baD kARmA INk

I’m tired, really fucking tired of hearing about Twilight. I mean, I know it’s kind of a Young Adult thing, so I can forgive the shitty writing, etc, but there are somethings that I cannot forgive. Now, I’m not going to give into my instincts and just say “you’re a fucking idiot for being an adult and reading religious propaganda drivel meant for fucking children”.

No, I’m going to take the high road.

As an adult, you really should realize why Twilight is a shitty little story for teenage girls, but, as I’ve learned over the years, folks need to be shown the alternatives. As such, I’m going to tell you about vampire tales that are better than Twilight, and I’m going to give you some background on the vampire, both the old legends and the modern myth, and why, even though these stories are better than Twilight, they are responsible for the environment that allows bullshit like it to be published.

Back in the Day…

The current state of the vampire myth can solely be placed on the shoulders of Bram Stoker.

Before Dracula, vampires came in many forms. Almost every culture has a vampire type myth. The common denominator is simple: a person sucking the life out of another person. The fear is that they are being preyed on by one of their own.

Unfortunately, for the people that want to believe in vampires, that’s where the similarities end. The idea that there is a breed of critter out there like a vampire is appealing to a certain set of folks and a common legend among many cultures would be decent evidence.

Instead, the legends come from a common fear: that one of your own is capable of killing a fellow tribe member. Probably the very definition of paranoia, this fear of your fellow man lead to some seriously imaginative monsters.

Personally, I like this diversity. For example, there were the the tlaciques or tlahuelpuchi of the Nahuatl, who were witches that changed into blood drinking turkeys, the chordewa from Bengal who could turn into a vampiric black cat, and the Russian upyr that preferred children as their main course with their parents for desert.

There were also a bunch of different ways to become a vampire also. One legend has the improperly disposed of bodies of werewolves returning as vamps. Speaking of wolves, if you were in Greece and ate a sheep killed by a wolf , then you came back as a blood sucker.

A lot of times, you could become a vampire out of sheer bad luck. Take the ustrel. If you were a Christian child in Bulgaria that was born on a Saturday but you died before you were baptized, you’d dig yourself out of your grave after nine days and proceed to feed on cows until the heard was lead through some fires where the heat made you fall off and were stuck in the field until you were eaten by a wolf. Kinda makes you wonder what they are smoking in Bulgaria.

It’s all Stoker’s fault, sorta.

That being said, Dracula itself wasn’t what gave us the posh, aristocratic, romantic vampire. That can be traced back to “The Vampyre” first published in 1819. However, Dracula was the one that popularized it.

Bram Stoker was in the right place at the right time. The industrial revolution was also the birth of mass media. Automation made cheap, easy printing possible. Because of which, Dracula was readily available. Add in the fact that Stoker was also a playwright, and you have an early multi-media marketing campaign.

Mass availability helped, but I doubt that it would have been as popular without it being a reflection of the times. Horror is, after all, relative. In the Victorian Era, there was very few things scarier than sex. Well, the idea of sexuality.

With sexual repression a HUGE part of the times, the idea of a man stealing his way into a woman’s room was both scandalous and irresistible. Humans, by nature, love the forbidden, and that veiled sexual act was a big hit. But even then, Dracula was not the first to do this. Most notably “Carmilla“, published in 1872 predates Dracula by 25 years and is about -gasp- a lesbian vampire.

All of these factors lead to Dracula becoming the seminal vampire story archetype. No longer was the vampire a myth, a monster, and had tales told round the hearth to keep the kids from wandering around at night. No, the vampire had become an object of lust, a dapper nobleman capable of sweeping the weaker sex off their feet, leading to over a century of good looking, sexual bloodsuckers.

However, the first Dracula movie almost changed that.

Next time, Nosferatu.