Vampires: A Break from Realism

I was on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses  and saw Maven of the Eventide's video on Queen of the Damned and...well... Lestat and The Vampire Chronicles in general. It got me thinking about vampires again. Well, also I've been doing something else extremely naughty. In fact, I'm somewhat afraid to admit it...

I watched the Twilight movies. 

We will seduce you! With sparkles! And solemn looks!

I can hear you groaning and laughing hysterically in my head depending on how well you know me and how you feel about those... abominations.

It started after I watched a Nostalgia Critic video on whether or not Twilight was really as bad as I thought it was. I admit. I read the first book, tried to read the second book, but wasn't interested. I didn't even really read them. I listened to them on CD. Someone had to read the books to me so that I could stomach them. And they still weren't interesting to me!!!

In fact, I thought it was the end of vampires as I know and love them.

So, the Nostalgia Critic got me thinking that I really hadn't seen the movies or ever really given them a fair chance. I just was bored to tears by a bad book, saw how popular the damn thing was, and wrote off modern vampires as horrible, weak, flailing things that I wanted nothing to do with. 

So. I've been watching the movies and... They're horrible.

No, I mean it. I had seen the first Twilight movie drunk and they're just as hilarious sober. You have no idea how madly I giggled at every corny thing or badly spoken line or awkward attempt at romance. It was... brilliant. I think I can understand the guilty pleasure side of it now.

The movies are awful. They aren't the worst movies out there, however. There is a worse vampire movie that I used to love and still love. It's called Queen of the Damned.

Pout with us!

Yes.

When I was a very young little girl (probably fifteen years ago-ish), my mom was reading this book... or my cousin was watching this movie. I can't remember which happened first. The movie my cousin was watching was The Interview With the Vampire. The book my mom was reading was The Vampire Lestat or The Tale of the Body Thief. Either way, I'm pretty sure they were before my horror film obsession fully bloomed into life and I was watching every scary movie I could.

I could be wrong though.

Anyhow, I saw the movie and I was intrigued. Vampires were supposed to be scary. Not funny. And you certainly weren't supposed to feel bad for them! But, there was blond Tom Cruise and blue-eyed Brad Pitt on screen being all manic and happy and sad and mopey. Then there was Claudia. Holy crap! I just remember being so interested.

Interested enough that I tried to read the books without knowing about the movie or the connection just yet. Everything was going fine. I really liked what I was reading. It was intriguing and the idea of vampires appealed to me for some reason... until the nightmares started about vampires wanting to suck my blood and kill me and my mom for whatever reason and then we'd be vampires and we'd have to kill our family and either we converted them and ruined their lives or they died and left us behind. OH GOD!!!

My Mom. Confiscated. The Books. I didn't see them again... for several years.

Then, I was in junior high and pretty much an outcast. I loved horror films. ESPECIALLY horror films with vampires in them. I couldn't get enough of them! Sure I was a bit sad that there wasn't much variety. They were all tweaked  versions of Bram Stoker's stuff. On the other hand, I didn't care all that much.  The glamour. The monster hiding barely under the surface of someone refined and regal. The mystique.

I couldn't imagine anyone who didn't love vampires.

I found the books sitting on my aunt's shelf at her house... I think. My uncle used to keep these huge bookcases in his front room with books everywhere. I come from a bibliphilic family. We always have books everywhere and I would spend weeks during the summer with my aunt, uncle and cousins playing the the creek, reading books, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. My summers growing up basically trained my to be a hick-nerd.  Well, I probably got bored and I was looking for a new book series which happened often. I saw the books on my aunt's shelf and... I remembered when I'd tried to read them and gotten nightmares.

So, because thirteen is so much older than nine or ten, I decided to try again!

I fell in love! I wanted Lestat to be real. I loved the mythology and the ideas that percolated Anne Rice's universe. 

I watched the movie. And then Queen of the Damned came out and I watched it too.

I'll admit it, at thirteen/fourteen, I was pretty stupid and I loved the music too. It was kind of geared toward me. I did turn "goth" in high school for about two years until I remembered that being a general "nerd" is so much more fun and it allowed you to say creepy things to people and really freak them out instead of people just being like, "Meh, she's goth she's supposed to be that way."

And I like the human anatomy very much. You would look so much better without your skin. Muscles and bones are gorgeous.

