Famous Real Vampires

vampires, their history is long, and by long i mean myths about them have been around since 5000 BC, long before Jesus ever came into play. each culture, of course, has their own variations to the myth.

The first myth on vampires predates back to roughly 4000 B.C.E. from the ancient Sumer civilization. The Ekimmu, like many vampires of folklore, was believed to have been created when someone died a violent death or was not buried properly. although not describes as vampires( as the word vampire was not used until the mid 1700's) They were described as demonic in nature, severely rotting corpses, phantom-like entities that roamed the earth, unable to rest, in search of victims. 

Vlad The Impaler

 Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula as he is commonly known, didn’t come into play until the 1400’s. he is the most widely known of the “vampires” having killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people in his lifetime, using the most brutal of methods to do so. When he was killed, his body was never found, hence the myth that he is in fact a “vampire”. He has had many movies and books written about him. In some adaptations of Dracula, Bram Stokers book and his life story are put together as one.

Elizabeth Bathory

 Another widely known “vampire” is Elizabeth Bathory, who as the myth goes, would kill young women, virgins preferably, and would bathe in their blood because she thought that that would keep her young and from dying. She was eventually caught and tried for the killings of several hundred girls. Her legacy definitely followed her, as there have been several books, and movies made about her. She even has several hardcore metal bands named after her.

Selling Out To The Vampires

Selling out. It can happen to anything and everything just like overexposure can. Vampires have definitely been overexposed in the last couple of years, beginning with, unsurprisingly, Twilight. Before Twilight there was a lull of a couple of years where vampires were not really in the mainstream, they had more or less faded into the background once Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel went off the air. Twilight however, awakened something in teenage girl’s hearts and made them go absolutely crazy for any and everything vampire related. Pretty soon there was jewelry, clothing, posters, key chains, any sort of merchandise you can think of, being sold in big stores such as Wal-Mart, target, and even “Goth” store Hot Topic.

The Drink from True Blood

 After twilight came The Vampire Diaries, and all its merchandise, True Blood and all its merchandise( including TruBlood, which is a fake blood beverage that’s in the show and was now sold in places like Hot Topic) and even the parody Vampire Suck came out, although with very minimal merchandise.

Muse

Now, on the topic of selling out, it does not have much to do with vampires as much as it does with the music on the soundtrack for a certain Vampire series. The Twilight soundtrack has an impressive amount of good bands including Muse, Paramore, and Linkin Park. Muse seems to have had the most success following the release of the soundtrack, now having had accumulated multiple awards. They have however, been accused of selling out. Their hardcore fans are angry at the fact that so many “tweens” and teens now like their music after hearing it on the soundtrack.

Paramore

Muse is just trying to make money, and make it big here in the United States, which they have succeeded years after having started. Paramore, the other band that garnered success after twilight has the same problem. Me, being a fan since the beginning, felt like muses fans did, angry that all these people liked Paramore now thanks to twilight. I am, however, very happy that they are successful. That was their aim, and no matter how they achieved it, they did, even if it took a crappy sparkly vampire movie to get them there.

The FCC Won't Let Me Be

America in this day and age really reminds me of America back in the 1950s. What I mean is, instead of progressing forward with certain ideas, it seem like we are reverting back to what was once familiar. The FCC has gotten tougher with its laws over what can and cannot be shown or said on television. The parent’s councils that are so prominent are making a big deal of things that if it was another country would never have even been brought up. There is a big problem with nudity here, that nothing can really be shown, because oh no what will the children think! (Though parents, honestly your child knows way more than they let on). Do not even get me started on the idea of both sex and homosexuality. Both of which are a big no no around these parts.

Back not even 10 years ago, it seems like both movies and TV shows were a lot riskier than they are now, with everything that I stated above. There were more gay characters and yeah, more implied sex in TV shows. In Buffy, they even had one of the main characters, Willow, come out as a lesbian, and have multiple girlfriends and everything.

