“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.
