Across countless generations and cultures, storytellers have used some form of the vampire to appeal to audiences. Fictional representations of vampires in literature and film have variously represented, among countless other complex subjects, primal human impulses, the conflict between past and present, and, perhaps most popularly, sexuality. Responses to these presentations vary even more widely than vampiric depictions themselves, diverse worldviews and beliefs manifesting as a broad spectrum of interpretations regarding what the vampire is or should be. Analysis of the relationships between a fictional portrayal of vampires and the viewers thereof can therefore offer significant insight into an individual’s or a culture’s values and fears. Of particular interest is the relationship between contemporary fictional representations of vampires and members of the actual vampire community.
While the need by which many of us define ourselves lends itself easily to such an identification, some, both within and outside the community, object to the community’s use of the word “vampire” as an identifier, given the strong and typically negative associations that many have with the term. Although some members of the community model their personal styles after those of vampires in fiction, few of us have anything of substance in common with these entertaining but unrealistic characters beyond the need for sustenance from donors. In fact, our need often corresponds to a heightened necessity for empathy that we might efficiently attune ourselves to the needs and emotional states of donors, setting us far apart from the ravenous monsters or reckless libertines in the movies. Despite these valid concerns, the community of self-identified vampires continues to grow. Paradoxically, it may be our empathy that drives many of us to identify so strongly with the fictional vampire, frequently depicted as lacking any interest in the emotions of others.
While the complexity of fictional vampires’ moral and ethical conflicts differ considerably from story to story, contemporary depictions most typically associate vampires with at least some traits that are socially undesirable. These range from the innocuous—being cold to the touch—to the macabre—regularly murdering innocent people—but always clearly set the vampires apart from non-vampires and often establish a hostile relationship between the two groups. Some more thoroughly developed vampire tales present well-rounded vampiric characters, but what is it in the classic stories of seemingly irredeemable nocturnal predators with which actual compassionate vampires identify? Clearly, for vampiric audiences these stories are not simply about good versus evil; we do not merely passively accept that the vampire—however violently depicted—is unquestionably evil or deserving of death at the hands of a righteous hero. Our unrivaled empathy allows us to relate even to those we are told to fear and to despise. For us, these stories are tragedies.
When, between two opposing forces, one is identified as right and the other as wrong, the audience with this perspective predictably responds to the unfolding of the story with unambivalent emotions: righteous anger when Right is oppressed and vindication when Right prevails. An audience that sees the merits of both sides of a conflict for which no compromise is possible, however, experiences a sense of inevitable sadness that is entirely distinct from the anger or excitation evoked by conflicts involving one clear villain. This is the essence of tragedy; the depiction of two sympathetic forces that cannot both feasibly survive a conflict. Tragedies allow no compromise, necessitating that the parties of a tragic conflict simultaneously cling to opposing absolutes that can only result in the overcoming of one by the other. Acknowledging that both sides have equally valid needs without vilifying either and, further, validating the unwavering conviction of both positions without suggesting that either or both should equivocate demands the ability to empathize much more broadly than can be expected of the average person. Accordingly, a highly empathetic audience experiences far more stories as tragedies.
This places actual vampires in a peculiar position relative to the fictional vampiric villain. Experiencing such artistic works as tragedies demands that we recognize the validity of the pursuits of both sides—were we to assert that the classical vampire alone was the righteous party, we might see the predatory actions of these mythical representations as exciting stories, perhaps even comedies, and our reaction to the eventual killing of our heroes might evoke anger and sadness but these would be unmitigated by a sense of inevitability or acceptability—and yet we identify most pronouncedly not with the victor of the story or the party that wins the endorsement of the majority, but with the opposite, with the side that most needs our empathy. By siding with the “villain” while also averring—with our feelings of tragic beauty—the rightness of both sides, we are not suggesting that the mythical vampire is uniquely faultless or absolutely and exclusively right, we are making a plea for balanced empathy, a trait natural to real-life vampires.
This internal balancing act is further reflected in the mythical vampire’s eternal youth. Vampires untouched by time simultaneously embody the absolutism of youth and the tendency toward compromise often associated with old age and experience. Fictional vampires are forever young not only in appearance, but also, frequently, in their impulsiveness and, a vital characteristic for any participant in a tragedy, an unequivocal worldview. In precisely the same moments, they can be brilliant tacticians, capable of adapting to wildly different environments and extremely limiting obstacles (e.g.: inability to travel in sunlight). They are thus completely uncompromising and constantly adapting at the same time, not unlike the vampire in the audience who can concurrently relate to two mutually exclusive points of view.
Not all members of the community feel this inclination toward empathizing with fictional monsters justifies subjecting ourselves to the disbelief and ridicule of those less gifted with empathy, and, in fact, not all whom we might consider vampires so identify. Crafting an effective argument either for the community-wide maintenance or abandonment of this label, though, demands a thorough exploration of why so many of us were drawn to identify with the vampire in the first place, and our inherent tendency to emotionally connect with others may well play a central role in the formulation of that identification. The future of the community’s relationship with the term “vampire” and its accompanying connotations is uncertain, but our underlying empathetic nature will likely keep many of us rooting for the undead underdog regardless of any change in terminology.