Americans proved remarkably uncomfortable in their own skins at the dawn of the twenty-first century. An emphasis on the body’s aesthetics and the need to save the body from death (or save it for the resurrection) betrays a profound anxiety about physical experience. The obsession of physical aesthetics combined with concerns about infectious disease, the politics of the womb, cultural battles fought over alternative sexual identities, controversy over genetics, and the obsession with physical aesthetics have absorbed enormous amounts of media attention.34
Zombies and vampires became the ultimate meaning machines in this era of the body wars. The rotting, and yet animated, bodies of the zombie mapped anxieties about the body, both religious and secular. The immortal, and often eerily beautiful, bodies of vampires sucked the blood that Americans imagined as the carrier of infection and death, creating an iconography of fatal, diseased, erotic pleasure.
The zombie, with its awkward movements, single-minded desire, and rapidly decomposing flesh, manages to combine terror, threat, and humor into a single flesh-eating package. In a grotesque reversal of dieting culture, zombies are the ultimate late-night snackers who have no interest in anything but their victims and no interest in their victims except as a source of food. In some respects, this makes the zombie the ultimate nightmare of the culture of dieting, exercise, and bodily transcendence. They are unable to transcend their flesh and its desires. They are frightening, or more generally just described as “gross,” because their appetites denigrate the human body, turning it into an abject consumable. Meanwhile, their own bodies, or at least what is left of them, represent a parody of both secular and religious hopes for the body as a vehicle for transcendence.35
The walking undead, whether they are flesh-eaters or bloodsuckers, evoke images of plague, disease, and infection as well as monstrous consumption. Modern America had worried little about the dangers of disease since the deadly influenza epidemics of the early twentieth century. The 1980s saw the beginnings of new fears of older diseases as well as the metaphor of malignancy and ill health applied to a variety of social problems. The AIDS epidemic and its political and cultural uses became central to a societal discourse about threats to the body. Warnings about sexual permissiveness went hand in hand with warnings about poison and illness in a strange new vocabulary. Social critics Arthur and Marilouise Kroker dubbed this new vocabulary a “Body McCarthyism,” which sought to contain threats to the body and the social order.36
The vampire and the zombie became the perfect monstrous metonyms for this era since each spread a kind of infection. The AIDS epidemic seemed to especially resonate with the mythology of the vampire given the immune disorder’s blood-borne disease vector. This comported with a homophobic tendency to imagine gays and lesbians as a kind of vampire. The antigay activist Anita Bryant, who more than anyone helped to initiate fundamentalist Christianity’s national backlash against gay liberation, made explicit use of the vampire metaphor. Bryant once wrote that, “the male homosexual eats another man’s sperm. Sperm is the most concentrated form of blood. The homosexual is eating life.” Bryant also argued, in imagery redolent with vampire symbolism, that “homosexuals … must recruit, must freshen their ranks.” While conservative critics often focused on gay men as a source of moral and physical corruption, film imagery of lesbian vampires became an increasingly common trope in the 1970s. Films like Daughters of Darkness, The Hunger, and Embrace of the Vampire offered men voyeuristic pleasures while evoking fears that imagined women as both bloodsucking freaks and dangerously autonomous in their sexuality.37
Conservative politicians and the leaders of the New Right eagerly deployed imagery that connected homosexuality with images of infection, transforming AIDS into a metaphor for a diseased and dying social structure. In 1983 Jerry Falwell urged blood banks to reject gay donors and suggested that gay political influence had stood in the way of stopping the spread of disease. A growing moral panic over infection and gay sex led to the passage of a 1986 Senate bill that legalized the creation of donor pools that individual families could contribute to and thus avoid the use of blood from “the general population.” The Reagan administration had, at this late date in the epidemic, not even acknowledged the existence of AIDS, even as the president made use of the imagery of disease, infection, contagion, poison, and degeneracy to describe the general moral state of American society. When finally speaking publicly about the epidemic, Reagan and his speechwriters used imagery from serial killer narratives when they described AIDS as moving “insidiously through the length and breadth of our society.”38
The homosexual as vampire and AIDS as a “gay plague” delivered by the blood provided a powerful weapon in the culture wars. The pale gauntness of the vampire and the transmission of his condition through an exchange of bloody body fluids became juxtaposed with gothic imaginings regarding gay sexuality in which infection spread in bathhouses where men allegedly had “30 to 40 sexual encounters a night.” Phrases like these became a common way for conservatives to talk about the spread and origins of AIDS. It suggested that gay men must have a supernatural sexual appetite combined with an impossible physical prowess. It further envisioned them as voracious creatures of the night, eagerly infecting as many victims as possible.39
