The Vampire Lecture

[delwyncole]

So, if you read the last post, you know that there will probably be two more tonight. The first is this one, on the History of Vampires in Film & Television lecture that I went to on Friday. Later still, probably aproaching midnight, while I'm filling time waiting for NaNoWriMo to start, I'll also get a post up that deals with politics and the

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[delwyncole]

The professor did not talk about the shift in migration patterns as regards the cities, but it was something that kind of flitted across my mind as he said it. He did talk some about how the shift reflects the way that by the mid-80s, Americans saw most of their major challenges/threats as coming from within (drugs, sex related badness, juvenile delinquency, etc., etc., rather than as something external. Sure, the cold war was still going on, but was anyone really afraid of the Russians or China anymore? Not on a popular conciousness level anyway. There was mostly disdain, and some anger towards those groups, but not any real fear. Some of this dovetails nicely with some of the things I've been reading about as I prepare for my NaNovel, and deal with the ickiness that is current politics, and the way they play on fears.

I know that the specific date he's using for AIDS is the Reagan thing, but I suspect, that he's also talking about the fact that 1985 is the year, that several celebrities first admitted to being HIV positive. I'd think that AIDS was certainly in the minds of at-risk populations, but I would suspect that while they'd heard of it, it wasn't something that was really feared in mainstream America yet in 1983. So I'll say it's a plausible connection that AIDS was one thing they meant to be addressing in the film (though he does also point out that the Whitley Streiber novel it's based on and supposedly very faithful to, though I haven't read it yet, was written in 1976 well before AIDS would be recognized), but that Vampirism was also being used as a stand-in for the broader perceived problem of sexual promiscuity, the rise of sex clubs in the 70s and 80s, the emergence of the Swingers subculture, etc., which goes beyond the possibility of disease and into the culture war type issues of destruction of the traditional family structure.

Honestly, when it comes to screen vampires, I haven't really watched enough to have really good opinions. I've got a whole list of things to catch up on, before I have anything definitive to say. I do think that the immigration theme continues to carry over.

In addition, I think that vampires, especially when depicted in groups, act as a metaphor for any number of groups, but the GLBT community is most often talked about in connection with this. As vampires continue to become more sympathetic in a lot of their screen depictions, there's also a good case to make for vampirism as disability. I'd really like to watch the movies for Twilight and maybe read the other books before I make any definitive statements on those, but I think there's a lot of class consciousness to them, and also a clash between traditional cultures and new cultural norms (both within the vampire community when you look at how the Cullens differ from other vampires presented, and in the clash of the Werewolves and the Vampires. For the most part this can be looked at as a difference between modern white society and traditional non-white societies the Native American connection is most obvious, but it could also apply to asian cultures among others). To a certain extent, a theme which Stephanie Meyer at least made an effort to address is the increasing sense of almost crippling responsibility that some teenagers feel regarding their families (came through in the first book, I don't know about the movie or other books).

Oh, and before I forget, the 2000s also saw a return to a more traditional horror vampire in films like 30 Days of Night, I think those vampires tend to be a terrorism metaphor.

I apparently talk too much, because I had to split this reply up.

[delwyncole]

Yes, I noticed too, that written vampires seem to be 20 years or so ahead of the curve. I found that interesting, though I'm not entirely certain of what to make of it. It might explain some of the differences from book to film, including some of the ones that most annoy me.

I suspect over the next decade or so we'll continue to see a real dichotomy of the well-integrated, often less threatening vampire and the horrific monstrous vampire, with the traditional horror vampire ramping up as time goes on. That's largely because of the threat of terrorism. I think we'll see a lot more vampires come to the screen through original scripts and foreign animation (most notably from Japan), and see fewer and fewer novel-to-screen vampire adaptations.

If we get LKH and the like coming to screen, I think it will be in the next 5 years or so. I suspect that they will focus heavily on the sex, and I will probably be even more annoyed with the films than I am with the books.

Another interesting trend, that I think Buffy was really the start of, but which was continued with the BBC's Demons and which any LKH drama would certainly be a part of, seems to be an increasing focus on those who oppose the vampire (or other supernatural baddies) rather than on the vampires themselves. In some ways this is kind of a return to early vampire stories, but I think it goes further. It would be as if, Dracula had been told entirely from Van Helsing's perspective.

That's a definite shift away from things like Interview and Forever Knight, without completely abandoning the idea of the chaste vampire or the sympathetic vampire.