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.
One of Satan’s most common tactics seems to be his attempts to make sin look appealing. The degradation of evil is glossed over. Wrong is made to appear right and right wrong.
Modern man looks for the most frightening thing he can imagine, and it turns out to be himself.
Actually, this is something with which Christians can come close to agreeing if we give depravity its proper weight. Abel Ferrara (whom I believe is Catholic) focused on this in his vampire movie The Addiction in which a philosophy student struggles with theonomy after being bitten. The closing line comes from R.C. Sproul: “We’re not sinners because we sin; we sin because we’re sinners.”
Modern man looks for the most frightening thing he can imagine, and it turns out to be himself.
As Loren said, nothing new here. Christian pre-modern man looked for the most frightening thing he could imagine, and it was a fallen creature with a spiritual disorder. A pretty good description of the Christian view of a human being.
In both cases, the undead are not just about fear. They’re about fear of the corruption to which we as humans can succumb, how low we can go.