I want to suck your blood - Vampires and the vampire concept

[Ford Prefect]

hey just letting you know Being staff means I get to use these sweet boxes to draw the eye. This isn't intended to be a spoiler thread, but but please be aware that there may be unmarked spoilers for relatively recent vampire fiction in this post and in the thread generally.

I don't know about you but I love vampires. I couldn't tell you exactly how it happened, but over time I came to really think of vampires as being to horror what dragons are to fantasy. Or put another way, if Godzilla is King of the Monsters, then the platonic vampire is king of the supernatural. To my mind they represent this higher level of horror character. It makes sense to me that vampires occupy the highest place, or a high place, in whatever supernatural hierarchy is present in a story or fictional milieu. For a while now I've really wanted to engage with the character of the vampire and build a story around the concept.

As much as I like vampires, I have to admit there are a lot of really terrible vampires out there, and a lot of terrible vampire stories. The genre, so to speak, is often just plain terrible. While you can attribute some of this to Sturgeon's law, to some extent I feel like it's a symptom of the character. Being both an enduring and reoccurring figure in fiction as well as an element of real folklore, there's this wealth of accumulated information, tradition and expectation. It drives creators, in my opinion, to somewhat paradoxically follow the leader and also leave their own mark, which I think is directly responsible for the overall state of vampires in fiction.

That might sound a little strange, but I think it can be seen in a whole genre: fantasy. Almost the entire fantasy genre consists of following the leader, in this case Tolkien as seen through the lens of Dungeons and Dragons. People repeating Tolkien, people putting a spin on Tolkien, people writing responses to Tolkien, and so on. I'll admit that as much as I am fond of the fantasy genre, I can say I haven't really enjoyed the traditional medium for fantasy - novels - in a long time. It is either all samey or so very obviously trying to be different that it becomes trite. Most importantly imitators tend to miss what actually made Tolkien's works so compelling.

I feel that vampire fiction is the same. Often it's just imitating Stoker after having read Vampire: The Masquerade, or feeling clever because aha I've read an account of the Albanian shtriga. Most importantly I think that a lot of modern vampire fiction tends to miss what makes vampires so compelling.

If you were looking to shut me up at this point you could say 'I bet you don't even know what makes vampires compelling you elitist poser' and you'd have me over a barrel because to be honest I'm not entirely sure what is compelling about them. I think of 'the vampire' as being a king of its genre, but to some extent that's just informed by personal feeling rather than anything specific.

So for the purposes of this discussion I'd like look back on the primordia of the fictional vampire, the vampire character - Polidori's Ruthven, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Stoker's Dracula - and see what guidance we can take from them. I'd also like to look at some modern examples which I think execute the vampire concept well.

-V-​

The Vampyre was published in 1819, Carmilla was serialised from 1871 to 1872 and Dracula was published in 1897. I tend to think of these novels, somewhat inaccurately in the case of The Vampyre, as Victorian era novels, and they all tend to reflect what I would consider Victorian style sexual and religious mores. This is particularly obvious in Carmilla, where the theme could be summed up as 'if you're not careful a lesbian will drag you into hell.'

The sexual morality of the 19th century is not something I agree with and the demonisation of sex and sexuality is not really something I'm interested in doing. It is interesting to look at what underlies all this, though. Ruthven, Carmilla and Dracula are all sexual creatures. At the same time they represent a kind of dangerous temptation or corruption. Aubrey's sister marries the handsome Ruthven and is subsequently, and very literally, eaten. Dracula is most clear in this regard, as his purpose in contacting Harker is to arrange his relocation to England, where he hopes to spread the curse of the undead further.

The corruption element shines through most strongly. In Carmilla it is so focused on lesbianism and sexuality to such a degree that it becomes somewhat distasteful, but Dracula has another element to it. I've seen it said that Dracula, an ancient aristocrat who emerges only from his castle to feed on the blood of his subjects, can be taken as commentary on the excesses of the nobility. Voltaire once wrote that the decline in the folkloric belief in vampires coincided with the rise of vampires in another form - bankers. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre ends with Johnathon Harker, a young solicitor who deals in property, taking Dracula's place.

The vampire romance is an enduring element of the genre and vampires have never stopped being sexy, but it's this element of corruption which I think I find most interesting. Obviously vampires can transform other people in vampires, about as literal as it can get. But there's other things to consider as well.

Vampires tend to be rich. I remember being struck by how Eli of Let The Right One In lived in some nondescript Stockholm apartment but owned a trinket that could pay for a nuclear power plant. Being typically depicted as immortal and often aristocratic, it follows that a vampire will have probably amassed considerable wealth. This combination of wealth and power ties in neatly with this notion of corruption, but also temptation. Living, as most SVers do, in capitalist societies we are drawn to wealth as we can use it to obtain security and comfort. At the same time we are aware of the excesses of the super-wealthy and the deleterious effects it can have on others and ourselves. In the 19th century it was all about sexual corruption, but Herzog's film helped me see how it can be framed differently in the modern day.

