The Cycle of Undeath

"Parasite. Slowly I approach him. Cancer. He allows his eyes to meet mine. Disease."

V:tM-Redemption - NYC Hub Rap

 

Lovecraft's The Shunned House (which you may want to read if you hate spoilers) feels fairly typical of his brief career's early half in its gothic horror scene-setting. But like Herbert West, it also draws upon Science Fiction sufficiently to hint towards his later shift toward materialistic explanations. Seriously, how many vampire stories culminate in defeating the monster not by religious rite or secrets of the ages passed down by quaintly ethnic informants, but by the thoroughly modern sanitary expedient of jugs of sulfuric acid? After all, vampire myths were at least as likely to resemble ghosts in most mythologies rather than solid corpses. In fairness, memorable but not HPL's finest work. His customary purple prose ran away from himself, as did his effort to provide historical context for his purple people-eater. But that whole gritty, slimy, chthonic nastiness imbuing what is rather explicitly a reimagined vampire myth got me thinking about the waves of vampiric (and to a greater extent, undead) portrayals as either super or natural.

 

Stoker's Dracula provides a bit of both. Educated, refined and imperious its antagonist may be, but one of the book's best executed scenes had him descending a sheer stone wall head-down in a splayed-limb, reptilian crawl, a suddenly alien, animalistic perspective shift. By the time movies rolled around in the early 20th century, monsters were expected to be monstrous and Count Orlok (rather exactly contemporary to The Shunned House) played up the second angle. Bela Lugosi was more ambivalent and Christopher Lee (conscious of the character's power/sex/violence appeal, especially to women) transitioned more fully toward the first. By the time I took an interest, the market was already redefined by Anne Rice's sexualized, romanticized vampires, which her own characters in Interview consciously verbalize as a new evil for a new age: no longer bedraggled graveyard ghouls but sleek, idealized Prince Charmings. Notably, even imitators from other genres, like the electric space vampire haunting a candle (yes, seriously) from ST:TNG's laughably terrible Sub Rosa episode, toed the new line of ethereal, sanitized parasitism, replete with dainty Victorian duds.

 

The inevitable overshoot into Twilight's idiotic emo sparkles made most genre fans finally aware that something, somewhere, had gone un-horribly off the rails. But though attempts have cropped up with some regularity to return vampirism to its monstrous roots, these have hardly contested three decades of Rice-Meyer dominance. Maybe Bloodlines 2 will help with that. Maybe not. One hopes.

 

What truly mentally clicked into conjunction with The Shunned House though was a surprisingly engaging third act of WH40K: Rogue Trader, concerning the setting's Drow knockoffs the Drukhari. Though technically evil space elves, physically thriving on Sadism of the most vicious bent also brings vampirism into the mix.

Apostrophic violation! Summon the Grammarian Imperialis!

A reliance on telepathy which could unduly sanitize the proceedings is offset by the sheer gruesomeness of their methods of extracting said psychic suffering. Something of the Orlokian ghoul seeps back into their bloodthirst and mangling torments. As with Sub Rosa, I find this side attraction merely touching on the genre more informative than official "Vampire" fare as an indicator of undercurrents moving with or against the main tide, not least because like Star Trek, Warhammer is a market force in its own right, and (again like Star Trek in the '90s) one striving for legitimacy.

 

Granted throughout all this pop culture has fixated on a different breed of undead, zombies, which have proliferated since the Living Dead days like... some kind of infectious plague. But though they really are monstrous, deformed, animalistically vicious, their core feature of losing control or intelligent planning makes zombies a very different narrative device, demonstrated by every zombie plot shifting away from them and toward survivor infighting as source of conflict. Nevertheless, the proliferation of movies about earthier, less powerful, more physical ghouls at the same time as vampires lost such traits demonstrates a market reaction against prettified monsters.

 

The new age movement has come and gone, so maybe its new evil can follow. The idea that villainy or monstrosity can be sanitized, or excused as women's sexual ideal, needs a solid stake through its heart.