Welcome to another whenever-I-feel like it journal, where I'll rant about whatever geeky subject comes to mind and give my opinions on it... both positive and negative. Today's subject, considering it is Halloween... Is Vampires.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Once the greatest of the horror monsters, now the lamest things in existence. When was the last time that a vampire was legitimately scary? When was the last time someone took the CONCEPT of a vampire seriously?
Let's go back... WAY back to when bloodsuckers were scary.... The original idea of a vampire is a corpse... a ROTTING corpse that rises up and drinks people's blood to sustain itself. It has vast powers, and can only be killed by being pinned down through the heart with a stake, then decapitated. Anyone who is bit by a vamp becomes one, and vamps have the power to control minds and turn people into thralls.
Over time, the myth changed into the stake being the thing that kills a vamp. Slightly less scary, but when you consider that the vamps were still insanely powerful, it didn't diminish from the fear-factor.
Then came the 80s and 90s... and people came to the EXTREMELY weird conclusion that getting the blood forcibly sucked out of your body is "erotic." ...Which I guarantee you it would NOT be. THAT was the beginning of the end for the vampire. They'd already been on a long and steady decline, but tragically THIS was the (pardon the pun) final nail in the coffin.
After that point, the vampire no longer was a rotting ghoul. It now was club-goers and ravers who indulged in sex while drinking you dry. They were pretty boys and sexy girls who used sexual allure to drag victims to their death.
Then... came Twilight. Stephanie Meyer admitted she never did even a HINT of research on vamps in her story. It killed the vampire forever. No longer the scary, pure-evil ghouls of old, now the vampire is a whiny, SPARKLING, emo jerk. And sadly, they will never recover from this.
I think it is time to stop using vampires in horror. They have gotten too caught up in the baggage that has been piled on them over the decades. They have been romanticized too much, to the point that they cannot be taken seriously. Luckily, the ZOMBIE is still scary. There's nothing you can do to make a cannibalistic rotting corpse romantic.
Now, for examples of vampires done RIGHT... Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel by Joss Whedon is the vampire done perfectly. For one thing, they're not just corpses, but they're corpses animated by a demon. The REAL person is dead when they're turned into a vamp. A monster is all that's left. They're pure evil with NO exceptions. The only "good" vamps are those that have gotten their souls back, namely Angel and Spike. There are no vampire nightclubs... No "erotic" vamps... they're monsters through and through.
The Blade series of movies based on the comic by Marvel is another example of well-done vampires... but sadly they also fall victim to the "erotic vampire" trope... So I can't rate them as highly as Buffy.
Finally 30 Days of Night is actually even MORE perfect than Buffy's vamps. The vamps in this are completely inhuman, with streamlined faces and black eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth... They look like sharks more than anything. There's nothing erotic or sparkly about THESE vamps. There's a scene where they systematically slaughter an entire town with nothing but their bare hands and teeth. They're bulletproof, and possibly even stake-proof, and the only way to kill them is through decapitation or sunlight. Too bad they showed up in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in America, during the longest night of the year....
In conclusion, all I have left to say is that in general, vampires don't just suck... they blow.
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12 years, 6 months ago
30 Oct 2011 17:27 CET
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