The current popularity of vampires

[Jeff Wrangler]

OK, I'm venting a bit here, so either indulge me or move on. ...

I'm more than a little pissed off at the hoo-ha over Twilight and True Blood and the consequent current popularity of vampires in entertainment. What I wanna know is, Where were all these vampire lovers during the 2007-08 TV season, when Moonlight lasted only one season in prime time? Thank God for DVD.

Alex O'Loughlin, as "vamp" L.A. P.I. Mick St. John, and Sophia Myles, as Internet news service reporter Beth Turner, were so good together and so much fun to watch--as was Jason Dohring as Mick's millionaire "vamp" friend Josef Kostan. The show was well written, witty, even a little quirky at times, and sophisticated. And maybe that was it's problem. 

Alex O'Loughlin was incredibly masculine and sexy as Mick, in his form-fitting knit shirts, though not nearly as pretty, I suppose, as Robert Pattinson--at least in the eyes of tweeny-bopper girls, anyway. On the other hand, there was no explicit sex (it was broadcast TV at 9 p.m. on a Friday, after all)--which, I gather, is one of the drawing cards of True Blood (plus, I've seen photos of Ryan Kwanten with a--presumably fake--hard-on in his tightie-whities).

So maybe that was the problem with Moonlight: It was too adult and sophisticated for the tweeny-boppers but didn't have enough sex to satisfy the folks who would make True Blood a hit. 

Like I said, Thank God for DVD.

Mick and Beth rule!!!!! 

[Kd5000]

Where were you for DARK SHADOWS (1991)?      I really liked that show, but vampire tv series don't seem to do well. TRUE BLOOD does seem to be the exception. 

Vampires have been popular for some time.  It's interesting to see how they evolved from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice's version to the ones in TRUE BLOOD.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Where were you for DARK SHADOWS (1991)?      I really liked that show, but vampire tv series don't seem to do well. TRUE BLOOD does seem to be the exception. 

Vampires have been popular for some time.  It's interesting to see how they evolved from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice's version to the ones in TRUE BLOOD.

Friend, Dark Shadows goes back a lot farther than 1991. I remember of the original version, afternoon soap opera, with Kate Jackson before she became a big star, from when I was a kid. It showed afternoons before I got home from school.

[Kd5000]

Yeah, I used to watch it when I came home from school (1rst grade). One day, the show was gone. My mom had to explain to me that it got "cancelled" and I didn't really grasp the concept.  I use to have the board game DARK SHADOWS and we'd play it outside an old abandoned house for atmosphere effects.  We never saw no vampires. 

[louisev]

I was a Dark Shadows fan !  The original series ran from 1966 to 1971, but I saw it in reruns in the mid 1970's.  One of the best things about the series was that it did not glorify vampires, but rather it was treated as a curse which Barnabas and his friend Dr. Julia Hoffman, tried to cure.  I find the entire premise of these latecomer vampire stories to be rather laughable, with the "glittery" vampires and the type of teenager plot obsessions they put into "Twilight."  The more I read about the plot of these recent ones the more I think about back when we had REAL vampires!

[Jeff Wrangler]

I was a Dark Shadows fan !  The original series ran from 1966 to 1971, but I saw it in reruns in the mid 1970's.  One of the best things about the series was that it did not glorify vampires, but rather it was treated as a curse which Barnabas and his friend Dr. Julia Hoffman, tried to cure.  I find the entire premise of these latecomer vampire stories to be rather laughable, with the "glittery" vampires and the type of teenager plot obsessions they put into "Twilight."  The more I read about the plot of these recent ones the more I think about back when we had REAL vampires!

I didn't know that about Dark Shadows. That was basically the tack taken with Mick St. John in Moonlight. Mick was "turned" against his will by his ex-wife (  ) and was a "vamp" who was not happy in his own skin. One of the ongoing story arcs in the series was Mick's quest for a "cure."

[delalluvia]

I was a Dark Shadows fan !  The original series ran from 1966 to 1971, but I saw it in reruns in the mid 1970's.  One of the best things about the series was that it did not glorify vampires, but rather it was treated as a curse which Barnabas and his friend Dr. Julia Hoffman, tried to cure.  I find the entire premise of these latecomer vampire stories to be rather laughable, with the "glittery" vampires and the type of teenager plot obsessions they put into "Twilight."  The more I read about the plot of these recent ones the more I think about back when we had REAL vampires!

