With the recent popularity of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods, vampires are enjoying a contemporary resurgence in literature, film, and pop culture. In fact, when it comes to modern incarnations of magical creatures, vampires have been on the ascent ever since Nosferatu star Max Shreck thrilled and terrified flappers onscreen in 1922.

 Max Schreck as Count Orlok 1922Today’s cinematic and fictional vampires are a lot hunkier than the sickly Shreck was made up to be, but the celebrity vampires of today all share the same intense intimacy with desire and death.

This intimacy is both timeless and central to vampire mythology. The interesting question (to my mind, anyway) is: Given that sex is splashed all over everything these days in the form of advertising and product development, why now? Why are vampires suddenly so hot now?

I believe the answer is that while the modern era no longer rigidly represses sexuality (if anything we exploit and celebrate it), we do repress death. (How many dead bodies have you personally seen this week? This month? In your lifetime?)

In earlier times death was everywhere and people witnessed it up close on a daily basis. Sexuality, on the other hand, was dangerous and problematic.

Today, that situation is reversed.

According to Pam’s Informal First Law of Paranomal Phenomena, whatever we repress tends to come out larger than life in paranormal form.

Enter the vampire. Again.

Vampire lore has lots and lots of layers, but in popular culture, the way we imagine vampires changes according to what surrounds us and which part of it we are trying to ignore.

Vampires that emerge during times of plague, famine, and carnage (when death cannot be ignored) tend to be represented in popular lore as repulsive and depraved. Vampires that emerge during times when death is discreet and socially contained (but sex is off the chart and all over the place) tend to be represented as wildly attractive and romantic.

During times of plague and carnage, vampires are villains that lure innocents into the charnal house. During sexually exploitive times, vampires become anti-heroes who vanquish death by embracing lust. 

Blood Lust

Blood and sexual power have been equated since prehistoric times.

Menstruating women used to be banished to remote areas or huts during their bleeding to contain their power, and menstrual taboos remain in effect today in many cultures. Sex during menstruation is considered distasteful by even many modern persons, yet studies show that the peak of desire in a woman most often coincides with the period during which she sheds blood.

Lucy from Bram Stokers DraculaIn Victorian times, pale, bloodless women wracked with consumptive fever (known today as tuberculosis), were highly eroticized. For girls, sick was sexy. Victorian literature is filled with passages about the sexual attractiveness of feverish, pale women on the verge of death.

During this same period, these passive objects of desire were portrayed as returning after death with a bad case of insatiable blood lust (think of Lucy in Dracula).

A clearer example of projection is hard to find.

Few historical periods were as sexually-phobic as the Victorian Era. It is no accident that it was the Victorian era that first gave us sexy vampires in the form of pallid insatiable dead women who, once bitten by lust, returned to life as dangerous creatures that could not die again. In reality it was desire itself that could not die, no matter how many tight corsets the Victorians tried to cram it into to tamp it down.

Rock Me Sexy Jesus

Contemporary teen vampires similarly illustrate the shadow side of real people. This time the projectionists are Evangelical Christans, who set up female virginity as virtue and sexless love as a religious end for all.

The young vampire men in these new novels fall in love with human girls and then refuse to indulge their vampire desires as an expression of that unusual love relationship. Ironically, this arrangement allows Christian girls to wallow in overtly sexual feelings and emotions without consequence. This hysterical dynamic recalls the luridly sexually ecstasies of the early Catholic female saints, whose sexualized love for Jesus caused them to swoon and orgasm openly and without shame.

The vampire of today is a kind of Christian anti-hero. Unlike mainstream mortal Christians. the vampire gets to live forever AND have sex and kill people. This new, improved vampire gives young Christian girls an outlet for their sexuality that doesn’t result in out-of-wedlock births, while still incorporating Christian themes of eternal life and timeless passion.

Recently, teen vampire novels like those written by Meyers and De la Cruz have come under fire from feminist groups that charge these books romanticize and legitmate abusive male/ female relationships.

Edward & the Cullens: Would you really want your daughter to marry one?At the very least, the relationship between Bella and Edward in Twilight is grotesquely unequal. At its worst it is addictive in both directions. Bella uses Edward as an unnatural release for her very human sexual energy. In doing so she feeds his power and depletes her own. Edward professes endless fussy internal conflict over this unhealthy dynamic, but you have to wonder how hard it really is on him.

I mean, he’s got forever, right? He’ll probably come to terms with the guilt and move on.

 In that sense, Edward is a bit like God, or like a god. He’s Christ made sexy for the retail book market.

Whenever feminists start critiquing pop culture this way, people of both genders tend to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “la la la la la la,” and I understand why. Talk about party pooping crab asses! But an informal survey of both my kids and my personal friends who read and love these books garnered widespread (if sheepish) agreement that there is a grain of truth in this critique.

Sex and desire are not identical. It is possible to have sex that is scarcely as interesting as a healthy bowel movement, (ask any longtime married couple), but desire is always hot and full of energy, and its permutations are endless. In truth, sexual desire is what life is: desire is the pulse of life, the life force incarnate, in much the same way that living blood is life, the physical evidence of embodied life.

To be cut off from desire then is to be cut off from the lifeforce and the body, and to be confined to the sterile, bloodless mind. When a culture commodifies sex and slaps it on cereal boxes and soap flakes, it has the effect of separating sex from desire and rendering it lifeless and pale.

The vampire bridges that gap, and oh boy howdy what a bridge. 

Are vampires—psychic, mythic, or otherwise—real though?

More on that question later. Stay tuned.

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