What have they done with Vampires?!!

Cafe Society
1

I watched the Deadliest Warrior Vampires vs Zombies and found out some truly depressing things that have recently happened to my favorite bloodsuckers. Now instead of the classic vamp fangs, they just have a mouth full of daggers…WTF! I don’t watch modern horror movies, mainly because they have no horror and are all about the gore, to me they should’ve made another category for the gory shit and left horror alone…even suspense/ thriller seems to be gore focused. Putting that aside, however, now they’ve amped up the gore factor for vamps, they just rip the side of your neck open (a lot like zombies IMO), and drink from a gushing wound, plus, vamps are no longer seductive…again: WTF!

I remember the good old days, when vampires were horrifically charming, you actually wanted Bela Lugosi to sink his fangs in you (or at least the ladies did ;)). Back then, they didn’t even show blood, and I was almost convinced that vampires didn’t even swallow the blood, they just sucked it through their teeth like they were straws or something and it went directly into their veins. Vampires, IMO, also get stronger as they age, increasing their strength and vampiric powers, even in Anne Rice’s books vampires could reach un-imaginable levels, and when they’d sleep for a couple centuries, they’d awaken when multiplied abilities. Which brings me to my next concern, specifically about the Vampires vs Zombies episode, if the vamps were really old and had extreme power, they’d hardly be threatened by a few walking stiffs, in fact it wouldn’t matter how many zombies there were, one vampire ancient could take on an infinite amount. Contrary to Anne Rice, I like to think that an old enough vamp can venture out into the sun without risking anything more than a sunburn, which would heal after stepping out of the sun for a bit, especially after some feeding :).

I realize this is a silly thing to even discuss, vampire lore changes of course, as does any lore, but these movies, like 30 Days of Night (which I didn’t even realize was a vampire movie since I’ve never seen it), they’ve taken these elegant creatures and turned them purely into monsters, not that they weren’t already, but now they’re just barely above zombies anyway. If their only thoughts are for feeding, then there’s little left to set them apart in the monster world, they might as well be werewolves.

Thoughts? Am I just holding on to something that’s as dead as these mythical characters? Opinions on 30 Days of Night and movies like that?

2

I don’t think anyone was in danger of being charmed by this guy. So the idea of a more monstrous, less charming vampire is hardly new.

3

There’s lots of different interps of vampires, and always have been. There are vampires that are pure monsters (nosferatu). There’s the Dracula-type sophisticated and sexually attractive blood-suckers (undead,) And there’s the type that just drain life-force without drinking actual bood (succubi.) So, different movies and TV shows take different intepretations.

Footnote: Jim Butcher, in his Dresden series, actually includes all three types (as Red Court, Black Court, and White Court vampires, respectively.)

4

You’re right, vampires as grotesque and demonic entities was started with 30 Days of Night. It never happened before that.

EDIT: ninja’d by Simplicio

5

Better gory, scary monsters rather than sexy, sparkly, emo teen heartthrobs.

I abhor vampires who are not wholly evil. Nothing wrong with being sexy and evil; I liked the stories that made vampires sexy but unable to consummate. Vampires are evil, superhuman monsters that need to be hunted into extinction, and who view humans as nothing more than feed cattle. Anything else is not a vampire.

6

FWIW: my understanding is that most of the original folktales had vampires as basically blood-drinking zombies*, and the idea of the sexy, intelligent vampire was an invention of 19th century romantic writers.

*of course, zombies at the timer weren’t zombies, but hypnotized slaves of voodoo-priests. So in the early 19th century, zombies weren’t zombies and vampires were.

7

Anne Rice did actually feature this idea in her books. The eldest vampires would go out into the sun to, I kid you not, get a tan, so they’d fit in with humans better.

8

I agree, I’m not looking for teen heartthrobs, I want them to be pure evil incarnate, the seduction itself is evil, the vampire feeds off the emotions as much as he does the blood almost. That’s what makes them so terrifying, Lugosi, for example, was scary because you were enthralled with his presence and could not resist. Even if you did resist, he’d just hunt you down, but also, at the same time, he could attend a party and no one would be the wiser that he was a vampire (unless someone had a mirror :D).

