Guest Post: The Ghosts of Vampires
Written By Tennyson Thomas
About the Author: Tenny is an avid blogger and a reviewer of movies specializing in horror movies. He runs the blog Movies of the Soul where his fictional characters Vampire Owl and Vampire Bat review the pluses and minuses of a movie. His blog Divine Epic is a running fiction on faith, belief and hope. He also runs a general blog The Tea Cerebration and travel blog The Viator.
There was a time when Dracula should have been a pseudonym for vampire, but that has obviously changed. There has always been Carmilla, Lord Ruthven and Varney the Vampire, but none of them had anything too different from the most well-known vampire of all time. Dracula has been a character beyond all cultures, and not defined by any limitation with its reach for the admirers. But a variation was inevitable, and one of the most significant changes came with three vampires which Anne Rice had invented and was brought to the big screen through Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst – Louis, Lestat and Claudia.
That takes us to the movie Interview with the Vampire, one of the most impressive vampire movies of all time. One has to admit that it has brought more than a few thousands of new vampire fans. There was conscience, there was the presence of thoughts, and there was a rare breed of philosophical vampires. The vampires were no longer declared without a soul or without the scope for being good. The state of damnation was present, but their existence was not necessarily pure evil, but defined by their actions which were the result of the myriads of thoughts. It was a beginning of a change, something which seemed fair in the beginning, only to be destroyed by the movie Queen of the Damned based on the works of the same writer.
This was part of fertile grounds, and on the same, Vampire Journals made an appearance. This lesser known movie has a similar situation, with “a vampire with a mortal heart” as our protagonist calls himself as he goes on to destroy the bloodline of the one who created him. This is another intense movie which follows somewhat the same path as Interview with the Vampire. The next impressive vampire movie came much later in the form of Byzantium (even as the Underworld movies did have their merits), but between them, there were movies which made a mockery of the vampire legacy, those which I would call “the ghosts of vampires”.
Among those ghosts, the most popular and the prominent ones belong to Twilight, displaying its vampires as mutant-like creatures with superpowers, only retaining that taste for blood. Their existence itself making no sense at all, sparkling in sunlight is one of the most disastrous qualities that a vampire character could have ever been given, and the addition of the protagonist Isabella Swan to the vampires list only devastates the already existing list of shame, while the werewolf side and the ending in the final part of the movie, are better left untold. My question about it is that couldn’t these creatures been something else other than vampires? What was The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones doing with its vampires? Depressing.
It is not that the vampire can’t be depicted as part of the modern life, because Fright Night could achieve that so well. But the question remains about the impact that the vampires could bring a long time ago. But that doesn’t exist anymore, as the vampires are no longer of the power that they once had, as they have becomes the “ghosts of their self”, the shadows of themselves. The good about them which were obviously “the bad” no longer has that much of a role to play, and vampires, with too much of humanity becomes no longer themselves, but ghosts of vampires. Their undead existence itself is denied, and due to which, they can no longer the same.
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