Vampires Before 'Twilight': Hot And Dead

Los Angeles Times:

Vampire stories didn't begin with Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series, Anne Rice's bayou bloodsuckers or even Bram Stoker's "Dracula" in 1897. What one finds, in reading "Dracula's Guest: And Other Victorian Vampire Stories" (Walker & Co. 480 pages, $17), is that these creatures emerged from 18th century accounts of Eastern European peasant superstitions, then got a boost from the Romantic movement, which, as editor Michael Sims notes in his introduction to this 22-story anthology, "objected to evidence-based thinking as arid and godless, and worried that science was fumigating all the fun out of the world."

Read the whole story: Los Angeles Times

Comments

[JohnSawyer]

10:03 PM on 07/11/2010

Human culture has nearly always, and nearly everywhere, been hierarchical, though often to the point of horror: horrific either by its nature--what it does to people (Spanish Inquisition, Aztec sacrifices, and general religious torture); and/or with trappings of horrific imagery (various frightening costumes and masks worn during rituals in primitive cultures, Nazi death's-head uniforms, or externalized horrific "this is what will happen to you if you're not obedient" images of hell; etc.). Most of our current versions of hierarchical culture don't directly incorporate such practices or imagery, or not at the same scale, but one hierarchy, that of the rich and their corporations and politicians, indirectly promotes (and in some cases deliberately embraces) at least one type of horror imagery: that of the vampire/victim system (some willing, some not, some who can't tell the difference), even to the point of popularizing vampires in entertainment, changing their image from the original one of awfulness and being predators to avoid, to one of misunderstood, powerful cool people who have codes of moral conduct, and are passionate lovers to boot, so that their curse of living forever as awful people, has been changed into a virtue. They even have their Renfield, as did Dracula--toadies who don't benefit nearly as much as the upper hierarchies, but are satisfied with being linked to them and eating crumbs/flies instead.

[JohnSawyer]

10:15 PM on 07/11/2010

Vampire literature for some time has presented a world with parallels to our current corporate/serf world: tension between vampire culture and normal humanity, in which humans resist the vampires and their wiles (the role taken in real life by some greedy/amoral corporate heads and their PR/advertising departments), but either eventually fall prey to them, or willingly give in, and after they "cross over", their lives improve in various ways: almost all of them no longer have the "burden" of caring much for humans, with rare exceptions that are supposed to somehow redeem the vampire, and so they too can prey on humans with no moral compunction. The ones that do retain their feelings for humanity, are seen as the ones that good humans can seek to become too--that if they become vampires, proof of their superior moral strength through the transition, is to become one of these sympathetic vampires, and thus their acquisition of eternal life wouldn't be too spoiled by the fact that they're also damned (the role taken in real life by the struggling person who works their way up from some lower socioeconomic level in an attempt to put themselves into some high position, while still retaining their feelings for the little people). That kind of "damned" many people can live with!

[JohnSawyer]

10:19 PM on 07/11/2010

A similar fictional representation of hierarchical "civilization" is The Matrix, in which the machines keep humans in high-tech coffins (a reference to vampire's coffins?) with tubes attached to them, vampirically using their energy to run the machine culture. Here, too, in a sense, the sleeping people in their coffins are semi-voluntarily keeping themselves imprisoned, not wanting to wake up, and instead choosing to support the system. Another model is H. G. Wells' Morlock/Eloi "culture" (though more of a farmer/livestock relationship) in "The Time Machine". The real-life versions of these hierarchies are being implemented using very clever psychological ploys and tricks, incorporating behavioral science (punishment/reward, etc.), advertising, pop culture, aggrandizement of military culture, exploitation of the religious impulse many people have, manipulation of economies, etc.

[marijam]

08:23 PM on 07/11/2010

It's fun and a great way to escape. I get enough of reality, thank you. I'm not into the zombie craze though.

[ptrgamb]

12:24 PM on 07/11/2010

I'm just not into the whole vampire and zombie business. Not one bit. Living and breathing humans are fascinating and sexy enough.