Virtually all folk and fairy tales deal with issues of good and evil. Hansel and Gretel for example explores the limits of human morality under starvation, and a series of set-pieces are strung together based around the theme of food: a mother and father driven to abandon their children during harsh famine by leaving them to starve in the woods, the children are forced to make their own way when birds eat the trail of breadcrumbs they left to lead them home, lost in the woods they discover a house with gingerbread walls and sugar windows and are so hungry they literally eat through the walls; inside is a witch who wants to eat them, culminating in her being cooked to death when they realise her plans and trick her into her own oven. When they return home, bearing the stolen witch’s jewels they will use to buy food, their stepmother is dead; perhaps she too was vanquished when the witch who tried to devour them died in the oven, this imposter in the home who refused to fulfil the most basic biological function of the mother-child bond and feed her children. The impersonal violence of nature, as symbolised by the birds, is contrasted with the human evil of the witch and the stepmother (who are metaphorically the same figure).
And in many of these older tales, there is a greater level of moral sophistication than the passive, pallid heroines of Disney movies might suggest.
http://goo.gl/SZN4i “Okay, my ugly sister just snail-trailed period blood all over the floor again. I fix this mess, someone’s got to sense the despair engendered by the action and drag my ass away, or the universe is a bad, cruel, godless void of horror. That is all.”
It’s nice to get a little more than Disney’s “bitch scrubs the floor dreaming of a happy ending until an effeminate hero with a stupid voice breezes in at the last minute and take over the goddamn movie” approach. And you can apply the same reasoning to the folk tale’s offshoots, modern-day adaptations of their good-versus-evil pattern. According to my current stoned musing, these would be the inundation of popular culture with all things vampire and werewolf-related, through which writers from various mediums explore the dark side of the heart of man.
The most common contention of vampire lore is that once turned into a vampire, a person begins to lose human conscience, growing increasingly predatory as the craving for blood overtakes the hangover of their human selves until they ultimately become a monster. Werewolves, on the other hand, commonly retain their human selves and struggle to contain their condition, losing their consciousness in monstrosity only once a month under the full moon. They will not live forever, and are not in a constant state of physical craving for blood and violence like vampires. As essentially mortal creatures who are utterly consumed by a demon within, beyond all hope of controlling it with willpower, their human selves are forced to cohabit with the darkness, to avoid being consumed by it.
And this, surely, bears more interesting and real, honest parallels to the issue of human evil which is really at the heart of all of these tales. Some folklorists suggest the spread of folk tales about monsters was aided by serial killers, which may help account for such discoveries as series of mutilated or eviscerated corpses found around villages. Superstitious peasants saw monsters all over Europe, from the savage wolf-men of Romania tales to the foul, bloated vampyres of Germany.
Werewolf myths abounded most consistently in countries where wolves posed a very real threat to survival, and going into the woods unprepared could cost people their lives - it is no coincidence that the dark forest is often an inherently frightening place in European folklore. The fusion of man with wolf betrays an anxiety regarding human nature, which must be aided in its expression with a reassuring element of the beastlike, the Other. It is here that the most deep-seated fears regarding, if you like, the soul of man, can be most honestly faced. Is a character like Dexter, a serial killer who has learned to channel his violent urges into the collective good by killing only other serial killers, so very different to the werewolf who locks himself in a disused warehouse at every full moon, to avoid ripping innocent people to shreds? Both are, after all, monsters with enough humanity left to realise and fight against their own monstrosity.
