I was reading an interview with novelist Victor Lavalle in the NYT today & he believes that the popularity of American zombies is due to a lack of ancester worship culture and that “Dracula” was actually about fear of immigration, especially of immigrants preying on women.
Romero zombies to me always represented the fear of death, they are slow and lumbering but in their billions eventually you’ll make a mistake and then…
There is a foreigner theme in early vampire movies, but most vampire movies now no longer have that theme. In recent years vampirism=drug addiction seems to more popular.
I agree that vampires originally were a metaphor for dangerous foreigners. Not just Dracula. You see the same thing in vampires like Carmilla or Ruthven. (Ruthven was nominally English but he had been living abroad and adopted foreign ways which he brought back to England.)
In Dracula, however, the danger was primarily foreigness. In Carmilla and Ruthven, there were also strong elements of implied homosexuality.
As grude noted, vampires are a pretty protean metaphor.
Surrender to a vampire can also represent a surrender to carnality in every sense of the word. Plenty of male adolescents have fantasized about that, and females as well, especially lately.
Zombies are popular because they pose the direct question of what we would do if civilization broke down completely and we were forced to act in ways that might undermine our day-to-day sense of right and wrong. It’s a philosophical question posed under the duress of heavy adrenaline plus our protective instincts.
I think zombies are generally a metaphor for death itself. Like death, they’re just a mindless force that attacks everyone. There’s no malice or planning involved - zombies, like death, are just something that happens. And zombies usually win - like death, they can only be put off temporarily not truly defeated.
Zombie stories are usually about survival… Escaping death. I prefer vampire stories. They are more elegant. I’ve liked some zombie movies but they get too samey.
Oh, yeah, wasn’t one of Anne Rice’s vampires a rock star?
In the 80’s or 90’s, a lot of zombie stories were about fear of AIDS. The Canadian TV show Forever Knight brought that subtext a tad closer to the surface. Gay SFF writers assured me that that insight was old news; they’d read a lot of vampire stories where vampirism as a metaphor for HIV/AIDS was pretty overt.
But vampire stories from earlier decades were more about the dangers of succumbing to primal passions/sex/violence. Reading Dracula, I get the feeling that Stoker was afraid of women.
Zombies, though. I don’t get the fascination with zombies. Maybe the decayed appearance has something to do with fear of aging and the decline of physical beauty?
Not just a metaphor. Some places, people who died of consumption actually were believed to have been vampires, and the bodies dug up and staked. Michael Bell’s Food for the Dead was about such cases in New England.
Cracked After Hours did an episode on movie monsters last Halloween (the uninitiated might find Michael Swaim, dressed as Count Chocula in this episode, to be a bit much, but it’s sort of his schtick in this series). Mostly zombies and vampires.
While his comment seems pretty off-the-cuff and tangential to the question he was answering, the idea that zombie stories work due to a lack of ancestor worship is interesting. I think I’d expand it to the fact that modern American culture is averse to acknowledging death, dead bodies, and the whole kit. We’ve shoved what happens to our dearly departed well out of our day to day consciousness, and it’s bubbled up in zombie lore instead.
But of course, none of these monsters thrive due to a single cultural influence. Zombies also represent the relentlessness of day to day problems, our inchoate fear of environmental disaster and feelings of helplessness about it, commentary on consumerism, fascination with imagining how we’d survive an apocalypse, and an outlet for our underlying violent impulses toward our fellow humans.
Vampires have been about fearing eastern European immigrants, female sexuality, blood borne illness, and being overcome by base carnal instincts. It doesn’t have to be one exclusive thing.