Creepy Things

A terrified and pleading young woman is undressed in front of a few hundred theatre-goers before being feasted upon by a troop of vampires (pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires). I’ve seen this movie enough times that I know this scene is coming, and retreat quietly to a different room.

“Don’t you like it?” Asks a friend.

“I do. It’s just that gang-rapey scene.” As though the use of ‘rapey’ as an adjective did not imply this, “I find it a little disturbing.”

“But they’re vampires.” She says, and waits, and I wait too, hoping to grasp her point. I don’t.

My friend is transfixed. Vampires, the dark overlords of the culture’s underworld psyche, stalk through the night and feast upon the blood of unsuspecting humans and animals. These humans are usually somewhat deserving - mostly women, promiscuous, or prostitutes, and whether this is a morality tale or a reflection of ease-of-access that mirrors real life serial killers, it doesn’t really matter. We humans are enraptured by our pale fictional friends, and I know one or two young women who would gladly sacrifice their jugular for the cause.

I liked Interview with the Vampire, and I cheered on the smiley and sociopathic Tom Cruise (and rolled my eyes an effeminate and moralizing Brad Pitt). I can certainly relate to the allure of the Dark Side. A great deal of the allure, I think, lies in its simplicity - we don’t need to know why Bad Guys are bad. We don’t need to hear about Tom Cruise’s tragic and neglectful upbringing and the fact that in his early vampire years he adopted a scrappy kitten named Philippe who died tragically in a house fire…we don’t know, and we don‘t want to know, because the title of ‘kickass bad guy’ contains all the information we need. Tom Cruise remains self-interested and unrepentantly evil. He is powerful, vengeful, intelligent, and crazed. He is nothing more, and nothing less, and if you try to cross him by feeding him the blood of the dead, he will kick your ass, Kirsten Dunst.

This lack of moral nuance has faded out of popularity in recent years, which is a bit of a tragedy. We miss the simple tales of our youth, where bad was bad and good was good and the answer to ‘why’ was ‘because I said so.’ Prisons today keep choosing to rehabilitate criminals instead of just torturing them…well, most prisons. And ‘hate’ has become a word reserved for the parents of adolescent children instead of an emotion freely spewed at people of different races, municipalities, and those who cut you off in traffic. This left-leaning trend of understanding and shades of grey has left a void. We miss our black and white world of old and, most of all, we miss the badass men lurking creepily in the dark.

The more recent vampire flick, Let the Right One In, speaks to this desire directly. A small ugly child is bullied by his peers amidst a bleak socialist wasteland in this independent Swedish film, until a vampire moves in next door and teaches him the true meaning of friendship…and revenge. The bloody rapture that follows speaks to the secret desires of everyone who’s ever been bullied or abused. In fact, we’ve all had moments where we will someone else to DIE!…and thankfully, we don’t have powers of telekinesis, and nothing ever comes of these fleeting homicidal fantasies. We aren’t immortal, and we aren’t all powerful, and we aren’t vampires…and so we must learn to forgive and forget and function within a regular society.

Vampires don’t have to obey any such rules. And so we all stand on the sidelines, cheering them on and living vicariously as they suckle upon the blood of the innocent…until the moment is reached that our stomach turns. Suddenly, the dazzling veil is lifted, and I realize I’m watching a bloodbath that victimizes women and treads dangerously close to a rape-and-murder fantasy that I don’t want to think too hard about. The revenge plot reminds me of school shootings, and the crazed glee of Tom Cruise’s Lestat seems a prelude to the actor’s sermons on the virtues of Scientology.

But a true Bad Guy is one who is neither demonized or humanized, nor examined with any real scrutiny. He remains conceptual, fictional, and the object of only a momentary fascination. The villain, the vampire, then disappears and emerges a decade later, unaged and in a slightly different form, from the prose of Bram Stoker to the dribble of Twilight. He shows up in a Swedish snowdrift, and then he’s gone, again, no more than a vapor in a dense and foggy night.