But Whinier.
Have I mentioned that people often describe me as “horrid and bloated?”
There’s a segment in Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire where Louis, having broken with Lestat, is traveling Europe in search of fellow vampires. In Rumania, Dracula-land, he finds only “revenants” – creatures much closer to the vampires of Eastern European folklore, with no more mind or personality or sex appeal than a Romero zombie. But why these revenants exist, and why they are so different from the intelligent, ever-so-sexy-yet-utterly-sexless vampires such as Louis and Lestat, is never explained in any of Rice’s novels, AFAIK.
I had a college class on Eastern European Mythology and this is pretty much how the original myth(s) described them. They were often viewed as nonsentient, like zombies in our modern movies. One recommended way to deal with them was to beat them into immobility with a shovel.
Of course that didn’t prevent later storytellers from sexing them up. Remaining available for fetishization are the zombies; any takers?
Sailboat
Yeah, my family came here from Ukraine. I can’t say any of the old country people I knew actually really believed in vampires, thought they did know stories about them. Their superstitions ran more towards believing in things like the evil eye or that a priest could kill you by saying a funeral mass for you.
Reading about vampire sex comes across as gross and skeevy because you’re basically reading about someone else’s fetishized sex fantasies. And, unless you share their fetish, that always comes across as rather gross and skeevy.
I’d maybe wonder where this suddenly large market for vampire fetish sex came from… but then I’d look over at the overwhelmingly huge “romance” fetish sex market (which can be just as skeevy in its attitudes toward sex, IMO).
Friar Ted asks:
Lovecraft’s story is The Shunned House from 1924. When he wrote this, Hamilton Deane’s version of the play “Dracula” was still touuring the provinces, and hadn’t come to London. “Nosferatu” had been released in nGernany in 1922, but I don’t think it had hit the US yet, so Lovecraft had only the novel Dracula and the other vampiric forbears, without the interpretations given by the stage version of Dracula. You can read Lovecraft’s story here, and see that it harkens back to an older tradition:
http://www.eponymous.org/lovecraft/theshunnedhouse.htm
Lord Ruthven , it’s implied, is much more human than previous vampires – as I say above, he’s the first titled vampire I know of, and appealing enough to have won a bride. But he’s not portrayed winningly, certainly.
Cousin!
Here’s a link to my story about my Grandmothers tale of Vampires from the Old Country.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=10170059&highlight=vampire#post10170059
Yep, those are the same old country vampires my folks told stories about. Mindless, or nearly so. Prey mostly on family. Disgusting to see and smell. Nothing remotely sexy about them.
Hey! I don’t care if you found their stories boring; that’s no way to talk about your folks!
Small aside: you live in Wisconsin?
Near the Dells?
On Bray Road?
The Dells and Bray road are a far distance apart. Center it close to Delavan or Elkhorn and give some random reports a distance north and you have it’s area. Delavan was a circus town coincidental or not. Old world Wisconsin isn’t to far away either.
I was wonderin if anybody would catch that.:D:cool:
I think it’s a family of feral clowns or circus freaks from Delavan a hundred years ago.
Or maybe something more skeevy than goths-who-think-they’re-vampires: Juggalo tweekers.