Twilight, like always was bound to come up. Twilight is doing nothing to advance our thinking on sex. Stephanie Meyer, the author of Twilight is Mormon. She does not believe in sex before marriage. Her books are all about waiting to have sex. She managed to make the one thing that has always been free, that is basically a symbol for sex, and turn him into something completely different. Girls now think it is completely okay for them to have a boyfriend who wants t wait for sex. That is not a bad thing. Edward, the main character, is manipulative, bossy, and is basically an abusive boyfriend in the making, and Bella just goes along with it, because she is in love with him. What kind of message is that telling to all the teens that read the book or watch the movie? That it is totally ok for your boyfriend to treat you like crap, because he “loves” you.

I have a big problem with that. I want the United States to be up to par with the European countries that do not make sex, nudity, and swearing on TV a big deal. We need to stop worrying so much about what’s being shows to our children and start thinking a little more about what is going on with the economy and the country in general. 

Popular Discrimination: Even The Vamps Do It

“Popular tastes tend to ignore traces of authorial signature and focuses rather on generic convention.” – John Fiske, Popular Discrimination

Generic conventions. Every genre ever created has them. Westerns always have the cowboy hats. Action movies always have the older leading man with a chip on his shoulder. Things like that. Vampire movies, while some tend to differ from the older generic conventions (fangs, cannot go out in sunlight, garlic) the main formula has mostly stayed the same.

Reason being, the movie and TV show companies feel that if they change the formula too much, then people will simply not like it, and that has proven to be quite true. It is the whole idea of popular discrimination as John Fiske puts it, where even the most well advertised, high budget, big movie star having movies and TV shows can fail if it is just too different from the norm, the norm being the things that people are used to seeing for that genre, like I stated above.

Like always, I am going to talk about twilight. Twilight is that movie about sparkly vampires. So yes, it does not follow the conventions of fangs, or that vampires die in the sunlight. But what it does do is the average romantic movie conventions- falling in love with someone you are not supposed to. Everyone wants to fall in love with the bad boy with a heart of gold or in Twilights case, the dead vampire boy with no heart at all.

Now in recent times, or well how it has always been, the human girl always falls in love with the male vampire. Lets see, in Buffy the Vampire slayer, Buffy falls for Angel first then after he is gone, she falls for Spike. In True Blood, Sookie the waitress from a small town, falls in love with Bill one of the vampire residents. Vampire Diaries, Elena falls in love with Stefan, the century old vampire. All of these have the exact same formula, and all of these have been very well received by audiences.

Blade: The series however, did not do so well. It could have been the timing, as it was aired in 2006. It could have been that it did not capture the intended audience’s interest (it being males 18-30, since it aired on Spike TV) but it probably has a lot to do with the fact that it did not follow the generic conventions. There was no clear good vs. bad, no love interest, nothing that really made it like all other vampire shows. So it failed.

It really goes to show that while we like to think of ourselves as people who like to watch different things and that we aren’t all the same, if we don’t see some familiarity in the advertising for shows/movies we aren’t going to make an effort to watch it. People need something familiar to cling to.

Anne Rice: Fanfiction Hater

When watching any movie or show, we do not really think about whose “property” it is or who owns the rights to what were watching, we just watch it and get sucked into it. Janet Wasko talks about copyright laws, and how in Disney, they have everything copyrighted, so if anyone, and I do mean anyone, were to use the likeness, or name of one of their characters, then they are probably going to get sued.

Now how do vampires factor into this whole copyrighted mess you ask? Vampires are very very popular creatures used in well everything. Right now you have the twilight sparkly vampires, the Vampire Diaries emo vampires and of course the True Blood sex crazed vampires. And when on said movie or TV show, the fans do not like the storyline, or the character pairing, or sometimes just because they feel like they can do a better job of writing the show/movie themselves, they turn to fan fiction.

Fan fiction is just what it sounds like, stories written by fans of any given show/movie/ or even real life people. If people have heard about it, somewhere on the internet, someone has written a story about it. Now it may seem like I am just talking randomly about some things, but I can relate fan fiction back to vampires and copyright laws.

Anne Rice. Writer of such books as: “Interview with a Vampire”, “The Vampire Lestat” and “Queen of the Damned”. Also a very well known hater of fan fiction. Anne Rice does not like it when people write stories based on her books or characters. She is so against it, that in 2000 she released a statement saying just that and prohibiting (yes prohibiting) the writing of such things. With the release of her statement, thousands of stories that had already been written were removed from the popular site, fanfiction.net.  Sure, she is not the only one who has done this since then, but she is probably one of the more influential writers to do so.