The nosferatu is not really a vampire, it’s a plague. Granted, nosferatu and succubi are vampire-like creatures, but I’m talking real vampires, undead vampires, powerful vampires, vampires that terrify you and charm you at the same time. I’m talkin’ vampires that are thousands of years old and they no longer even need to chase you down anymore. They’re powerful enough to use their mind and alter reality, you turn around and the door you just came from doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just a wall, and there’s no way out, only the deathly cold embrace of the vamps presence, and he’ll feed from your terror for hours, before finally feeding off your blood, draining you dry and leaving your corpse, or turning you into one of his kin.

Yes, I know that vamps used to be zombies and zombies were slaves, but this is about as boring as what vampires are now, it’s like they’ve come full circle almost. I also realize that classic vamps turned into goth figures, but some goths would argue that, they’d say there’s vamps, and then there’s goths. Either way I don’t care for humans running around acting like they’re goths or vamps or whatever, that’s some weird stuff IMO. Maybe it’s the gothiic thing that turned people off about vampires and made them want something else other than that. At least Elder Scrolls games know what vampires should be like. A vampire is like The Most Interesting Man In the World: he can disarm you with his looks, or his hands, either way :D.

9

Interesting, I remember from The Vampire Lestat that the original vampires tried to kill themselves by stepping out in the sun, and as a result all the vamps got horrible burned…Lestat was one of the few that wasn’t.

10

Exactly.

Humans:vampires::Happy meals:5-year-olds

11

Also, vampires belong in castles, or at least large mansions with deep catacombs, none of this living in the big city with a werewolf and a ghost as room-mates (Being Human). They either need to be solitary, or have a clan that lives in a giant graveyard with underground passages…to hell with Twilight (pun intended :D)

12

So in other words…

“I’ve got a very specific idea of what a vampire is, even though it disqualifies most vampire fiction and all of the original legends themselves. That’s what a vampire is dammit!”

:wink:

13

Although there were stories of vampires before the 18th century, and vampire-like (in many respects) creatures in other nations throughout history, the modern vampire effectively began about 1800, with Polidori’s The Vampyre (and it was mainly popular because everyone thought it was Lord Byron, whereas his vampire story nevere got beyond a couple of paragraphs). Prior to that, a vampire was a somewhat brain-dead walking corpse with obsessive-compulsive disorder (you could stop them from operating by confronting them with a messy time-consuming task) who was well-known by everyone in town to be dead, so they didn’t exactly pass for normal humans. They generally didn’t speak, and they weren’t neatly dressed. Polidori’s story gave us the aristocratic, neatly-groomed, cultured vampire who could Pass for Human, and it’s been with us ever since. As new people added to the Vampire Saga, they added their own bits of “fakelore” (mock folklore), and they were far from consistent with each other. Throughout the 19th century lots of people wrote about vampires, and a lot of them were disembodied or “psychic” vampires. But even among the solid-bodied blood-suckers you had plenty of variation. People pretty much agreed on them being Creatures of the Night, of their being strong, and you could kill them with a stake through the heart, but everything else was up for grabs. Bram Stoker actually invented a lot of “vampire lore” for Dracula, just so Dracula could subvert it and Van Helsing could exploit it. But that bit about not beimng seen in a mirror, for instance, seems to be original with him.
That Creature of the Night thing varied, too. Vqarney could be Restored to Life (!) after being killed by being exposed to moonlight. Stoker’s Dracula was sort of comatose when asleep in daylight, but Stoker had him walking around London in daylight. It’s true that Murnau’s Nosferatu dissolved in daylight (a first), but the film was hunted down and destroyed by Stoker’s widow, and wasn’t widely seen. Vampires in literature and movies afterwards died by being staked, burned, or dissolved in acid, not by exposure to sunlight. Not untuil Curt Siodmak wrote the screenplay for Son of Dracula did they statrted dissolving in daylight in earnest. He re-used the idea in House of Frankenstein a couple of years later, and a trope was born. I suspect Universal liked the idea because it eliminated the monster with a minimum of gross, gory bloodshed.
A lot of vampires were genteel, aristocrats, or at least polite, well-dressed folks, but some of them were outright monstrous, from Max Schreck’s rat-faced Count Orlock to Robert E. Howard’s pretty much unseen vampire to batlike creatures in the Indian stories of Vikram and the Vampire.

14

OK, let’s be perfectly clear about the staking, because nobody seems to understand it. Vampires are un-living corpses who rise from their coffins at night to feast on the blood of the living. So, open up the coffin in the daytime, and you find a perfectly preserved corpse. How do you stop this corpse from rising in the night? You can’t kill it, it’s already dead. So, get a big-ass wooden stake and a hammer, and nail that bloodsucker into the ground. How the fuck are you gonna climb out your coffin now, hotshot?