The monster would not allow itself to mean only one thing. The vampire became, for many in the age of AIDS, a symbol of transcendence rather than of societal decay and decadence. In the 1980s, in part inspired by Rice’s novels, a loose network of local networks, night clubs, and eventually websites and chat rooms created a “vampire subculture,” an offshoot of the goth movement.40
Becoming a part of the vampire community could mean anything from dressing in black and wearing high-priced fang implants to taking part in exchanges of blood with willing sexual partners. For the most part, vampire communities have encouraged safe practices (AIDS awareness and testing became a common element of vampire clubs), as well as tolerant, New Age style spirituality. “Real Vampires,” a term usually used by those who want to delineate themselves from vampire fandom and role players, come in two basic types. “Sanguinaries,” or “Sangs,” drink the blood of a partner or have their blood drunk by a partner. This is often, but not always, in a sexual context. “Psychic vampires,” or “Psis,” believe they siphon mental energy from their willing victims. This seemingly diabolical activity is often presented as a kind of mental communion between the participants rather than an invasive attack.41
Those who do not want to take their vampirism so far can take part in the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. Reaching the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s, this live-action role-playing game allowed participants to become members of various vampire clans and act out various gothic scenarios. Cultural critic Eric Nuzum describes Masquerade as a kind of “improvisational theatre” in which players can perform their vampire fantasies with plastic fangs, blood capsules, and the roll of dice.42
Cultures frequently employ an iconography of death to deal with moments of historical horror and rapid social change. Fourteenth-century Europe freely employed the “Dance of Death” imagery during the plague. In the late eighteenth century, daughters of the nervous French aristocracy wore red chokers and effected a deathly pale aesthetic during the days of the guillotine. In an era that desires the transformation of the body, and transcendence through the corporeal, the bloodred lips of the vampire prove enticing, while the zombie, falling apart before our eyes, becomes a black joke about our worst social fears.
“I’m the Slayer … and you’re history!”
In the late 1990s the critically acclaimed television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer fused, parodied, complicated, and nuanced the American fascination with the apocalyptic and the gothic. Running for one hundred and forty-four episodes over seven seasons, Buffy told the story of a teenage girl, seemingly a typical petite blonde in Southern California, interested in cheerleading and boys. The conceit of the show was that Buffy was actually “the Chosen One,”
the one girl in every generation empowered to fight vampires, demons, and a whole host of monsters. Since Buffy’s school, Sunnydale High, sat atop a convergence of dark mystical energy known as a “Hellmouth,” the young slayer could be supplied with plenty of monsters, week after week.43
Joss Whedon, the creator and sometime writer/director for the series, has described Buffy as a kind of feminist fairy tale. Media descriptions have underscored this claim frequently, seeing the show as an example of what the late ’90s christened “girl power.” The Village Voice described Buffy as “a female empowerment saga,” while critic Michel Ostow saw its lead character as a model of feminine strength. When the show premiered, most discussions of its politics centered on how Buffy combined a traditional femininity with supernatural strength and monster-killing prowess.44
Buffy
Buffy’s feminist inclinations and how that message engages its audience has received more attention than the show’s subversive cultural and political comments about the nature of society and how forces in society construct, and seek to destroy, the monster. Incorporating both traditional monster imagery and the apocalyptic concerns of 1990s America, Whedon’s series inverted the meaning of its own source material and made Buffy into a different kind of monster slayer from anything audiences had ever seen.45
American society seemed consumed with the idea of the apocalypse as the new millennium drew closer, expecting the year 2000 to bring either a technological or theological “end times.” Buffy and her friends (who came to include a witch, a werewolf, two somewhat reformed vampires, and a centuries-old demon) avert numerous apocalyptic events, so much so that it becomes a running joke on the series. Buffy’s sometime boyfriend, Riley, comments in season four that his time with the slayer has made him wonder “what the plural of apocalypse is.” When Giles, a heavily redacted Van Helsing who serves as Buffy’s father figure through most of the series, announces dramatically in season five that “it’s the end of the world,” Buffy and her crew respond in unison “Again!!”
