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Printheads: your preferred literary vampire
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They certainly would be...
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@Brandon
I think the writing staff may have written themselves into a corner where you *couldn't* have a big, scary vampire on the show anymore, without introducing a whole new breed of vampires like they did in the final season or vampires with a new set of powers in the Season Eight comics -- because they'd left the audience laughing at them for so long.
I consider that to be a failure of imagination more than anything else. Vampires are just humans with the "vampire template" added to them. The simplest way to create decent, scary vampiric villains would be to research scary human criminals and psychopaths and then give them vampiric abilities. John Wayne Gacy as a vampire. Ted Bundy as a vampire. Idi Amin as a vampire. Just take the already horrible shit that humans do to each other and add vampirism.
Also regarding writers who use actual folklore, go check out Jonathan Maberry's Pine Deep Trilogy. It's really good and well-researched. -
@johnjones
"The simplest way to create decent, scary vampiric villains would be to research scary human criminals and psychopaths and then give them vampiric abilities. John Wayne Gacy as a vampire. Ted Bundy as a vampire. Idi Amin as a vampire. Just take the already horrible shit that humans do to each other and add vampirism"
No offense intended because we're just kind of brainstorming here and the more opinions, the merrier, but... you talk about a lack of imagination and give us redundancy -- take a scary, evil guy and... uh... make him scary...and evil.
IMO, the more frightening aspect is a normal, decent person, with the "vampire template added" makes them a cunning, vicious predator who would drain the life from their loved ones with little hesitation... and maybe a little joy. That's scary. -
No offense intended because we're just kind of brainstorming here and the more opinions, the merrier, but... you talk about a lack of imagination and give us redundancy -- take a scary, evil guy and... uh... make him scary...and evil.
I suppose I didn't express myself as well as I wished. You don't actually have Idi Amin or Gacy as vampires. You take their histories and deeds and horrors, then use them as inspiration when building your own vicious creatures.
Speaking to the above ideas of RPG vampires, I really like the two-tiered system of character creation in the New World of Darkness. In it you build your character as a mortal and then apply the applicable supernatural template. You start with a person. And out of that person you create your monster. -
@johnjones
I didn't think you were being literal about those specific people...
The Gacy or Amin types are nasty enough as is, adding vampire to the mix adds very little - -they're already monsters. It just seems pointless. -
This is a bit off-topic and I apologize but, what the hell is so special in Twilight?!
I keep hearing lots of people talking about it and when i read the synopsis I just keep thinking "can it be more lame? it almost pours sugar and fluffy stuff out of it with lots of love to offer to everyone". It looks like stuff I would read and daydream about it when I was what? 12? 13? not knowing what real life is? .
So, what makes a 19 year old boy I know who likes comics in general, Conan, Lovecraft and God knows what cool stuff, watch the movie and run to buy the freaking book and keeps bothering me with "you have to see it! it's perfect! don't listen to what they say on the internet! they are lying!buy the book, go watch it" ?!? -
@DC
I agree about Twilight - -it's "safe" vampires for teen girls who've grown up reading fan-fic, essentially.
I don't think this is off topic - -it's just the flip-side -- your least preferred literary vampire... -
*On* topic
Cassidy, from Preacher? Does that count?
Otherwise... I don't really read much with vampires in. Mostly I just interact with them through the world I've built for V:tM, which is actually quite different to the actual WoD. Didn't like the nauseating, wrist-slitting whining about the eternal darkness.
Ultraviolet was a very good TV SERIES - the unrelated film was gobshite as far as I could see. Moonlight is fun enough, if a little frothy. -
I forgot about the weirdest vampire from my youth - Barnabas Collins ...
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"Two hundred years!"
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- CommentAuthorpicaropicara
- CommentTimeDec 9th 2008 edited
@stsparky: YES. Although not literary. But I do love what I've seen of Dark Shadows
My friend Chloe calls the Darren Shan vamps as her favourites. More balanced in terms of monster/realism, and I probably agree from what I remember.
On the other hand I like my vampires crude, cruel, vicious and slightly feral. None of this namby pamby foppish wussing.
Twilight is crap. I wouldn't use its pages to wipe my arse. It's perpetuating a terrible fantasy of the perfect relationship but trying to make it darker (and failing quite epicly) by making the characters vampires. If I remember right they don't actually have FANGS. How does that work exactly?
Or the Terry Pratchett vampires, subverting vamps in pop culture. -
[self edited]
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I haven't seen Requiem: Chevalier Vampire (Pat Mills/Olivier Ledroit) mentioned here. The art is terrific and the synopsis caught my attention.
I'm ordering it when I have enough spare cash. The trade came on November's Preview and its published by Heavy Metal. Panini UK is going to print it someday. -
The Gacy or Amin types are nasty enough as is, adding vampire to the mix adds very little - -they're already monsters. It just seems pointless.