Wooden stake through the heart==crumples to dust is a pretty recent invention. And by recent, I mean by Joss Whedon for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that was only because he didn’t want to have his teenage protagonist have to deal with piles decomposing vampire bodies.

15

Since The Vampyre, Varney, and Dracula have been mentioned, we might as well fill out the foundation of the genre* with Carmilla - in which a major part of the story was the title bloodsucker and the narrator taking regular afternoon strolls through the narrator’s estate - it wasn’t exactly an action packed story. (Carmilla liked to sleep late, not usually joining the family until near noon, but she hardly abhorred daylight.)

  • I was going to say ‘major influences’, but really for the most part, Polidori and Rymer really had second hand influence, through influencing Stoker, and while Le Fanu had a bit more luck, pretty much the only part that didn’t enter the genre primarily via his influence on Stoker is the lesbian undertones (which Le Fanu does much less offensively than most writers who’ve played that card later - primarily by playing it subtly, so it didn’t feel nearly so salacious, but also…while the narrator considers Carmilla’s apparent feelings for her odd, and a bit uncomfortable, it doesn’t really come across as part of what makes her monstrous, and the feelings seem to be quite real).
16

Not quite, Dracula crumbled into dust when his heart was pierced by Quincey’s bowie knife.

17

CalMeacham, wow, great vampire lore, you really know your stuff, bravo. How much influence did Vlad the Impaler really have in all this? I mean, I know he was a major inspiration, but now, with all that info, I’m wondering just how much, maybe he doesn’t deserve as much credit as he’s been given. Lemur866, this is an extremely interesting take on the stake :D, in that case, the heart wouldn’t necessarily need to be targeted, you could just pin down the limbs, so I wonder how the heart became the place to pierce, this could have started becoming more popular with religion…crosses and all that.

Yes, okay, you got me there, maybe I am looking for a particular style. However, the style I’m looking for maximizes the creatures power, I don’t want the vampire to be easily killed, and the older it is the harder to kill. A lot of vampires out there seem too fragile, dumb, and gruesome. I’d think a vampire that’s able to blend in would greatly increase its ability to survive, making it more reasonable that it would be old, and I’d rather the vamp be able to get stronger, which would give it a better story, for it to be this strong it would have to have been through centuries of staying alive and all that, and now the imagination takes over dreaming up what it’s seen. I want to add to the lore, have less vampires so that the ones that are around are very old and extremely powerful, etc. and so on. All this does is make them more interesting, plus, if they weren’t so gory and violent, it would be much better for kids. When I was 6 or 7 I watched a couple vampire movies, but now, if I had kids and wanted to show them a good vampire movie, I’d have to explain why it’s not in color, I couldn’t show them a modern one, not with blood and guts flying around.

18

Pretty much nil.

He provided a name and location for Stoker’s vamp (I’m given to understand that the story that became Dracula was originally set in Styria, the same setting as Carmilla, though he moved it to what is now Romania in an early draft), but beyond that…nothing of import.

Count Dracula is not (IIRC, it’s been more than a decade since I last read Dracula) suggested as having committed any of the specific atrocities Vlad is accused of, nor was Vlad ever accused of being a blood drinker (though there was that one feast among the corpses). Stoker liked the name (which means either ‘Son of the Dragon’, or ‘Son of the Devil’, and is a reference to his father’s epithet, Vlad Dracul (Vlad the Dragon, or Vlad the Devil).), and his rep as a monster, so grafted them onto an otherwise unrelated character.

19

Anno Dracula is back in print! It’s the first of Kim Stanley’s series–in which von Helsing & his crew lost & Dracula survived–to marry Queen Victoria & make vampirism The Done Thing in England. And most of the “civilized” world.

As a result, vampires came out of hiding–from all the other vampire tales. They had different characteristics, according to lineage (or according to the original author). Some could grow used to the sun. One plucky Irish vampire lass had no fear of holy water–because she was proudly Protestant.

There are two more books in the series & a collection of short pieces about to be published. Characters include vampires from legend & fiction, other fictional characters & “real” people. It’s all great fun, with not a bit of glitter.

20

Right–a knife, not a wooden stake. This is a separate motif, a character having only one vulnerable spot, like the heart or the heel. In advanced cases, the vulnerable part can be removed and hidden in a safe place.