Vampyres: Endothermic or Exothermic?

file photo: Y at graduation (Plymouth, 1796)

First, spelling Vampyre with a “y” was traditional before it was trendy, ok?

Second, everyone knows some of the fictional tropes about about vampires: they drink blood, have super-human strength, tend strongly toward the alluringly sensual, are averse to garlic and silver, and burn up in the sunlight.  Stakes (not steaks, which have the opposite effect), crosses, and beheadings tend to come up in a vampyre discussion.

Although geeks like me enjoy Rules in our fantasy fiction, the reality - fortunate or unfortunate - is that mythologies like the Vampyre which go back more than two centuries and stem from oral traditions in the first place tend to be meandering and contradictory.  In other words, no unified field theory of the Rules about vampyres is possible or even desirable.  But the choices modern fiction makes when it lays down the ground rules for a vampyre story can endeavor at a minimum to be internally consistent.  Take the question of whether, when exposed to sunlight, a vampyre explodes and implodes.

In other words, when you dramatically pull back the drapes at the end of the movie, do you get an actual bursting into flames (exothermic explosion) such that the busty chick better duck and cover?  Or do you get an internal combustion that just consumers the vampire from the inside (endothermic combustion).

I didn’t notice until recently that endothermic vampire combustion is all the rage lately, perhaps best exemplified by the cinematic moment at the end of 30 Days Of Night.  I don’t know how the comic handled it, but the movie has Josh Hartnett “ash” into oblivion during an Alaskan sunrise in the arms of his beloved.  It’s hard to hug an exploding vampyre, so the choice of a romantic ending dovetails nicely with the choice to make Josh endothermic.

And yet I’m not sure how I feel about the nature of a vampyre combustion taking a backseat to the thematic needs of Josh Heartthrob being all sensitively dying slowly for a gushy “aw” ending.  A large part of me thinks that you ought to work out your vampyre mythology and let it tell you how the ending goes.  Shouldn’t you come to an understanding of what a vampyre is conceptually before you bend it to suit the needs of your plot?  Yes, yes you should.

I suppose the “problem” with vampyres and sunlight is that we’ve reached the point where “vampires can’t be in sunlight” is a convention without a rationale.  Anyone recall why vampires can’t be out in the sun in the first place?  Right…  you don’t need to know that because it’s a convention, like gravity, and when it’s a convention, the explanation can shift to suit the needs of the director.  Except, unlike gravity, which has an explanation, when the convention of a mythology gets so far away from its root, you end up standing in the middle of nothing.

And that’s the problem.  It’s not the individual choices that directors and authors make when handling vampyres that most often bothers me.  It’s the failure to root their choice outside of the conventions that has eroded my own interest in vampyres.  I don’t look forward to these movies coming out anymore, and I don’t read as many of the books because it’s so difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.  I feel like it’s nearly heretical to say, I’m just not so interested in vampyre stories anymore.

No, it’s not because I’m nearly 30 years old and experiencing a natural “putting away of childish things.”  Screw that.  I still play video games and read about wizards and heroes and zombies.  And I write for this website.  So, no, I’m not experiencing any kind of emotional growth, and if it’s not me, then it’s them.  It’s the vampyres I’m being asked to accept.

Nowadays, vampyres are mostly the collection of their parts without being the sum of them.  In linguistics terms, they are a collection of signifiers increasingly divorced from what they signify.  Form without substance, a wood veneer over particle board rather than solid, stained oak.  No wonder zombies are invading the vampyre market share; at least we understand where they are coming from, if not literally, then at least figuratively.  American corporate culture made sure of that, if our educational system didn’t get there first.

So, what are my demands related to vampyres in fiction going forward into 2009 to remedy the draining of their brand to a pale and bloodless version of itself?  I have a few, and I don’t think they are too much to ask.

1.)  Stephenie Meyers will withdraw all unsold copies of her Twilight series from the shelves, offer to buy-back all extant copies with an apology and a full refund, and retire to the country without ever speaking to a publisher again.  Unlike Napolean, if she leaves her metaphorical Elba, actual creatures of the night out there among our readership are encouraged to eat her.

2.)  HBO will recast Sookie Stackhouse with someone other than Anna Paquin.  Anna, I have nothing against you, and your presence in Hurlyburly was pitch-perfect.  But you are not Sookie Stackhouse, and this HBO production of Charlaine Harris’ novels — among the few well-devised modern vampyre stories — threatens to poison the well for ever and always.  There is other blame to go around, but the reform of True Blood must start somewhere.

3.)  Buffy was wonderful, but Buffy is over.  No more “new” Buffy in any form.  Yes, Joss, that includes the comics.  She must die so that vampyres may evolve with the times and live again. Buffy deserves much of the credit for the popularity of vampyre fiction, which also means that she/you deserve much of the blame for the consumerist wave of genre dilluting garbage that’s out there now.  For it to stop, you have to do your part, too.  If you get bored, please pick Firefly back up again.  We all loved that…

Kindred: The Embraced (1996)

4.)  If you are a young whipper-snapper out there hawking a vampyre comic/book/show/movie, please go watch the 1996 series Kindred: The Embraced.  God I wish they made series like this one which involves vampyres, explains them, gives them the characteristics of humanity and of the fearsome Other.  This series isn’t a panacea for the watered down junk that’s out there now, because it had some watery moments, too, but it’s a better roadmap for what’s possible with vampyres than what’s out there now.  That show knew, as Buffy did, that you couldn’t just say “vampire” and then reverse engineer a story that’s really the same as any other romance or comedy or action/thriller.

5.)  Which brings me to “lastly.”  Lastly, if you want to have a vampire in a story that’s essentially about something else, don’t.  Just don’t.  If you want to write about vampyres, then you need to have it be a story that is about vampyres, not just containing one because it’s easier to rely on the sticky millieu of lore out there than to write a character from stratch — “this guy is moody because he’s undead” is a lot easier than giving him a backstory, right?  Well, sorry, that’s banned now.  If there are vampyres in it, then it needs to be more than superficially a “vampyre story,” with enough lore and rationale and guts to commit to a vision of — not just a character — but a world where that character is possible and real and can not-live and not-breath.