I see the film Twilight is gearing up to be a blockbuster, and I remember Interview With A Vampire was a solid hit both in book and movie format.
Why?
What is the appeal of vampire story lines?
Not trying to be snarky, and yes - a case could be made for what is the appeal of cowboy books and movies, or war books and movies or any other genre for that matter. And yes, it is sort of like asking why you like chocolate ice cream. You do or you don’t - no big deal.
Still, there were real cowboys, and real wars, etc. and if I am not mistaken, not a whole lot of real life vampires. Yet there seems to be legions of fans over the decades who flock to these vampire books and movies.
I guess I am just trying to figure out if there is a reason.
Is it some sort of sexual fantasy? More for women than men?
Is there some other underlying reason I am not aware of that makes stories about vampires so popular?
Vampires are the ultimate bad boy and some of us girls like the bad boy. Plus, in the case of Twilight (and probably most vamp stories) you get the even better scenario of the bad boy (vampire) who is trying to good for the sake of his one true love. And when he’s good, he’s so good. It feeds into the notion that we can change that boy through the power of our love!!!
Yeah, IRL you can’t change anyone, especially a boy. But we have to have our little fantasies.
Vampire stories serve as allegories for some of the most fundamental facets of the human condition–the fear of dying and the price of striving for immortality, the decay of the soul based on decisions you can never take back, the despair of isolation and loneliness, the allure of the forbidden, the internal conflict between the carnal and the spiritual.
Sex, Death, and Loss, baby–it can be the stuff of great drama (though I’m not familiar with Twilight so won’t argue that it belongs in that rarefied class).
A better comparison might be to ghost stories. The idea of a form of life (or at least existence) after death has interested humans for thousands and thousands of years, as has the idea that there are supernatural beings that can harm living humans. Both ghosts and vampires can be used in several types of stories – horror, mystery, tragedy, even romance. Since both can be people who originally lived long ago, there’s the whole “visitor from the past” thing too. With vampires there’s also the idea of great power won at great cost, which has good dramatic potential. It doesn’t hurt that pretty much everyone already knows what a vampire is, so the author doesn’t have to do much work establishing the character’s supernatural qualities.
But as I said in the Twilight thread, I think the whole vampire thing is way overdone and has been for at least the past decade or two. I’m not saying there should never be another vampire story, but writers/filmmakers could give it a rest for a while…ESPECIALLY when it comes to vampire romances.
The only thing that ever made vampire romances interesting was that the vampire was generally seen as a frightening or evil figure. This made for some tension within the story, even if the particular vampire was largely harmless. It seems to me we’ve come to the point where the harmless romantic vampire is the norm. Bo-ring! It seems to me that a lot of contemporary vampire fiction is really about juvenile fantasies of either being or dating someone who is cool, rich, gorgeous, never gets old, and has great powers that came at essentially NO cost. Anne Rice’s Lestat is a good example of this. He’s not only a handsome nobleman AND famous rock star AND has incredible psychic abilities, but during the course of the series he also becomes the most powerful vampire on earth (mostly because the queen of the vampires thinks he’s hot) and starts flying around in the sky like Superman. That’s just silly.
