[Peter Jackal]

What is it with vampires these days? I don’t know about you, but from my point of view, things have been getting a little bit silly since Buffy & Angel kicked their butts back into the mainstream.

On the one hand, we have what I call the “Blade” disease, where the sons and daughters of Dracula have all turned into ninja mafiosi who won’t venture outside unless they’re fully dressed for fetish night at a Dutch nightclub. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed “Underworld” and “Van Helsing” and I will always treasure those memories of Kate Beckinsale’s jumping spinning cyclone kick in a leather catsuit, but I think that any more of this flagellatory, bestial necrophilia would just be flogging a dead horse.

At the other extreme, I recently saw the teen movie “Twilight” for the first time, and was amused to witness the hitherto hideous curse of the undead metamorphosed into some kind of positive lifestyle choice.

Far from sticking to his traditional role as the immortal nemesis of an increasingly culturally irrelevant Christian church, in this film, one trendy bloodsucker had triumphed over the twin handicaps of an insatiable thirst for human blood and a fearsomely erect haircut to become the ultimate high school jock!

Return of the King

Yet, gently engaging though the Twilight saga is, it has no power to frighten or truly interest me. It has diverged radically from what viscerally fascinates me about the curse of the vampire. To worm our way back down into the truly rotten, poisonous core of that enduring myth, I say we need retrace our steps no further than Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”.

A beautiful book and an equally appealing TV miniseries, the vampires within it establish a nest in the eponymous town and set about infecting as many hapless victims as they can, each human meal reanimating from the grave to become another nefarious vector for the supernatural plague.

Brother eats sister, pupil murders teacher, mother feeds upon squealing child.

King’s vampires are not the slightly embarrassed, superior companions of humanity: they are the potential agents of its complete destruction. Ultimate predators that left unchecked, would exponentially eradicate the warm mammals upon which they feed in an escalating orgy of senseless greed.

In my darkest dreams, this is what vampirism represents: a ferocious disease transmitted by a ghastly species of cannibalistic, total r#pe in which the body and perhaps even the very soul itself is stolen, corrupted and twisted into a voracious simulacrum of the human host.

And what of the prey, those of us who are condemned run like rabbits beneath the talons of the immortal raptor scourge? We are entranced: in sexual thrall to the beasts that lust after the pain of our flesh; in awe of their strength and preternatural beauty, enchanted by the promise of eternal life dangled above the trembling weakness of our fragile, fleeting forms.

I need vampires to be ruthless, starving, mutated beings that can mimic those we love the most whilst harbouring a feverish desire to feast upon our trusting blood. They should be an appalling threat that appeals profoundly to the deep and complex webs of fear and dependence that interweave within our closest emotional bonds.

What mother wouldn’t open her window to the prodigal daughter she thought was lost forever? What infant son can resist the arms of the mother risen from a grave that he barely understands? What lover could deny the bite of a lost soul mate that promises perpetual union in an endless night of superhuman passion?

Yet though we might be enticed to jump into the grinning jaws of the assassin masquerading as our dearest love, to do so would be to take a leap into the terrible unknown. When we surrender to the teeth of the killer, do we become more than we are? Or do we die, only to be replaced by a ghost that haunts the echoing chambers and empty veins of a puppet corpse, while what remains of our conscious mind boils in the endless exile of unbearable damnation and pain?

Does anything of the host survive?

Sleeping with the Enemy

Like perplexingly many people, I frequently endure horrifying dreams of a post apocalyptic struggle to stay one step ahead of just such ravening, malignant hordes. These are archetypal nightmares, wrought into the structures of our brains by some synchronistic twist of psychochemical destiny. I love and hate these compelling visions of unbearable horror in equal measure. They revolt and fascinate the deepest, wettest recesses of my cerebellum.

In one recent variant that repeated on several nights, the world’s oceans had been replaced by a planet-wide pool of infectious, intelligent saliva that sought out its victims by sweeping into their cities and homes. Once stung by its corrosive fluids, the human body slowly began to decay, and its mind was gradually and agonisingly digested into the collective unconscious of the carnivorous sea. Yet while its crumbling flesh remained intact enough to shamble in pursuit of the living, it served its watery god as a hunter of men, its putrefying limbs and darkening senses directed to seek out fresh and uncontaminated bodies towards which to beckon the caustic, sentient waves.

“He’s in here” they whispered through rotted throats and peeling grins as they peered through cracks in the door behind which I cowered in the grip of paralysing dread.

Each distinct stripe within this tortured spectrum of my fabulous rainbow of nightmares is coloured by the same wave of unbearable emotion. The terror and exhaustion of an existence which has no meaning other than escape from a threat of almost inexpressible evil: comfortable and familiar people altered into hideous and infectious things.

Over the years, these dreams have recurred often enough to force me to recognise that the beasts that dwell in their depths are seemingly interchangeable. On some nights they are vampires, on others, zombies of one grotesque genus or another. The words may change but the song remains the same. This ogre swapping penchant of my subconscious eventually guided me to understand that the life-cycles of these two famous monsters are remarkably similar: the reanimated bodies of our friends, family and neighbours, hungrily chasing us down to bring us into their unholy fold by eating us alive.

Once this, in hindsight, glaringly obvious parallel had dawned in my waking brain, I began to notice the pattern elsewhere too. The most evidently isomorphic legend is that of the lycanthrope. The werewolf is clearly a vampire with a fur coat and bigger teeth.

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