%2C%2Bpor%2BJean%2BAntoine%2BValentin%2BFoulquier%2B(1853).jpg "Les femmes vampires by Jean Antoine Valentin Foulquier (1853)")
Les femmes vampires by Jean Antoine Valentin Foulquier (1853)
Gheorghe Coşbuc: Strigoii (Vampires)
The Christians that are awake, with fear they call
The Mother of Christ and-light rushed
Incense and garlic on a bronze vessel
She's single in the lodge, poor mother
image sits stunned...
Becca Rothfeld: Vampire Socials. The distressingly human lives of vampires today
Becca Rothfeld is the assistant literary editor of The New Republic
AT HIS INCEPTION, the vampire was a solitary figure.
Typically the occupant of sprawling gothic ruins atop a desolate
mountain, he was pallid, fanged, and obviously monstrous, occasionally
distinguished from other members of his cohort by red eyes and other
dramatic deformities. Often, he hailed from Transylvania, sometimes from
other remote quarters of Eastern Europe — if we never learned just
where, it only enhanced his mystique — where he invariably had an estate
and a family fortune of opaque origins.
He was enigmatic, otherworldly, always a foreigner or a visitor from
abroad, maddeningly standoffish and stubbornly impenetrable. Lord
Ruthven, the protagonist of John William Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyr,
had “nothing in common with other men,” and Dracula of the famed 1897
Bram Stoker novel lived in an all-but-inaccessibly remote fortress.
Nosferatu, the iconic vampire in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film of the same
name, sported claws, pointed ears, and a hunchback. He was strange,
sullen and reclusive — nobody’s prom date.
In contrast, today’s vampires have traded their capes for fashionable
leather jackets, their claws for manicures — and they’ve taken a turn
for the social, crashing all manner of gatherings. From homecoming in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to prom in Twilight, from college fraternities in The Vampire Diaries to Merlotte’s Bar & Grill in True Blood,vampires have rapidly become the life of the human party. They’ve infiltrated our institutions (Twilight’s Edward and The Vampire Diaries’Stefan attend human high schools), and dated — and even occasionally married — our own (Buffy’s Buffy and True Blood’s Sookie boast a string of vampire boyfriends, and Twilight’s Bella marries hers). Starting in the 80s with films like My Best Friend is a Vampire, The Hunger, and Vampire’s Kiss, we’ve witnessed a host of vampires who seek to fit into society. The contemporary British series Being Human
goes so far as to center on a vampire named Mitchell whose foremost
ambition is to pass for a human being: “I just want something good and normal,” he confesses to his human love interest over a bloodless cup of coffee.
The transition from Nosferatu, so grotesque and off-putting, to
Mitchell, who is charming and approachable (if somewhat anemic), is
striking: creatures of the night, once satisfied to exist on the margins
of society, have irrupted into our communities, intent on assimilation.
Vampires like Dracula and Nosferatu helped us make sense of ourselves
by differing from us so obviously, so savagely. They were monsters who
brought our humanity into acute relief, outsiders who opposed human
communities on the “inside.” They menaced us by standing against us,
threatening not to obliterate us but rather to alter us — to change us
into something terribly, appallingly other. Confronted with
their freakishness, we were relieved by our comparative compassion; by
what struck us, in the throes of self-satisfaction, as our humanity.
But today’s vampires cannot be counted on to provide such a dramatic
contrast with their human counterparts. Where the threat was once
external, bearing down on us from without, it’s become internal,
originating within — and if it is often imperceptible, masquerading as
your high school lab partner or a stranger at the bar, it is that much
more treacherous, that much better equipped to chip away at our sense of
self. Once, we had vampirism — Dracula — on the one hand, and humanity —
Dracula’s righteous opponents — on the other. Now, we have Mitchell of Being Human and Edward of Twilight — vampires who are not quite vampire, humans who are not quite human.
Vampyres ( Director: Víctor Matellano )
Starring
Caroline Munro
Marta Flich
Almudena León
Christian Stamm
A lesbian vampire couple abduct various passers-by, both male and female, to hold them captive at their rural manor in the English countryside in order to kill and feed on them to satisfy their insatiable thirst for blood.
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