Vampires: What the Hell Happened?

When did vampires stop being monsters? Seriously. If you watch TV and movies nowadays, vampires have stopped being the threat they once were. In fact in many stories they have become the hero. And I have to ask, when did this happen? When did our culture decide that it’s okay to drink blood if you save a couple lives every now and then? I remember watching The Lost Boys and Dracula growing up and there was never any confusion. The vampires in those stories needed to be killed.

Now there was always a bit of a sexual nature in the portayals of Dracula, but he was still a monster. He killed innocent people. There was no illusion that the world would not be a better place if Dracula died. Vampires were horrible monsters and need to be killed. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by Francis Ford Coppola, the character of Dracula even asks to be killed at the end of the movie. He realizes what he is and he tells Nina to chop off his head. He knows he is a monster and accepts it.

Years later we would get the Anne Rice novels. These were vampires a bit more removed from the Lost Boys and Dracula. These vampires were tortured and miserable and only stopped whining long enough to sake their thirst for blood before whining all guilt tripped about living forever. But they were still monsters. Very whiny, effeminate monsters, but still monsters. They were just as deserving of death as their predecessors but sadly no one seemed to have the decency to put them out of their misery in those novels.

Anne Rice’s vampires could have definitely used Buffy Summers, aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The brilliant creation of Joss Whedon, Buffy was the typical high school girl who prior to this would have been the victim of vampires instead was mankind’s best defense against them. As much as I love Buffy, she introduced what was probably the biggest game changer in the vampire mythos. Teen angst. Vampirism and teen hormones seemed to be forever intertwined after miss Summers plunged her first stake and watched her first vamp crumble into dust.

The sexual tension between Buffy and Angel (a vampire who was good because he had a soul) was the beginning of the end for vampires as monsters. Angel was a monster, but he was a monster trying to atone for his monster past. He was determined to be a hero and worked along side his “mortal enemy” for a chance at redemption. And Buffy crushed on Angel hardcore. A vampire could now be someone that you pursued not with the forbidden lust of the past, but with the adolescent crush that everyone has experience at least once in their life.

These vampires scare me for a different reason

And it is because of Buffy that we now have True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and yes, Twilight. Twilight is essentially Buffy without everything that makes Buffy cool. If Buffy had never been a slayer, she probably would have been like Bella in Twilight. Vampires aren’t even monsters that need to stay out of sunlight. They don’t burn, they sparkle. Nothing about the Twilight vampires are threatening. Even the werewolves in those films are cute and fluffy.

There have been brief attempts to return vampires to their monster roots, From Dusk ‘Til Dawn and 30 Days of Night being good examples, but sadly those films did not succeed critically or financially. It seems that the world prefers the defanged and love interest vampires to the blood lusting and scary vampires. I fear the vampire as monster has been staked and burnt away in the sunlight, to never be resurrected.