-V-​

So lets move to the modern day. When I think of vampire things I've liked I tend to stop and think 'ah, it's all Japanese.' I watch a lot of anime. To some extent I'm forgiving of Japanese interpretations of vampires because there tends to be an associated visual element that is often more strongly handled than American equivalents. Owari no Seraph doesn't have a particularly good depiction of vampires - it's fairly ordinary, really - but the vampiric nobles are often incredibly snappy dressers.

But the recent vampire thing I liked the most was Mercury Stream's Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2. If you're not familiar with Lords of Shadow, it is something of reinterpretation of the Castlevania mythos. The first game has you playing as holy knight Gaberiel Belmont, envisioned as the very first Belmont family vampire killer, fighting the titular Lords of Shadows. The first game and its DLC is also the origin story of Dracula, which was revealed in an honestly pretty great twist ending.

Its follow up is set in the near future gothic metropolis of Castlevania City, and featured PATRICK STEWART summoning DRACULA to FIGHT SATAN. It's the kind of premise that only comes around once in a generation. While imperfect, the game has you playing as Dracula himself and true to the franchise's history he has delirious array of quite ridiculous powers, ranging from turning into a swarm of rats to sneak around to punching the face of a boss enemy in with a tornado dragon punch.

Moreover, the character of Dracula is, at least at the beginning, appropriately bad. He's Dracula, you know? He's a bad guy. There are some scenery chewing moments where Robert Carlyle gets to deliver some outrageous villain monologues, and early on there's a scene where after his giant robot a paladin desperately attempts to defeat Dracula using the power of faith and prayer (it all makes sense in context). Dracula joins in because prior to being the Prince of Darkness he was literally God's chosen one, and his almost sarcastic encouragement to the paladin was just this perfect villainous moment. It lets itself down towards the end when it becomes clear that it's a redemption story, but for much of the game it's 'the good guys' consist of Patrick 'The Grim Reaper' Stewart and Dracula the Prince of Darkness and it's really only because their enemy is Satan that they get away with being the heroes. And the ending is somewhat ambiguous, suggesting that whatever redemption Dracula might have had, he's still planning to conquer the world.

So what about this depiction worked for me? It was a combination of the primacy of Dracula in the world and narrative - the only thing Satan fears is the king of vampires - as well as how unashamedly supernatural the whole thing is. There's no scientific element to the vampires of Lords of Shadow, and whatever rules they adhere to are sketchy at best. In the first Lords of Shadow Carmilla's leading lieutenants are actual demons from actual hell that she subsequently turned into vampires after they met. Very little attempt is made to codify what limitations, if any, Dracula and his cohort of vampires actually have. It stands in stark contrast to, say, the elaborate and deeply mechanical hierarchies of Vampire: The Masquerade.

There's even a neat callback to the first game that highlights Dracula's stature in the world. One of the items in the first Lords of Shadow was a crystal that summoned a very powerful demon up from hell, which would subsequently nuke everything on the screen. In Lords of Shadow 2 you fight one of Dracula's Belmont descendants who actually attempts to use the same item, and Dracula just kills the demon. Priceless.

There's also a really great 'vampire aesthetic' in the game. You can only unlock the treasure chests in the game by sticking your hand inside so they can stab you with giant spikes and drink your blood - the kind of thing that only a vampire could really do.

If I were to sum it all up, it wasn't furtive. Dracula moves in secret so as not to attract Satan's attention, but society itself doesn't concern him. There's no skulking about away from humans - when Dracula encounters humans it's in the form of the corrupt riot police who are equipped with powered armour and he just up and eats them. As you discover Dracula is actually a apart of the modern world's history, with the enormous assault on his castle actually being recorded as a thing that really happened. His vampire powers are sometimes ridiculous. His motives and personality are huge and outrageous - a continual and open war with God, driven by depths of spite we can only image. He was big, he was bad, he was a vampire.

-V-​

After almost two thousand words of me going on about how totally radical vampires are, you might be wondering where exactly I was going with this.

At the beginning of the this post I talked about people trying to leave their mark on the vampire concept. In my experience this is usually done by developing elaborate vampire societies or seeking out scientific or pseudo-scientific vampirism, UV lamps and anticoagulants and whatever. I don't want to suggest that those things cannot be done well, but for me they're not what I would consider to be the foundation of a good vampire story. That comes down to taste, which will differ between people. I'd like to see where people stand on this, because it's the most important issue of all.

So for the purposes of discussion, I'm going to say that:

A good vampire, even when the protagonist, should be an evil force and a corrupting influence on the world and the people around them. Their presence in the story should present extreme danger. Whatever admirable traits they have must be balanced against the fact that they literally eat people, and eat people they should. Moreover they should not present as 'second best' to other supernatural creatures in the story: while it should not go so far as to hurt the drama, they should be something of a 'top dog' in the world.

now fite me over it losers

 

[EarthScorpion]

Mmm. That's pretty much along the line of my thoughts. Above all, I feel that to count as a "real vampire", they have to be predatory. They have to harm people by existing. Once you've got that in place, it's a lot more based around semantic quibbling. In fact, I would consider the predation a more vital element than the blood drinking. The predation is the core of the thematic vampire; the blood drinking is merely an aesthetic. A vampire must take, must lessen others to survive. Blood's an easy metaphor, but I'd certainly say other things can work.