What other models for truly compelling monsters do we have other than humans? Bestial monsters are ultimately boring. When all Something wants to do is eat or kill or fuck it's just an animal. Maybe a dangerous animal, but still an animal. An environmental hazard. We can't present a truly non-human intellect because we've never encountered one (anal-probed rednecks notwithstanding). Any intelligent nonhuman we present is by necessity a "human in a funny suit." So to my mind, the best place to turn to for inspiration to create a monster, especially a monster like a vampire, is human monsters. -
I happen to like Twilight I also like most Pop music and Bands that have become Popular that I used be the only fan of. It is what it is.
Moving on, for me vampires have always been about sex. Hunger, seduction, older men, and ultimately Taboo. Ya know...fucking and dead/soulless people.
I like Terry Prattchett's recovering addict vampires. The 30 Days of night where a little Zombieish in the film but rather nice in the books. And as for Will Smith that book has been made into a movie three times in three different decades, our perception of the concept reflects our fears of the time. Dracula is a classic if a little out of touch (Gary Oldman non withstanding). Ann Rice, Suki, and the others are just like Twilight; Dina Steel with fangs.
As for the serial Killer as vampire is redundant, same psychology...hopefully less clown suit. -
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CommentAuthorBrandon Seifert
- CommentTimeDec 9th 2008
Okay, I'd like to know: What is it people like about the 30 Days of Night vampires? I'd like some opinions, because I've so far failed to get the appeal there. What is it about them that was different from other takes that resonated with people? -
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@picaropicara
He's in books (not fan fiction AFAIK), I had the Barnabas Collins Joke book as tween; And, there are books; There was even a daily comic strip. -
@Brandon
I haven't seen or read 30 Days of Night, but I gather from context, they're the unstoppable killing machine type vampires - -the terminator, but with actual predatory malice, instead of a "kill order" programmed in and with a very human enjoyment of the hunt, the sport and feelings of power upon success, instead of simply hunting for food Throw in a sharp, pointy set of choppers (a lot of pointy teeth, like a shark or a cannibal) and they're scary enough. I guess the plot also has elements of vampire politics... so their not mindless killing machines, but smart ones, which makes them more dangerous.
What's not to get? A stronger, faster, more vicious and possibly more cunning creature than man wants to eat you. Fear of the dark, fear of predators (man is used to being the top predator on the planet), fear of strangers, fear of skeletal, dead looking (or old looking) guys who show the opposite of expected frailty -- which ties into fear of mortality... which is two pronged with vampires - - you have the mortal fear of them killing you and the lure of them freeing you from mortal fear, but possibly cursing or damning you in the process -- if the creature that results is actually you at all -- plus you can forget about getting a tan.
From what little I know of the 30 Days vamps - -they're not special. They just have a very clever and novel plan. -
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CommentAuthorAdmiral Neck
- CommentTimeDec 9th 2008
One of the vamps in the 30 Days of Night movie is played by Danny Huston. Specialness achieved automatically. Other than that excellence, as mlpeters says, they're just very brutal, though kind of alien, with their odd language and such. Also, the movie contains one of the greatest shots in recent horror history, as the vamps swarm the town and eat everyone outside, all displayed in a bravura overhead shot that tracks over everything.
As for preferred literary vamp, I honestly don't think I've read a vampire book my whole life. Not even Salem's Lot. In that case, my favourite would have to be Angel, from Buffy and Angel. Unimaginative, yes, and from a TV show and not a book (not counting comics and bad fanfic) but he was great. And he was a Fanilow. -
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CommentAuthorBrandon Seifert
- CommentTimeDec 10th 2008
I'm finding this thread very interesting. It's had me do some more research on vampire folklore and fiction (I rented the Ultraviolet TV show because of this thread, and though I ended up finding the show itself horrifyingly boring, the premise is certainly interesting), and I've got some more interesting ideas for the vampires in my own work because of it.
A couple specific comments:
@johnjones: Initially I didn't care for your suggestion that Buffy's writers should've looked to real-life serial killers and psychopaths to make scarier vampires, because I think the vampires in Buffy were too much in an action film mode rather than a psychological horror mode for that to work. But I've done some research on serial killers because of your suggestions, and I'm finding them interesting inspiration for my own work. Because really, a vampire in a contemporary urban environment would face a lot of the same problems a serial killer faces -- how to find victims? How to lure them somewhere you can prey on them? How to keep from being interrupted? How to dispose of the body and keep the death from being traced to you? How to avoid altercations with the police? So that's turning into some good story fodder. Thanks for that!
@mlpeters: I don't see the appeal of Mike Myers With Fangs -- because Mike Myers, and Jason Voorhees, and plenty of other implacable, unstoppable, Terminators Made Of Flesh exist already. But I think what I'm not getting is -- I'm not the barometer of taste, and some people may very well *want* to see Mike Myers With Fangs. The subtle, refined elements of vampires as villains may be less interesting to them than something that just slaughters wantonly. -