I, like most people, like vampires. I'm certain that Bram Stoker did not know he was touching off an entire genre of popular entertainment when he published Dracula back in 1897, or in fact if he ever knew, since vampire stories didn't become their own genre until the latter half of the twentieth century. Anne Rice, White Wolf Games, etc. etc., ballooned the monster subcategory into a genre in its own right, with vampirism being just another character trait in a story. There are vampire detectives, vampire lovers, vampire heroes, and of course vampire villains. To say that a certain character is a vampire is no longer enough to describe them.
One of the effects that the flourishing of vampire stories has had has been to provide a vast array of interpretations of vampire traits. Authors and directors have built upon older works and re-interpreted what being a vampire entails. So I thought I'd go through a list of the common vampire traits and opine upon them.
Although a very few vampire storytellers have dismissed the vampire's traditional aversion to the sun, it's generally accepted that vampires don't go out in the daytime. A lot of people attribute this to the sunlight itself, and thus can get away with covering their vampires in heavy clothes or even sunblock. Witness, for instance, the film Near Dark. On the other hand, there are those who subscribe to the vampires more mystical need to rest during the day, and regardless of the cloudcover the Nosferatu simply shuts down when the sun comes up, and is effectively a corpse until nightfall. Here we have the classic American Dracula film from '32, and Laurell K. Hamilton's highly oversexed bloodsuckers.
Myself, I prefer the latter approach. Vampires in sunblock is just silly.
A lot of current vampire stories downplay the whole sleeping in coffins part of vampirism. The tradition, very strongly from Stoker, is that a vampire must sleep in 'his native earth' - hence, a coffin full of dirt from the vampire's original grave. (Never mind that coffins are generally designed to keep the dirt out.) The Lost Boys, ferinstance, did away with that one.
Here I have no problem with a bit of rule-bending. Coffins are a bit silly, really, and what about those folks who get vampirized without the use of one? So I lean towards dispensing with the big wooden boxes, although a nod towards 'native earth', such as a pouch thereof on a vampire's person, would certainly be a good touch.
Everyone knows that vampires hate garlic. It's a staple of popular vampire lore and part of children's jokes. Many of the nouveau angsty vampires, however, have no particular problem with garlic at all. It's a silly allergy, and these black-clad poets - or biker thugs or whatever - don't do silly.
I'm split on this one. Ultimately, the image of someone warding off a vampire with a braid of garlic gloves is silly. And, although I do have a preference for tradition, at a certain point in the face of decades of lighthearted mockery, you just have to draw the line. So garlic yes, but only if it's treated seriously.
Time was, vampires were vampires because they were in league with the Devil. That was, in fact, the true horror of a vampire; a vampire would bite you and you could no longer go to Heaven. That was the tragedy of Lucy Westrena. Not that she died, not that she rose and started sucking the life out of little kids, but that she was damned.
You can see the horror there. A vampire bites you and through no fault of your own, your soul is now banned from Heaven. I mean, wow. That's heavy stuff. (And wrapped in all sorts of different sexual overtones, depending on the treatement. But that's neither here nor there.)
Of course, our culture is a lot less monolithically Christian these days. We have to ask ourselves, what about Jews? Buddhists? Atheists? Does an Atheist vampire fear the cross? Do they burn if doused with holy water? And generally the answer is no, although there are exceptions. From my experience films generally come down on the side of crosses and holy water working, and novels generally come down on the side of them only working on Christian (or formerly Christian) vampires.
I tend to side with the purists on this issue. Vampires are supernatural creatures. If you have vampires, obviously you have life after death. And if a story is going to postulate that, I have no problem with them further postulating the existance of Heaven and the power of Christian artifacts. In fact, I prefer the reversal of the equation - it's not the vampire's opinion that matters. It's the opinion of the person warding the vampire off. What powers the cross or the holy water is not universal truth, but faith; a devout jew would have as much success with a Mezuzah. And an agnostic would be screwed. Stephen King's Salem's Lot is a good example of this school of thought.
"Enter freely and of your own will"... Dracula's invitation to Jonathan Harker, but it has come to mean in certain stories that vampires may not enter a residence until invited. Many stories, on the other hand, ignore it as a silly stricture, and one very very amenable to rules-lawyering.
I like it. It's classic, it's elegant, it evokes really rudimentary concepts of place, touching pre-Christian concepts of the threshold and of the power of invitation. It also forces the vampire to be a little clever, and usually more than a little seductive.
We are a gun culture. Our movies, and to a lesser extent our literature, are jam-packed with people shooting each other. Vampires, however, are in theory immune to traditional sources of harm, being vulnerable only to a limited set of valid methods by which they can be killed. The wooden stake in the heart, sunlight, a few others.
But, you know, bullets work. They are real, and what is particularly hard to dismiss is the kinetic damage they do. A shotgun knocks things down. A .45 slug rips out chunks. And what about large explosions? How can a vampire withstand that?
Some storytellers don't bother. Guns (and other weapons) work on vampires, although only through the kinetic damage. Generally, the damage will repair itself over time - time spent in the coffin - but if you can inflict enough grievous bodily harm, the vampire's finished. Grenades work great.
Other storytellers have their vampires constructed of other than flesh, so that bullets either pass through harmlessly or drop off as though striking armor. A tremendous explosion raises a fireball, out of which the vampire walks out, a dark shadow neither warmed by the inferno or moved at all by the concussion.
I don't know which I like better. I'm firmly of the opinion that you shouldn't be able to kill a vampire with a gun. On the other hand, simply dismissing kinetic effects seems... overly unrealistic. So I don't know.
Sadly, that's all the time I have. I'd also like to get into discussing other aspects, such as whether vampires turn into wolves or mist or what have you, and if bullets can't kill them, what can, and why?
But that will have to wait. The sun's coming up.
- Sun Ra