The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

When I was a child, I was very afraid of the idea of vampires. I don't remember why, but I do remember that I used to stay awake Halloween night until after midnight, figuring in my childish imagination that the stroke of 12 marked the beginning of the morning hours, and spooky, supernatural things had to have happened before then.



Maybe some of that fear disappeared as I grew up in the era in which Twilight was so popular, with its hilarious mockeries of the vampire concept. In any event, I decided in college to read Bram Stoker's Dracula, a decision for which I will always be grateful. I found the format of that book - told entirely through journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and so on - to be tremendously engaging and absolutely riveting.



Perhaps more importantly, "Dracula" portrays the vampire with very little artistic sympathy. He is a monster. He is a dark and terrible villain. That's why I was so disappointed when I saw the 1992 film "Bram Stoker's Dracula", because a lot of the romantic, tragic, and erotic elements had been added to the narrative which, in the original book, were either absent or only hinted at.



For a long time I didn't give it much more thought. Ironically, what got me thinking vampires again started with that awful 2002 film "Queen of the Damned", of which I had been aware for many years because of its provocative cover imagery (Aaliyah in her Akasha costume) and which I decided to watch one late, bored night.



Now I've never been a metal fan; in fact I despised the genre for most of my life, but the movie Queen of the Damned seemed to bring out the genre's themes in a way I found quite compelling. In looking up the film in Wikipedia to find our more about the music, I discovered to my shock that that underwhelming movie was based on the third vampire novel by Anne Rice, of which the famed "Interview with the Vampire" was the first. In a leap of curiosity, I picked up Interview, and began reading.



Interview with the Vampire has all the trappings of a modern novel, but the writing really is unique, and not at all as blatantly vulgar as some critics at the time made it out to be. Something unique really struck me as I read, however. The book is told from the Vampire's perspective, and delves wonderfully (albeit tragically) into his existential and emotional turmoils across the many decades of his life. The incredibly sincere way in which this was rendered left me with a burning question: why does Anne Rice know what it feels like to be a vampire?



It turns out that in her novel, Rice's vampires are allegories for lost souls. That is to say, people that have been ripped from life by a tremendous personal tragedy or loss, and find themselves feeling not unlike some kind of living dead. Anne Rice knew how that felt because she herself had lost her daughter at a young age, and grieved for years at the loss.



Even though I haven't experienced any tragedy on that level, still I felt, for the first time ever, some relation to the vampires in the story, particularly Louis and Claudia, though I couldn't quite say why. Fortunately, Lestat came right out and said it in one of his admonitions of Louis:



"You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth."



Isn't that a tragedy with which we are all familiar? Especially as you move from your early 20's to late 20's it really begins to dawn on you that you really cannot have what you had before, that the last echoes of your lively, carefree days are disappearing forever. I can never again go on trick-or-treating adventures with my friends, and talk about the candy we got at school on Monday. Though I look forward to Christmas each year, it will never begun with the same exuberant wonder with which I did as a boy. Every day of every year from now on is full of responsibility and a grim awareness of what I really have to do just to survive, and of how much I have to lose.



What does it feel like to be a vampire? It feels like you've lost something precious that you can never have back. It is the loss of innocence. Whether through a tragic, horrific disaster, or the slow, steady drain of time, we are all stripped of beautiful things and left a colder, darker thing trying to pretend nothing is wrong, blending into the crowds while trying to survive.



That's why we relate to these night creatures. We share a kinsmanship with them, and I suspect we always will.