Every girl I know has a favorite vampire. Some are Damon girls. Some are team Edward. And some just really like gothic literature. Regardless of the count in particular, most young women have a vamp they’d like to sink their teeth into. But what is it about vampires that we love so much?
The myth of the vampire has existed for centuries in various iterations all over the globe. In 1897, Braham Stoker took this myth and made it more extreme, combining legend, the history of Vlad the Impaler, and the abilities of flight and transmogrification to create an unforgettable antagonist. The gothic novel Dracula gifted us with the most infamous vampiric figure in modern history. Although there’s a lot in this novel to discuss, its most interesting element is its representation of sex and gender roles.
Horror has always been used to represent the fears of its society, even back when Stoker penned his novel. During the late Victorian period, early feminists were beginning to protest in favor of greater rights. These “new women” threatened traditional familial roles, and there was a palpable anxiety over the women’s liberation. Stoker’s novel makes an argument against this movement, depicting his two female characters as opposite female archetypes. He juxtaposes the sensual and assertive Lucy with the dutiful Mina, showing how Lucy’s sexual desires literally make her a monster. When Lucy meets Dracula in the cemetery, it is understood to be a promiscuous act, and the subsequent bite is the consummation of their relationship. This sexually deviant action transforms Lucy into a vampire, a monster like Dracula. Later, the more traditional Mina is also bitten. Yet this time, the action is perceived as an assault rather than a choice. By the end of the novel Lucy is staked and beheaded, yet Mina goes on to live a happy life with her husband and their son.
Stoker’s novel clearly has a grim perception of female sexuality, as it literally kills a character over her desires. However, in equating a vampire’s bite to sexual action, Stoker had a hand in forever linking the mythos of the vampire to sex and gender relations.
Early vampires of the silver screen followed Dracula’s formula, generally depicting stories of innocent women who needed saving from predatory monsters. 1922’s Nosferatu, the very first film adaptation of Dracula, asserts that the vampire can only be defeated if a pure-hearted woman distracts him with her beauty. This movie, and other vampire stories of the early-to-mid twentieth century, generally upheld the societal values of chastity and purity in women. While their vamps were either undesirable monsters or handsome perversions of male sexuality.
In the 80s and early 90s, our perception and use of vampires changed. Films like Fright Night, The Lost Boys, and From Dusk till Dawn responded to the Aids epidemic by using vampires as a representation of the risk of infection. Instead of focusing on women specifically, the genre shamed the behavior of those infected, implicitly depicting the victims of the virus as monsters.
By the late-90s and 2000s, the genre altered again. We finally get to see the vampires that many of us are most familiar with: The vampire-as-lover in teen dramas. Here sexual deviancy is swapped out for desirability. The vampires are seldom monsters (and if so, are always redeemable) and are consistently played by extraordinarily handsome actors.
These modern vamps generally come in two categories. The Sensitive Type and the Bad Boy. Sensitive vamps see themselves as the monsters they are. They swear off human blood and brood over their demonic curse, dramatically insisting that they are not good enough for the female lead. Bad boys, on the other hand, love being vampires and relish in their acts of hedonism – much to the chagrin of the sensitive vamps. Some of these characters start their stories as antagonists or even villains, yet always find the road to redemption through love.
Both of these vampiric archetypes are meant to be distinctly appealing to the audience. Whether they are penned as more romantic or overtly sexual, there is a desirability to their character. They are no longer the story’s predators, but its love interests.
The role of women in these stories has also evolved over the years. The pure-hearted, dutiful leads of the past have been swapped out for women with substance. Now the heroines are allowed to have distinctly feminist, well-rounded attributes. Some can even be the Van Helsings of their stories (Buffy, anyone?). And if these women ever suffer a vampire bite, it’s always their choice, and actions of sexual agency are no longer a death sentence.
Although these modern vamps are a great improvement from the Draculas of the silver screen, they still come with issues. As with all vampire media, there is the topic of consent. If a vampire bite is a sexual action, then any performed in malice are de facto rapes. This is an aspect of vampire lore that most teen dramas handle extremely poorly, or simply choose to ignore altogether. Additionally, we repeatedly see the “All Girls Want Bad Boys” trope in these narratives. A trope that can often be used to excuse the harmful or abusive behavior of male characters. However, as we look back on the famous vampires from this time, people are beginning to be more critical of how writers handled these issues. A fact that likely means that the vamps of the future will not only be sexy, but distinctly feminist.
So how did this change happen? What brought our culture to love vamps instead of fearing them? As society evolves, so do our monsters. It makes sense that as cultural thoughts about sex and gender progressed, vampires needed to keep up with the times.
This Halloween think of having blood-sucking crushes as a feminist statement of sorts. Loving a vampire is a representation of how far we’ve come in terms of how we understand and judge sexuality, and it can also be a nice reminder of just how far we still have to go.