This is the third part in a four part series looking at the extraordinary popularity of the vampire genre, Dracula being the subject of more films than any other fictional character. The four parts are:
- One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
- Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
- Vampires selling unsafe sex? looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
- Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.
Vampires selling unsafe sex?
What is it that has driven the increased interest in the vampire genre over the last twenty years? An English university professor I talked to even said she was seeing a lot of thesis ideas based around the vampire genre, and there is even an online journal of vampire studies.
One obvious answer: s-e-x.
Getting around Victorian prudishness
The 1897 Bram Stoker novel that started it all (in terms of contemporary Western culture’s obsession with vampirism) came out during the age of repressed Victorian sexuality yet was able to allude to issues that couldn’t be discussed except in fiction. Winona Ryder as Mina, the heroine engaged to Jonathan Harker, is cast in Coppola’s 1992 film as virginal compared to the more abandoned Lucy and marriage will bring all those issues of sex and death (in those days intimately linked by problems during childbirth) to the fore.
Mina drinks Count Dracula’s blood from his breast. Jonathan Harker in turn is trapped by sexual abandonment with the vampire sisters in the Count’s castle, and we watch Dracula sexually ravage Lucy as a beast.
Vampires in the swinging 60′s to 80′s
The sexual revolution in the ’60s saw 32 vampire films made and in the ’70s this doubled to 61 films. A number of the Hammer films were particularly sexualized such as the 1960s ‘Brides of Dracula’ set at a girl’s boarding school.
More recently than the Hammer films, adult sexuality and vampires has been explored in the mid 80s in the R-rated The Hunger with David Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie (Bowie’s always been a little ahead of his time, beating Coppola by 9 years).
In The Hunger there is also a very clear link between vampirism and the prevention of aging and yet another love triangle. A nice touch that the female vampire in the film negates men’s dominance and is stronger than they are. The sexuality angle is particularly emphasized in the more recent post 2000 films and series like True Blood.
The term ‘vamp’, often traced right back to Theodora Bara in ‘A Fool There Was’ in 1915, is in fact the sultry vampire seductress who preys on upright men. A particular appeal of the genre is the way that it reflects the common experience that sometimes personal relationships can be categorised as ‘predatory’ (or where one partner of any gender seems to experience a transfer of ‘energy’ from the other) if you chat to your local relationship/family counsellor.
Titillation and the horror movie director
Sexuality is also a hugely important part of the horror moviemaking toolkit as it is standardly used just before a scary scene to disarm the audience.
We’re happy to let down our guard that ‘this is only a movie’ when we’re being voyeurs and can therefore be set up for the monster jumping out of the shadows.
Vampire movies with their sexualized overtones are therefore much less forced than all those horror movie scenes where you gratuitously insert two teenagers making out before the big fright scene.
Sexual risk for adolescents and vampires
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Twilight and The Lost Boys (1987) all play to the promise and risks of sex for adolescents – in The Lost Boys the single mother of the two teenage boys even invites the head of the vampire clan over to the house for a date.
The teenager interest in vampires fits well with what they perhaps hear from contemporary parents: don’t do drugs, don’t have sex, don’t get drunk because horrendous things will happen to you that will ruin the rest of your lives. And, by the way as a friend of mine says, just study as though the rest of your interests are dead!
Watching my youngest (Gen Y) sister over Christmas sitting on the balcony smoking to general family disapproval and reading Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series, you wonder whether the vampire genre is the Gen Y version of rebellion. Forget about black leather jackets, I’m carrying a copy of Twilight; I’m bad-bad-bad.
Virginity
Virginity is an important issue for Stephanie Meyer. Bella Swan (the ‘beautiful bird’!) is able to experiment with sexuality and desire for a long time (3 movies!) but without having to actually go through with it. Perhaps it even remains better than it is in reality. The penetration metaphor of biting or for that matter of ‘staking’ a female vampire is hardly a coincidence. Just in case you’ve missed the reference Twilight even gives you the forbidden apple from the garden of Eden on the book’s cover: a nice melding of the religious and sexuality themes.
In the Twilight series we spend inordinate amounts of time waiting to see if Edward the vampire and Bella will have sex (because when that happens he fears he cannot control himself). No question that there is a very thinly veiled message here: ‘young men can lose control when it comes to sex‘ (but hell maybe with 57% of rapes occuring from dates this is fair enough).
Love triangles
And to heighten the sexual tension why not throw in a Bram Stoker-like love triangle? This is somewhat ponderously recreated in the Twilight movies in a series of set pieces e.g. Bella’s departure from school on Jacob’s motorcycle or the somewhat unlikely scene in the tent in Eclipse towards the end (as a girl friend of mine says male characters in the Twilight series are even more unlikely than vampires themselves: men who talk about their feelings). The Vampire Diaries also uses the adolescent vampire love triangle device, and was written 10 years before Twilight in 1993.
There’s no gay symbolism here – move along now
Vampirism perhaps also provides a ‘safe’ exploration of gay issues for heterosexual men. The vampire as a male creature can ‘father’ a child and it has been noted that there exists a rich vein of gay references as a result as when Dracula notes of Jonathan in Coppola’s film “this man belongs to me” (two years before the publication of Dracula in 1897 Oscar Wilde stood trial for sodomy). More recently True Blood looks more explicitly at homosexuality via the character of Lafayette and perhaps the personal anguish of Eric about the death of his ‘maker’ Godric.
It will be interesting to see which fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or TV series. Place your bets below.
This article filed under the following 'Interest' categories (click category for more) Unanswerable questions