Why vampires?

Both comments on yesterdays’ post were in support of some current pop-cultural phenomenon centered around vampire/human romance. What is it about love between humans and vampires that excites so much interest? I suspect there is something deep going on here.

It can’t be just the whole Byronic-hero sublimated-passion thing. That might explain “Twilight” but not the new HBO series. There is nothing either Byronic or thwarted about the latter.

Any ideas?

One thought on “Why vampires?”

  1. Perhaps we have a hint as to what may be going on in a throw away detail from the HBO series True Blood.

    During the opening credit montage that mixes swamp imagery with a trucker’s eye view of deepest Louisiana, there’s a quick shot of a back-lit sign, like the kind at a country church, reading the phrase “God Hates Fangs.”

    It really doesn’t give anything away about the show’s storyline to say that ‘True Blood’ is a coming-out-of-the-coffin-tale that mines the dramatic potential of human-vampire co-existence.

    So maybe what you’re seeing is a pop culture that’s using actual demons to dramatize and process the plethora of issues that American culture is witness to as it works to assimilate various demonized ‘others’.

    On a side note, if he did anything, the politician Rick Santorum demonstrated that non-standard concepts of co-existence and demonization could motivate some fairly wild flights of imagination. A Wikipedia search for “Santorum controversy” will give some back story on that.

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