Twilight and the Vampire Myth

From Bela Lugosi to Buffy to Twilight, popular culture just can’t get enough of vampires. What is it about these pesky bloodsuckers that has everyone fascinated?

When I was a kid, vampire movies were the most terrifying way to spend a Saturday night at home. I remember cowering under a blanket on the lounge with my cousins, watching Christopher Lee in the ominously entitled Dracula has risen from the grave. There was nothing quite as scarily fun as an old black-and-white rerun of either Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi as the Count stirring up mayhem in the quest for blood.

Of course, they were so over the top (‘Look eento my eyes!’ says Dracula) that we knew it was all just silly nonsense. But vampires have made quite a comeback in recent years. From films like The Lost Boys (1987) and Interview with a Vampire (1992), to television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), True Blood (2008) and the Twilight book series (2005-2009), those undead bloodsuckers just keep coming.

So why are vampires such resilient characters in our popular imagination? One theory goes that they are personifications of society’s gravest fears and that as those fears have changed over time, so have our depictions of them.

Our fear of nature

In their earliest incarnations, vampires were ugly, ghoulish creatures of the night, with translucent skin and long, bony hands and oversized fangs, not unlike Tolkien’s repulsive Gollum. When the German actor Max Schreck played the vampire Count Orlok in the 1922 film Nosferatu, he was pale and bald and stooped, with sunken eyes and fingernails like talons.

In medieval times, vampires served as the personification of all that Europeans feared in nature. It was said they only came out in the dark, when small, vulnerable, rural villages lived in fear of anything that went bump in the night. As famine and plague swept Europe, most villages held a very tenuous grip on life. The vampire, along with ghouls and goblins and werewolves, became representative of the horrors of night time and the capriciousness of the natural world.

As they could only be warded off by holy water or crucifixes, clearly, to those in the Dark Ages, they represented the chaotic and dangerous world of nature and could only be controlled by religious faith.

Our fear of the aristocracy

But by the 19th and 20th centuries, we were subduing nature and had found explanations for most natural mysteries and diseases. It’s in this period that vampires change from vile little monsters into suave aristocrats. Count Orlok is long forgotten. Enter the white, European, male vampire-norm of Count Dracula, Barnabas Collins and Lestat de Lioncourt (later played by Tom Cruise).

This period was marked by the emergence of democracy and political freedom in the West. The greatest fear held by democrats in France or Russia or America was the rise and re-emergence of another cruel aristocracy. Vampires were depicted as wealthy counts, living in massive castles and emerging at night to suck the blood from poor working class people. As godless aristocrats, they were no longer afraid of crosses. They had to be killed by a stake through their heart. The irreligious aristocrat who believes in nothing but his own inherited power and privilege must have his cold heart destroyed.

Our fear of ... teenagers?

And so it’s quite surprising that the 21st-century versions of the vampire are cool teenagers. In The Lost Boys, teenage vampires run rampant in sunny California with the tag line: ‘Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire’.

So, do rampant adolescents represent our greatest fear? Well, maybe there’s a bit more to it than that.

If you look at the vampire metaphor from the perspective of postmodern theory, it gets more interesting. Postmodernism subverts the whole in/ out oppositional structure of modernism, so some postmodernists say that a key to understanding the vampire is that it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure: it is the monster that used to be human; the undead that used to be alive; the monster that looks like us.

And, when you think about it, nothing deconstructs that in/out, black/white dichotomy more than fresh-faced beautiful young people actually being the bloodthirsty undead. Nowhere is this deconstruction more obvious than in the wildly popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.

Vampires in love

The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed to change everything we knew about vampires. Creator Joss Whedon’s teen vampires could fall in love with mortals. They could find redemption if they tried hard enough. They could also choose to resist their murderous urges and become ‘vegetarians’ drinking the blood of animals, not humans.

When Buffy (a vampire slayer) falls in love with Angel (an oddly-named vampire), we see that postmodern deconstruction at its peak. Buffy is a pretty blonde teenager, studying at Sunnydale High. It couldn’t be more like Mum’s-apple-pie. But in her spare time Buffy battles demons and witches and carries on an affair with a vampire, who is himself undergoing a profound existential crisis. Young hotties searching for redemption and holding back the forces of evil that belch from a ‘hellmouth’ located under Sunnydale? That’s what I call postmodern.

Now we have the next instalment of the vampire myth. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of books have taken the world by storm, selling over 30 million copies and spawning a hit film version.

Twilight is basically an adolescent romance novel. Like Buffy, the vampires are hot teenagers in love. Plain, unpopular Bella Swan moves from sunny Phoenix to Forks, Washington, the rainiest city in the USA. Lonely and disoriented she meets the enigmatic Edward Cullen, whose extremely pale skin should be a dead giveaway that he’s actually a very sexy vampire. And a romantic one! In fact, Edward is a doe-eyed ball of love when it comes to Bella.

Meyer has cast Edward as a good vampire who only drinks animal blood and who comes from a fine upstanding family of vampires, all of whom are ‘vegetarians’. When Edward and Bella fall hopelessly in love we know they’re in for all sorts of vampire trouble. And, sure enough, another group of bloodsuckers have got their sights set on his new girlfriend, so the gallant Edward must protect her from their fangs.

If vampire stories tell us something about the greatest fears of their era, what do Twilight and Buffy and the new HBO vampire series, True Blood, tell us about our time in history? I suspect it tells us we’re afraid of uncertainty. To return to my earlier comments about the postmodern deconstruction of black-and-white certainties, Twilight upsets all our preconceptions.

Sexuality and power

Edward is a chaste, caring, responsible young man. And he’s an immortal vampire. Go figure! In the old Hammer horror films, Dracula was a sex-crazed old Transylvanian, but, in Twilight, Edward refuses to consummate his love for Bella lest his passion boil over and he sink his teeth into her milky white neck. I’ve never seen such a clear and popular depiction of celibacy in the name of love. And by a vampire?

In such a sexualised culture, Edward’s chastity is unusual and for many readers, an expression of great inner fortitude. Again, Meyers is deconstructing the usual categories, twisting our expectations. Vampires have superhuman powers and are usually prepared to use them for evil, but Edward uses his vampiric strength to resist his physical appetites in preference for love.

Alienation and truth

Both Bella and Edward are alienated teens, although for different reasons. But it’s their very place as outsiders that gives them their unique standpoint. They’re not like their peers and this actually enhances their clarity about what’s truly important in life. Again, this is a distinctly postmodern perspective. The truth can only ever be discovered at the margins of society. The powerful and the elite are inherently untrustworthy.

Supernatural in a rationalist age

Despite the rise of so-called New Atheism, which tells us religious belief is unsustainable in a rationalist era, Twilight continues to show the persistence of the fantastical. The plot lines of Twilight or Buffy, or Harry Potter for that matter, are so ridiculous as to be laughable. But there remains embedded deeply in our society a belief in the supernatural. The fact that Twilight the movie is considered a so-called chick flick should tell us something about the complete metamorphosis of the vampire myth. This transformation has progressed to the point where now the vampire serves not as literal horror, but as a metaphor for various aspects of contemporary life. And belief in the supernatural is clearly one of those aspects.

With all the standard categories of good and evil and right and wrong being subverted and redefined, our greatest fear is uncertainty. Our definitions of morality, family, gender roles, religious faith, the economy and even nationhood are being turned upside down. When uncertainty and ambiguity are a society’s greatest fears, the vampires it creates are chaste teenagers in love.

This article is by Michael Frost, lecturer at Morling College, Sydney, Australia, and is an edited version of one which appeared in Day Star magazine (New Zealand). It is used with permission.