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Multicultural Perspectives
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Fearless Vampire Kissers: Bloodsuckers We Love in

Twilight, True Blood and Others
Bernard Beck

Northwestern University
Published online: 31 May 2011.

To cite this article: Bernard Beck (2011) Fearless Vampire Kissers: Bloodsuckers We Love in Twilight, True Blood and Others,
Multicultural Perspectives, 13:2, 90-92, DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2011.571551
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15210960.2011.571551

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Multicultural Perspectives, 13(2), 9092

C 2011 by the National Association for Multicultural Education
Copyright

ISSN: 1521-0960 print / 1532-7892
DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2011.571551

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PART II

Fearless Vampire Kissers: Bloodsuckers We Love in Twilight, True

Blood and Others
Bernard Beck
Northwestern University
The figure of the vampire has been an important
element of popular culture for more than a century.
The movies have been a home for vampire stories,
and they have presented them as unusually frightening images. A recent explosion of vampire screen
works reveals a new emphasis on addressing female
issues as opposed to male issues and focusing on
the erotic attraction of the vampire rather than the
fear. As a fictional, but very obvious, example of an
alien group in our midst, vampires are like many
sub-groups. The change from fear to arousal may
augur a change in sentiment that allows us to be
more welcoming of outsiders.

his fictional victims, and secondly to his many real, live

readers, listeners, and viewers.
Although human fascination with horror and supernatural menace go all the way back, the horror genre
in modern popular culture is a product of the short,
innovative age of instant communication, urbanization,
literacy, and high-tech messages. It refers back to ancient
traditions and superstitions, but it treats them as a manufactured effect, conveniently packaged and temporarily
arousing. It is not based on belief, but on the willing and
self-gratifying suspension of disbelief. The monsters and
menaces that are found in this form of amusement may be
built on the foundation of our real anxiety, but a little fear
goes a long way in providing fun. The breath-taking sense
of danger necessary to a good roller-coaster or fun-house
ride is supposed to stop well short of real danger to
the riders. When someone is actually harmed on one of
those contraptions, we are outraged and indignant. We
dont find it at all funny. In the same way, we indulge
ourselves in the devilish imagery of Halloween with the
deep certainty that it is all a game.
But among the crowd of awful creatures we use to
incarnate our thrilling experience of fear: the aliens from
space, the maniacs whose civilized restraint is missing,
the murderous agents from the regions of pure evil, the
deformed vengeance seekers we have created with our
own carelessness, the unsuspected beasts that suddenly
appear from the mysterious evolutionary processes of
nature, this one particular creature combines its awful
destructiveness with a heart-quickening allure. Vampires
are different; our agitation is produced by fear and arousal

Fatal Attraction
Vampires are different. Among all the monsters,
demons, and horrors in popular culture that have amused
us for centuries, vampires stand out as an unusual menace,
attractive and erotic in their deadliness. Monsters like the
vampire have been imagined by many peoples throughout
human history. But the version that has achieved worldwide popularity in our day has a very recent origin. It all
started with Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula (Stoker,
1897) is only a century old. The contemporary version of
the vampire figure is powerfully attractive, first of all to

Correspondence should be sent to Bernard Beck, Northwestern

University, Department of Sociology, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston,
IL 60208. E-mail: BBroncks@aol.com

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both. In fact, the overpowering desire they evoke is as