One of my favourite twists on the concept of the vampire, for example, is a specific vampire-like creature brought up in the The Wicked Dead sourcebook for Vampire: the Requiem, called the formosae. The formosae are fat-eaters, constructed as a metaphor for anorexia and obsession about thinness and beauty. Rather than preying on people by drinking their blood, they latch onto people and drain fat from them, killing them slowly. They're bloated, horrible things that grow obese and ugly from their predation even as their victims grow thinner and thinner as they waste away and lose muscle tone, acquiring the ethereal kind of beauty that the Victorians adored when they were going all doe-eyed over young women dying of tuberculous. Their prey dies thin and beautiful, while they go on to afflict others. And so despite the fact that they're not "technically" vampires insofar as they don't drink blood, nevertheless I feel they're an excellent vampire.

I do, however, disagree somewhat about the "primacy" - or, rather, the primacy of the vampire is just one form born of the aristocratic vampire and thus passed down to their descendants (like vampire-as-sexy-celebrity). There's certainly place for what might be described as pre-modern vampires - the original folklore kind of wicked souls who claw their way out of their grave (often linked to deals with the devil or cursed blood) and who are dead, taking life from others to sustain their own existence. These vampires are not what I would describe as lordly or princely or even pre-eminent - they're wretched, cursed souls, damned by their nature, serving the devil and evil due to their own vices, sins and moral weakness. They're pitiful, crippled by their weaknesses (driven away by the chiming of church bells, burned by silver, repulsed by icons of faith), and all they can prey on is the ignorant or those away from God's love. This is a much more low-key kind of vampire, who in the folklore rather more exists to be beaten - often as a morality lesson tied to the necessity of faith.

 

[Jace911]

I'll be honest, until I stumbled across Night's Black Agents I was never really the sort of reader who would give vampires the time of day. The idea of transporting the concept of a vampire into the context of modern society and linking them to disturbingly vampiric practices--human trafficking, financial predators, organized crime, etc--rejuvenated my interest in them and it's all but impossible for me to consider vampires outside of the 21st century lens, because for fantasy creatures they just fit so damn well in the contemporary era. @Ford Prefect mentioned Dracula representing the "excesses of the nobility"--Wall Street anyone?

A good vampire, even when the protagonist, should be an evil force and a corrupting influence on the world and the people around them. Their presence in the story should present extreme danger. Whatever admirable traits they have must be balanced against the fact that they literally eat people, and eat people they should. Moreover they should not present as 'second best' to other supernatural creatures in the story: while it should not go so far as to hurt the drama, they should be something of a 'top dog' in the world.

Click to shrink...

Mmm. That's pretty much along the line of my thoughts. Above all, I feel that to count as a "real vampire", they have to be predatory. They have to harm people by existing. Once you've got that in place, it's a lot more based around semantic quibbling. In fact, I would consider the predation a more vital element than the blood drinking. The predation is the core of the thematic vampire; the blood drinking is merely an aesthetic. A vampire must take, must lessen others to survive. Blood's an easy metaphor, but I'd certainly say other things can work.

Click to shrink...

I wholeheartedly agree with these assertions, particularly the bolded bits. I've been toying with the idea of running a VtR game for my group and setting it in Sacramento, because it's where we're all from and we know it so well--but also because I think using real places that we have some sort of emotional connection with will really reinforce the themes of predation, corruption, and the threat that a vampire poses even to the things they care about. Like EarthScorpion said, they have to harm and threaten people by their very existence.

Consider your shoes for a moment: unless you're especially particular about where you bought them from, odds are they were made in some sort of sweatshop--or if not your shoes, then something else you own. While you almost certainly don't condone child labor, the knowledge that it was used to make the products you buy is rarely enough to prevent you from buying that product, and thus you support the market that rewards child labor. In a sense, you profit from the misery of these far-off, nameless children you will never meet.

I feel like vampires are at their best when they take those children and draw them close, so that we're forced to look them in the eye as we exploit them--whether for labor or blood. They're an excellent tool for examining how we as ordinary people prey on others in tiny ways throughout our day to day--socially, financially, emotionally, mentally, even physically.

 

[Vindictus]

now fite me over it losers

Click to shrink...

Vampires are cool

But Dragons > Vampires


And obviously, Dragon Vampires like in the Tears of Artamon series are on the top of the heap.




More seriously, I agree with most of what you've got here, but I think that the argument that any specific type of monster should always be the biggest bad is kind of... Not very useful? I mean, Twighlight Vampires are actually ridiculously powerful, as are vampires in Rosario + Vampire. I don't think that really helps either series become better vampires.

I've always viewed vampires as being more like drug dealers and cartels, and I think they work pretty well in a similar role. Sure, maybe you've got one or two 'Kingpin' vampires who are absurdly powerful, and obviously the image of that absurdly powerful vampire lord is seductive and attractive, but most vampires in this metaphor aren't kingpins- They're the pusher on the street.

The rest, about Vampires being predatory and harmful, is very on the nose. If you've got a bunch of unearthly beautiful immortal people who just happen to harmlessly drink a little blood now and then, you don't have vampires. You've got elves with a vampire fetish.

