Why Vampires are OHMIGOD SOOO Romantic.

(This post started life as a set of comments on the blog of a friend who just doesn't understand why people so romanticize a bunch of walking corpses.  It was really an attempt to explain why they are romanticized when, face it...they're just dead people who drink blood.  It was first fully posted in this final form on my entertainment and pop culture blog, Exhaust Pipe Potatoes and it seemed a fitting starter for this blog...)

Vampires have long been romanticized.  However, if one reads up on some of the more ancient, classic vampire legends, particularly those from Eastern Europe, it quickly becomes clear that a vampire isn't a beautiful, romantic creature; it's a freaking WALKING CORPSE!  As one scholar put it, originally, being bitten by a vampire was about as romantic as being bitten by your dead Uncle Boris.

The concept of the vampire as more than just a walking corpse came about because, as well as being immortal, they were well-nigh invulnerable (fire was bad...and decapitation...but most other stuff was just a scratch. Oh, and staking wasn't originally to kill them...it was to pin them down so you COULD kill them...so you had to drive the stake ALL THE WAY THROUGH.) Invulnerability=you don't rot=you are eternally young/the way you were, which is a very attractive prospect to some.


John Polidori, the doctor to George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (you know...Lord Byron...the poet) can

John Polidori

be blamed for some of the earliest changes to vampire mythology in the western world.  Polidori was one of those present at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva during a stormy weekend in 1816.  The group, which otherwise was made up of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), and Mary's stepsister Claire, spent much time reading ghost stories and discussing scientific advances.  Eventually, someone suggested that they each write their own tale of terror.  Only Mary and Dr. Polidori, with Polidori basing his work upon Byron's own uncompleted fragment, finished theirs.  That weekend gave birth to two horror icons: Frankenstein's Creature and Lord Ruthven, the first "romantic" vampire.

The Vampyre, published in 1819, was a popular success, spawning adaptations, imitators, and spin-offs for many years to come.  It can be blamed for a good deal of the portrayal of vampires as good-looking or sexually attractive characters, as the character was based on the handsome, seductive, and rather charismatic Byron.  Suddenly, the vampire was not simply a walking corpse wandering about at random to find a victim whose blood would sustain its life force.  Now, the vampire was a canny creature, befriending and often seducing its prey.  Authorship of the tale was originally attributed to Lord Byron, though both he and Polidori later attempted to correct that notion.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The year 1872 saw another important development when J. Sheridan Le Fanu published his vampire story Carmilla.  The tale introduced a new vampire archetype, one that still fuels male (and some female) fantasies: the lesbian vampire.  Some would argue the point, but the character Carmilla pursues only female victims and she approaches them in a manner which, while typically restrained for that era, is rather obviously sexual.

The romanticization of the vampire was a sort of a romanticization of illness as well, since many of the common "symptoms" of a vampire or their victims closely matched those of tuberculosis, often considered a disease of the young and of poets and of lovely, fragile people.  In 1897

Bram Stoker

the next leap ahead in the romantic identity of the vampire came with the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  This called for a new sort of descriptive hyperbole; it was not, say, the vampire story to end all vampire stories.  Rather, it spawned yet another generation and gave us the vampire most like the modern interpretation most people can identify.

Vampires continued to be a staple of fantasy literature and theater; later, of course, they moved to the big screen, thrilling cinema goers with depictions that were nothing like what a villiager in, say, medieval Romania, would have expected.

With the advent of television, vampires had yet another place to be all seductive and evil.  Then came Barnabas.

Jonathan Frid as Barnabas
Collins

When Dark Shadows, a foundering soap opera with Gothic overtones, moved from characters like ghosts and Phoenixes to introduce an outright vampire in 1967, the ratings went through the roof.  Barnabas Collins, a long-imprisoned vampiric ancestor of the Collins clan, was released quite by accident from his coffin and began a reign of terror in the town of Collinsport.  Granted, it was a fairly mild reign of terror at first, but he did kidnap local waitress Maggie Evans and attempt to make her into a duplicate of his 18th century love, Josette.

But then things turned a corner.  The show's viewers, many of them children and teenagers, were so enthralled by Barnabas that what had originally been intended as a one-off character for a few weeks/months became a permanent fixture.  And he went from being evil to hating what he was, wanting to change.  In short, Barnabas was one of the earliest examples of the tormented vampire in popular culture.  Which brings me to my next point.

Most people don't consider the fact that vampirism would, of course, have its downside. You'd live forever, thus watching any non-vampires you loved wither and die around you. Also, due to the time-age-speed paradox, you'd go mad as time flew by the older you got.  Barnabas, for example, describes time thusly:  "For most men, time moves slowly, oh so slowly, they don't even realize it. But time has revealed itself to me in a very special way. Time is a rushing, howling wind that rages past me, withering me in a single, relentless blast, and then continues on. I've been sitting here passively, submissive to its rage, watching its work. Listen! Time, howling, withering!"

Juliet Landau as Drusilla

Madness is a popular theme in vampire in some vampire media.  For example, on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the character Drusilla had been driven mad by the vampire who turned her and was, mentally, like a strange, evil child.

Anne Rice

Evil, however, is no longer inherent in vampires.  Several characters in the well loved vampire novels of author Anne Rice are sympathetic, or kind.

Vampire Junction,
the first Timmy
Valentine novel

There have been some attempts to rework the vampire mythos still further over the years.  S.P. Somtow's trilogy of novels dealing with child vampire Timmy Valentine takes a deeply psychological look at the aspects of the legend, i.e. if a vampire does not believe that things such as garlic and crucifixes and even sunlight can harm them, then they won't be harmed.  Also, if the symbols themselves have lost power in the hearts and minds of mortals, then they lose power over the creatures.
In the previously mentioned "Buffyverse", vampires retain less and less of their human appearance as they age, eventually always having the demonic appearance they originally only bore when feeding.

So, there you have it.  We romanticize vampires because immortality seems like a good idea.  We want creatures who live forever to be eternally beautiful and, in most cases, sympathetic.  We don't want to imagine being bitten by walking corpses 'cos ICKY!

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen:
Maybe he's born with it...maybe it's
Maybelline.

But don't even ask me to explain what Stephenie Meyer was thinking.





***BIG GIANT HONKING ADDENDUM***

An alert reader from Facebook pointed out that I neglected to mention one early example of the "self-loathing" vampire in the form of Varney, a character from a mid-19th century British penny dreadful novel.  I didn't mention him initially because many of my readers probably haven't heard of him or read his story, but then it occurred to me that I am here to educate.  So yes, Varney was probably the first example of a vampire who was tormented by the facts of his existence, thus leading to Barnabas, Nick Knight, et al.  But Barnabas was the first in a filmed medium (I'm sorry, the Bela Lugosi Dracula and most that immediately followed him were pretty happy with what they were, or at least relished the blood-suckage)