upsetting to the ordinary citizens of the horror world as
the fear of destruction they awaken.
In the novel and the early movies, especially the silent
classic Nosferatu (Dieckmann & Murnau, 1922), the
vampire is as dreadful and repellent as possible. Max
Schreck, the German actor who played the vampire, was
chosen for his hideous appearance and bad behavior, with
no hint of exotic attractiveness. By the 1930s, with the
addition of sound, the universally recognized image of
Dracula as played by Bela Lugosi was unveiled (Browning
& Laemmle, 1931): richly dressed, impeccably groomed,
and mellifluously spoken. In his mysterious, dramatic
black cape, he offered a dashing, handsome, though eerie
figure. This elegant version became obligatory in most
later movies, until very recent times.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the sexual element was
presented explicitly. Slick styles in cinematography,
especially including new combinations of color and
lighting, made possible a new kind of vampire movie,
with sexy women in revealing decolletage. The vampires
bite was eroticized, and his female victims became
predatory but alluring vampires themselves, assuring an
ever present supporting cast of starlets. The new idiom was
found in British movies, especially those from Hammer
Films (e.g., Hinds & Fisher, 1958). At the same time, the
British studios were offering a similar combination of
thrillers and hot girls in the James Bond movies.
The focus on the vampires unique power to get girls
complicated the basic horror theme of supernatural evil.
He was not only a mortal threat to their lives, he was also
an irresistible stimulus to their passions. Then the good
guy heroes relationship with the vampires was not only
that of noble hunters and vicious quarry, but also that of
honorable suitors and vicious seducers of the human (all
too human) sweethearts. This was a new development in
the affairs of the mutually hostile neighbors. They were
not only enemies but also rivals for mating opportunities.

sexuality had been expressed in the vampire genre.

Polanskis recognition of vampire stories was followed
by Andy Warhols production of an unrestrained joining
of the gory and the lewd, under Paul Morrissey and
starring Joe Dallesandro, important figures in Warhols
movie group (Braunsberg, Warhol, Yanne, & Morrissey,
1974). Then came Nosferatu the Vampyre by Werner
Herzog (1979), with Klaus Kinski as a stylish upscale
vampire tale, The Hunger, from Tony Scott (Shepherd
& Scott, 1983), with David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve
and Susan Sarandon, as glittering a cast as could be
assembled at the time, and Francis Ford Coppolas
version of Dracula (Coppola, Fuchs, & Mulvehill, 1992).
A corner had been turned. The Dracula story had been
transformed from a fright festival to a titillating excursion
into the erotic. This change was part of an era when
movies were liberated from restriction of sexual content
and the encouragement of sexuality. The larger context
of liberation from censorship should not obscure the
fact that from then on we went to vampire movies in
particular, not to be frightened but to be turned on.
Welcome to the Dollhouse
But still more changes were coming. Although vampire
movies were full of fateful events involving women and
monsters, at their center were always heroic men with
pure hearts. The sexual shenanigans that arose from that
encounter left these good guys out of the loop. The next
phase of vampire pop culture arrived in the world of
commercial fiction and developed from there into mass
appeal movies and television shows. This new phase had
a distinctive feature. It was created by and for women, and
it was consumed voraciously by women and adolescent
girls. The monster movies that began as treats for men
and boys were now the province of the female side of
popular amusement. They have become chick flicks, so
they are of doubtful interest to male audiences.
A milestone in this new path was the appearance in
1992 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rosenman, Kuzui, &
Kuzui, 1992), an unlikely vampire movie aimed at teen
audiences with a female protagonist. This heroine was
also fashioned to include elements of satire. Buffy was a
stereotyped blonde valley girl, like the later, better known
heroine of the vampire-free Legally Blonde (Kidney, Platt,
& Luketic, 2001). Both movies were followed by sequels
and television series, with corresponding success. These
movies not only created a novel pattern for their main
characters, they also appropriated the admirable traits of
standard male heroes for their previously marginalized
girl protagonists.
The 1990s and 2000s saw other such figures in
association with vampires, representing different age
groups and regional locations. Women novelists had great

Major League
Sometime in the late 1960s, movies, popular culture
and a fearless younger generation took over the center
of attention. Building on the impatient proposals of the
new wave in French cinema and the political grievances
of a world-wide youth movement, young filmmakers
transformed the character of serious art and culture.
Vampires, along with a host of other disreputable cultural
concerns, became material for serious work by new movie
makers who established their own serious credentials
and critical respectability. They brought to their vampire
productions major movie actors. Roman Polanski, the
daring European director, made The Fearless Vampire
Killers (Gutowski & Polanski, 1967). At last, the explicit

