a club or a store are having open to all invites while retaining the restriction for private areas, some dispense with it entirely. Buffy’s force field at the threshold always struck me as a little over the top, while Sinners played a much more subtle action where it was clear the vampire desires to enter but simply doesn’t actually try until invited.
The most problematic and yet widespread aspect of the vampire is the repulsion by a cross or crucifix. Traditionally this is straightforward Christianity, the symbol of the power of a real god and his manifestation in the world of the living acts is a shield against evil and a promise of eternal life not damnation for his believers. As society secularized over the decades, the ‘reality’ behind the cross’s symbolism faded with most creators supplanting a ‘truth’ of the Christian religion with the power of faith by the wielder.
By the time we get to Buffy, the cross itself is simply another talisman wielded by non-Christian with equal efficacy. Sinners wisely dispenses with this aspect entirely, a vampire wearing a cross has no particular meaning and a vampire can easily repeat the Lord’s Prayer without any ill-effect.
I would suggest to anyone thinking about crafting a tale with vampire think deeply about not only which aspects to include but also to why those aspects apply.
