Not-sferatu: Vampires in a Different Light

Vampires as a myth and monster have an amazing staying power. There is rarely a time when it’s hard to find fresh movies, books, TV shows, what-have-you, dredging up these bloodthirsty creatures. Certainly part of it is because they tend to be sexy (even the versions of vampires that look and act grotesque have people lusting after them) as well as the fact that they can move among humans relatively undetected. Lots of other monsters lack the flair or control of vampires so there’s not the same pull for sexy Frankensteins and slutty mummies, though werewolves have really seem to have come into their own lately in that regard. 

Admittedly, I have never been one for the sexy werewolf thing, but I maintain that vampires have a long track record of being sexualized. I’m sure someone will want to fight me in the comments for that, but that’s the price of having an opinion on monsters.

So let’s take a look through three different lenses and see what overlap and distinctions we can find among these types of vampires. We have a musical where the vampires are the opposition, a German comedy presenting vampires as lost souls in need of help, and a horror action movie where they get to be vicious, hungry, and surprisingly moral.

Let’s kick this off right with Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001). The simple story is Jesus (Phil Caracas) and Mary Magnum (Maria Moulton) team up to find the vampires who slaughtered a group of lesbians. Along the way, they uncover a plot from an evil scientist trying to make vampires immune to sunlight, and they recruit the Mexican wrestler El Santo (Jeff Moffett) to help them. Plus guess what else? It’s a musical. And Canadian.

Obviously, Jesus is the good guy of the film and while the vampires are seen as monsters, they’re also seen as pawns being used by Dr. Praetorious (Josh Grace), the evil scientist experimenting on them. The main vampires Maxine (Murielle Varhelyi) and Johnny Golgotha (Ian Driscoll) have agency to some degree but are also fast to leave others behind to save their own skin. There’s no community here like vamp-fans might see in the worlds created by writers like Anne Rice. These vampires are little more than fodder.

On another humorous note, we’ve got Therapy For a Vampire (2014), a German film that takes the concept of couple’s therapy and asks, “but what if it was for vampires?” I don’t mean that to sound snide. I really enjoyed this one.

Therapy For a Vampire centers of a Count Geza Von Kösznöm (Tobias Moretti), an Austrian vampire who is unhappy with his very long vampire marriage. He begins sessions with Sigmund Freud (Karl Fischer), since it’s 1932 and he’s got the means, but ends up falling in love with the girlfriend of Freud’s assistant, Lucy (Cornelia Ivancan). In classic vampire style, he believes Lucy to be the reincarnation of his executed first love, Nadilla. As he attempts to seduce Lucy, Geza’s wife Elsa (Jeanette Hain) becomes jealous and goes after Lucy’s boyfriend Viktor (Dominic Oley). They’re all trying to turn or stay human or figure out their relationships in an utter mess of a love triangle. 

Lucy is bitten and is on the way to becoming a vampire when a blood transfusion is performed on her, halting the process. Freud himself gets bitten and is shown to have vampiric qualities. Therapy For a Vampire spends more time in the world of the vampires, explaining rules and trials that one living that life must deal with. Elsa, for example, hires Viktor to paint her portrait because she hasn’t been able to look at her own face for centuries. For Geza and Elsa together, the reality of being married for centuries is draining (in a not fun way) and knowing the high level of commitment needed to move onto another holds them where they are. These vampires live real world adjacent: they might be bloodsucking night dwellers but their problems resemble our own.

Near Dark (1987) represents a pretty good combination of the two previous movies. The vampires are monsters without question, but they live and die by their own rules. They face mundane interpersonal issues like people in the group not getting along or being unhappy with their situation, but they also kill at random in order to survive.

As vampire movies often do, this one starts with an innocent young man named Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) meeting a beautiful stranger named Mae (Jenny Wright), who casually bites him on the neck before taking off. Caleb starts to turn and seeks out Mae to find out what’s happening to him, which is where he meets Mae’s vampiric “family.” This nomadic group has a serious bond with two of the vampires claiming to have known each other since the 1800s. They protect and look out for each other, and their leader Jesse (Lance Herinksen) even stops Severen, the wild card of the group (unexpectedly played by Bill Paxton), from killing Caleb once they realize Mae started to turn him.

Like Therapy…, Near Dark features rules within which the vampires operate. Some of the rules are outside of their control (how someone turns, how they can be killed) while others are their own moral code. The core group in Near Dark believe they only kill people they think deserve it, though there are a few scenes in the film that could definitely be used to argue against that. Regardless, they tend to follow this rule and others that pertain to the group. Jesse and Caleb even become friends to a point where Jesse trusts him to act in their best interests. They’re not mindless monsters, nor are they counts and ladies living in European splendor. Near Dark is a dusty road movie of a vampire story where the creatures are only one step ahead of danger, hunger, and anyone who might be getting suspicious. 

But, in the grand tradition of vampires, a few are still very sexy.

What’s really fun about how many iterations there are of the vampire myth and how many versions get brought to life via film or books is the way they’re all different. The rules are different, the roles are different, their enemies and frailties are different. Naturally we see some recurring themes, but a vampire from the universe of Buffy and one from Interview With A Vampire lead very different undead lives. I believe that this (along with the sexiness) is why vampires remain a perennial favorite: anyone can come in and make the myths their own.