 Not on Fanfiction.net

Personal opinion time. I really do not get why she would prohibit people from writing stories based on characters she created. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. If I was an author and people wrote stories based on my characters, I would be happy and think, yes I am big enough to where people want to write about something I created. Not everyone is like that though, and for now and the foreseeable future, Lestat, Louis, Akasha and any other characters she’s created cannot be used in any story considered fan fiction.

Too Much Is Not Always A Good Thing

What do vampires, indie artists going mainstream, and hip-hop artist making it big have to do with each other?  They have all sold out, at least according to the people who claim to have liked them before they got big.  I know so many people that have complained about not liking a certain band anymore because, they “sold out” and because they sold out their music is no longer good, even though not 5 minutes ago they loved the band.

Same can be said for vampires.  I remember being in middle school, and seeing a weird girl walking around reading a book about vampires.  She would be teased endlessly simply because she refused to do what everyone else was doing and decided to do what she wanted.  This girl is now my best friend.  In high school, I hung out with all the so-called weird kids, who yeah read about vampires, and were into other “weird things” like anime.  Not even 2 years later, twilight comes out, and vampires suddenly turn into all the rage.  My best friend, who read the books when they first came out and were not popular, simply refused to watch the movie, because it was too “mainstream”.  All those people that would laugh at whoever would read “those stupid books about vampires” were now the ones being consumed by all things vampire.

Once things go mainstream, people stop liking it, and move on to the next thing.  I can say that I loved vampires before they were mainstream, during the time they were mainstream(although not as much because having to hear how Edward was “omg so hot” if I even mentioned vampires was not worth it) and I will continue to love them after they fade out because they have always fascinated me.

At this moment, I can honestly say that there is too much vampire related things going around.  Twilight?  Sure one movie about a sparkling vampire.  When it first came out, I did not think that that many people would get into it.  Vampire diaries?  Ok now a movie and a TV show about vampires, that is cool.  True blood, the third underworld movie, countless books being advertised at every store, all the merchandise.  That is when the media started being oversaturated with vampires.  Even me, who I can honestly say used to love the twilight series, started resenting it a bit because everywhere I turned, it was vampire this, or vampire that.

I hope that in the coming months, or at least by the time all the twilight movies are out, the vampire craze dies down a bit.  I do not want to completely hate my favorite supernatural being.

Vampires- Where's the gay?

There has always been a severe lack of gay people in the mass culture, even now in 2010 when more people are becoming ok with homosexuality. Them being ok with gay people does not mean they are comfortable with having them portrayed on TV, or as something that is completely normal, which it is.  The millions of overtly religious old people in this country cause a lack of any sort of diversity in movies and television, with books being one of the only things that really doesn’t get censored anymore, except for in schools.

With that being said, there is an even bigger lack of gay people in the vampire subculture.  The only example that I have been able to find for gay vampires is in true blood, the vampire series that is on Showtime.  There are slightly more vampires that are lesbian.  Carmilla, a novella written by Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872 is the first literary example of lesbian vampires.  Lesbian vampire killers, a British comedy about killing lesbian vampires is the most recent example.  While their were probably other lesbian vampires throughout the years, they have probably only been put into the movies/TV shows to titillate men, since honestly, in most cases, that’s what lesbians in major TV shows or movies are used for.

There is a line that they straddle though.  They pretty up the male leads, making them look stereotypically androgynous or gay, and have them have a really close male best friend, but then pair them up with a hot girl.  This leads to subtext between both males, which is what gay people have had to make do with for forever.  In interview with a vampire, tom cruises character and brad Pitts character basically make a life together, at least for awhile.  The good thing about subtext is that you can find it in nearly everything.  In Underworld, between Selene the main character, and any female.  In Twilight, between Edward, and any male character.

This just really made me think that gay characters need to be more incorporated into the media.  I know it is hard enough to make a good female lead, without making her too whiny or dependent on a man, but if that can somewhat be accomplished, then so can a gay vampire!  Or a good lesbian vampire that is not used to lure men to watching whatever show or movie they are in. anything would be good, let’s bring two subcultures together, why not?  This way gay people who love vampires will not just have to depend on subtext.