We Get The Vampires We Deserve
I vant to write an essay.
Fortunately (and also sometimes unfortunately), I’m a pretty big rules follower. This goes for the rules of humanity. For example, I’ve never murdered anyone and I rarely steal. But also for more innate and personal random rules. For example, I’ve never had a cigarette and I’m obsessive about posting a movie to Letterboxd right after seeing it.
Vampires are fun because there’s an entire mythos behind them with a very substantive and well-trodden set of rules. They need blood to survive, they can’t step foot in the daylight and they hate Jesus. We all know this, and then the rest is up for grabs.
In the last year or so, we’ve had Abigail, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, El Conde and Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, which is both the above image and a lovely coming-of-age-comedy that just so happens to center on a family of vampires. We also have Nosferatu coming soon. We’ll be talking about that A LOT soon enough.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a title that really rolls off the tongue, is a delight and has a hell of a good time creating a vampire underworld that reminds me of the movie and eventual TV show What We Do in the Shadows. The Canadian French-language comedy never reaches the insane heights of What We Do in the Shadows but few things do.
I think what makes this new movie so fun is that it takes the mythic creature and drops it into the modern age, something that has been a trend for vampire tales for generations. Sara Montpetit’s Sasha is a do-gooder who’s so anti-violence and death that she very nearly starves herself. She feels like she’d fit in (outside of the vampire stuff, obviously) with a current generation of high school and college students sick of the shit that the world has put them through and will do what it takes to find a solution.
Most vampire stories either adapt to the trends of modernity or become a look-back into a world long ago. Another modern-day take is Abigail, which turns the vampire story on its head and becomes a cat-and-mouse game. It feels right in our age of elevated horror to take a story that could easily be a simple hide-and-seek thriller and add an extra fantastical layer on top. Something similar is happening in The Watchers, which uses fairies as its way into the film.
There’s also something to be said about how easily recognizable the concept of “vampire” is and how they’re an easy selling point for movies that may not have the name recognition or engine behind it that other mainstream horror movies might have. You don’t need to explain the concept of “vampires.” People just know what they are and the basic set of rules that come with them, which makes it a bit easier to get movies centering those stories greenlit.
It’d be tough to dissect 21st-century vampires without analyzing the Twilight saga. The first one is legitimately pretty good and then it gets more and more bloated as it goes on until we eventually get to *whatever this terrifying creature is*.
The first movie came out in 2008 and coasted off of the YA books that became a hit in the same way as the Harry Potter franchise. The Hunger Games quickly followed and we found ourselves in an abyss of spiritual knockoffs from Divergent to The Maze Runner to The Giver again for some reason. Stephanie Meyer took a vampire trope and adjusted it to our modern world. What would happen if Nosferatu had to go to high school and started creepily staring at Kristen Stewart? The world would never be the same.
Vampires, because of their rules and then vague boundaries thereafter, make for a perfect entry point into movies. They’re perfect horror movie foils and coming-of-age tweens, but most importantly, they can become Jackie Daytona.