So, I loved the movie even though... It didn't follow the book at all. I was so stupid, I didn't even get properly angry over it for several years. Stuard Townsend was hot. For some reason I really wanted to kiss Aaliyah as Akasha. I just... I was young! I mean, they took a book with so much depth and beauty and history and turned it into... 

Well, Twilight is better than that movie in a lot of ways. At least the Volturi are amusing.

And they took Lestat and GUTTED HIM! They made him into a shallow Angel or Spike! Who pouts all the time!

I own that movie... because now it's a guilty pleasure that's really fun to laugh at. Also, the Gag Reel? Brilliant!

Anyhow, where was I?

Before all that background.

Vampires.

I mean, Maven and Twilight kind of brought it back for me. You know, what it was like being a teenager in love with vampires. I remember going through thrift stores trying to hunt down L.J. Smith's Vampire Diaries book because they were out of print and the library didn't have all of them. I remember reading Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series and being... all moony over the romantic bits in all the vampire books I absorbed. I enjoyed Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and her self-insert book!

Aubrey was decently awesome though...

I remember being nineteen with my grandma trying to get me into romance fiction and introducing me to Christine Feehan and her Carpathian series.

So, I get the romance with a vampire thing. I get the love of vampires in general thing.

I also know that I (mostly) grew out of it. Just like I grew out of most of my romantic fantasies from when I was a teenager.  Heck, I grew out of my romantic fantasies from when I was obsessed with Disney and Princesses too.

Am I a normal person for having loved vampires? No. I liked darker vampires. Gore never grossed me out, it was interesting. It was also incredible fake. I've drained blood from a dead body and replaced it with a formaldehyde solution. I've seen the corpse of a person that killed him- or herself. I've helped set up for the funeral of a dead baby and a dead child. I know people who have liked vampires who can't handle that stuff, though.

So... I'm probably just sick and twisted on my own.

I don't mind.

The thing is... vampires appeal to the general masses most of the times in one fashion or another. You have to keep in mind that vampires in lore were traditionally more zombie-like in behavior and appearance. However, instead of wanting to eat your brains, they just wanted to suck your blood.

Now, vampires are people too, and they probably want to have sex with you... or your teenage daughter.

Times change, but vampires were at one point closely related to the succubus and incubus, demons that seduced men and women with sex and fed off it. So... It kind of makes sense.

It's when the succubi and incubi are people too that the world will end!!!

Oh shit!!!

So... vampires aren't that bad. They can't get much worse in movies. And, it's not like they could go much further down then the child-friendly Count from Sesame Street. I mean, yeah, he's still better than Twilight or Queen of the Damned (Seriously, watch that movie. It's bad), but he's not scary and he isn't going to bite you.

Heck, Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was awesome in Season Two and Season Five of Angel, but Seasons Three through Seven of Buffy had him becoming less and less and less an interesting badass pseudo-Lestat and more and more... cuddly. They even started calling Badass Decay "Spikification" on TVTropes for a while.

So... vampires still have a chance! I mean, there are movies where vampires aren't so bad... and someday I'm going to write a vampire book that will hopefully be pretty good and turn them into horrible monsters again. Horrible monsters you may be able to somehow relate to, like Anne Rice (not that wretched film), but still you know... people that eat people.

On the other hand, you want vampires that can be friendly and still twisted and awful, The Saga of Darren Shan by... Darren Shan is a pretty good example. Again, don't watch the movie if you can help it. It's not bad. In fact, the one element I didn't think I'd like was actually pretty awesome. John C. Reilly can act! And not just as a stupid, foolish manchild that needs to be castrated to protect the planet!

So... this is mostly a rambling post, isn't it? I guess that's what this blog is for anyhow. I get to ramble about whatever I like and tonight it's vampires.  In my last vampire post, I talked about what my ideal vampire is like. The Vincent Price vampire. Suave, debonair, bites you when your back is turned and is a complete gentlemen about cleaning up your body.

That's Lestat. My first vampire was actually Louis, but the one I liked was Lestat. You never really forget your first vampire... if you get into that sort of thing. Sort of like how my grandmother has never forgotten her first fantasy author (mine was John Peel). There are just things that are important like that... and it's good to hold on to them.

Sadly, someday, a girl will be writing a blog about her first vampire being Edward Cullen. There is one thing to say about that:

Damn Straight!

Damn! I really want to reread the Vampire Chronicles now, but I think I'll work on one of my vampire stories instead.

Sweet Dreams!