Vampires and Zombies

Vampire movies suck.

Well, zombies have always and will always be the coolest things that human beings have ever dreamt up for the use of scaring people (or comedic relief!). I mean, Pride and Prejudice had zombies toss into the mix. I finally got around to reading it. :)

Vampires now sparkle in the light and are cute, conflicted boys who are...I don't know. It is this Twilight thing.

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2009/11/12/stephenie-meyer-comic-book-twil...

Pft, Tommy_Paine

You probably think that there are too many Godzilla movies and other strange heresies.

I read Stephen King talking about his novel "Salem's Lot", and how it kind of resurected the whole vampire craze.   He said at that point, vampires in literature and entertainment had evolved from the truly scary to a character on a kid's serial box, and that these stories are probably cyclical this way.  I don't know too much about "Twilight"  but it seems that vampires have once again gone from scary, to campy to non threatening boy friend material.

Mind/Body transplants are very much the zeitgeist in fiction right now, specifically science fiction and fantasy.

• Twilight, the most popular example, ends with Bella becoming eternal, and beautiful. The 4th book focuses heavily on how beautiful she becomes as a vampire.
• True Blood season 1 is a spectacular commercial success. According to TV by the numbers, its DVD sold 50 million dollars, far more than any other TV show. Hits usually make it to 10 million or a little higher. It is a show about vampires, shapeshifters, and a hot telepath that goes into other people's minds.
• Avatar is another story, an extremely popular story, that deals with mind/body transplants. Again, in avatar, the new body is more exciting.
• District 9, our antihero, Wikus, ends up becoming an alien, and living like them.
• Another show, Dollhouse, deals with this issue. There was a movie surrogate, but that one flopped.
• Daybreakers recently came out, it's a movie about a virus that turns everyone into a vampire, and the last remaining humans are harvested for blood - by pharmaceutical companies.
• I'm currently reading "Glasshouse" by Charles Stross. It's about mind-wiping technology in an era when bodies can go on forever, and be recreated upon death. It's considered by many one of the top sci fi books of modern times.

About vampires and zombies. Zombies are the flipside of Vampires. Zombies, I think, are what we're worried we could become. Mindless drones, driven by impulses. Vampires are in some ways what we wish we could be. Eternal, powerful, strong and gorgeous.

That's an interesting observation, 500 Apples, about body and mind transference.   When I was reading de Sade years ago, I found it fascinating how he was trying to use naturalistic rationalizations for his libertine philosophy, and in so doing was all around, but not in the bullseye of evolution that Darwin hit a generation later.   There were other writters at the time of de Sade who were similarly anticipating a new understanding. 

Similarly, people look at their computers and the internet, and wonder just how far off the day is when we will be able to deposit our consciousness into a machine or virtual repository for fun and games, or to fascilitate it's deposit into another body, and perhaps we see that anticpated in our modern mythology.

I'm more old fashioned in my interpretation of the vampire mythology, in that it's more sexuality driven than a reflection or commentary on classism.

....he said, opening the door to the basement.......

Because vampires are always pretty and you don't need to worry about your vampoboyo going off the deepend and reaching that awful stage of puberty where he can grow chesthair or a 5 o'clock shadow, and your vampogirly is always young and pretty. Basically, the modern vampire is pretty much a metaphor for creepy ephebophilia. Stephenie Meyers has written a book for readers who want to be young foreeeeeeeeeever. Also, it requires a grade 2 reading level and the ability to shut off critical thinking. Perfect for big sales!

As for zombies, their most poignant example is Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which takes place in a mall. Basically Romero used them as a critique of consumerism. Good movie. I do, however, find it silly to ascribe a certain political ideology to zombies and zombie movies, mainly because everyone is a plodding, brainless drone to the other side.

What I'm hearing these days is that they are now supposed to be sexy.

Well, go back and read Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, and think of it in the context of the times, and even the old Dracula movies from the 30's.   The sexual angle is pretty hard to miss.

