Working on the night moves
By Casey Gillis on Nov. 19, 2008
We’ve feared them. Anne Rice interviewed them. Buffy slayed them.
Vampires have long been a part of our popular culture, usually as the villains of the story, the scary creatures that lurk in the dark and hide under our beds.
But the creators of these stories soon got bored with one-note villains and started offering twists to the genre. A vampire with a soul (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). A half-human, half-vampire superhero who hunts other vamps (“Blade”). A tortured creature who feels genuine guilt when he kills (“Interview with the Vampire”).
Lately, Hollywood is embracing another kind of vampire: the leading man, a romantic hero with whom we can actually sympathize.
And, quite possibly, have the hots for.
“We love to be scared,” Stephanie Meyer, author of the “Twilight” series, told USA Today Weekend recently. “But most of the monsters that you see are disgusting. They are usually oozing something. Vampires are the only ones who are dangerous, scary and, at the same time, hot.”
Meyer’s series — four best-selling novels about the romance between teen vampire Edward Cullen and his ladylove Bella Swan — has reached “Harry Potter”-levels of devotion among its fans.
The movie version of the first book, “Twilight,” hits theaters this weekend and, if advance ticket sales are any indication, it should dominate the box office, much like the “Potter” films often do.
More than 500 of Thursday’s midnight showings are already sold out, according to Fandango.com, and 86 percent of daily tickets sales on the site are for “Twilight.”
One reason for the books’ — and now, the film’s — popularity stems from the blurring of genres.
Sure, it’s about vampires. But for many, the real appeal lies in the romance between Edward and Bella. In a recent survey conducted by Fandango, 67 percent of respondents said the books’ most appealing element is the love story.
“(Meyer) set out to write a young adult novel with vampires in it,” says Tim Kane, author of “The Changing Vampire of Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Growth of a Genre.”
“There are people who have never been fans of vampire movies at all, but they love this.”
Doomed love
Edward isn’t the first, and he likely won’t be the last, vampire to capture our collective movie-going, book-reading hearts.
“Every generation finds their own favorite vampire story,” Stacey Abbott, author of “Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World,” said in a recent interview conducted via e-mail.
“Before ‘Twilight,’ it was ‘Buffy.’ While I was younger, it was the work of Anne Rice. And, again, it was hugely popular for similar reasons. The vampires were romantic and isolated figures.”
Vampires and humans, she says, have become the ultimate star-crossed lovers.
“Vampires have become a cool way of capturing romantic notions of tragic love affairs,” Abbott says. “There is … something tragic about a character who can live forever but who cannot be with the woman he loves.”
In the books, Edward is part of a clan that lives in a dreary Washington town.
He and his family are a rare breed of morally conscious vampires that refuse to kill humans, instead hunting animals to quench their thirst for blood — something that becomes particularly hard for Edward when he meets Bella. He falls for her pretty quickly, but has to control his inherent urges to, well, kill her.
“They are these creatures who exist to hunt humans,” Meyer told NPR. “They are evil, and they choose something different. They find another way.”
A similar world exists on “True Blood,” an HBO series based on Charlaine Harris’ “Southern Vampires” book series.
Harris’ vampires have gone public. They’ve assimilated into a society that’s wary of them, and most drink a synthetic blood concoction instead of feeding on people.
The main character is chivalrous vampire Bill Compton, who falls in love with waitress Sookie Stackhouse and, much like Edward, tries to protect her from the worst of his kind.
“Vampires are just like humans,” Alan Ball, creator of “True Blood,” told The Washington Post recently. “Nobody’s a hundred percent good, nobody’s a hundred percent bad.”
Evolution
The vampire evolves because it has to, says Kane.
“By changing it, it makes it more accessible.”
The vampires of the 1930s Universal movies were “very supernatural,” he says, “turning into mist, turning into bats, turning into wolves.”
And they weren’t physically imposing with super-strength, like we commonly see today.
Instead, “they had a stare that would transfix people,” Kane says.
Bela Lugosi played Dracula as debonair, and even sexy, in 1931 — a far cry from the character described in Bram Stoker’s original novel, which was published in 1897. In it, Dracula has a large nose, thick mustache, sharp teeth, pointy ears and hair in the palms of his hands.
But “no one really wants to be swept off their feet by something that looks like that,” Kane says.
The Hammer Films of the 1960s and 1970s — like “The Horror of Dracula,” “The Brides of Dracula” and “Lust for a Vampire” — took away those supernatural abilities as the vampires became physically stronger and sexual.
Eventually, we started seeing more sympathetic vampires who roamed the Earth alone.
“Vampires have come to represent the outsider, and we all identify and sympathize with outsiders,” Abbott says. “I think that sense of isolation, loneliness (and) impossible love touches a lot of people.”
The first of their kind rose from his coffin in 1967, when the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows” introduced a vampire character named Barnabas Collins.
Barnabas was only supposed to be on the show for one season, Kane says, but ratings went up and “the fan mail came in at, like, 10,000 letters a day.”
The character originally terrorized the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, but as his popularity grew, he was de-fanged a bit and went on to pretty much become the series’ star.
He also softened up the vampire image.
“They became a little more sympathetic, a little more likeable,” says Kane.
Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire,” which was published in 1976 and adapted into a film in 1994, introduced us to two very opposite characters: Lestat, a bloodthirsty vampire who embraced his dark side, and Louis, who felt guilty every time he took a human life and, for awhile, only fed on animals.
Today’s fictional vampires really run the gamut between the two.
“For a long time, Dracula was the granddaddy of all vampires and, while his influence is still felt to this day, today there is no one type of vampire,” Abbott says.
“Our generation’s vampire is diverse and ever-changing.”
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