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What Vampire Movies Teach Us About Humanity

“That’s so fourteenth century.”
-Eve, Only Lovers Left Alive

The best sci-fi/fantasy, and horror movies are not about far away galaxies or mythical monsters – they are about the human condition in the here and now. Unfortunately, this sort of work always suffers from a deep prejudice against genre films, as though something that includes fantastic or imaginary elements somehow says less about the human psyche than middle class melodramas. All works of fiction are imaginary. Last I checked the Discovery Channel, extreme creativity is about the last thing left that separates us from the other animals, since language, making and using tools, love, emotion, and consciousness exist in the other species as well.

Every person faces the same issues during her life: Time. Death. Love. Injustice. Addiction. Illness.   “Speculative fiction” movies often give us a clearer lens to view these issues than straight drama.

Take Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. Here is a wonderful little vampire flick about . . . a marriage. Someone wise once told me that the whole “‘til death do us part” thing was invented when people only lived to be 27 years old. Eternal life casts “ever after” in a whole new light. But there’s hope! Even with divorce statistics being what they are, there’s hope for true love and lasting relationships. Adam and Eve, the vampires in Only Lovers, have been married 140-plus years and they still adore one another, though they don’t always choose to live together. And even vampires have in-law problems, who knew? Adam and Eve refer to humans as zombies and complain that we ruin everything – the environment, the blood supply, everything. They have a point.

The perception of vampire films lags far behind that of the films’ genteel literary cousins, novels. Books about vampires do not suffer the same prejudice. Look at recent bestseller “The Quick”, by Lauren Owen. It was sold in the “literary” sections of brick and mortar stores, and reviewed as if it was A Real Book – and taken seriously. Similarly, Elisabeth Kostova’s “The Historian” and Susan Hubbard‘s “The Society of S” are all serious novels about vampires, and don’t have to face the presumed lack of merit accorded to movies about vampires. Books have inherent snob value that graphic novels and games, which often form the basis for vampire movies, just don’t. Could it be because these books were all written by women? Women make up a majority of readers, and women writers are enjoying success (you go girl, J.K.) never seen in history before. Possibly the snobbery is already slanted towards women. So now books about vampires by women are Serious Literature, but films about them (by men?) are still niche genre junk aimed at adolescent boys of all ages, to be dismissed by critics. As a further iteration of this, witness choreographer Nancy Page’s adaptation of the Dracula story into a successful ballet, and hers isn’t the only one. Think about it. Ballet. Based on Dracula. That’s quite the mixture of high art and lowbrow genre literature.

Which brings us to the Invasion of the chicks occurring in film, as well. Filmed in 1987, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark heralded a trend in female-helmed vampire flicks which have built new structures over the old bases. She’s the one who later directed The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

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Near Dark exchanges joining an itinerant group of vampires for joining a gang. The protagonist suffers from a kind of shitkicker ennui – nowhere to go, nothing to do. He’s discontented with his family life, and there’s no chance of escape from his dry and dusty mundane Oklahoma reality, until the bad guys show up and take him in. Now he’s got adventure and acceptance.   The protagonist, played by Adrian Pasdar, likes his new outlaw life just fine – until the vampires threaten his sister and father. He kills the gang and his veterinarian father devises a cure for himself and his vampire girlfriend, and the night life no longer holds any allure for him. Near Dark shares the iconography and visuals of a Western with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour is another example of a vampire movie created by a woman. Like Near Dark, it definitely doesn’t belong in the same categories with splatter flicks or even lesbian art porn, which is where vampire females used to reside.

Girl suggests that revenge is a dish best served with ice cold hands, as does Let the Right One In. In Girl, the vampire acts as a one woman avenger against terrible men, particularly those who abuse women.   The vampire in Let the Right One In (the lesser U.S. remake was called Let Me In) exacts retribution on the schoolboy thugs who bully her chosen human helper. None of these films use the previously ubiquitous white makeup or contact lenses to create a traditional vampire look. The vampires in Near Dark don’t even show any fangs.

Girl and Near Dark are Westerns as well as vampire flicks. It’s unusual for a vampire film to be directed by a woman, and it’s even more unusual for a Western to be directed by a woman, yet here are two movies that are both – and they are both directed by women. If a genre movie crosses genre lines and incorporates elements from other classes of film, it is often criticized for doing so, as in “it doesn’t know what it wants to be.” Maybe if a director doesn’t cross some lines, she’s not trying hard enough. Not striking out into new territory away from the tried and true qualifies in my book as undeveloped storytelling.

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Girl is a feminist vampire flick. There are not many of those around, but it’s not the only one. Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2012) follows the lives of two female vampires, mother and daughter. The mother was taken and turned out as a child prostitute; the daughter was raped in retaliation for her mother’s self-determined transformation into a vampire. Vampire society in this movie is absolutely male-dominated and controlled. Women do not belong and are not allowed to turn anyone. In addition to the tale of how these women defy and overcome the unfairness and injustice of the male vampires, Byzantium is a coming-of-age story as well. Director Jordan chronicles how the daughter separates from her mother, coming to terms with her situation and becoming her own person. The mother takes advantage of men for blood and money, setting up a brothel to further exploit them. The daughter, however, becomes a merciful angel of death, euthanizing the old and sick, as long as they are ready to go. In a twist on the eternal life theme, both the daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend are turned to prevent them from dying of incurable diseases.

