Vampires 106 – Miss-information
Vampires are dangerous. I’m sure you’ve realised that by now. Everyone used to know this, even though modern society has forgotten it. This shift was due to miss-information and propaganda realised by the vampires.
At the end of the 18th century, we’d almost wiped them out. They were running and hiding, and everywhere they fled we were waiting. The Inquisition did some wonderful work. However, the vampires changed tactics. They’re smart (they always have been), and it would have been stupid to keep doing what wasn’t working. They decided to hide in plain sight, given that hiding in the shadows wasn’t working. To do this, they wormed their way into fiction.
If you look at any vampire story from 1800 or earlier, it’s very clear about vampires. They’re evil. They must be killed. They’re very dangerous. It’s really quite simple. The stories told everyone how to avoid being a vampire’s victim and also told them what to do if confronted by a vampire. Ah, for the good old days. Of course, layered over the top of this was a collection of rubbish about how only the Church could get rid of vampires and the need to follow the old ways or everyone would die horribly (quite untrue, even if it was the best scientific thought available at the time), but that was due to the nature of the society. All in all, though, these stories were very helpful to the common people when dealing with a vampire, because the vampires hadn’t thought of attacking the teaching tales from the inside yet.
The vampires began to infiltrate literature just before World War One, going through Bram Stoker. Stoker said that a dream about vampires inspired him to write Dracula. Nobody realised until much later that it was a vampire who sent him that dream (influencing the minds of those around them is one of a vampire’s first tricks. Moving on to dreams just required a bit more skill. It didn’t help that particular vampire, though). It was a subtle shift, just beginning to change the basic powers of a vampire. Stoker believed it to have been his own idea and he hid the changes inside of a story about the changing morals of the time, and the need to avoid lustful behaviour. The vampires had planned it so carefully that no-one realised what was going until the middle of the century, and by then it was too late.
You see, in the 1950′s, 60′s, and 70′s, as well as hippies and rock music (the hippies were not vampires, we’re quite sure, but we still have doubts about certain musicians – Keith Richards looks a bit too much like the walking dead for us to be entirely comfortable with him) the horror movies became very popular. Leading the charge was the vampire. We very quickly realised that something was wrong with the stories because they bore no resemblance to real vampires. Research told us the sad tale, vampires were living in Hollywood and had no intention of leaving. By the time we got rid of the vampires (it took a while, and we still didn’t get all of them) it was too late. The Hollywood idea of vampirism was too strongly ingrained. As was the idea that vampires don’t exist. A strange reversal took place; vampires moved into the light of society as high flyers (quite literally), while we were forced to operate in secrecy and shadow.
From then on, we kept a close eye on anything to do with vampires in fiction. Occasionally, though, something gets through the nets (do you have any idea how hard it is wipe things from the internet? It’s a good thing Google’s on our side). All these little things add up and now we have stories like Twilight. Stephanie Meyer is not a vampire. She is not even under the influence of vampires. No, the vampires no longer need to do anything because authors are writing stories about the “good” vampire without prompting. People are beginning to question the wisdom of the ages to the point where I begin to question the intelligence of humanity. Even a pigeon knows better than to go near their natural predators. Humans seem to have missed this one.
Of course, it’s not as if we could really give an accurate portrayal of a vampire in a book or on screen. It would never make it through the ratings boards (Hammer Horror never made anything that even approached the horror of a true vampire).
