I love vampires. I hate Anne Rice. Not the person Anne Rice. I don’t know her. But the institution of Anne Rice. To be perfectly accurate: I hate Anne Rice vampires.
I’ve always been of the Weird Tales/Kolchak the Nightstalker vampire variety. They’re bad. You stake’em, holy water’em, burn’em with crosses. You’d never want to be one. An undead thing that sucks the living blood from helpless victims. No different than a shark or a vampire bat. A dangerous beast that would kill your friends and family.
But an Anne Rice vampire is this sexy guy with powers and a great hair cut. Did Anne Rice create them? Certainly not. Her vamps are only the latest in a long line of Lothario-vampires who spend their time, not feeding off any warm-blooded body they can find, but trying to do your girlfriend. (The word “Lothario” enters the English language in 1703 when Nicholas Rowe wrote the play The Fair Penitent. The evil seducer in that story was named Lothario. Since then it has become synonymous with a seducer of woman, a womanizer.)
So where does it all start? Well, at the beginning, of course.
To the ancients the idea of glamorizing a walking corpse would be ridiculous. The scaly lamia equally unappealing. The vampire as a monster was a representation of disease. The victim went from being healthy to sickly then finally dying then becoming a spreader of the disease of vampirism. Like a poster child for bubonic plague. Attractive? I think not.
Things begin to change in 1811 with that famous party on Lake Diodati that gave us Frankenstein. I won’t go into lengthy detail. (If you don’t know what I am talking about try watching the Ken Russell film, Gothic.) Mary Shelley came away from Diodati with a modern Prometheus. Another partier, Dr. John Polidori, came away with a tale of vampirism that some suggested he stole from Lord Byron, others say is a scathing parody of Byron. Either way, when “The Vampyre” came out it was attributed to the master, not the servant.
Lord Byron. Poet, lover of lost causes, pervert. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Polidori traveled Europe with Byron as his personal physician. Was the evil Lord Ruthven really Lord Byron? More than likely. It doesn’t really matter for with “The Vampyre” the undead thing became more humanized, more sexy, more Gothic.
In 1764 Horace Walpole had created the whole Gothic literature movement with his novel, The Castle of Otranto. Gothics typically featured a villain named Manfred who was very much the same as old Lord Ruthven. Polidori was writing in this same vein. Lord Ruthven is kin to Manfred or the Monk or Melmoth. They are the bad boys we enjoy watching. We can’t condone their behavior but we enjoy watching it all the same. The Lothario-villain isn’t much of a jump away from Lothario-villain-vampire.
The trend was spreading. Varney the Vampire in the penny bloods, despite having gray skin and metallic eyeballs, still got the reader’s sympathy. Out went the ugly nosferatu, in came the suave European gentlemen who makes all the ladies wet. Like Svengali a hundred years later, he represented a dark Latin threat to good old-fashioned WASPiness. Like the real Rasputin or Vlad Tepes, these characters are the bad boys your mother warned you about.
Dracula is the final word on all things vampire. It is the book that cemented the vampire legend in our culture. The Count is one of the Lotharios. Stoker only shows him four times in the book so he hasn’t a lot of time for groping the girls. The damage might have been repaired if Hollywood hadn’t got in the game.
It is with films that the final Lothario-vampire becomes king. Think about it. You pay Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella or Gary Oldman big bucks to be in the film. Are you only going to show him four times? Forget it. Dracky’s getting some serious screen time. And the romance angle is going to get played. Not between Mina and dorky hubby Harker but with Drac. It’s a supernatural love triangle. And Drac would win if it wasn’t for that annoying Van Helsing.
It starts with Byron and it ends with Hollywood. Vampires are super-studs. Whether it’s Wesley Snipes or Tom Cruise. The idea that the vampire represents disease has changed. Now the vampire represents power. Sexual power. Violent power. Angel and Buffy can have long Dracula-Van Helsing love affairs. It’s not about disease any more. (If you want that you have to watch zombie movies.) It’s about being a super-hero.
I hate Anne Rice vampires. The world seems to loves them.