My friend Walt showed up, and we were just talking and I asked him what he wanted to watch, and he said True Blood. So I watched ep. 1 of Season 6, and now I am a goner. I’m watching ep. 2 of Season 1, and I think I just kissed the next two months goodbye.
Why is there always so much sexual tension within the vampire genre, btw? It’s always been that way, even in the White Wolf days, the VTM and other game play including the GodWars and Circlemud renditions of vampires, and of course, Ann Rice.
Redshirt
Penetration, and blood.
Hann1bal
Every vampire story, including the original Dracula is about sex, in one way or another.
SIA
I was hoping for an insomnia thread. Vampires were NOT on my list of preferred topics. I’m skeered of them.
Redshirt
Best Buffyverse vampires, in numbered order:
1. Angelus
2. Spike
3. Darla
4. Drusilla
5. The Master
6. Luke
7. Those Redneck vampires from Buffy season 2
8. Harmony
9. The Chosen One
10. That book reading vampire from Buffy Season 3
Thymezone
Why is there always so much sexual tension within the vampire genre
Because some people will fucking believe anything?
The prophet Nostradumbass
I’m pretty sure that’s the subtext of most of the vampire genre.
VodkaGoGo
I responded to you over on twitter but I figured I might as well post over here too. The simple answer is that Vampires represent the aristocracy feeding on the proles and the proles need to be seduced. I don’t watch True Blood because that show is farging awful so I don’t know if they stick to that but that’s always been my understanding of the classic Vampire fiction.
Amir Khalid
I’d have to dig out my old copy of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, but I think he said they were always some kind of metaphor for sexuality.
A Humble Lurker
What everyone else has said. Sexual predation, societal damnation of our urges, drinking blood yourself turning you into a monster, (having sex and turning into a slut), it’s all in there. It’s kind of interesting no matter how far we run into the arms of the fantastic, we can never completely outrun our reality.
SpaceSquid
Indeed. Basically it’s because the genre was kick-started by a Victorian writer so simultaneously obsessed with and repressed over sexuality that he went on to write The Lair of the White Worm because Dracula wasn’t an obvious enough metaphor for him.
Since then I think the reasoning bascially goes like this: it is exceptionally unlikely any writer will look at genre and think “I’d like to have a go at that, but fuck me, I’m going to want to take the sexy bits out”.
WereBear
@SpaceSquid: LOL! I love that. True.
Also, vampires are now good-looking! Old-fashioned werewolf puts the moves on you, you’re like, “Larry, not till you shave. And I don’t mean just your back.”
geg6
Duh…vampires are a metaphor for SEX. Forbidden, dangerous, surrender, vulnerability, not being in control. A vampire story without the sex isn’t much of a story.
Keith
Rutger Hauer is a good addition to the show. He makes anything better. There gets to be a bit too much overt beefcake/T&A for my liking (I think more subtlety in trying to pull in demographics), but all-in-all it’s a good show, and Jason/Terry/Andy all add some great comic relief to the show. Season 2 (with Maryann) was way better than S1, but it really picked up when they added Russell Edgington.
jayboat
There’s sex because those bitchez be hot!
Damn, Sookie flips my switch.
Agree w Keith about Edgington- dude reeks of vampire.
SpaceSquid
@geg6
A vampire story without the sex isn’t much of a story.
I think that’s an overstatement. The original metaphor made the jump to vampirism as STD pretty easy, and from there you can remove the “S” and still have something entirely worth doing (see, for example, Matheson’s I Am Legend, which does involve sex but only as an afterthought).
I’d also point to the underrated Daybreakers as an example of an interesting vampire story without sex. That uses the disease metaphor as well, but bolts it on to the Gaia Theory stuff about humanity itself being an infection Mother Earth has to put up with.
Joey Maloney
Why is there always so much sexual tension within the vampire genre, btw?
Because without it they’re just leeches with legs. Boring. And gross.
Although I like Andy Fox’s book about the vampire living in New Orleans who’s morbidly obese and diabetic because all the people he preys on have such shitty diets.
