What's with all the damn vampires?

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Vampires haven't become "sanitized;" the original threat of STDs (and a lack of understanding about disease and death) that spawned them has been replaced by a purely social trope, the Social Outcast-slash-Bad Boy who must be brought into the popular social circles, or used as a vehicle to escape the selfsame social circles.

When you adopt a tone of sweeping dismissal, do take care to follow the argument being made and actually refute it. You've merely changed the subject.

You've also attempted to justify unimaginative writing by pointing out that, from the point of view of sales, it meets the needs of a given market. Additionally you've tried to excuse sentimental writing by sentimentalizing its audience.

I'm not trying to pick on you, but these strategies are deeply irritating.

Your summing of the history of vampires as the rise and fall of STD fear morphing into James Dean worship confuses the etymology of symbols in pop culture with their usage in a quest to be socially responsible about metaphors, which hinges on the idea that art is reducible to a message. I disagree.

Fiction needn't be healthy in any socially improving sense. Those who've tried to push that agenda have left us with either pabulum or propaganda.

All my life, I've known people who made their living writing novels about vampires -- John Shirley, Nancy Collins, Poppy Z. Brite -- and none of them has been interested in diluting the unavoidable brutality of monsters in order to sell teen romance. This isn't conceptual evolution, it's commodification. It's what happens when an idea is used too routinely and loses its, um, fangs.

Vampire oversaturation has everything to do with parasitic corpses being recycled as boy bands and nothing to do with some revolutionary and socially correct new way of appealing to "YA." Many young adults had already been reading about vampires.

The market isn't proof of talent or quality. It is simply the market. People here have complained about being sick of the way vampires are now depicted and used Twilight as their example repeatedly. It isn't an anti-populist argument because the point is the quality of the novels and films themselves, not which special audience happens to like or despise them.

This suggests that this trope can be transferred to other characters/caricatures, something less fantasy and more grounded in the elements of life that will become important to YA as they mature into collegiates"

The "trope" doesn't need to be "transferred" to other "caricatures" because the qualities you're describing are so general as to apply to virtually any remedial teen novel or television series. The idea has been used in endless contexts already. Perhaps Meyer's doing a better job of using it by not sentimentalizing The Lost Boys would have left many of us less nauseated with her Twilight franchise.

[xg4bx]

I think steampunk will replace the urban fantasy market within the next year or two. Urban fantasy is collapsing under a dearth of too similar,second rate product and that inevitably forces a collapse.

Personally I'd like to see more "body horror" ala David Cronenbergs films and I think "bio-horror" will be a big genre i.e. ecological catastrophe or the merging of flesh and machine.

At the end of the day though, the kid in me wants to see some giant bugs or dinosaur/demon based survival horror lol.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

Personally I'd like to see more "body horror" ala David Cronenbergs films and I think "bio-horror" will be a big genre i.e. ecological catastrophe or the merging of flesh and machine.

I grew up loving Cronenberg's earlier flicks, which verged on body dysmorphic horror. Obvious examples were They Came from Within, Videodrome and Dead Ringers.

At the end of the day though, the kid in me wants to see some giant bugs or dinosaur/demon based survival horror lol.

Given your mention of survival horror (which suggests you might be a gamer), I wonder what you think of Shadows of the Damned, a collaboration by Suda51 and Resident Evil 4's Shiji Mikami. It seems to be a winking love song to grim but awful taste. From the review in Eurogamer:

Shadow of the Damned doesn't hold back when it comes to conjuring Dante-esque dioramas of the grotesque, with entrails spilling from doorways and monsters that make their stage appearance by bursting through the translucent skin of a woman. But the dreadfulness is softened in every scene with a clutch of knob gags, or freaks that speak with plum English accents. It's as if Bayonetta had been produced by Terry Gilliam, the effect being that the horror is robbed of shock and transformed into black comedy.

Doesn't hurt, I suppose, that Suda51 had been an undertaker just before he got into game design.

[NVash]

I blame Anne Rice. No, actually, its totally Stephenie Meyers fault.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

When you adopt a tone of sweeping dismissal, do take care to follow the argument being made and actually refute it...

I wasn't dismissing. I merely stated my impression of the reasoning behind the trend, backed by its clear level of success in the media.

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Vampire oversaturation has everything to do with parasitic corpses being recycled as boy bands and nothing to do with some revolutionary and socially correct new way of appealing to "YA."

Your examples amount to exactly the same thing: It has everything to do with trying to appeal to YA, no matter what that does to traditional characters and tropes, in order to make a buck. Very few literary concepts have managed to avoid the "rebranding for profit" strategy; why should vampires be any different? It's not like Bram Stoker can complain...

And again, I'm not defending or justifying the strategy, I'm just stating.

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

The "trope" doesn't need to be "transferred" to other "caricatures" because the qualities you're describing are so general as to apply to virtually any remedial teen novel or television series.

True. Which is how they were so easily applied to vampires.