 

[krinsbez]

More seriously, I agree with most of what you've got here, but I think that the argument that any specific type of monster should always be the biggest bad is kind of... Not very useful? I mean, Twighlight Vampires are actually ridiculously powerful, as are vampires in Rosario + Vampire. I don't think that really helps either series become better vampires.

I've always viewed vampires as being more like drug dealers and cartels, and I think they work pretty well in a similar role. Sure, maybe you've got one or two 'Kingpin' vampires who are absurdly powerful, and obviously the image of that absurdly powerful vampire lord is seductive and attractive, but most vampires in this metaphor aren't kingpins- They're the pusher on the street.

The rest, about Vampires being predatory and harmful, is very on the nose. If you've got a bunch of unearthly beautiful immortal people who just happen to harmlessly drink a little blood now and then, you don't have vampires. You've got elves with a vampire fetish.

Click to shrink...

I have to agree.

I have to admit, the conceit that the vampire has to be top dog is one that not only do I not understand, I have developed an active dislike of it.

 

[Jace911]

I have to agree.

I have to admit, the conceit that the vampire has to be top dog is one that not only do I not understand, I have developed an active dislike of it.

Click to shrink...

It depends on the context you present them in and what themes you're using them to embody. Historically vampires have been likened to nobles and the elite (Political or financial) exploiting and preying on the masses--this theme doesn't really work when the vampires aren't actually the elite. I mean you can have them be threatened in the same way that Van Helsing and his companions threatened Dracula, but even in that example Dracula is still acknowledged to be a great threat to them all.

Honestly if you don't have vampires sitting atop some sort of power structure, preying on those down below, then you might as well just make them zombies since at that point they're both undead monsters that need humans to survive. In fact, I would say that Blaine from iZombie is closer to a vampire than a zombie--replace brains with blood and it's a surprising fit.

 

[Vindictus]

Honestly if you don't have vampires sitting atop some sort of power structure, preying on those down below, then you might as well just make them zombies since at that point they're both undead monsters that need humans to survive. In fact, I would say that Blaine from iZombie is closer to a vampire than a zombie--replace brains with blood and it's a surprising fit.

Click to shrink...

Sure, but they don't need to be on top of 'The' power structure. They need to be on top of 'A' power structure.

Just because you've got vampires on the top of X Slaver Empire doesn't mean that vampires also need to be on the top of the entire local food chain. They just need to be a step above humanity.

 

[Jace911]

Sure, but they don't need to be on top of 'The' power structure. They need to be on top of 'A' power structure.

Just because you've got vampires on the top of X Slaver Empire doesn't mean that vampires also need to be on the top of the entire local food chain. They just need to be a step above humanity.

Click to shrink...

Sure, but then you have two problems:

1. Power creep--the real threat is THESE guys, and then THESE GUYS, and then THIS GUY (Hello Old World of Darkness!)
2. you can't really have a metaphor for the elite nobility if your metaphoric elite nobles are not the actual elite nobles, lol

At that point your vampires are basically the middle class, which completely changed the themes and meta-narrative from "the excesses of the elites exploiting those below" to "people exploit and are exploited". And just to be clear, that's a totally valid theme to explore--but it's not really what vampires were crafted for, y'know?

Night's Black Agents makes a point of underlining this when guiding GMs through crafting their own vampire conspiracies--the bloodsuckers should almost always be at the top, both because it's dramatically appropriate and because they are the pinnacle of the entire system of exploitation. Everything the conspiracy does should be to feed the vampires, whether literally with blood or metaphorically with wealth and power they can use to insulate themselves. If you put them somewhere in the middle...they're just freaky henchmen.

 

[Ford Prefect]

More seriously, I agree with most of what you've got here, but I think that the argument that any specific type of monster should always be the biggest bad is kind of... Not very useful? I mean, Twighlight Vampires are actually ridiculously powerful, as are vampires in Rosario + Vampire. I don't think that really helps either series become better vampires.

Click to shrink...

I actually think it does. In Twilight it's undermined by the Olympic coven being 'vegetarian' vampires, but I remember how lots of people talked about how Meyer's vampires were really lame (there was a lot of focus on how 'effeminate' Edward was, which I think says it all) but when I read the novels I didn't think so. I think that Meyer included too many details, but in practice her crazy living rock monster vampires were actually pretty cool. It's the same thing in Rosario to Vampire. Neither of these stories are what I would consider good examples of the genre, but they would definitely be worse as vampire stories if the vampires were less powerful.

I've always viewed vampires as being more like drug dealers and cartels, and I think they work pretty well in a similar role. Sure, maybe you've got one or two 'Kingpin' vampires who are absurdly powerful, and obviously the image of that absurdly powerful vampire lord is seductive and attractive, but most vampires in this metaphor aren't kingpins- They're the pusher on the street.

Click to shrink...

