My thoughts on the thoroughly obnoxious "vampires as sex objects" fad. Because I don't care for the genre I haven't seen anything but the one Twilight movie that my spousal unit dragged me to (she owes me big time for that waste of two hours) so I am going to be primarily talking about it rather than the other wannabes.
Several points to consider...
In the Twilight series the protagonist vampire (don't remember his name and don't care) is hanging around a high school pretty much all the time. The guy is a zillion years old. This immediately struck me as the bad kind of creepy. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against vampires being creepy...they suck blood and kill people, they are supposed to be creepy...but not on the level of borderline pedophilia. Old guys stalking young girls is not the kind of creepy I am interested in for a movie (or book).
There is something wrong with fantasizing about having an intimate relationship with the undead...let's see, what could it be? Oh yeah, it's sort of a necrophilia kind of wish fulfillment thing. Except in this case you don't have to track down a corpse to do the nasty with...in these romantic vampire stories they come to you. Sort of like a pizza delivery only with cold dead horny people instead of pepperoni with extra cheese.
None of these romantic vampire stories follow any of the tried and true vampire mythologies of the past. Garlic? No problem. Holy water? Forget about it. Crosses? They wear them. Mirrors? No way. Sunlight? We get sparkly stuff for reasons that make no sense...no flaming corpses. Now that just isn't right. These romantic vampires seem to have all of the traditional vampire strengths (live forever, super strength, super speed, mind control, eternal beauty...btw, where are the ugly vampires?) without any of the traditional vampire vulnerabilities. These vampires should be multiplying and ruling the earth under these conditions. But they aren't. They just hang around schools and stalk children.
And then there's this whole werewolf thing.
What? Vampires aren't interesting enough all by themselves that we have to inject a whole other genre into the story? That's just weak writing and story crafting. Why stop there? Why not introduce all sorts of other fantasy/horror genres into the romantic vampire epic? BUT...since werewolves were introduced they get destroyed, too. These werewolves change back and forth at ridiculous speeds with zero relationship to daylight/night time or what phase the moon is in. I'm guessing that a silver bullet would be pretty much useless against them, too. Oh yeah, and in this universe you don't get bitten and turned into one but rather you are born that way like a kind of seriously messed up on again/off again mental retardation birth defect.
I don't want to psychoanalyze the whole vampire genre because I'm not a psychologist and it's been done to death already BUT...seriously, vampires and romance? How messed up is that? For a lot of vampire stories where "romance" is involved it's kind of a guiltless (responsibility free) sex act...on one level you might even call it sexless rape wish fulfillment. The kind of people that I imagine as fantasizing about BEING a "romantic" vampire are the sorts of people who are perpetually unattractive to the opposite sex and do nothing to improve upon the situation. Yeah, living in their parents' basement, bathe on rare occasions and spend most of their non-working at McDonalds time playing XBox. R*pt*v*o comes immediately to mind. Not that he fits that description but he still reminds me of that type of person. Arrested social development but still full of hormones with nothing to take them out on and zero prospect of situational improvement. So along comes a way for the pimply faced, overweight social outcast to successfully work his will over supermodels and yeah, they see that as pretty appealing. NOW...given that this is typically the type of person who would want to
be a "romantic" vampire type of loser what does this say about the person who fantasizes about being ravished by one? Ugh. (Did you throw up in your mouth?)
I used to like the whole vampire genre. It used to be one of the better horror niches in books and movies. Now it's totally f**ked up. Thanks, Stephanie Meyer. Thanks, Anne Rice. The last good book (and sort of good television movie) about vampires was Stephen King's "Salem's Lot." No romance in that one, no way. It was regular people versus the undead and the bloodsuckers pretty much won. I don't care for much of Stephen King's work...it tends to be preachy in a very obnoxious and unsubtle way. I particularly detest the way that he makes the most despicable characters be Christians and Republicans. But he did get the vampire genre right with that book. The television movie was very tame in comparison to the book and should get a serious remake attempt for the big screen someday. But it got all the basics right. It was well thought out and left you with no desire to get cuddly with a vampire. Robert Rodriguez got it mostly right with "From Dusk Till Dawn" except that it went way over the top with the vampires as hookers and sluts thing. But once everyone knew they were dealing with the undead it was all about killing them off as quickly as possible.
Anyway, I just don't get the vampires as sex objects thingy. I can no more comfortably imagine a vampire as a sex object than I can a zombie. Who wants to suck face with a rotting corpse? Don't laugh, though...Stephanie Meyer is probably working on it right now.
In the meantime there's
this: