[originally posted July 17, 2009]

It’s just a regular Transylvania in these parts lately. For kids, you have the glittering anti-heroes and torture-porn childbirth of Twilight, while adults get the tacky porn (just plain porn, really, no prefixes) of HBO’s shameful hit True Blood. I think there’s some kind of especially declawed version coming out on the CW network this Fall (with the word ‘diary’ in the title, no less), and Anne Rice, though she’s since turned to Christ and all-white clothing, is still responsible for accessorizing Brad Pitt’s grunge-era pout with cat-eye contacts and thus stirring women everywhere into a froth of wish-fulfillment lust that hasn’t abated since.

But it’s of course embarrassing to claim Anne Rice, or even Alan Ball or that plump Mormon lady, are solely responsible for the allure of the vampire. Charlaine Harris, et al, are capitalizing off an age-old pre-existing sex appeal of the vampire, packaging them up in entertaining ways and doling them out to the masses like cocaine-laced candy hearts. Maybe you prefer yours to shimmer like diamonds but then bruise you silly and gauge out the headboard when you finally, FINALLY, have honeymoon sex. Or maybe you like your vampires with a corny sub-culture, nightclubs and crime rings and non-alcoholic drinks. Then there’s always the fall-back of sensitive blond-haired gentleman who spends decades avoiding his own monstrousness only to eat Christian Slater. Spoiler alert, sorry. You’ll get over it.

All three of these vampiric grand-dames (i.e., Harris, Meyers, and Rice) have similarities in their work. Surprise! The three main vampires are brooding and complex; they’re delicately angst-riddled and ashamed of their roles as, let’s be honest, bloodless soulless killing machines. Harris’s Bill is a Southern Civil War era gentleman who’s managed to retain his long-underwear mores for centuries, to the delight of exactly nobody except a 25-year-old hillbilly virgin. Meyers’ Cullen agonizes incessantly about the danger he poses to his ladylove, slamming into the bedroom wall like a giant moth if he gets too hot-n’-bothered, and delaying sex for marriage even though Bella is gagging for it from day one; and Rice’s Louis is so appalled by himself that he feeds off rats and becomes EVEN MORE melodramatically pale and languishing than even your typical garden-variety vamp. (Side-note: is our current obsession with vampires analogous to a Victorian obsession with invalids? & if so, why?) 

So, vampires are gentlemen, who possess you like a toy but take very good care of you while they’re doing so. And then there’s the whole “progeny” thing (good with progeny = a good father for the babies you’re so desperate to start producing, Typical Female Viewer). Louis fatefully turns the little prepubescent street-rat, Claudia, into a vampire, and is then stuck with her weird mix of grown-woman frustrated sexuality and little-kid brattiness. Also, judging from the film, your hair curls when you turn into a vampire? Unexpected benefit! Clairol, take note! Bill Compton (in the TV show, but not the books) is forced to create a baby vampire in order to save his girlfriend’s life. The victim is my personal favorite character, the ginger-haired Jessica, who, once undead, flounces around in a sundress and a fit of bad impulse-control, spouting lines like, “Now I get to homeschool you, in what it’s like to be scared!” True Blood also addresses the tricky matter of sexuality, but this vampirette at least doesn’t focus hers on her father-figure … she finds a nice boy at the local bar and lets Bill stay faithful to his waitress.

Edward doesn’t exactly create a new vampire, not in the typical neck-biting-by-moonlight fashion. Instead the sullenest Cullen opts to impregnate his bride through good old-fashioned sexual intercourse. The birth scene in the final book of the Twilight series is quite literally the most disturbing display of gore and violence that I’ve read on paper, making Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis sound like prayer-lisping Boy Scouts. Edward’s infant daughter claws her way out of her mother’s stomach, snapping bones left and right, grins at her parents with a full set of teeth, and bites her mother’s breast. You think I’m kidding? I’m not. That entire sentence is something that actually literally happens in a book that little 7-year-old girls read on the school-bus while eating their fruit snacks.

All of which maybe proves that a potent blend of outdated religious mores and the natural-but-culturally-sanitized grossness of childbirth, left to steep in one woman’s brain for three decades and then given the platform of YA fantasy, is the scariest monster of them all. … No, vampires are still scarier.