Hawes
All monster stories are about various subliminal fears. Frankenstein was a fear of science and the implications that man aspired to be God. Zombies can be a fear of death and disorder. They can also be – via Chuck Closterman – a fear of the incessant monotony of daily life. Most science fiction monsters are about the unknown, but some are about losing our own humanity.
debbie
@Hann1bal:
Yes, in his time, Bela Lugosi was considered the epitome of European sexiness. Happily, tastes change.
Randy P
It’s been a while since I saw it, but wasn’t Nosferatu missing a lot of this sexual tension?
RSA
@SpaceSquid: Good examples. Some of my favorite vampire stories are straight-up horror adventure, with the goal of killing a vampire to survive. A couple of collections along these lines: Robert McCammon’s Under the Fang, which has a premise similar to Matheson’s (IIRC–as vampirism spreads, eventually humanity becomes a minority intelligent species on earth), and Greenberg’s Vampire Slayers, with a variety of stories about, well, killing vampires.
Sex has played a part in vampire stories since the early days of the genre, with Carmilla. I think it got a huge boost with Ann Rice and then with the growith of paranormal romance novels. (The Sookie Stackhouse novels are typical of that genre.) But there are still good stories to be told about non-sparkly vampires.
hartly
I’ve got to admit, I’ve never thought of vampires as “sexy”. They’re cool because they’re hard to kill and they get to stay up as late as they want.
J.W. Hamner
The White Wolf games had(and still have I would guess) different families of vampires to match some of the different ways vampires have been portrayed. One of them is super sexpot vampires, but one of them is also disfigured a la Nosferatu.
greennotGreen
Anybody see the PBS (probably really BBC) miniseries in the 70s with Louis Jourdan as Dracula? He was over 50 at the time, but he was seriously hot to my twenty plus self. My then husband said, “Wow, even I’d let him bite my neck.”
hartly
@Randy P: I think there was a tiny bit, with the Mina Harker analogue serving as a sort ultra-feminine sex purity symbol. What I remember most about that film was the way the Jonathan Harker character laughed at EVERYTHING. Thank God it was silent.
hartly
@greennotGreen: I saw that, but I thought he was a little wooden – the French accent maybe?
hartly
@greennotGreen: Sorry to bring more Dr Who trivia into this, but the State of Decay story was originally going to appear around the time of this version of Dracula’s was televized. For some reason the BBC thought a Dr Who vampire story would seem like a “sen-up” (whatever the hell that means) of their Louis Jourdan production, so SoD had to be held back a few seasons.
hartly
@hartly: Sorry, meant “send-up”, not “sen-up”, and Dracula, not Dracula’s
OmerosPeanut
Vampire feeding is a kind of oral sex.
jake the snake
Blame John Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, and much abused sometimes boytoy.
The same laudanum laced ghost story session that led Mary Wollstonecraft to write Frankenstein,
led Polidori to write “The Vampire” in which he modeled the title character on Lord Byron.
Prior to the publishing of that story, vampires were traditionally seen as revenants, more like
blood-sucking zombies than as suave, socially sophisticated (sexual) predators as they have been since.
Ted & Hellen
First season was different, fun, and campy/scary.
Second was less so.
Third got stupid quickly and it was downhill from there.
Anna what’s her name is a horrible actor.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@hartly: Mina was the pure one, which is why she was saved. Her friend succumbed to the seduction so she perished. What I remember most about the book, with the exception of the basic plotlines, is that the last third didn’t feature a single scene in which Stoker didn’t go on for about a half-page about the absolute virtue of the heroes – Harker, Van Helsig, and their other assitants, along with Mina. Coulda edited 90 percent of that out – we got the point the first couple of times.
TomG
I watched the first two seasons of True Blood, and although there is a lot to like there, what pushed me away from continuing was the “every monster and the kitchen sink” mentality: we got vampires, shapeshifters who WEREN’T werewolves, faeries, evil goddesses, and then actual werewolves. It felt like too much to keep track of, to me.
