I’d like to welcome David MacDowell Blue to TMtV. I met David through Leila’s forum and we have corresponded on and off since. David has produced an Annotated Carmilla, to which I provided the preface and has written plays based on both Carmilla (twice) and Dracula. David has produced a blog to celebrate twenty years of TMtV, based on a paper he wrote for the World Dracula Congress.
Not everyone finds the undead even remotely sexy. Plenty are baffled by those who do. But denying plenty of people do feel exactly that way? Denial, pure and simple. The sheer number of porn sites and adult movies as well as hardcore erotic novels on this subject make up a thing called “evidence.”
But...why? To be sure nearly anything can be erotic to someone. But what in English culture latched onto the vampire, generation after generation?
Here’s my own theory. Part of this is probably the simple fact that for many pleasure and pain bleed into each other at times, not least during foreplay and especially at the moment of climax. Biting is erotic, a vampire bites, plus the aura of submission, the pleasures many feel entwined with losing control, etc.
There must be more, though. Begin with timing. By the 1800s, specialization and mass production had begun to impact lives in a way the Renaissance never did. Cities in Europe had begun to swell far beyond what they had been. Among other things, this meant people had less to do with basic processes of life. Increasing numbers no longer grew their own food, baked their own bread, and perhaps more importantly, never slaughtered their own meat. This last seems vital because to slice open the throat of a creature with a face, a creature to which we might well have given a name, that is a profound experience. And it reminds us we share something in common with that goose, that pig, that bull. We too will die. This period also saw increasing isolation from the processes of death. Doctors now took care of the very sick. Morticians took over preparing the dead for burial. It took generations, but it happened.
In this milieu The Vampyre by John Polidori emerged, followed by more literary vampires which—unlike their folkloric counterparts—engaged in temptation, seduction, betrayal. But all—from Varney to Carmilla and Dracula—embodies DEATH not as force but a character, someone with whom victims and others had a relationship. A relationship we no longer have with that part of life.
As death itself became repressed, shut aside, pushed down, so the Vampire in art became a forbidden but alluring figure of power. Perhaps more importantly, this was also a time as the idea of sexuality changed, echoing the same suppression about death. Just as we no longer killed our Christmas goose, so we were not supposed to “enjoy” pleasure from our bodies, at least not that kind of pleasure. Especially women. In the Middle Ages, a woman could ask for a divorce—and get it—if her husband did not give her enough orgasms. By the time Victoria had been on the throne for awhile, the idea of women enjoying sex became seen as an unhealthy deviancy! Small wonder as the Vampire became an avatar of forbidden lore of one kind it became associated with another, given the timing. Certainly both Carmilla and Dracula used such themes, exploring taboo desires often in an effort to “cure” such.
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| Carmilla as portrayed in The Vampire Lovers |
By the time the twentieth century arrived, and as it progressed, all this became wound up with other aspects of life in some sense forbidden. Church and medical professionals as well as dozens of other institutions portrayed efforts to avoid death as unnatural, as much so as deviant forms of lust (including but not limited to dominance/submission, same sex attraction, fascination with pain or darkness in general). Small wonder then the centers of culture so often seen as “decadent” created many of the most memorable vampires which continue to haunt us. Weimar Germany gave us Nosferatu, while Hollywood turned Bram Stoker’s Count into a sinister sex symbol, and the same country from which the Beatles emerged also brought heaving bosoms as well very bright red blood into a whole slew of cult classic movies. Likewise, it makes such perfect sense New Orleans was the original home of Anne Rice, whose first novel took place in that beautiful, decaying, sensual city!
The pattern I see is how vampires remain entwined across the decades with whatever our culture wants rejected. Addictions, sexual excess, same sex love (all of Anne Rice), polyamory, cults (i.e. alternate spirituality a la Count Yorga or The Strain), interest in shadows and death (Dark Shadows), rebellion against the status quo in so many forms (including Twilight interestingly), power given to women, acceptance of the part of us that is animal (see 30 Days of Night for example), everything our teachers and parents and others insist we don’t “really” feel, at least not unless we are flawed (shades especially of Owen in Let Me In).
We aren’t supposed to feel a connection between ecstasy and agony, between feeling life ever more acutely in the presence of death, the primitive nature of so many of our desires (including the ones which cannot help pervade our lives). Jung called all these things our SHADOW, an archetype within our unconscious minds, the embodiment of all we have been taught to suppress. A figure of repulsion and attraction. Something we fear yet somehow know we need, and which being a part of us cannot be amputated without disfiguring or crippling ourselves.
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| Orlok as shadow in Nosferatu |
Vampires have become one incarnation of that Shadow. Our isolation from death, from death as part of life, from the processes humans now have done by proxy in order to survive, the sexual repression that emerged in the rise of the middle class, the specific shape of female repression and its frankly terrible consequences for all genders—plus maybe a little bit of our acquired idealization of biting into delicious red meat, tasting what seems like blood on the tongue (it isn’t really, but we’re talking visceral impressions here). All these combined into shaping this image—a seductive creature of sensual power, combining life and death, offering horror and freedom, slavery and excess, pleasure side by side with torture. It might not be handsome, although certainly most of the men cast as Dracula have been very good looking, and the voluptuous vampire woman in a translucent gown revealing a lot is an icon in her own right. It might be ugly, like Orlock or the spawn of Barlow in Salem’s Lot. But it remains in some sense attractive, often in the same way a toxic significant other may be, or the thrill of a very dangerous habit like heroin, or simply a temptation to power in one way or another. Achieving it, wallowing in it, or giving it away, releasing oneself into sensation and submission.
It could have been something else. The Hunger in some other timeline might have been about djinn. Abigail could have been a werewolf. Sinners could have been about zombies. From Dusk Till Dawn might easily have been about Minotaurs or Mermaids or even Elves!
Yet in the specific cultural stew of England in the early 1800s, the ingredients took the folkloric Vampire and simmered for centuries with the sexual neuroses of the Victorian Age into what we have today--a version of Jung’s Shadow within us all, tempting with danger and sin and truths we’ve been told are lies.
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