What have we done??

I have been thinking about vampires here lately. The latest Twilight movie is due out this week and It has made me ponder vampires. Vampires have changed quite a bit from the folklore vamps that made people's heart race and fear consume them in the dark of the night. They have went from being basically the living dead with pale skin and fangs like a tiger with an eternal lust for blood. Vampires now days are seen as lovely creatures who may or may not have fangs, the male of species will be ripped with six pack abs and a great smile; the females are beautiful beyond compare, pretty much sex on legs, the perfect rack with a deadly bite. It doesn't matter if your a boy or a girl out there somewhere is the vampire of your dreams.


Pop culture has softened vampires to the point where we would invite them into our homes and allow them to have their dinner without much protest. Lord knows if Eric from True Blood showed up and was hungry me being the good hostess that I am would let him have a drink on the house accompanied by a little something for desert. There is no fear pumping through our veins, no need for holy relics or prayers to save our souls. We want to be consumed, made into their perfect meal while secertly hoping it will develop into more.


I must say that our ancestors would be ashamed of us as a whole. Would we willingly sell our souls to the devil to become vampire? Would we risk loosing our humanity to become what we are not? Would we risk our afterlife for just a taste? From what I see and what I am included in I would say yes. That we are begging for it.

Most people cannot see that there is more to this than just vampires and being obsessed with living forever. It's about being able to change from being "normal" to something otherwordly, into something that is the top-of-the-food-chain-predator, something beautiful, and contain a bit of magic within ourselves. It's not that we want to loose our soul, we want to loose ourselves.

A good book does that to a person. It makes us want to be different, to be the hero struggling to find themselves on a quest that is world changing. We want to have the power to make our destiny truly our own. If that means dressing as a wizard with a room full of friends while playing a role playing game so be it, or immersing ourselves in vampire books, or playing video game for hours upon hours we will.


What this change in vampires is saying to me is that we are taking away their scare factor and humanizing them to the point to where we can assume their identity easily so that we can escape for a short while. If they are thinking more like us, the humans, then we feel like we know them, that as a species we can pin point what it feels like to be an all powerful, sex driven vampire that can get away with murder, or having numerous sexual partners without guilt and shame.

Vampires have evolved and morphed into these physically perfect bodies while we as humans are still waging the battle of the bulge. They have perfect eyesight, perfect hair, perfect teeth. Really no flaws physically, but mentally they are a bit off in different ways. A perfect example of this is Eric from True Blood seeing children as "tea cup humans". We have given vampires personalities other than being lustful for the red stuff that pumps through our veins. We have taken folklore that scared the crap out of our ancestors and turned it into the stuff of fantasies and perhaps our dreams for the human race. Who wouldn't want to be a physically perfect version of themselves?

Should we put the fear factor back into vampires? Should we allow them to return back to their graveyards and suck out their almost human ways? I think we need to remember that vampires evolved from a stories told around the fire to remind us that out there in the darkest part of the night there might be creatures out there that are deadly and want not just our blood but our very souls. If we strip vampires of their spooky essence so to speak what does that leave us with? It leaves us with another verison of the human race. Now what fun is that?