Before you start rolling your eyes at me, let me start off with this...I have no desire to read or see any of the Twilight series. The thought of it makes me ill. A sparkly brooding pseudo-vampire in a love triangle with a human teenage girl and a werewolf and having babies? I'll pass, thanks. I like the kind of vampire that embraces what it is, plays with it's food, and enjoys pleasures of the flesh. Now, do you care to read on?
I'm not exactly when my love of vampires started. I don't remember watching Bela Lugosi as a child, and if I had I'm pretty dang sure the puffy middle-aged Hungarian wouldn't have turned me on to them. The first thing that I can think of is when they ran the new version of Dark Shadows in the 90s with Ben Cross as Barnabas Collins. Was I the only person who watched it? I don't even remember the storyline other than they kept going back and forth in time and I got really confused. The series didn't last very long - one, maybe two seasons at the most. Apparently I wasn't the only one who was confused.
After that, I don't remember watching any other vampire movies or shows for a couple of years, but I think the thing that really got me hooked was having to do a theme paper my junior year of high school on any piece of literature we wanted. I was never one for the Brontes or Dickens, and I loved pushing boundaries, so I decided to go for Dracula by Bram Stoker. The theme that I chose? "Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Oh, this was a fun paper to do research on. While it wasn't the easiest book to read, the story being told in diary entries and news stories, the books I read to back up my theme were great. I got to read all about how the biting was a metaphor for oral sex, how they swooned like they were in the throngs of orgasm...and all on school time. Oh, this was great! That is, until our teacher decided to make it not only a paper, but an oral (pardon the pun) report as well. I think I should leave that as a blog post for another time...Anyway, all that research really got me hooked. Gee - I wonder why.
I started trying to read every book I could find. Ever heard of "Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu? It was actually written before Dracula, and it's not too shabby. I tried to get through Interview With the Vampire, but I just couldn't get past the character of Louis and how he was so glum all the time. Get over it already! The book was put on my shelf to collect dust.
Not long after that, Francis Ford Coppola's version of Dracula hit theaters. The acting was terrible except for brilliant performances from Gary Oldman and Tom Waits. (Whoever they had as a dialect coach should have been fired after the first take.) The cinematography was absolutely beautiful and the story closer to that of the book, except they threw in some smarmy love story between Mina and Drac. Since I was in high school, and in love with my future hubby, I did fall for it- "I have crossed oceans of time to find you." Yeah, it worked for me...then throw in all that sexual symbolism again and I was a happy camper. I wanted the young version of Dracula to find me *please note, the young version as in the picture to the right - not the creepy old kimono-wearing, long fingernailed, wall crawling version.
Jump ahead a few years, and Interview With the Vampire comes out as a movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt(?). Okay, I still want to slap Louis upside the head. Claudia is a little brat and I can't stand her either. I wasn't fond of Tom Cruise, but at least Lestat was fun. Armand, on the other hand, was simply yummy. Antonio Banderas as a vampire? Yes, please! Okay, so he was a little pasty and had a thing for Brad Pitt, but he had no problem killing someone for "art" in front of a whole theater full of people. Now that's embracing who you are. Seeing the movie interested me enough to try the book again. I pushed through my disgust in poor, dreary Louis and made it through. I'm thankful I did because the following books were much better (well, other than the whole Lestat as a rock star thing, but I'm not going to get into that). I was finally into a series of books that were not only filled with naughty vampires, but also great periods in history and an appreciation for art. Oh, how I loved those books. Unfortunately, Anne Rice's husband died and she became a born-again Christian who started writing about Jesus. Would one more book have sent her to hell after all the books she had written before? Ah well, a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do - can't really fault her for it.
Once the series ended, I went through a drought. There wasn't much in the way of vampires out there in the media. I don't count Blade...ick. Queen of the Damned? It brought back the whole Lestat as a rock star thing and I just didn't like it. I re-read the classics that got me started, had my fill of watching my movies on DVD, but nothing new. Then HBO came out with True Blood. Honestly, it didn't interest me until a couple of my friends told me I had to watch it. Anna Paquin turned me off and I wasn't sure about the whole redneck aspect of it, so I was slow in getting to it, but once I did...I was hooked. I still am. The two main characters, Sookie and Bill, I could really do without - it's the other characters that keep me going. Eric, Pam, Maryann, Alcide, just to mention a few. It's a show that is naughty and knows it, keeps to the traditional vampire lore (sleeping in dirt, no walking around in the daytime, no sparkling for god's sake), and lets vampires be vampires. Like I said, I steer away from the romantic stories that are out there - especially now that this wave of vampire stories has hit bookstores, movies and tv. Now every teenage girl and bored housewife wants a vampire to sweep her off of her feet. I grew out of that once I graduated high school. I have no desire to be swept anywhere...just taken. (I like 'em badass) I've been this way for years and will most likely stay this way long after this trend is over. Just don't hate me for loving vampire stories - I do have taste.
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