I'm not sure I agree with this (badly written & old) essay but she makes some interesting points directly related to the topic.
MSU Scholar: Popularity of Vampires Reveals Cultural Values
by Evelyn Boswell
5/16/01 BOZEMAN -- Enjoy vampire books and movies? Wear plastic teeth for Halloween?
Go ahead. But when you're done, look deeper. The popularity of vampires reveals something important about our culture, says Gwendolyn Morgan, an English professor at Montana State University-Bozeman. It shows that people still hunger for immortality even though they live in an atheistic age. It indicates that people want to avoid responsibility for their actions.
"If this is true (and I can see why she thinks so), then the academic tendency to regard all this as merely ephemeral and beneath one's dignity is seriously mistaken," says Tom Shippey of Saint Louis University. Shippey co-edited a book on "Medievalism in the Modern World." It includes a chapter Morgan wrote on immortals in popular fiction.
Vampires made their first appearance in literature around 2000 B.C. in Egypt. They were fertility figures, says Morgan, whose course on vampires is one of three she rotates under the general heading of "Popular literature." As Christianity developed, vampires quickly became associated with the devil and the undead. They stole souls. They were "horrible in the worst ways. They were truly miserable, repulsive things."
That image started changing in the late 1960s, however.
"All of a sudden, we made heroes of them," Morgan said.
To find out why, Morgan started studying vampire literature, television shows and movies. She discovered that the switch seems related to the sexual revolution and an increasingly godless society.
"I think it's a shirking of responsibility. I think it's a substitute for religion. It's vastly popular because it's sexy," Morgan said of the genre.
The image of vampires started to change with the book "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, Morgan said. It was enhanced in novels by Anne Rice and Michael Romkey, movies like the Highlander trilogy and television shows like "Forever Knight."
"All such tales involve the assumption that these powerful beings create our greatest art, pioneer our greatest medical and social advances, articulate our greatest scientific discoveries," Morgan wrote in Shippey's book. "On the negative side, they perpetrate the greatest oppressions and wholesale slaughters of humanity and engineer economic disasters."
Vampire novels have a common theme--that everything in history happened because of vampires, Morgan explained. That includes the Holocaust, scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs. Likewise, all the major players (like Hitler, Stalin and Thomas Jefferson) in the novels were either good or bad vampires.
Since ordinary people lack the enhanced intelligence and abilities of vampires, the novels give the message that they shouldn't feel remorse or take responsibility for any historical tragedies. Neither can they be expected to make important contributions to society.
"It shows up again and again in these novels," Morgan said. "It's the same kind of motif. Vampires and other immortals become a way ... of saying, ‘I can't do anything. I'm not responsible. It's not my fault.'"
Morgan is internationally known for researching medieval ballads and translating Old English poetry. She continues that work and was recently honored with the prestigious Charles and Nora L. Wiley Faculty Award for Meritorious Research and Creativity from MSU. But she added vampires to her plate after noticing how popular they had become in the past 20 to 25 years. Ballads were part of the popular culture in the 14th through 16th centuries.
"Everything I do is about popular culture," Morgan said.
Morgan treats herself by reading Stoker's "Dracula." "Interview with a Vampire" is her favorite vampire movie. Most other novels and movies don't measure up, she said, but "I'm interested in voices of the whole culture, not just the intellectual or cultural elite."
