From The New Yorker:
Vampire discourse has long been concerned with the undying allure of vampires. They are so ubiquitous and entrancing. We will never escape their chilly embrace, especially not in late October, when the air is crisp and the equinoctial mists circulate, when the unsleeping operator of the twenty-four-hour bodega acquires a red gleam in his eye. In 2008, Macy Halford, an unwilling captive of the “Twilight” quartet, by Stephenie Meyer, looked to hematology to explain her bloodsucker fixation. (She quoted the medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who chronicles our fascination with “blood as drops and globules, shed and separated bits, as well as with . . .the redness, liquidness, the being-alive-ness, of that which is poured forth in death.”) Scholars have also located the vampire’s power in its metonymic relation to hot-button issues: disease, technology, colonialism, immigration. In 2009, Joan Acocella returned to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to ask: “Why do vampires still thrill?” Sociopolitical relevance might play a role, she concluded, but the real draw was all the figuration of illicit sex. Describing “the baring of the woman’s flesh, her leaning back, the penetration,” Acocella writes, reasonably, “reading of these matters, does one think about immigration?”
These days, one thinks a lot about immigration and not much about vampires. Are the fanged fiends over? This year is thin in films documenting the hipster undead, the eerie friendships forged in the snows of suburban Sweden, the languid teen-age heartthrobs who have been sixteen “for a very long time.” Nothing has risen to replace “True Blood” (d. 2014) or “The Vampire Diaries” (d. 2017). Instead, supernatural romances have gone aquatic. Angel, the immortal love interest of Buffy Summers on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has reinvented himself (again) as a Navy seal, while Tom Cruise continues to leverage his unnerving agelessness not as Lestat but as Ethan Hunt, in endlessly multiplying “Mission: Impossible” movies.
Perhaps overexposure killed the vampire.
Link to the rest at The New Yorker
People have been writing the obituary of the vampire since the 80s. [shrug] They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. Nothing to see here.
Angie
We writers, like movie producers, are the ultimate recyclers.
The stories about Prince Dracul were already centuries old before Bram Stoker buffed off some of the old paint and added some new colors. Frankenstein is simply the even older golem legends, recast for the new “scientific” age.
RAH said something like “The readers say they want new things, but what they really want is product as before – just changed enough to feel different.” (Or maybe that was tradpub editors, but that was in the days when they actually paid some attention to what sold over the long run. Same difference.)
Free at last!
Just in time for Halloween!
Of course, they’re only looking at corporate publishing output. Old news, at that. They moved to other fads ages ago.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure there’s still plenty of new vampire fiction coming from Indie inc to keep fang fans busy.
My thoughts exactly, Felix. All it takes is a simple glance at the Amazon best-seller lists to find that vampire fiction is still alive and thriving.
Count Dracula would be rolling over in his grave if he saw crop of vampires.
I love a good vampire story. But the old, traditional vampires who have been somewhat scarce for some time. I’m less enamoured of the The Twilight type vampires and the Anne Rice type vampires and similar but have no quarrel with those who love them. Each to their own. But these new age type vampires have simply been done to death. All types of vampires are enjoying a well deserved hiatus, and will probably continue to do so until the next great book or movie about them comes along. The fad seems to be mostly over for the time being. But be warned. It is not dead, but undead, and in time will rise to feed again.
To quote Buffy to Dracula: “You think I don’t watch your movies? You always come back.”
Like everything else, you can run things into the ground and what was exciting is now ho-hum …
On to the next big thing: Vampires – in space – with smurfs controlling the muppets – only able to drink ice-water from Mars! 😛
May Your Mileage Vary