LUCID FORGE

Legends about vampires have been a part of folklore across the “Old World” for centuries; from Mesopotamia to the Holy Land to Ancient Greece and Rome, tales of blood-drinking demons or spirits were common of nearly a thousand years. The word itself dates back to the 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, coming out of the legends, particularly from Eastern Europe, about human looking creatures, bloated and purple from the drinking of blood with grown teeth, nails and hair.

It took Bram Stoker to wrap his head around these myths and legends, publishing the first, best vampire tale of the modern era: Dracula, in 1897. The Transylvanian Count captured the imagination of readers globally, and when film became the predominate entertainment medium vampires thrived there too. Dracula is only second to Sherlock Holmes as the most filmed character in history. According to the Internet Movie Database nearly 200 films have featured Dracula as a main character and nearly 1,000 films have referenced vampires as a people.



In recent years though, the vampire has been supplanted by the zombie for the horror movie monster of choice, although some exceptions exist. Last year’s 30 Days of Night, based on the graphic novel of the same name, was about a group of vampires that descend upon an Alaskan town to feed on the residents during a month long darkness. But those vampires were hardly the cloak-wearing, gentleman scholars that we normally think of and instead were nearly mindless, blood-thirsty savages that have more in common with the hordes of 28 Days Later, then Bela Lugosi.

But at least 30 Night featured vampires being vampires: coming out at night, attacking people and drinking blood. Action movies like Blade and Underworld used vampires, and other creatures, to varying degrees of success, but both were more concerned with about creating cool fight scenes and deconstructing the vampire legends for modern audiences. Think the vampire cabal in Blade where they control a wide swath of business interests and dabble in genetics, or the instrument of choice to kill vamps in Underworld: a sunlight-filled bullet.



But what’s interesting is that if you look at both Underworld movies, you can easily count the number of times one of the vampire characters bite a human: once, and even then it’s not to feed. So what went wrong? How did vampires lose their big screen mojo? And perhaps most importantly, how do they get it back?

Perhaps it begins with a couple of very high-profile projects, one for the small screen and one for the big. The former is Alan Ball’s new HBO series True Blood and the latter is the film Twilight based on the best-selling novel of the same name. Actually they’re both based on book series with Blood being taken from the “Southern Vampire” novels written by Charlaine Harris, but by far the best known is Twilight, the success of which has awarded author Stephanie Meyer the title of the next J.K. Rowling.

Twilight is, to phrase it politely, a very girly book. It’s a tale of teenage romance as muddy as anything from Dawson’s Creek, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The massive success of Twilight and its follow-up novels New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, is driven in no small part by a loyal fanbase of young, female readers; although there is a pretty strong contingent of male fans too. The appeal of Twilight is not hard to see. It’s the story of boy meets girl, et cetera, et cetera… except the boy has been 17-years-old for nearly a century, has the rare ability to read minds, and lives with an adapted family of fellow vampires on the edge of town. The girl is Bella, a transplant from Phoenix, AZ. to the significantly smaller and climactically different Folks, WA. The novel’s told from Bella’s point of view as she falls deeply and hopelessly in love with the boy, Edward. When it comes to the vampires of Twilight though forget everything you know, the only rule that need still apply is staying out of sunlight, but not for the reason you might think. In the direct sunlight, the skin of a vampire, as Bella explains: “Edward in the sunlight was shocking. […] His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of diamonds were embedded in the surface.” So vamps stay out of the sunlight not because it hurts, but because they’ll be instantly recognizable. These and other scenes have many a Twilight fan giddy with anticipation, and are probably grateful to that other literary adaptation, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when it pulled stakes to next summer, freeing the schedule for Twilight to open three weeks earlier.

The film is being directed by Catherine Hardwicke from a script by Melissa Rosenberg. Both women know the young mind, Hardwicke as the director of Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown and Rosenberg was a writer on The O.C. and screenwriter on the first Step-Up. Kristen Stewart (Into the Wild, The Messengers) will play Bella and Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) is Edward. The excitement is very high for this film; the hype is almost as big as it was for the first Harry Potter film. As Hardwicke told Entertainment Weekly this summer, she had “old ladies saying, 'You better get it right.’”

Operating only slightly more below the radar is True Blood. On the one hand it’s based on Harris novels, which have a cult following but haven’t transcended the mainstream like Twilight. But then those novels became the foundation for Alan Ball’s follow-up series to his critical and commercial acclaimed Six Feet Under. The appeal must have been obvious for Ball, after six seasons exploring the lives of a family in the mortuary business, what more natural next step could there be but to look at the lives of the undead. In True Blood, a Japanese scientist invents synthetic blood. Obviously, this has a wide-spread positive implication in the constant need for blood to transfuse, but it also allows vampires to reveal themselves to the public at large; “come out of the coffin” as it were. The small town of Bons Temps, LA. is like anyplace post-vampire-coming-out, America, there’s religious intolerance on one side, while the government works to secure vampire rights on the other. Amongst the social and cultural minefield is Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a mind-reading waitress, and her boyfriend Bill Compton (Stephen Meyer), a 173-year-old vampire. Obviously Ball is playing with some social parallels in drawing the tapestry of the series. Accompanying the promotion of True Blood are a pair of viral websites. One for the American Vampire League (http://americanvampireleague.com/), which is fighting for the passage of the Vampire Rights Amendment, and the other for The Fellowship of the Sun (http://fellowshipofthesun.org/), who believe the opposite.

The Fellowship’s website says, “The Fellowship of the Sun (FoS) is a grass-roots organization pledged to protect humanity from the vampire scourge. These Creatures of Darkness (CoDs) threaten not only our very existence with their perverted craving for human blood, but they also undermine our way of life, sullying our communities with their routine acts of hedonism and cruelty.” And in another post they say that, “Vampires infiltrate Hollywood to glorify their obsession with sex and violence.”

The AVL’s mission statement is “To eradicate the fear and hatred of vampires that is caused by both widespread misinformation and an entire race's punishment for the crimes of a few.” The message is from Nan Flanagan, a vampire advocate, who ends her message saying, “To humans we say: Vampires are your neighbors, your nightwatchmen, your ancestors. And to my fellow vampires: It's time we all come out of the darkness. Let's learn to live together without fear.”

Heady stuff for a vampire series, but both True Blood and Twilight play with an element of moral ambiguity in regards to their risen-from-the-grave protagonists and others of their kind; in these worlds vampires can be good, bad or indifferent – in other words, like humans. Previously, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel played with these notions a lot, creating a more well-rounded vampire that has to deal with jobs and relationships and struggling to find a place in the world beside that which has been carved for them.



Back in Stoker’s day, the vampire was a personification for Victorian notions of repressed sexuality. It comes as no surprise than that as sex struggles to find its “proper” place in our modern age that vampires struggle as well to retain their footing. Is vampirism a metaphor for addiction; a self-destructive habit that leads to a dangerously altered personality, like Blade? Are they a pastiche for the faceless puppet masters we feel control our lives without our input? Or are they simply their own unique ethnic group trying to find their place in the melting pot of the modern world?

Basically, vampires will continue to serve whatever purpose we see fit to foist upon them. Now and in the future, they’ll remain a point of fascination for us, their human prey, in whatever form they take.

True Blood airs on the Movie Network Sundays at 9 pm
Twilight will be released in theatres on November 21st.