Tone in DC
I figure for all of the bohemian, murderous bloodsuckers depicted, there’s a need for some tortured, angsty vamps as a counterbalance. Angel, Spike (and, for one episode, Buffy) were great in that capacity.
I tried to watch Sookie and Friends; it always helps that Anna is very cute. The show’s season 1 didn’t do much for me. I liked “Moonlight” better than that.
hartly
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: You raise an interesting point and I think you’re right, but I was talking about Nosferatu, which doesn’t have the Lucy character in it. (Not saying this to be snarky, just clearing up any misunderstanding.) For me the most awful thing about the last third of Dracula was the endlessly repeated Mina’s asleep on a boat scene. Man that Stoker new a thing or two about pace!
Biscuits
They had me at Alexander Skaarsgard. 6’4″ of yummy yummy man. WOOF!
CharlesW
Could it be because most modern vampire/werewolf lit is really just a subgenre of the bodice-ripper?
From my limited reading it seems like one common feature is the strong, independent female protagonist “saved” by a man with literally superhuman strength, speed, agility, and of course rippling abs. Sookie Stackhouse’s vampire boyfriend plays the role of protecting father figure (which is of course what all women must be looking for).
Sly
I find the main cast/characters and plotlines boring and contrived, to be honest, but the supporting cast is pretty good. Nelsan Ellis (Lafayette) Todd Lowe (Terry Bellefleur), and Chris Bauer (Andy Bellefleur) in particular.
Chris Bauer has perhaps the greatest line in the history of television (NSFW).
CaseyL
Why are sexy vamp stories so popular?
Well, let’s see: Eternal youth and all the sex you want, with strong overtones of dominance-submission (social as well as sexual), and a soupcon of existential angst for character depth.
What’s not to like?
It is kind of interesting that vampire stories, which first became so popular during an era of sexual repression, became even more so in the modern day. They just shift their metaphoric meaning, from any sexual experience at all to STDs and the fear/attraction of becoming Other.
Another aspect I find interesting is that the stories where the vamps are part of an international vamp socio-political order always portray “vampire councils” as byzantine, authoritarian, and cruel (to the vamps as well as to mortals). Not, in other words, any kind of ordering framework a normal (Western) person would want to live under, much less obey without question.
RSA
@CaseyL:
This is also true about all the fantasy stories I can think of that involve some sort of governance, including what I’ve read of modern urban horror. It’s always an autocratic ruling council or a single figure at the top, with magical powers and not much in the way of democratic impulse. I imagine it’s because of the historical models that the stories are typically based on, whether it’s Faerie, Middle Earth, the Pantheon, Hell, or something else.
Steeplejack
@Randy P:
No.
beliebert
I don’t ever need to see another damn vampire or zombie movie/series as long as I live.
Cole is always asking about recommendations for Netflix. I was reading up about the CEO of Netflix when I heard he is supposedly an accomplished and interesting guy. He said his favorite movie is “Gloomy Sunday” which I had never heard about. It’s a subtitled foreign movie set in WWII Hungary.
If you haven’t seen it check it out.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0155722/
Roxy
Does anyone remember Frank Langella in Dracula. He was one sexy Count in that movie.
TomG
BTW, if there are any fans of Game of Thrones in here, the author George R. R. Martin wrote one of the best vampire novels ever (IMHO) – Fevre Dream – in 1982. It combines believable vampires with a pre-Civil War Southern setting. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in vampire stories.
Desert Rat
It goes all the way back to the beginnings of the genre, Carmilla, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, etc.
My personal belief is that Gothic Horror as written in the 19th Century was a cautionary tale about “loose” women. It’s pretty much a staple of the genre.
Then, Anne Rice. It can’t be overstated just what an influence Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and its follow ups (the first was written in the 1970s) had on everything that came between. Vampires went from creepy to sexy and most importantly, superpowered.
Desert Rat
It goes all the way back to the beginnings of the genre, Carmilla, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, etc.
