Editor’s Note: Over the next few months, The Take Three will be evolving into a more well-rounded entertainment site; movies will of course remain, but we will be adding music and pop culture into the mix as well. Two of my very dear friends (and both very good writers) will be joining me to wax on about music and pop culture– hence “The Take Three,” or, three different people’s takes on entertainment. Soon you will (virtually) meet and get to know them both well. Tonight, I present a special guest blog from our soon-to-be Take Three author of all things pop culture. Enjoy, and get ready for more of her in the future!
When did vampires become so wussy?
Flickr/i heart him
With “New Moon” premiering this weekend, I started thinking a lot about vampires in popular culture and how these days it seems like you can’t turn around without a mysteriously dark and brooding vampire in your face. To say things have gotten out of hand with this latest incarnation of vampire legend and lore would be an understatement.
Let’s travel back a bit, to a kinder, gentler, simpler time when men were men and women knew their place. Of course I’m talking about Victorian England (and America for that matter), when in the late 1890’s, some Irish dude named Bram wrote this little book (you might have heard of it), called “Dracula.” For most people, this was their first real introduction to vampirism, and it certainly didn’t pull any punches. Dracula and his fellow vampires kidnapped and ate babies, killed scores of people, and worst of all, deflowered virgins! Granted, most of that last part was all subtext, but the fact remains that much of Dracula had to do with sexual taboos and perversions, which ultimately were quelled by the heroes in the novel who restored balance and virtue. Yay good triumphing over evil!
Flash forward a little less than 100 years, and you have Anne Rice enthralling a whole new generation of readers (and eventually movie goers), with her Vampire Chronicles. This time around, however, while they still are depicted as undead, blood-thirsty creatures, there’s also an element of humanity in them. They are seen interacting with one another, going a long with many societal conventions, getting bored, longing for something more. All of these notions seem a far cry from a monster whose sole purpose is to survive off the blood of others, with no regret, remorse or discretion.
Personally, I blame the watering down of vampires to Gen Xers as well as the Y’s. The late 80s all the way into the early 2000s were chock full of angsty, good-looking vampires that reflected the way the young adults of the time felt (or thought they felt). It was all about society not understanding them, or the man trying to keep the young people down—it was crap. Movies and TV were littered with teens and twenty-somethings trying to do their thing and make their way in the world, and many of them just happened to have vampires as the central figures to convey these messages.
Here’s just a brief list that I came up with off the top of my head of films and television shows that I watched growing up that featured our favorite fangy antagonists (and sometimes protagonists):
The Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Forever Knight, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Kindred: The Embraced, Interview with the Vampire, Blade (1, 2, and 3), Underworld (1, 2, and 3), Dracula 2000, Angel
Somehow, over the course of say 15 years, vampires went from something to be feared to something to be desired. They were the new “bad boys” in school that all the girls were drawn to—handsome, brooding, and misunderstood. So what if they were technically dead and need blood to survive…they had great hair, smoldering eyes and an awesome wardrobe. All they want to do is live out their eternal lives, same as you or I, so what’s so wrong about that? Best of all, some of them even wanted to love and be loved….awwwwwww, that’s so romantic! POPPYCOCK!
If you are undead, you have no soul. If you have no soul, you have no conscience or sense of right and wrong. You do whatever it is you want to do because there are no consequences for you. Most importantly, you cannot love, because to love requires sacrifice and giving of one’s self, which if you are an immoral immortal, you cannot do.
Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some vampires stories as much as the next person. I even wrote a 25-page research paper on vampires for a folklore class I took in college. Unfortunately, I’ve just had it up to here with the Edward/Bella nonsense. These love-sick, shimmering vampires are just silly and so far removed from the original legends, that they’re making the undead all uncool and wimpy. The books are “eh” at best and the movie(s) are the ultimate in cheese (waiting for the dirty looks and shrieks from the peanut gallery to subside). If tweens, teens, and even most adult women want to get all gaga over these characters, fine and dandy; however, when the backlash eventually hits, and it will, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Unlike vampires, we mere mortals are fickle, and society can only take so much bubblegum and pop before it turns and rears its ugly head (think Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in ’79).
What’s next? Zombies are going to be conflicted about eating human flesh and want to work for the government? Werewolves are going to use their transformation to become drug and bomb-sniffing superheroes? Frankenstein’s monster will go into the field of medical research? I could go on and on…but I won’t. Suffice to say, it’s time for vampires to stop being so Metro and get back to doing what they do best: scaring the peasants, being evil, acting as a manifestation for society’s sexual urges and desire for the forbidden, and sucking blood. Now that’s cool!
As the above article states, it appears that the vampire legend has been altered to the point of absurdity, and we have our own generation to blame for it. Since the 80’s the “vampire” lifestyle has been romanticized and has been blurred with soap opera. The Vampire genre is a sub-genre of the overall horror/thriller genre, which seems to have become neutered and dumbed down itself. Actually, you can say that for the bulk of cinema these days. Even “independent” movies are sold to major Hollywood studios and become product themselves (The Blair Witch Project, which crosses both genres and therefore is a very good example, gave birth to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2). If anyone has seen this movie, I don’t believe I need to elaborate how this is a perfect example of what I am saying.
On the plus side, pop culture has always created a vacuum, leaving room for a counter-culture of sorts. Sure you have The Lost Boys, about broody teens and not fitting in, but you also have Near Dark, which actually shows the darker side of Vampirism. It even went out of its way to have a child vampire, which was actually one of the most brutal characters in the film. And it was also directed by the incredibly underrated Kathryn Bigelow, who arguably is a better genre director then most of the men out there. But I digress.