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success producing series about their vampire-curious

women characters. Those series created a fiction genre
that drew readers as powerfully as the romance, science
fiction, or detective genres. And they led to successful
screen versions, such as the movies Interview with the
Vampire (Geffen, Woolley, & Jordan, 1994) and Twilight
(Godfrey, Mooradian, Morgan, & Hardwicke, 2008) and
the television series True Blood (Ball, 2008).
These works were a different kind of vampire narrative.
The women were in one way quite different from the
standard male protagonists. They were not horrified by
the vampires, nor did they feel intimidated by them. On
the contrary; they were downright chummy with them.
In fact, they were intergroup pioneers in establishing
sympathetic contact with the alien creatures. There is a
long history in the movies of stories about women forming
bonds of love and lust with despised out-groups, going
all the way back to The Sheik (Lasky & Melford, 1921).

sympathetic to those we insist on defining as strangers.

That message is not a metaphor or an arcane code.
Whatever else the vampires may be, they are not us,
and the challenge of the vampire story is whether we
can live together with them, as our human nature tempts
us to do. A basic principle of folk-sociology is that
human groups keep their solidarity by hostility toward
out-groups. But in our day, we too often forget about that
other basic principle of sociology, that our survival has
always depended on our ability to unite with others. The
vampires seem to be showing us that, as my wife points
out to me, ultimately we will learn how to get along
together one passionate embrace at a time.

References
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Home Box Office.
Braunsberg, A., Warhol, A., & Yanne, J. (Producers), & Morrissey, P.
(Director). (1974). Andy Warhols Dracula [Motion picture]. Italy,
France: Bryanston Distributing.
Browning, T., & Laemmle, C., Jr.(Producers), & Browning, T.
(Director). (1931). Dracula [Motion picture]. United States:
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Coppola, F. F., Fuchs, F., & Mulvehill, C. (Producers), & Coppola, F.
F. (Director). (1992). Dracula [Motion picture]. United States:
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Dieckmann, E., & Grau, A. (Producers), & Murnau, F. W. (Director). (1922). Nosferatu, eine symphonie des grauens [Motion
picture]. Germany: Film Arts Guild. (DVD available from Image
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Geffen, D., & Woolley, S. (Producers), & Jordan, N. (Director). (1994).
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picture]. United States: Geffen Pictures.
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C. (Director). (2008). Twilight [Motion picture]. United States:
Summit.
Gutowski, G. (Producer), & Polanski, R. (Director). (1967). The fearless
vampire killers [Motion picture]. United StatesUnited Kingdom:
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Herzog, W. (Producer & Director). (1979). Nosferatu the vampyre
[Motion picture]. West Germany, France: Werner Herzog
Filmproduktion.
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(1992). Buffy the vampire slayer [Motion picture]. United States:
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Rebirth of a Nation
Almost as popular as the vampire tale itself has been
the indoor sport of finding a metaphorical, deeply buried
social meaning of the tale. In fact, the horror or monster
movie category as a whole has been examined for its
social symbolism. Nothing is more central to a society and
to its cultural understanding of itself than the awareness
of threats to its survival. To know who the enemies are
and to understand their hostility is a necessary work of
the imagination. It helps to achieve a clear picture of
the mutual agreement to live together and to preserve
that arrangement with the greatest urgency. The specific
characteristics of each alien threat can thus be a guide to
understanding what, at a given moment, most scares us
as the proprietors of a social enterprise.
The insight we can gain from the vampire story,
frightening and erotic, is the importance in a male
dominated and male administered society of reserving
our womenfolk to ourselves. At this moment in our
history, we seem most troubled by the ease with which
outsiders can access our land, our opportunities and our
love objects. In the older vampire stories, the vulnerability
of the women to the vampires attractions caused the
greatest anxiety in the men devoted to protecting them.
But by now, the vampire story is a romantic tale of how
love can cause great mutual acceptance between hostile
camps of us and them.
The plain message of todays vampire lore is that we
are becoming less fearful and hostile, more curious and

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