The relationship between vampire books and vampire films shows up again in the work of Timur Bekmambetov and Guillermo Del Toro. In addition to the synergistic relationship between Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and every single vampire flick ever made, there continues to be much bleeding back and forth between the written and cinematic art forms.   Yup, I went there.

Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch and Day Watch turn a switch on the battle between good and evil. The movies – there were originally supposed to be three – are based on the novels by Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko. In both books and films, the Light Side is presumably the good side. Called the Night Watch because they keep the Dark Side from getting out of hand, the Light Others (Others are people with supernatural powers and traits) think of themselves as the good guys. Except that they do a lot of things that don’t seem so wonderful. For example, Olga, one of the Light Others, explains that Light Others feed on the good in people, like food. Dark others feed on the darkness inside. Sounds great, right? Here’s how it plays out in the books: when Anton, a Light Other, needs energy, he sucks light-ness out of a kid running happily down a street, playing. Now the kid is less happy. When a Dark Other needs energy, she sits by the bed of a child having recurring nightmares, and feeds on the darkness in the dreams. Now the child has fewer, milder nightmares. Hmmmm.   Sucking the happiness out of a kid, versus sucking out the bad dreams. This not-so-clear division between light and dark is spelled out more fully in the books than the movies, but the ambiguity of what constitutes bad and good plays out on the screen, as well.

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It’s amazing how many projects were killed by the estrogen-heavy Twilight franchise – a woman wrote the books, and a different woman directed the first movie. Despite the film series’ literary (here I use the word loosely) antecedents and large earnings, the films were generally derided outside of the sleepover set. As a result, many would-be vampire projects were considered corrupted, and therefore shelved. In addition to the third part of the Night Watch – Day Watch series (unfortunately named Twilight Watch before the American franchise took off), there were many would-be vampire stories that didn’t get made, including a remake of Bigelow’s Near Dark. The industry is only now beginning to recover. So much for the idea that women always make inherently better vampire-themed work.

The role of family pops up in vampire movies a lot. In addition to the marriage at the center of Only Lovers Left Alive, there’s the thought that love either saves the world, or kills it stone dead. This is a theme Guillermo Del Toro first visited in his first feature film, Cronos, and reworked for his novels with Chuck Hogan, which were developed into the television series The Strain. The voice-over which starts the TV series makes it clear that it is love that will doom humanity, once a vampiric contagion starts to spread. People who are infected will return to their loved ones, ensuring the rapid spread of the virus. This played out in real life with Ebola. Particularly in Africa, people who were or might have been infected refused treatment and defied quarantines. Fearing separation from family, possibly infected people put those families at greater risk by remaining with them. Nobody wants to get sick and die alone. Similarly, no one wants to face forever without friends or family.

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There is a little known but well regarded anthology film called Black Sabbath from 1962, starring Boris Karloff, which deals with the same theme. The final segment of three was adapted from a novel (again!) called “The Family of the Vourdalak” by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (a cousin of Leo Tolstoy). In the movie, a vourdalak, also spelled wurdulak, is a kind of vampire which feeds only on family members. I know it is tempting to think we all have one of those among our relations, but this film, like The Strain, suggests that there is an attraction to kin and a compulsion to turn one’s loved ones into the same sort of creature as oneself, however hellish, to preserve the family ties.

Vampire films help us work with our ubiquitous fear of death. There is a price to pay for eternal life. Though the terrors of death and illness are largely removed for a vampire, the threat of endless loneliness and isolation remains; without friends, without family, life may not be worth living. British poet and novelist Philip Larkin said “Parents fuck you up and then they die.” One of the upsides of eternity is that there is plenty of time to work out family shit, a theme that arises in Hubbard’s book The Society of S, especially if your family members belong to the same undying subspecies.

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In Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos (1992), there’s no vampire per se. A medieval device which is partly mechanical and partly insectival makes the user look and feel younger and more virile. It’s youthfulness that has the glamour here – the cult of being young. Despite the drug-like pleasure provided by the device which makes him desire blood (he says, “how good you make me feel” as it injects him again), the hero declines the invitation to eternal life. Rather than become a monster and risk feeding on his beloved granddaughter, he allows himself to starve to a final death. This may be the only vampire I can think of who just says no.

Vampirism is often used metaphorically as a comparison to drug addiction. Sometimes the link is overt as in Cronos, sometimes subtle. In the 1938 film Dracula’s Daughter, The title character, Marya, hopes to overcome her relentless craving for human blood. First, she destroys the body of her father, breaking the vampiric family bond.   Second, she tries to overcome her addiction with the help the help of psychiatry. Neither works. Daughter is one of many films that substitute vampirism for all kinds of real life destructive, addictive behaviors – it’s interesting to see it handled as such so well, and so early in the development of the genre.

Vampire movies cover all the human emotions, giving us a perspective which would be otherwise inaccessible from our mortal point of view. The indestructibility (or not) of blood ties. The nature of good and evil. Gender inequality. Vampires lead us to wisdom on all these issues. We need to lose the snobbery about these films, which has already faded for the novels. Quality work about the human condition shouldn’t be dismissed because it uses vampires as a storytelling device. Watch some of these films and tell me if I’m wrong.

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Amy Anna was raised by wolves. She spends all her time eating and watching movies while lying on the couch . Her animal totem is the velociraptor.

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