[shanghaichica]

I find their sudden serge in popularity intriguing. When I was a teenager I used to read all of these supernatural fiction books but they were not popular then. In those days it was considered to be a niche Market. It was not popular or cool.

[emmameade83]

I loved vamp & horror books as a teenager also.
Vampires have been a much loved part of literature for a century and I don’t think they’re going to disappear anytime soon. The success of Twilight just brought them back to the forefront of the media but they were always there. As a kid who devoured Point Horror books like they were chocolate before moving on to Anne Rice, I am delighted to see vamps light up the literary stage once again. Stephenie Meyers’ sparkly creatures may annoy a lot of people but I think there’s plenty of room for all different types of creatures of the night.

[morriss003]

I want to see a book about Vampires fruitlessly trying to drink the blood of Zombies and dying of thirst.

[Prestidigitweeze]

I haven't been back to this thread in months because I hated fighting with a writer who was openly discussing his ideas for new work, which put him in a potentially vulnerable position.

I'll leave all that aside to comment on this:

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Your examples amount to exactly the same thing: It has everything to do with trying to appeal to YA, no matter what that does to traditional characters and tropes, in order to make a buck. Very few literary concepts have managed to avoid the "rebranding for profit" strategy; why should vampires be any different? . . . And again, I'm not defending or justifying the strategy, I'm just stating.

Actually, the examples I mentioned have nothing to do with appealing to a projected (and quite possibly fictional) YA. The reason I know this is because three of the authors I mentioned are personal friends.

John Shirley is a prolific horror and SF writer who has made his living from writing fiction since about the age of nineteen. He's also the person who came up with the idea of making a film out of O'Barr's graphic novel, The Crow. After John's treatment was made into a successful film, he was offered the chance to write an original screenplay for the first sequel, a project that would have made him a great deal of money. Here's my paraphrase of his reason for turning down the offer -- as conveyed to me in letters and conversations -- beginning with a direct quote as the first sentence.

Great art comes from inner outrage. When James O'Barr was working on The Crow, he wasn't trying to write a commercial story. He wasn't some sell-out motherf***er looking at a bunch of successful s**t and trying to imitate that. The reason he wrote that book is because he was shrieking inside. He was insane with grief over the loss of his girlfriend, burning candles and crying, listening to Joy Division and Iggy Pop and trying to find some sense of vindication. That's why the book was successful. And the reason the movie was successful is because, despite the Hollywood board meetings, despite the dilution of the gore and all the meddling and the pandering, 80% of the original story made it into the film.

Here's what I told the producers: If you're willing to lock the director and me in a hotel room for a week with a bag of opium, then shoot the screenplay we write verbatim no matter how it reads, then I'll do it.

So far, they haven't called back.

Same thing with John's vampire novels: We lived in different rooms of the same house when he wrote two of them, and he was pale and shaken during the process because what he was really writing about were his own addictions, his own experience of evil and redemption in the world.

All of which are about as far from the pandering of Twilight as you can get.

[ekster]

Originally Posted by morriss003

I want to see a book about Vampires fruitlessly trying to drink the blood of Zombies and dying of thirst.

How about vampires turning into zombies! Who become consumed by a long inner-battle on whether they want brains or blood, followed by a philosophical debate on who they are.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by ekster

How about vampires turning into zombies! Who become consumed by a long inner-battle on whether they want brains or blood, followed by a philosophical debate on who they are.

I love it! +1

[carpetmojo]

Look, it's either the vampires, the Christians, or the self-improvers - which one would you rather have?

[Illinifan]

The good:

'Salem's Lot
Morbius from "The Amazing Spiderman #101" and following
Anne Rice

The ok:
Buffy

The bad:
Twilight
True Blood

[Todd Young]

Originally Posted by ekster

How about vampires turning into zombies! Who become consumed by a long inner-battle on whether they want brains or blood, followed by a philosophical debate on who they are.

I've just finished Justin Cronin's "The Passage" and though the infected seem to have more in common with zombies, they are also related to vampires. They're also very confused about who they are, but are incapable of philosophical debates.

[Dimwit]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Same thing with John's vampire novels: We lived in different rooms of the same house when he wrote two of them, and he was pale and shaken during the process because what he was really writing about were his own addictions, his own experience of evil and redemption in the world.

All of which are about as far from the pandering of Twilight as you can get.

As with everything, you will do well when you write about what you know. Yeah, a cliché but not untrue.

The big thing that is coming from this thread is the fact that Meyer's has undermined the very trope she wrote about and has done the whole subject a disservice. The fact that she became popular and then rich from that is just more vinegar for the cut. Stings.
As I said in my first post, it will just take patience. This doesn't have legs. In 5 years this will be so passé it is laughable.

What intrigues me right now is the rise of the zombie film. I'm not seeing it in literature but the visual media is going gaga and I can't figure out why. What is so appealing all of a sudden? What do zombies represent in pop culture? Soulessness? Lack of religion? Corporate hegemony killing the culture? Remorseless idiocy destroying us? Hmmmm.