My personal belief is that Gothic Horror as written in the 19th Century was a cautionary tale about “loose” women. It’s pretty much a staple of the genre.
Then, Anne Rice. It can’t be overstated just what an influence Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and its follow ups (the first was written in the 1970s) had on everything that came between. Vampires went from creepy to sexy and most importantly, superpowered.
Desert Rat
It goes all the way back to the beginnings of the genre, Carmilla, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, etc.
My personal belief is that Gothic Horror as written in the 19th Century was a cautionary tale about “loose” women. It’s pretty much a staple of the genre.
Then, Anne Rice. It can’t be overstated just what an influence Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and its follow ups (the first was written in the 1970s) had on everything that came after. Vampires went from creepy to sexy and most importantly, superpowered.
Roger
Just watched first five seasons in one go (well OK 4 or 5 episodes a night over two weeks) and really don’t recommend anyone else does it:
Season 1 actually does start quite well.
Season 2 falls off somewhat at least has the divine Michelle Forbes
Season 3 is mostly poor except when Denis O’Hare is on screen and camping it up.
Season 4 is one of the worst seasons of Cult/Geek TV I’ve ever subjected myself too
Season 5 does have a worthwhile main arc but also features an Iraq subplot that is as stupid and tasteless as anything I’ve ever seen on TV.
It really is just Buffy and Angel with tits and ass and swearing (but with a ‘heroine’ who is a vampire layer rather than a slayer) – but its best episodes are not much better than the more mediocre mid-season filler Buffys and the worst episodes are as bad as the very worst Angels.
So unless your life is very sad and lonely (mine is) that’s 50 or so hours you could spend more productively on almost any activity imaginable.
Roger
@Desert Rat:
Dracula was pretty superpowered – particularly in his Hammer film incarnations which all predate Ms Rice.
And is Frankenstein – the very well-spring of C19 Gothic Horror – about loose women?
Indeed even in Dracula the loose women are hapless victims of the predatory male (who may not be black but wears a lot of it and is an illegal immigrant to boot).
Carmilla stands out precisely because it stands the normal genre expectations of that time on its head.
hartly
@Roxy: I saw the Frank Langella movie, but I didn’t find him all that sexy, and it annoyed me that we never saw his fangs. Sylvester (7th Dr) McCoy has a small part in that film as one of Dr Seward’s (Donald Pleasance) servants. I think his name is Walters.
Bishop Bag
THE MOVIE that just about suffocated the viewer with the sexual tension was Paul Schrader’s 1982 film “Cat People”. Holy Crap! I swear, that is the sexiest tensionyist (?!?) make you squirm in your seat movie that I have seen. The scenes with Nastassja Kinski and John Heard were really tense. (Spoiler Alert!) When he is feeding the Black Leopard at the end, what a scene! Giorgio Moroder’s score really enhanced the film. One of my favorites!
mrmike
@Redshirt: Best Buffyverse vampires, in numbered order:
1. Angelus
2. Spike
3. Darla
4. Drusilla
5. The Master
6. Luke
7. Those Redneck vampires from Buffy season 2
8. Harmony
9. The Chosen One
10. That book reading vampire from Buffy Season 3
I disagree with both the content and ordering of this list (If Dru isn’t one of the top three if not the flat out best vamp in that entire series I don’t know who is), but I’m in a hurry, so I’ll just say:
No love for Vamp Willow? Bored Now.
Diana
@SpaceSquid: absolutely true. Before Stoker vampires were like ghouls: not sexual and not defined. Stoker reworked all of that, and redefined the vampire myth in the context of sexual liberation for the foreseeable future.
SpaceSquid
@Diana
Before Stoker vampires were like ghouls: not sexual and not defined.
Or not able to move without hopping, of course.
Roger
@Diana:
No – Polidori’s The Vampyr is 1819, Rymer’s Varney the Vampire 1845-7 (it was a serialised and interminable penny dreadful or Victorian pulp ) and Carmilla 1872 all well well before Stoker (1897) and established most of his key tropes with aristocratic eroticised vampires.