I speak from complete bias, but it seemed like my generation in the early 90’s was completely tired of all the ridiculously aqua-netted and neon pop of the mid to late 80’s, and everything went back to the more gritty realism of the 70’s. “College” music was discovered by more and more of the masses, as were “art-house” films. After a while, MTV and Hollywood figured out there was gold in these things, and we got “alternative” music and “independent” films. The gritty counter-culture became the gritty pop culture, and everyone seemed happy that they were finally “understood.” This was the decade that Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and other independent film makers became popular. I reference them specifically because, along with Make-Up maestro Robert Kurtzman they came up with From Dusk till Dawn, a genre flipping crime caper that becomes a vampire movie. Sure, the “vampires” are more like zombies with dark humor, but they’re still not “in love” and “trying to find a soul.”
This was 96, the same year Wes Craven directed a little movie called “Scream” which introduced the Slasher flick, in a rather creative way, to the X/Y generations (this was my freshman year of college, so four years from this time my generation was already “old”). I would probably fail an English class for basically changing the theme of my rant here, but this dovetails me right into the horror movies of the 70’s and 80’s. The slasher genre was more or less born with John Carpenter’s Halloween in 78, which spawned Friday the 13th and all the other early to mid 80 slasher flicks. Most of these films were, to put it bluntly, crap, but they were not mainstream – they had a niche following.
The best of these films keep the antagonist dark, brooding and terrifying – kind of like that guy Bram Stoker wrote about that was based on Vlad the Impaler. In Halloween the most you found out about Michael Myers was that as a kid he went nuts and killed his sister. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy was a pardoned child murderer, but there was never an explanation how he got into kids dreams and killed them there. There didn’t have to be. It scared the crap out of us, and the movie was just surreal enough to make you think you were in a dream yourself.
Let’s look at their counterparts today, in the ever ridiculous remake trend. I think I could write a whole blog on that, but I won’t too much. Just enough to prove my point that Michael Myers had a “tough childhood” with an abusive step-father and a stripper mom. He wasn’t a dark brooding embodiment of evil; he was a kid who wasn’t understood. Rob Zombie almost wanted us to feel sorry for him. And just the first trailer for the ridiculously un-needed “Nightmare on Elm Street” remake gives us more character development on Freddy Kruger then we ever needed. He’s not the boogeyman, he’s some school janitor that was “accidentally” burned to death and “may have” been falsely accused.
So basically, our generations search for self and “what it’s all about” has been bastardized to apply to all. We need to understand why the killer kills, instead of doing the smart thing and running up a flight of steps and getting trapped. In Friday the 13th you found out who the killer was at the end, but you didn’t need to know that at the beginning of the film. Even at the end you didn’t need to. Actually that’s a poor example, since the basic premise of this movie was to scare people and gross them out. Read about it – the filmmakers really could have cared less what the story was about, as long as they had Makeup artist Tom Savini making kills look realistic (cue Kevin Bacon with an arrow going through his throat).
I’m digressing again. As a kid horror movies of any kind terrified me. It’s what made them so attractive to me as a young adult. The most terrifying and, therefore, most gratifying were the Zombie movies. There’s so much subtext in a zombie movie that the early works of George Romero seem to be hailed by critics. Again, I won’t go into detail about these, since I notice that zombies are becoming as popular as vampires. Here’s where my true agenda shows its face – pretty soon we WILL have brooding teenage zombies that are conflicted between kissing the girl and eating out her brains.
The early 2000’s saw a Dawn of the Dead remake, which I felt was pretty good. It didn’t have the original’s subtext of consumerism or the new generation eating the old, but it did show how people can turn against one another in a crisis and it made what I thought were hard decisions that might not be a mainstream movie choice. There was also Shaun of the Dead which actually managed to make a funny movie about zombies terrifying. Also 28 Days later by now Oscar-Winning director Danny Boyle managed to make the zombie film interesting again, without loosing why they are important cinema.
But it’s already starting to happen. Resident Evil, although based on a video game, is LOOSELY based on that game and is more a tired rehash of a zombie movie. Granted I kind of enjoy these movies, but they’re like donuts. We know we shouldn’t eat them but what’s wrong with too much sugar every once in a while? Don’t get me started on “Dead and Breakfast” which is the USA’s answer to Shaun. And I recently watched a “Day of the Dead” remake. “Day” is about a small band of survivors of the zombie apocalypse living in an underground bunker, with some military personnel and basically a mad scientist, who is actually trying to domesticate a zombie named “Bud.”
“Zombies are going to be conflicted about eating human flesh and want to work for the government?” This is a direct quote from the above blog, and it’s exactly what happens in the remake. Instead of the entire planet being overrun, it’s a small town in Colorado which is being overrun by“flu.” Suddenly the sick go comatose, then their eyes turn white and sores break out all over their skins – they “turn” into zombies. So one of the military officers, a guy named “Bud” is bitten and turns into a zombie. But he won’t eat anyone. Why? He was a vegetarian before he turned! And he follows orders because he “retains the memory” of being a good soldier. THEN they find an “underground secret military bunker” in this small town that turns out to be the lab that started the “virus.” Of course it was a government experiment gone wrong.
I think you see my point. This is happening to all of our movies, because movie companies are pushing a product, not making art. And the teens and tweens of today are eating it up. As long as tickets sell, we’ll continue to get brand name cinema. And really, the nature of the horror film precludes it from being a brand name.
I think I’m going to go read a book.