Die Young, Stay Pretty
Vampires, and why they don't suck.
      by Rachel Hyland

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire.

Buffy, of course, is the Vampire Slayer, and thus she slew ol' Drac. Uh. We think. (He kept doing that dissolves-in-water thing, so how can we be sure?) The Buffy version of Dracula (Rudolf Martin) was just about the sexiest yet -- pageboy-on-acid hairdo aside -- and for the most feared and fantastic of vampire foes ever, he sure was... kinda cool.

How did this happen? He's supposed to be Bela Lugosi, he's supposed to be intimidating and malevolent. How in hell did we come from the evil Winona-Ryder-loving spawn of Satan vampires of yesteryear to the sexy and devastatingly attractive Brad Pitt-esque model that is more prevalent today?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Anne Rice.

She of the fetish erotica and the erotica fetish, Rice has made her fortune off the back of a somewhat twisted fantasy life that has proved, vexingly, to be the voice of all-too-many of the people. Certainly, much had written about vampires before the advent of Rice... but no one had made them so blatantly sensual, and the appearance of her first book in the Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire, in 1976 bred a new type of nightwalker. Rice's vampires are brutal, determined scoundrels who kill and kill and whine about how hard their poor misbegotten unlives are. But there is no denying that she somehow makes them people, with all the attendant flaming passions and thwarted desires that that implies. The intoxicating spell she weaves around her devoted readers leaves many panting for more death, more pain... more sex. (Even if the title of her latest book is the name of Buffy's original Watcher. Copycat.)

Forever Knight's Geraint Wyn Davies as Nick Knight, pictured above on the verge of a big ol' vampire sneeze.

Laurell K. Hamilton has ably continued this tradition with her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series of novels, in which young lovely Anita raises the dead for a living... and ends up sleeping with one of them. In her case it is the incorrigible and irresistible Jean-Claude, a Master vampire who only feeds from willing humans and gets about the place in some of the most ridiculous-sounding ruffled ensembles ever (though the descriptions of Anita's clothes at any one time are pretty Sears-catalogue-worthy themselves.) But Anita sees past his frock coats to the monster within, and her hot and heavy affair with him is enough to raise a warm blush on the coldest of prudish vampire cheeks.

While they are perhaps the two greatest written examples of the evolution of the vampire in our modern, rehabilitation-crazed world, there are copious examples of vampires -- the good, the bad, the studly -- in popular culture that prove beyond a doubt how very much things have changed for the bloodsuckers.

Vamps sure have been getting a lot of good press lately. And good film.

True vampire movies -- horror vampire movies -- with titles like Blood Sport, The Hunger, and even the what-the-hell-just-happened-to-this-movie? From Dusk Till Dawn keep the roots of their evil alive, but it is the lighter, comedic vampire movies that have taken over the genre. The comedy vampire movies that get great mileage out of the thigh-slappin' hilarious slaughter. From 1987's hottie-laden, Schumacher-directed The Lost Boys (oh, Jason Patric, how did it go so wrong?), through 1992's misunderstood Buffy the Vampire Slayer (oh, Luke Perry, how did it go so wrong?), to 1995's Vampire in Brooklyn (oh, Eddie Murphy, how did it go so... uh, nevermind) the comedy aspect of the myth has been exploited and explored thoroughly. Vampires just take themselves so seriously. It begs ridicule.

Scholars are at a loss to explain Vampirella's persistent popularity.

Vampire TV shows tend to accord their subjects a little more respect, and were achieving immense cult status even before Angel became the sane preference over Angel Lite at 9 pm. 1996's Kindred: The Embraced, brought to you by Aaron Spelling and based on the Role Playing Game Vampire: The Masquerade (how is it possible it wasn't a hit?), starred the sadly departed Mark Frankel as Julian Luna, head of one of San Francisco's vampire clans, and was actually... pretty good. Forever Knight -- oh, yeah, Forever Knight, baby! -- lasted three seasons and was everything a vampire show should be... okay, not enough eye-candy, but, in mitigation, the show was Canadian. And let us not forget Count Duckula, who set the standard for all other highly-evolved and socialized vampires ever by being vegetarian. Ah, Count Duckula. Almost as cool as The Count from Sesame Street.

And, hey! Vampires are in comics too. Remember in the early Eighties when Dr. Strange killed all the vampires in the world everywhere? And there were no vampires in any Marvel comics anywhere for years and years and years? That was weird. Vampirella is the longest-running vampire comic in the world -- and Vampi's two pieces of masking tape that they call an outfit wouldn't have anything to do with that, at all. Of course, there's also Blade, and any comic that leads to a Stephen Dorff movie has gotta have merit. Not to mention that his character, baddie Deacon Frost, gets wonderfully unclothed in order to engage in some unclothed-ness with his girl throughout. Sure, he's a vampire, and an evil one at that, but who says he can't have sex?

Angel and Buffy: What are we thinking?

Although... why is it that vampires are so often associated with sex, now? (Well, not Count Duckula, of course, but the others.) Can it always have been that way? The French call sex "the little death" -- but is the visceral thrill of the kill so close to that experienced during a great roll in the hay that necrophilia can suddenly be considered de rigeur? For that matter, how can vampires even have sex? Uh. Actually. No one needs to know the answer to that, do they?

After all, it led to that one perfect moment of happiness. And how can that be wrong?

Yes, even in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which features the exploits of the ultimate warrior against the undead, vampires are not uniformly treated with the contempt they, objectively, deserve. Angel. Spike. See? It's a ravenous plague, a curse upon humanity, that we are beginning to find these creatures so acceptable, so adorable, that we actively applaud their involvement with seventeen year olds and will them the love of impressionable mortal girls.

We're all sick.

But, oh well. At least it's only just pretend, right?

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