   My friend is a vampire fan and she gets annoyed at all these modern takes on vampires.  She got really upset with the Blade series because they didn't follow the "vampire rules". 

What a coincidence!  Just saw a blurb in my town's Sunday magazine where it states that not only are there "Dark Shadows" conventions and fans, Johnny Depp is apparently in talks to reprise the role of Barnabas Collins.

Personally, I don't get the big vampire craze. There's even a vampire anime coming to the movies Blood.  Personally, last time I liked vampires was with Anne Rice's books and of course, the movie Interview with the Vampire.

[Sophia]

  Don't forget Buffy the Vampire slayer and Angel two awesome vampire series that went on for 7 years. For some people they may have been a bit teenaged focus but for me they have been so much more. Feminist, cool, hot, sophisticated, unique and much more.   

[CellarDweller]

I did enjoy Buffy and Angel.....but stuff like Twilight doesn't do much for me.

Vampires are supposed to be feared, and we're supposed to be sustenance for them......not potential lovers.

[oilgun]

here's an interesting New Yorker article on the allure of the vampire:

In the Blood: Why do vampires still thrill?
by Joan Acocella
March 16, 2009

Vampires; “Dracula”; Bram Stoker; “The New Annotated Dracula” (Norton; $39.95); Leslie Klinger; “Twilight”; Stephenie Meyer “Unclean, unclean!” Mina Harker screams, gathering her bloodied nightgown around her. In Chapter 21 of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” Mina’s friend John Seward, a psychiatrist in Purfleet, near London, tells how he and a colleague, warned that Mina might be in danger, broke into her bedroom one night and found her kneeling on the edge of her bed. Bending over her was a tall figure, dressed in black. “His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” Mina’s husband, Jonathan, hypnotized by the intruder, lay on the bed, unconscious, a few inches from the scene of his wife’s violation.

Later, between sobs, Mina relates what happened. She was in bed with Jonathan when a strange mist crept into the room. Soon, it congealed into the figure of a man—Count Dracula. “With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: ‘First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions . . .’ And oh, my God, my God, pity me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!” The Count took a long drink. Then he drew back, and spoke sweet words to Mina. “Flesh of my flesh,” he called her, “my bountiful wine-press.” But now he wanted something else. He wanted her in his power from then on. A person who has had his—or, more often, her—blood repeatedly sucked by a vampire turns into a vampire, too, but the conversion can be accomplished more quickly if the victim also sucks the vampire’s blood. And so, Mina says, “he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he . . . seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh, my God!” The unspeakable happened—she sucked his blood, at his breast—at which point her friends stormed into the room. Dracula vanished, and, Seward relates, Mina uttered “a scream so wild, so ear-piercing, so despairing . . . that it will ring in my ears to my dying day.”

That scene, and Stoker’s whole novel, is still ringing in our ears. Stoker did not invent vampires. If we define them, broadly, as the undead—spirits who rise, embodied, from their graves to torment the living—they have been part of human imagining since ancient times. Eventually, vampire superstition became concentrated in Eastern Europe. (It survives there today. In 2007, a Serbian named Miroslav Milosevic—no relation—drove a stake into the grave of Slobodan Milosevic.) It was presumably in Eastern Europe that people worked out what became the standard methods for eliminating a vampire: you drive a wooden stake through his heart, or cut off his head, or burn him—or, to be on the safe side, all three. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were outbreaks of vampire hysteria in Western Europe; numerous stakings were reported in Germany. By 1734, the word “vampire” had entered the English language.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisIn those days, vampires were grotesque creatures. Often, they were pictured as bloated and purple-faced (from drinking blood); they had long talons and smelled terrible—a description probably based on the appearance of corpses whose tombs had been opened by worried villagers. These early undead did not necessarily draw blood. Often, they just did regular mischief—stole firewood, scared horses. (Sometimes, they helped with the housework.) Their origins, too, were often quaint. Matthew Beresford, in his recent book “From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth” (University of Chicago; $24.95), records a Serbian Gypsy belief that pumpkins, if kept for more than ten days, may cross over: “The gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like ‘brrl, brrl, brrl!’ and begin to shake themselves.” Then they become vampires. This was not yet the suave, opera-cloaked fellow of our modern mythology. That figure emerged in the early nineteenth century, a child of the Romantic movement.
[...]

Continues: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/03/16/090316crat_atlarge_acocella?currentPage=all