Blood Ties

Behind today's feverish vampire obsession lurks a desire to create the cool family we never had.

By Laura Miller

Jan 13, 1996 | Vampires, with insidious stealth, have taken over the popular imagination. The steady flow of vampire movies -- Robert Rodriguez' new "From Dusk til Dawn" joins Abel Ferrera's "The Addiction," Eddie Murphy's "A Vampire in Brooklyn" and the art film "Nadja" in general release, and "The Vampire Lestat," a sequel to the 1994 hit "Interview With The Vampire," starring Tom Cruise, will shortly begin production -- is only the surface. The Horror sections in bookstores nationwide are packed with fat vampire novels sporting glossy black spines, their titles spelled out in gothic lettering as red as the sanguine trickles that, inevitably, course down their covers. This is where hardcore vampire fanciers reign. It was not always thus. Once, Dracula shared the apex of monsterdom in a three-way tie with Frankenstein and the Wolfman (the Mummy a distant, shuffling fourth), just one among several things that went bump in the night. Anne Rice changed all that. With her bestselling 1976 novel "Interview With The Vampire" and its immensely popular sequels, she single-handedly initiated a new genre in commercial fiction. Now scarcely a week goes by without the publication of a new vampire novel, usually part of one series or another. Bloodsuckers have come a long way since Bela Lugosi. Dracula's kin may crave our hemoglobin, but the human appetite for vampires and vampire stories seems almost as insatiable. What's the attraction? The modern fictional vampire is a far cry from Lugosi's pudgy, middle-aged Count with his rolling eyes and bad housekeeping, although there is a family resemblance (vampires still overdress). Anne Rice revived the genre by tapping into a rich lode of contemporary pop fantasy, and the heart of that fantasy is pretty homely, despite its Baroque trappings.

Rice's first innovation was telling the story from the vampires' point of view, capitalizing on our identification with beautiful outsiders. And beautiful they are, the vampires created by Rice and her pulp fiction heirs. Most monsters arouse fear (the Wolfman perhaps a grudging sympathy -- we all feel like beasts at times), but modern vampires inspire envy and admiration. The vampires of popular fiction are often rich, invariably idle, travel a lot, have supercilious tastes in books, music and art (patently matching the author's) and gorgeous clothes. They are never fat, and are usually favored with high cheekbones.

Everyone seems to have a theory regarding the real meaning of Rice's vampires and their derivatives. The mythos is "really about" homosexuality, or sexual submission. Or it's really about drugs, or AIDS. Or it's about artists, or gangs, or rock 'n' rollers.

Well, yes. Vampire-mania is about all of these things and much more, because what it's really about is family.

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