Patrick Archbold at Creative Minority Report meditates on vampires and zombies, and the differences between traditional monsters and modern ones.
Come to think of it, even the original zombies show signs of the secularization of our culture. Vampires sought to drink blood, what was then regarded as the life force. Zombies want to eat brains. I think that science and secularization is changing what is craved – in more spiritual times monsters craved blood for its life force – now they crave brains as animals crave meat. As a result they are less scary and more pathetic. Lions and tigers and bears are scary because they can eat you, but they can’t destroy your soul. Secular monsters are boring. I mean vampires aren’t even afraid of holy water and crucifixes anymore. They are clingy and misunderstood. If I want clingy and misunderstood, I will watch a Woody Allen movie. Come to think of it, Woody Allen is scarier than these vampires.
(Tip: View from the Foothills)
I’ve talked about the legend of the vampire before here. The traditional vampire (before the novelists got hold of him) was a miserable, vicious creature, barely sentient, dressed in rags, stinking of corruption, driven by hunger. He resembled a zombie a lot more than Bela Lugosi or Tom Cruise.
The novels and movies changed that. Vampires acquired style and status, the charm of the Exotic Foreigner. With time, they’ve become so cool they’re not even scary anymore (see “Twilight”). So it was necessary to import zombies to do the work vampires wouldn’t do.
But the difference as (Archbold notes) is also spiritual. Both traditional and fictional vampires had an essentially spiritual disorder. Sure, they craved a physical substance–blood–but that was a perversion of the Christian eucharist, like a Black Mass. That’s why crucifixes scared them. Modern vampires (I think Ann Rice who, ironically, is now a Catholic, pioneered this) laugh at crucifixes. Once you reach that level of materialization of the monstrous, the distinction between vampire and zombie is reduced to food preferences and fashion choices.
Today’s monsters are not damned souls, but merely consistent materialists. Scary, yes, but not very exotic.
Modern man looks for the most frightening thing he can imagine, and it turns out to be himself.
, not because I was eager to read it, but because I’d run out of reading material one weekend and didn’t want to make a run to the bookstore, and it was there in the grocery store rack. I expected to hate it, as the result of an elementary chain of reasoning—it was written by a Swede. Swedes, generally, are Socialists and atheists. Therefore, anything written by a Swede is likely to offend me. When I saw that it was a mystery involving a family of industrialists, that conclusion seemed self-evident.