In Twilight, vampirism is a metaphor for sex.

My girls have, fortunately, decided that Twilight is crap.  Other people's daughters in the same age range are nuts about it. 

In Dracula (the original one), becoming a vampire made one lustful, hypersexualized without the actual sexual activity.  Lucy, for example, uses her voluptuousness and attractiveness to manipulate the vampire hunters into sparing her after she becomes a vampire.  Dracula himself is not attractive, but uses his powers to lure young women.  In the era, this unharnessed hypersexualization was evil, bad, destructive.  A horror in itself.

So the sexual thing has always been present in vampire fiction.  However, current writers are creating vampire stories in a much more sexually liberal atmosphere, and they've changed accordingly.  Anne Rice's vampires, for example, were very much erotic, and there was actually a fair bit of homoeroticism in her books.  Right now, vampires have become another version of the dangerous bad boy - apparently riding a motorcycle and being disaffected isn't enough anymore.  It's about the forbidden (drinking blood!) and the other, the outsider. And for young American women/teens/tweens exposed to abstinence-only sex ed, the forbidden is sexual desire...  To go all the way in Twilight isn't to fuck, it's to drink blood.

I could go on, but the family is agitating for my attention...  Have to go!

deleted

I've heard of it - haven't picked it up yet.

LOL!  "If I can't get the teenage girls maybe I can get their mothers...hey why not?  When you're 600 years old, there's no such thing as a cougar."

I haven't seen any of the movies mentioned in this thread (I saw Nosferatu when I was about 11, so missed any sexual innuendo - but it scared the willies out of me), so I still don't know much about what's being discussed, although I appreciate the discussion.  It seems to me, from reading the thread, that this trend in films is yet another example of mass culture being determined by the tastes of 12-year-old girls.

If that is your cup of tea, this is a great little on line game from the good people at Pop Cap (full disclosure - my brother in law works there).

I don't know about women liking zombies and vampires, but in my 1996 story published in Parsec, I used zombies as a metaphor for the master class:

Part I

http://www.reocities.com/damunicom/oomblaug.html

Part 2
http://www.reocities.com/damunicom/EnglishLanguageFiction/OomblaugDayPar...

I'm not saying that 12-year-old girls are creating this stuff, but that those who do are pandering their tastes.

My friends' daughters who are into Twilight range from 10 or 11 years old to about 14. 

A good feminist critique of the Twilight series on feministing.

Another good feminist critique of the Twilight series from Bitch magazine.

Little girls don't control the crap they're being fed, unfortunately.  This is nothing new - this is typical teen romance novel meets abstinence education meets fairy tale princess who gives herself to her man crap.

It's what society feeds to little girls from the time they can talk.  Little girls don't choose to be indoctrinated - they ARE indoctrinated, so that by the time they're 10 or 12, and are fed this teenaged version of sexist crap that they've been spoonfed since they were toddlers, then yes, of course it appeals to them. 

Junior high and high school culture is full of girls submitting to boyfriends, girls trying to catch boys, girls being judged by how attractive they are to boys, girls' status being defined by the boyfriends they can attract.  It's full of girls trying to "figure out" boys, girls trying to "take care of" and "save" the moody and self-absorbed type - so romantic! - and girls fighting over boys, girls being manipulated by boys, etc.

Yes, boys go through this stuff too, and it's not all one gender doing it to another.  But there's one gender who is told that the way to social acceptability is to play this role.

And it's not their fault that they buy into it.  They're just children.

At what point is it their fault? And I don't just mean girls I mean boys too. At what point do we blame them for not rising above the brainwashing.

I only read half the books my English teachers assigned me. They might have interpreted as "too hard". If so, they were kidding themselves, the books were not too difficult, they were too boring.

