Week Two: Interview with a Vampire

What is it that lead to the modern romanticizing of vampires and the overflow of vampire teen romance novels on the market? Personally, I have gone through my Twilight phase and I have never lost my love of supernatural storytelling.

I think to understand the idea of the Vampire novel; one has to look at where the idea of Vampires came from. The first idea of the “vampire” was said to have been created when people dug up current graves, rigor mortis had set in cause the dead bodies to expunge blood out of various orifices in the human body. These dead bodies also had bloated bellies from the digestive gases in the stomach. People found this incredibly scary and thought these bodies were attacking people and drinking their blood. Thus, this fear of the dead not being how they were left gave birth to the idea of hideous undead evil.

Vampires were brought to the main stream literary world with the 1897 book Dracula by Bram Stoker (and subsequent movie adaptations), despite it not being popular in his lifetime.

In the modern day, we understand the decaying process a lot better, and this fear of the decaying dead bodies has shifted onto zombies, rather than vampires. So where does this leave the vampire story?

Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire was one of the great looks in changing the concept of the vampire in popular culture. Instead of evil undead, it shifted the ideals of vampirism to the idea of eternal life and an unquenchable desire. These concepts are extremely relatable and mankind has been seeking ways to prolong life for centuries. Instead of the reanimated dead, Rice portrays vampires more like super humans with a fault of feasting on blood.

 The main character, Louis, was a refreshing and relatable character that emphasized his humanity in his feelings of guilt. Louis is the embodiment of how a long life would not necessarily be a good thing, which can clearly be seen in the ending of the story with him attacking the interviewer about not understanding this. I think that is what is so fascinating about vampire stories and this story in particular. They explore this concept of something we want versus how it would actually affect us.