Witches and vampires and ghouls, oh my!

With Halloween lurking just around the corner, costume stores are filling up—along with the sexy nurses/firefighters/bumblebees, there area all the spooky standards: pointed hats, broomsticks, fake blood, ghastly white makeup, creepy fake fangs. But somehow the old Dracula costume seems a little odd these days. As everyone knows now, vampires are sexy, right? Twilight, True Blood, the Vampire Diaries, and Buffy can’t all be wrong…

Bram Stoker’s classic gothic novel Dracula is riddled with sexual innuendo (and in fact is often read as an extended allegory about the dangers of sexual repression). But the character of Dracula himself is far from alluring: the character Jonathon Harker describes him as having a “high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.” But perhaps the most disturbing element—and here Stoker reveals his genius at evoking horror through the smallest of details—is the description of Dracula’s hands: “they were rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point.” Hair in the middle of your palm, and sharpened, pointy fingernails? Yikes. That is definitely not sexy.

So how did we get from Dracula—I forgot to mention that the tops of his ears are “extremely pointed,” and his mouth “rather cruel looking”—to the Adonis-like Edward Cullen in Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight? “Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn't get used to it, though I'd been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday's hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest. His scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids ere shut, though of course he didn't sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.” Apparently, vampires have evolved quite a bit since 1897.

Although Dracula is no doubt the most iconic piece of vampire literature ever written, the physical monstrosity of its vampire is perhaps more of an aberration than the rule. Vampires, especially in literature, have often evoked both the horrific and the sensual. In fact, the first vampire to appear in English prose would not seem entirely out of place in the cast of one of today’s sexy-vamp-soaps. Written in 1819, John Polidori’s story, “The Vampyre,” follows a young man named Aubrey and his encounters with the suave Lord Ruthven. Aubrey gradually becomes aware of Lord Ruthven’s cruel and evil temperament (yes, he’s a vampire), and without giving away details, eventually everything ends horribly. What’s interesting is that Lord Ruthven is handsome, “in spite of the deadly hue of his face,” and delights in seducing women and destroying their reputation. As early as 1819, sex was not only associated with vampires, but seen as one of their weapons.

In 1872, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published the novella, Carmilla, which many argue is about a lesbian vampire! A young woman is repeatedly visited by the female vampire Carmilla, who eventually is revealed to be an ancient vampire Countess. Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” has a similar theme of a female vampire preying on a young woman.

In the United States, fascination with vampires reached new heights with the publication of The Vampire Chronicles, by Anne Rice. As perhaps should be evident by the choice of casting in the film adaptation of Interview With A Vampire, Rice’s blood-suckers are excessively attractive and also emotionally sensitive. (If you haven’t seen the movie, star roles are played by Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, and Kirsten Dunst.)

Vampire literature has often been used to address all kinds of sexual themes: taboo relationships, transgressive acts, the relationship between sex and disease. So perhaps it should be no surprise that the newest spate of vampire entertainments seem to focus largely on the sexual allure of the undead. Plus, it sure helps TV ratings.

(Image: "Le Vampire," by Philip Burne-Jones (1861-1926) (Public domain))