I had no problem tearing through Flowers for Algernon, 1984, and Brave New World. The same teacher who taught me English for 2 years taught me 20th century History, of which I read the entire textbook in the first weekend. I'd spend hours at the library every weekend going through periodicals. However, I couldn't read Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peacve, Great Gatsby. Or rather, I did read it, but I'd have little recollection of what happened.

Find plots the kids find interesting, and they'll read them. Kids don't seem to have a problem reading Harry Potter and Twilight. Kids like adventure and escapism.

Is the laughable dialogue meant to be laughable?

If so, then yes.

If you`re talking about interoffice memos, I see your point.

In regard to literature as an art form, not so much.

Rowling is pretty inventive in the plot and setting department, and she isn`t too challenging a read.  However, try on Philip Pullman`s His Dark Materials trilogy if you really want to see a gem of fantasy told with style. 

Kids learn more when they`re challenged.  We don`t just hand our girls books and leave it at that.  We read together, or at least talk about the work, the story, the writing, what works and what doesn`t.  But then I suppose that`s the advantage to living with parents who write themselves.

Yeah, as a kid I read some pretty challenging stuff, I think, novels and non fiction beyond my age demographic.   I also read "Tales from the Crypt."

To this day, I have no problem reading Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins or Stephen J. Gould. And for fun I read Umberto Eco or Gore Vidal novels.  They are right below my shelf of graphic novels, and above the shelf that holds de Sade and Anne Rice's "Beauty" Series.  

Adults or kids, it is important for us to challenge ourselves, but it's also important to have a good ol' romp through the pages from time to time, also.

Well, Disney is disturbing on a whole bunch of levels, and it's the Disney produced programs on the missnomed "Family Channel"  that has inspired our ban.

I picked up a copy of the 1950 film, Young Man With a Horn a couple of weeks ago. It has nothing to do with vampires, but it does contain a line that I think is related to this discussion.

At one point Kirk Douglas (the Bix Beiderbecke character) and Hoagy Carmichael (the Hoagy Carmichael character) are talking about why their style of jazz doesn't sell. "You know who buys records?" asks Hoagy, " who then answers himself, "High school girls, that's who." He goes on to relate how these girls have no appreciation for music, but listen only to learn the words to the new songs...then move on to the next new songs.

 It seems that young females have had an influence on pop culture disprortionate to their numbers for some time now.

 Another factor in this zombie craze is suggested by Susan Jacoby, in her The Age of American Unreason. In a section dealing with Americans' succeptibility to creationism, and their hostility to scientific method, she notes:

 "Even when the entertainment media are not promoting a particular view of religion, they do promote and capitalize on widespread credulity regarding the supernatural. In recent years, television has communicated an unceasing stream of programs designed to appeal to a vast market of viewers who believe in ghosts, angels and demons. More than half of American adults believe in ghosts, one third believe in astrology, three quarters believe in angels, and four-fifths believe in miracles. The American marketing of the Apocalypse is a multi-media production, capitalizing on fundamentalism and paranoid superstition" (pp.18-19).

Are these zombie movies merely another manifestation of a culture that is awaiting the Rapture?

Oh you're about 20 years behind the times. Today it's the USSA and zombie capitalism that are dead a long time. The mad hatters have tried jolting Frankencapitalism with bolts of lightning and infusions of billions of worthless dollars to no avail.  Now the monster wanders the planet aimlessly threatening the environment and peace with unprecedented destruction and wars of aggression. The system that has failed under mostly ideal lab conditions in every experiment since 14th century Italy is collapsing again.

I'm not a big fan of zombies, vampires or horror movies generally (not that there aren't good ones, just that there are so many bad ones).

I do, however remember a a timely copy of the comic book Hellblazer (set in Thatcher's Britain) in which the protagonist stumbles into a yuppie vampire bar, He winds up strung up from the ceiling by his ankles, with all these well-dressed upperclass bloodsuckers prodding his neck for a vein to tap into their martini glasses.

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Quebec view of vampire