That's a pretty popular modern interpretation that I'm not fond of. I remember someone once saying to me that the vampire as drug dealer 'made sense' and it's common to frame them in modern contexts as being organised crime or part of organised crime, but I don't personally see it as a natural evolution of the concept. Like I get where it's coming from in that engages with themes of exploitation and consumption but I think it's a bit of stretch. The majority of vampires as 'street level dealers' is part of this - it's one of the reasons I keep dissing Vampire: The Masquerade.

I mentioned the emphasis on vampire societies in my opening post and it's a concept that I think is very easy to do poorly. It's not that I always dislike it - I liked Owari no Seraph well enough and What We Do In The Shadows is amazing - but to some extent I feel like it's this elaborate excuse for vampire levels, where higher ranked vampires exploit lower ranked vampires. It turns the whole thing inward, when it should be outward. A vampire is an antagonistic force to humans, and chewing on each other in vampire politics or whatever undermines that for me.

 

[krinsbez]

It depends on the context you present them in and what themes you're using them to embody. Historically vampires have been likened to nobles and the elite (Political or financial) exploiting and preying on the masses--this theme doesn't really work when the vampires aren't actually the elite. I mean you can have them be threatened in the same way that Van Helsing and his companions threatened Dracula, but even in that example Dracula is still acknowledged to be a great threat to them all.

Honestly if you don't have vampires sitting atop some sort of power structure, preying on those down below, then you might as well just make them zombies since at that point they're both undead monsters that need humans to survive. In fact, I would say that Blaine from iZombie is closer to a vampire than a zombie--replace brains with blood and it's a surprising fit.

Click to shrink...

In my head, vampires are associated first and foremost with disease and with corruption; note that these are two separate concepts, and they both ought to be present. The aristocrat stuff is secondary to that, and isn't really necessary.

Side note: as a corollary to this discussion, what do you think of the Fur VS Fang trope?

 

[Jace911]

In my head, vampires are associated first and foremost with disease and with corruption; note that these are two separate concepts, and they both ought to be present. The aristocrat stuff is secondary to that, and isn't really necessary.

Click to shrink...

Sure, but consider the issues with wealth inequality, with a rich 0.1$ hoarding wealth, with campaign donors buying votes in Washington; what is that is not a corruption of society brought about by the modern aristocracy?

Nobility and predation just complement each other too well to be separated without a good reason.

Side note: as a corollary to this discussion, what do you think of the Fur VS Fang trope?

Click to shrink...

Honestly, I think it's a bemusing bit of forced association. It's like comparing apples to bicycles.

 

[Vindictus]

At that point your vampires are basically the middle class, which completely changed the themes and meta-narrative from "the excesses of the elites exploiting those below" to "people exploit and are exploited". And just to be clear, that's a totally valid theme to explore--but it's not really what vampires were crafted for, y'know?

Click to shrink...

No, obviously Dracula etc. didn't focus on that theme, because they were products of the Victorian Era.

That doesn't mean that using Vampires in such a way is wrong. Symbols are not static things, and what a 'Vampire' is is subject to change over time, just like anything else.

I suppose it all depends on the story you want to tell. If you want to tell a story that's about an inhuman upper class exploiting and living off the life blood of the peasantry, then having vampires as the primary villains makes thematic sense, but that's not the only story you can tell with them, and I don't think it should be.

 

[Jace911]

No, obviously Dracula etc. didn't focus on that theme, because they were products of the Victorian Era.

That doesn't mean that using Vampires in such a way is wrong. Symbols are not static things, and what a 'Vampire' is is subject to change over time, just like anything else.

Click to shrink...

Let me clarify: I'm not saying you can't use vampires for that, I'm saying you can probably find or think of something better suited to that than vampires. There's not a lot built into vampires to emphasize how they are exploited by their hypothetical superiors--they were conceived to be the top of their own sociopolitical food chain, so if you wanted to tell a story about the poor middle class vampire who is preyed on even as he preys on those beneath him you're gonna have to tack something onto that, and that can be hard to do well.

I suppose it all depends on the story you want to tell. If you want to tell a story that's about an inhuman upper class exploiting and living off the life blood of the peasantry, then having vampires as the primary villains makes thematic sense, but that's not the only story you can tell with them, and I don't think it should be.

Click to shrink...

Hardly, but when you're trying to cut a 2x4 are you going to use a buzzsaw or a sword?

 

[NonSequtur]

I agree with some of the points, namely vampires as corruptive and injuring those around them, but I find myself rather at odds with the vampire as top of the supernatural food chain - or at least in the images conjured by Ford's examples. Vampires should be strong, yes, strong enough that it takes a powerful and heroic person to fight them toe to toe, but their power shouldn't be in punching dudes or throwing lightning or making golems out of blood or whatever. They should probably have a presence so terrifying it turns soldiers into cattle, twisted minions they can summon from hidden cellars and all manner of human slaves broken to their will, but physically their most noticeable characteristic would be how difficult it is to kill them permanently. Political power and privilege should be theirs in some way - castles, grand estates and the like - but vampires as grade-a face wreckers who throw down like fanged superheroes just sounds stupid to me.

