Quotes of the Week 25 ~ Those Trendy Vampires
This was inspired by a comment on Facebook by
inkwolf_at_last
I won't even make any vampire puns or jokes because some of the quotes below handle that quite well.
Jacob and Edward from Twilight Have Twin Corn Mazes in Utah
Have Fun Kids!
EVERY new audiobook series the library system gets (is) about vampires. There's only so much you can write about sucking blood and fighting werewolves, dudes!
~ Inkwolf
“The vampire is the new James Dean ... There is something so still and sexy about these young erotic predators."
~ Julie Plec, the writer and executive producer of The Vampire Diaries a series on the CW network based on the popular L. J. Smith novels about high school femmes and hommes fatales.
Damon: What's so special about this Bella girl? And Edward is SO whipped. I miss Anne Rice...she had it right.
Caroline: How come you don't sparkle?
~ Dialogue from The Vampire Diaries found HERE
"If people want stories about girls who love vampires, they should have them," Whedon said. "It's not like I came up with it. It's always deeply romantic or deeply interesting or deeply scary, or all of the above, and that's going to be mined long after I'm gone."
~ Joss Whedon in an MTV article called Sinking Our Teeth Into Modern Vampires
"That's driving me nuts ... We've got 'Twilight,' which 16-year-old girls are going batsh-over. One of my big motivators for '30 Days of Night' was that vampires had gotten annoying and silly [by being romantic]. So I strip it back to where they look at you like cattle. They don't like humans. They don't spend time worrying about us."
~ Steve Niles, creator of 30 Days of Night a scary comic book series and now a movie about roving Vampires in Barrow, Alaska.
Starting in the early 70s, a new generation of kids learned to count from the helpful, vamp-fanged Count on Sesame Street. He may have looked and sounded like Bela Lugosi, but he had the heart and soul of a friendly teacher. Ca-ching! Just about the same time, General Mills put out its popular and very sweet kid's cereal, Count Chocula, featuring a guy with chocolate and marshmallows running through his tasty veins. Ca-ching, ca-ching. Let the morphing begin. Because vampires are so domesticated and appealing now, perhaps it's time to put True Blood's hunky vamp, Bill Compton, on the Wheaties Breakfast of Champions box. Ca-ching-ching-ching!
~ Tom Alderman in a Huffington Post Editorial called Vampires - Why Here, Why Now?
I'm afraid I have a simpler and more cynical reason for the vampire trend. The people who manage to get popular books sold and movies made aren't very creative. My daughter explained the story line of Twilight to me and I kept on saying "oh, so its just like Buffy" or really more of a lame rip off of Buffy which thanks to Joss Whedon actually was a fairly creative series that showed female empowerment. Twilight turns the grrrl power slayer into a whiny debutante who needs to be protected by her demon-man. And in general the vampire myth provides a predefined set of stereotypes and plot devices that everyone is familiar with, especially when you take the Twilight approach and don't just pick up the general myth but many of the main ideas that proved so succesfull for a popular TV series. Much easier than actually inventing a fantasy world that makes sense the way J.K. Rowling did.
~ a poster named RedDogBear, in the comments section about the Alderman Essay
“It’s teen angst living forever ... Wouldn’t that be horrible?”
~ Karen Kohoutek, librarian from Fargo, ND, and author of the horror movie blog Haunted Vinyl quoted in Vampires Have a Heart, but Are They Losing Their Bite?