Let’s talk about vampires

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

I blame Twilight on the Puritans. Vampires have featured in American culture and media for centuries, but never more so than in the past 50 years, with smash-hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and several million versions of Dracula — and the repression that drives this trend is distinctly colonial.

Puritans originally defined our culture not by what it was, but by what they didn’t want it to be — notably ostentatious and sexual. Though most people wouldn’t describe themselves as “Puritans” anymore, branches of American Protestantism regularly preach against these concepts, keeping them in the public consciousness and feeding our cultural fascination with what society deems illicit.

Enter the vampire — the perfect embodiment of everything our culture condemns and craves.

Some are beautiful villains like Lestat from Interview with the Vampire, or for that matter, most Draculas. (For the record, I’m referencing the TV Lestat, not Tom Cruise.) They are amoral, hypersexual figures motivated solely by their own desires — the opposite of puritanical values. The creators of Dracula 2000 took this idea very literally when they revealed that the first vampire was Judas Iscariot.

Costume manufacturers and plastic surgeons market this fetishized, commodified version of the vampire as the ultimate freedom. There are several anti-wrinkle treatments called some variation of “vampire facelift.” Being forever young and unburdened by pesky things like morals is meant to be the perfect, unobtainable liberation. Look, but don’t touch.

This conceptualization of the vampire is a kind of false rebellion. Going out half-naked on Halloween or defying old age through surgery are common mass marketed practices that amount to little more than a fleeting thrill and a tidy profit for Spirit Halloween. Just as Harker or Van Helsing defeats Dracula, the party-goer takes off their costume at the end of the night, and societal conventions take over once more.

No matter how thrilling these characters are, they always have to lose to reinforce preexisting moral doctrine. Good has to triumph over tempting evil, and in the end we’re left with the moping, self-hating vampires like Louis from Interview or Henry from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Yes, I’m ashamed of the hours of my life I’ve spent watching horrible vampire flicks.

Vampires like Louis and Edward from Twilight are the embodiment of religious guilt. If you don’t believe me, keep in mind that Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight, is Mormon and Anne Rice, author of Interview, also writes novels chronicling the life of Jesus.

Penitent vampires apologizing for their very existence is the supernatural equivalent of Martin Luther’s self-flagellation. They live on the outskirts of society, constantly at war with themselves. These characters usually lack the cartoonish, fetishized immorality of their villainous counterparts, and I would argue they’re popular because they ultimately reflect back our own insecurities.

The prevalence of everything from beauty standards to racism ensures that no matter who we are, we’re ashamed of some part of ourselves. It’s easy to see why marginalized groups like the LGBTQIA+ community adopt these vampires. Homophobia in the U.S. teaches kids to hate who they are — because of their gender identity or sexual orientation — using the same puritanical values that shape the vampire. 

So long as society convinces us to hate and fear who we are we’ll always rely on these struggling vampires to show us that we aren’t alone.

These two archetypes aren’t the only kinds of vampires in modern media. It would take a mortal lifetime to catalog the thousands of American vampire stories and the equally diverse facets of our society that they mirror. One thing they have in common, though, is that they aren’t going away any time soon. We invited the vampires into our house and now we get to live with them.