 

[Vindictus]

Let me clarify: I'm not saying you can't use vampires for that, I'm saying you can probably find or think of something better suited to that than vampires. There's not a lot built into vampires to emphasize how they are exploited by their hypothetical superiors--they were conceived to be the top of their own sociopolitical food chain, so if you wanted to tell a story about the poor middle class vampire who is preyed on even as he preys on those beneath him you're gonna have to tack something onto that, and that can be hard to do well.

Click to shrink...

Why does it matter if I 'Could' find some hypothetical monster better suited to the role than the vampire, when vampires are things that are actually familiar to the public sphere?

I mean, I think this argument is kind of silly, given Vampires were originally conceived as murderous ghostly hobos who crawled out of their graves to bloat themselves on the blood of unfortunate villagers. If we weren't able to interpret stuff in different ways, and use it for different purposes than previous authors intended, we wouldn't have the Vampire as stupid sexy indictment of the noble class in the first place.

Personally, I think vampires work pretty darn well as metaphors for, or literal, cartels and human trafficking rings, and I find the argument that they only really work when they're able to beat anything else in the setting in a straight up fight kind of off base regarding why they're an appealing monster.

 

[Jace911]

I agree with some of the points, namely vampires as corruptive and injuring those around them, but I find myself rather at odds with the vampire as top of the supernatural food chain - or at least in the images conjured by Ford's examples. Vampires should be strong, yes, strong enough that it takes a powerful and heroic person to fight them toe to toe, but their power shouldn't be in punching dudes or throwing lightning or making golems out of blood or whatever. They should probably have a presence so terrifying it turns soldiers into cattle, twisted minions they can summon from hidden cellars and all manner of human slaves broken to their will, but physically they're most noticeable characteristic would be how difficult it is to kill them permanently. Political power and privilege should be theirs in some way - castles, grand estates and the like - but vampires as grade-a face wreckers who throw down like fanged superheroes just sounds stupid to me.

Click to shrink...

This also depends on how you approach your story. A vampire with physical prowess fits in a story about martial heroes, warriors, hunters, etc etc. A vampire with predatory cunning and intellect makes for a good antagonist in a thriller/mystery story. A vampire with extensive social and political connections and the charisma--whether natural or otherwise--to leverage them would suit a story rife with such things.

Honestly, you don't even need to have vampires that are difficult to kill. A reclusive count who commands an army of minions and sucks the life from the poor (Whether literally or through taxes) could still conceivably be considered a vampire of some stripe even though you could just stab him to death with a dull knife. The immortality really only comes into it if you're trying to make a point of how hard it is to truly defeat the sort of corruption that vampires represent--you can kill a man, but what he embodies is more enduring.

 

[spacemonkey37]

As a longtime fan of vampires, I found this pretty interesting to read. Because the thing is, while I still love the concept of vampires, I realized a while back that I don't actually like most vampire fiction. I've done some thinking about why that is, and I've come to a couple conclusions.

I was first introduced to vampires with Buffy, which is in many ways the prototypical example of the modern popcultural vampire. Oh, I'd read Dracula before, but it hadn't made a big impact on me. But I loved Buffy! It was the first work of fiction that got me seriously invested and involved in fandom. That love has faded somewhat as my tastes have changed, but I still have a certain nostalgia for it. The thing is though, I realized in retrospect that Buffy's vampires aren't actually very interesting or engaging. With only a few exceptions, they very much fit the mold of vampires as gangsters and muggers and drug dealers. This is understandable given the social issues of the nineties when the show began, but it creates a rather problematic message. Especially as the show went on, vampires basically just became mooks for the heroes to mow down without hesitation or remorse, which has some pretty unpleasant subtext. No, what drew me to Buffy was the character interaction, the humor, and the way that it spoke to me about the struggles of young adulthood. The vampires were basically just a backdrop to that, without a lot of thought put into their overarching narrative role. In fact, I don't think Buffy really qualifies as an example of the vampire genre, but rather a story which has vampires in it, which is an important distinction. I didn't realize that at the time, however, so when I went looking for more vampire stories, I found myself dissatisfied without quite knowing why.

So for a while I found myself drifting away from vampire fiction, but I was eventually drawn back in after coming across some works in the genre that managed to recapture my interest. One of these was a book called The Historian. Without spoiling too much, I'll just say that it's more about the historical Vlad Țepeș than the fictional Dracula, while retaining the core corruptive nature of the vampire. It also combines an obvious passion for history on the part of the author and a sense of creeping dread that accompanies the slow unveiling of the mysteries of the past. And that was novel! It was a refreshing change to read a vampire story that actively and deliberately delved into the roots of the mythos and the figure that originally inspired it. That led me to develop an appreciation for the genre itself that I'd been lacking before.

Another vampire story that I feel is worthy of mention is the anime Shiki. It's a fairly atypical example of the genre- not in the way that Ford mentioned as explorations of a vampire society or the metaphysical nature of vampirism or whatever, but in the thematic space they occupy within the narrative. Because Shiki's vampires deviate from the usual metaphor of sexual predation. That element is still present to some extent, but it lacks focus. Instead vampires and the way they propagate themselves seem to serve primarily as an analogy for disruptive social change and the backlashes that engenders. It's still very much a horror story, but it's a rather different kind of horror, and it worked pretty effectively for me.