As a nineties kid, I was and am a huge Buffy fan. Something I really admire it for since I started writing my own crap is the tightness of the mythology: no clever plot twist is without a satisfying explanation; the rules of the universe are clear, simple, as plausible as they can possibly be on a show about a teenaged vampire slayer, and an effective aid to some genuinely great storylines. When a person becomes a vampire, they lose their soul and become a creature of pure darkness. The only exception is Angel, who fucked with the wrong gypsy clan many years ago and got himself cursed with a soul, doomed to suffer the crushing weight of his sins for all of his immortal life now that his human conscience is back. He fights for redemption throughout the show and beyond into a mostly well-made spin-off, while brooding a lot and swishing a Matrix-style leather jacket during well-choreographed fight scenes filmed when Neo was just an itch in the Wachowski brothers’ pants.
http://goo.gl/ekZTi Spike rocked a similar look, while not brooding and being generally better than Angel.
TV series Being Human dealt with the good vampire issue interestingly: when Mitchell asserts that he does not feed off of humans, and his new flatmate Annie, herself a ghost, asks him if he doesn’t need blood to survive, he replies, “Nah – it’s just a question of willpower.” Working as a hospital orderly as he attempts to find a place in the human world, he tells his co-workers his hands are shaky because he has given up smoking. For a while, we see him renouncing the predatory existence of his kind to team up with fellow outcasts Annie and George, a werewolf.
However, after a series of losses and betrayals, Mitchell gives in to his darker nature (as virtually all of the new wave of friendly vampires must do at some point, to remind us amidst all the humanity and intense teary hugging that it exists). And as he begins to kill again, it becomes clear that blood to vampires is a drug, the alcoholic’s black rum; the more he consumes, the easier it becomes to drown out the remnants of his human conscience, and the further into the shadows he moves. The metaphor is underlined further when a newly-reformed Mitchell, saved from the darkness by George and finding the vampires looking to him as leader after Herrick’s death, runs AA-style support groups to help them stop killing, detox from blood, and lead quiet lives.
In further support of werewolves, I’d like present you with a song called, coincidentally, “Werewolf” [
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLgAEpOsek ]. This song will probably ruin all other music for you forever. It’s an a capella tour de force, with a schizophrenic build-up and startlingly beautiful harmonies: part-folk tale, part-gothic setpiece, part-demented hillbilly ballad. Just when you think it can’t build up any more, can’t get any more haunting or demented, it says “Fuck that”, throws a bar of soap in a sock, and has a pain-party over your doubting face. The good kind.
http://goo.gl/MZuUL
http://goo.gl/Ecfom
I’m thinking less Pulp Fiction, and more Blue Velvet. That’s normal, right?
It’s an awesome display of talent, and if listened to under the right conditions - i.e. stoned, by lamplight, in a small cosy womb-room on a cold winter night - you will call it master. Anyone who wouldn’t has no soul, much like vampires, who I believe we’re currently trying to establish are raging cocks.
http://goo.gl/597ul Seriously, what?
My biggest bug-bear about vampires is that everything always has to be all sexy, when everyone with taste knows the love interest angle is a vastly overused trope which many films would be better off without. I don’t want to see some winsome Keira Knightly lookalike’s pout taking over the screen as her lover lets her down again, being too busy saving the world to call and placate her, nor do I have any desire to eavesdrop on their private affairs while she tries to pull him into a normal life, back from the brink of a fall into his dark, vengeful urges. I genuinely don’t care. If I’m watching a movie about good versus evil, I’m here to see some villains’ shit getting ruined , sharp one-liners, memorable characters, and if there’s the occasional effect that has my inner twelve year old punching the air then Jurassic fucking Park. Look, basically I do not require a token love interest with no bearing on the central plot in ANY film, but it’s particularly offensive in ones containing any of the following: pirates, zombies, superheroes, mutants, robots, aliens, or supernatural beings of any kind. There are more but I’m too pissed off to think now.
A few exceptions: the episode of Doctor Who where Rose is trapped in the parallel world and can never come back, Buffy and Angel circa series 2, George and Nina in Being Human (Nina is a great character), Oskar and Eli in the brilliantly ominous ending of Let the Right One In. It wasn’t too bad in 28 Days Later, although the woman was a bit shit, and so was the man, come to think of it. And the incessant product placement. Actually, fuck 28 Days Later.