So to sum up, I have to agree with @Ford Prefect's conclusion that most of the flaws with vampires creep in when people copy the superficial traits without a deeper understanding of what makes the vampire a figure that resonates. An innovative take on the concept can work, but only if the writer has a firm grasp of what it is they're tinkering with.

 

[Acatalepsy]

A good vampire, even when the protagonist, should be an evil force and a corrupting influence on the world and the people around them. Their presence in the story should present extreme danger. Whatever admirable traits they have must be balanced against the fact that they literally eat people, and eat people they should. Moreover they should not present as 'second best' to other supernatural creatures in the story: while it should not go so far as to hurt the drama, they should be something of a 'top dog' in the world.

now fite me over it losers

Click to shrink...

you want fite? I give fite.

You know who fits your idea of what a good vampire is, given the work's tone and message? Jukka Sarasti, from Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Are vampires corrupting, predatory? Yes. But in addition to the obvious 'eats people' part, vampires take something else from humanity, something that reflect thoroughly modern fears: relevance. They're black boxes too opaque to be be trusted but too damn useful to give up, and who cannot be matched without sacrificing ones own humanity. They represent a corrupting of what makes us human, a step toward a universe empty of consciousness.

Is Jukka's presence a sign of danger? Very yes. Leaving aside the fact that his subordinates (or, at least Keaton, unreliable narrator whooo) is massively spooked by him, and he beats the living shit out of him as an 'object lesson' - yeah. Even before that, Jukka sends the crew of Theseus into danger for inscrutable reasons justified only by his own say-so.

(Admittedly, the vampire was not 'top dog', precisely - more like the real master's favorite puppet, or part of a yet bigger cybernetic monstrosity - he's still the effective top dog for all but the end, and I think it still works out quite well.)

 

[Fivemarks]

A good vampire, even when the protagonist, should be an evil force and a corrupting influence on the world and the people around them. Their presence in the story should present extreme danger. Whatever admirable traits they have must be balanced against the fact that they literally eat people, and eat people they should. Moreover they should not present as 'second best' to other supernatural creatures in the story: while it should not go so far as to hurt the drama, they should be something of a 'top dog' in the world.

Click to shrink...

I'm not sorry.

 

[Insufficient Dakka]

Click to shrink...

while it should not go so far as to hurt the drama, they should be something of a 'top dog' in the world.

Click to shrink...

 

[Lealope]

I dunno how I feel about vampires being the top dogs. Like, fundamentally, vampires are parasites. That's just what they are. And, as a metaphor for the upper classes, I think their power should not come from personal strength.

While obviously they should be more powerful than humans, I think the majority of their power should be soft and based on others. Like, the villager's slow, creeping realisation that your lord has already been corrupted and you can't rely on authority to deal with this. It's up to you.

 

[Nattuo]

I think one of the most compelling components of vampires as a monster is the uncertainty.

A vampire can, in theory, be anyone. They can be charismatic and charming and friendly. For all intents and purposes, trustworthy, until they decide to suck all your blood out to empower their unlife or whatever it is vampires do with their dinner. Very few monsters in horror re-frame humanity as the threat(or deal with issues of trust in so direct a manner). Most of them are ultimately overt and plainly bad and (usually not very) disquieting, but those kinds of threats can be identified and hopefully avoided. Meanwhile, a vampire is a flirt from some bar who wants a little more than you expected, or an old friend who turns on you for the sake of convenience. The often uncomfortable parallels between their actions and real life predation by other people helping make them all the more threatening.

In many ways, that aesthetic drives me to disagree about vampires being top predators in their ecosystem, a large part of their effectiveness as a monster is their ability to blend in. To ultimately betray trusts and act like giant assholes, an alpha predator has no need for such subtlety. So vampires are benefited by being intimidated by the society in which they find themselves(Though not on an individual level, because monsters gotta monster). The networking, the social influence and the corruption are all facets of their inability to combat society directly, they cannot be top dog and still make effective use of those elements. A vampire is a hidden sickness spreading influence, or an evasive serial predator taking the vulnerable and isolated. Both of those depend on metaphorical darkness to operate, and there's a strong synergy there with the concepts of illumination and sunlight. A top predator has no need to stick to the shadows, and then the whole "weakness to sunlight" thing just comes across as a goofy kryptonite variation.


To completely change topics. I also quite like the moral quandary implied in humans becoming the monster. There's something wonderful about the idea that vampires don't start out as monsters, not really, it's just a nearly inevitable consequence of having to hurt people to live. Or perhaps a consequence of the personal power acquired in becoming a vampire. Or both. Either way, I like the idea that every vampire has probably at some point regretted their actions and their nature. Which as that's an unsolvable problem, almost always drives them to put aside morality for being too painful to think about.

 

[teslashark]

Should I whip out my headcanon about vampires again...
Worldbuilding - Invent new monsters and/or revamp preexisting ones | Page 44

Historically accurate (?) Vampires:
Undying monks and knights who do whatever they see proper to protect their historical monasteries and treasures, usually via creative murder. They are often responsible for assassinations over trivial matters all across Europe. Sometimes, other religious organizations would hire them as muscle for very ungodly situations. They drink the blood of sinners, heathens and blasphemers at communion because they rule themselves as unworthy for the blood of Jesus.

There is no cheap way to kill them such as stakes, garlic or sunlight. Only decapitation and lobbing off of vital parts can be trusted. Contrary to popular culture, they would leave crosses and their own brand of blessed sparkling water at their honor killings as calling cards.

Click to shrink...

I haven't played Lord of Shadows, though I like the idea of Dracula fighting against Satan. Satan doesn't really need to be there in person: Because the historical Dracula is a sort-of-self-appointed, sort-of-recognized defender of "good", it's interesting to see him doing inexcusable things in order to do "the right thing". I see drinking blood as more of a humiliation for the enemy/offer to God than a way of gaining power.

Has-been authorities (monks, the historical Dragon Order of Romania, knights) and fringe authorities make interesting followers for Dracula: Conservative prudes usually played for laughs can be outright terrifying when given immortality but not dystopian control. It's interesting to imagine them walk the earth for ever motivated by an ancient sense of justice and a twisted sense of perfectionism - never dying because of a magitech deal with God (and God regrets it), not going to hell because they hate hell, not going to heaven either because they see themselves as unworthy. Their hunts are dirty jobs that never needed doing.

 

[Ford Prefect]

Another vampire story that I feel is worthy of mention is the anime Shiki. It's a fairly atypical example of the genre- not in the way that Ford mentioned as explorations of a vampire society or the metaphysical nature of vampirism or whatever, but in the thematic space they occupy within the narrative. Because Shiki's vampires deviate from the usual metaphor of sexual predation. That element is still present to some extent, but it lacks focus. Instead vampires and the way they propagate themselves seem to serve primarily as an analogy for disruptive social change and the backlashes that engenders. It's still very much a horror story, but it's a rather different kind of horror, and it worked pretty effectively for me.

Click to shrink...

Shiki is a great show and easily one of the better pieces of vampire fiction out there. The concept is lifted almost directly from Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, but executed in what I think is a much better way. It's a genuinely chilling story in a lot of ways, and overall it's very effective at what it does. What makes it a great story is its use of suspense and the way it reflects on human nature in a very frank way.

You know who fits your idea of what a good vampire is, given the work's tone and message? Jukka Sarasti, from Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Click to shrink...

While I kind of liked Sarasti, I didn't like Blindsight and I really didn't like Watts' vampires. The overdeveloped scientific take on vampires did nothing for me. I guess maybe they fit my thesis in some ways but I don't really give a shit about Watts' pet theories about consciousness so it's hard for me to really care about whatever it is his vampires are supposed to represent. I just don't find the thesis of the novel credible, in part because it literally wasted my time.

Like, fundamentally, vampires are parasites. That's just what they are.

Click to shrink...

Fundamentally vampires are supernatural beings that eat you. They aren't parasites any more than humans are.

In many ways, that aesthetic drives me to disagree about vampires being top predators in their ecosystem, a large part of their effectiveness as a monster is their ability to blend in. To ultimately betray trusts and act like giant assholes, an alpha predator has no need for such subtlety. So vampires are benefited by being intimidated by the society in which they find themselves(Though not on an individual level, because monsters gotta monster). The networking, the social influence and the corruption are all facets of their inability to combat society directly, they cannot be top dog and still make effective use of those elements. A vampire is a hidden sickness spreading influence, or an evasive serial predator taking the vulnerable and isolated. Both of those depend on metaphorical darkness to operate, and there's a strong synergy there with the concepts of illumination and sunlight. A top predator has no need to stick to the shadows, and then the whole "weakness to sunlight" thing just comes across as a goofy kryptonite variation.

Click to shrink...

There's a lot of emphasis on the vampire as a social creature which I'm willing to pin on Anne Rice and Lestat. It's a popular image but I'm not fond of it. Lord Ruthven was certainly charming and ingratiated himself into society while leading a secret double life, but then I remember that Carmilla was not exactly adept at negotiating social space. She makes friends with Laura but otherwise doesn't fit in. Dracula is somewhere between, but still relies on Harker to provide him social capital to move to England.

Moreover, I'm just not really sure I can buy it. We don't try to manipulate cattle, you know? We just eat them.

 

[Skippy]

The best vampire by far that I've seen in the last five years was The Girl in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

We don't try to manipulate cattle, you know? We just eat them.

Click to shrink...

We manipulate cattle to a tremendous degree, not least by enticing them to do what we want with food. I mean it's not called herding cattle for nothing, you know? Cattle farming would be a vastly more dangerous and difficult business if farmers didn't know how to get their animals to do what they want, as well as having an established bond of trust with them.

What you're talking about is more akin to the relationship of a tiger with deer. That's a fairly limited conception of what a vampire can be, though. I'm not opposed to it by any means, but there's a greater range of interesting stories one can tell than that of the solo predator. Particularly if you're trying to examine vampires-as-corruption in a modern setting; evil bankers/human traffickers/property lawyers rely on using people's worst tendencies to ensnare and damn them, and that requires interacting with people in a more meaningful way that just eating them.