Buffy clearly and deftly satirized the imagery of apocalypse prevalent in American culture. Rather than the foreordained apocalypse of evangelical Christianity, the end of the world is averted again and again through human agency. American millenarianism that imagined the coming of God’s judgment on the modern world is replaced in Buffy by an apocalypse of evil, engineered by monsters. These apocalyptic events are often prophesied but are never predetermined and are prevented through acts of self-sacrifice and unconditional love on the part of Buffy and her “Scooby Gang.”46
In the final episode of the final season (“Chosen”), Buffy and her friend Willow (who came out as a lesbian and became a powerful Wiccan in the course of the series) deconstruct the patriarchal source material that formed the very basis of the series. Obviously the idea of the “Chosen One” draws from centuries of monotheistic religion’s fascination with messianic male prophets and saviors. Buffy had already nuanced that imagery by presenting a woman as the Chosen One. The final episode subverted messianic imagery completely by having the power that male elders channeled through generations of slayers explode its parameters and become the property of women all over the world.
Buffy not only deconstructed American notions of apocalypse, it also complicated the American monster tradition. Although Buffy centers on the monster slayer and her allies, it also systematically breaks down the narrative of ordered community of respectability that destroys the monstrous other. The show achieves this by frequently exploring the dangers of becoming a monster while trying to fight them. In the classic season three episode “Gingerbread,” Buffy’s mom and the other adults of Sunnydale band together against “occult influences” in their community, a clear reference to America’s satanic moral panics. Joyce Summers issues a rallying cry to rid the town of “the witches, the monsters and the slayers.” If this crusade to destroy the monsters succeeded it would mean, of course, the destruction of her own daughter and several of her daughter’s friends.47
Those who fight monsters should also beware lest they fall in love with them. The dark eroticism of the monster has been a theme running through hundreds of years of American cultural history. Buffy explores this idea but goes beyond it. In the first and second seasons, Buffy’s friend Xander falls for what turns out to be a cannibalistic giant bug and a millennia-old mummy. He eventually has a relationship with a vengeance demon (that looks like a young woman) and almost marries her. Willow has an Internet relationship with someone whom we learn is an ancient demon that has escaped into cyberspace. She later has a long-term relationship with Oz the werewolf and, after she comes out of the closet, experiences a fulfilling, deeply moving, and doomed romance with a fellow female witch.
Buffy’s own romance with two very different vampires became central to the narrative arc of the series. The relationship between Buffy and Angel, a brooding Byronic “vampire with soul,” became the centerpiece of the early seasons. Angel, though reformed and tortured by his past deeds, is presented to us as having once been the cruel and lethal vampire Angelus. In season two, Angel reverts to his monstrous self, though he later finds redemption once again. After season five, Buffy’s romantic interest centers on Spike, another vampire of legendary evil, who seeks and finds redemption in an effort to win Buffy’s love and admiration. Along the way, these “monsters” not only form a romantic bond with Buffy, they become a part of Buffy’s community of misfits whose bonds of love and friendship often prove essential to the salvation of the world.
The possibility that the vampire, and the monster more generally, could be loved and cared for as well as darkly desired marks a new departure for the American monster tradition. The monsters of Buffy are sometimes creatures that must be destroyed or made into sexual fetishes. But they are also potential “life” partners and members of a community in which difference and the most extreme varieties of otherness prove no barrier to companionship. The slayer calls into question the need for slayers.
The end of Buffy in 2003 coincided with the growth of an even more popular manifestation of the vampire craze, one that borrowed heavily from certain aspects of other undead narratives while rejecting wholesale most of the vampiric tradition. If Buffy called into question the notion of slaying monsters, Stephenie Meyer took a very different route. Her monsters are not monsters at all.
Twilight of the Gods
The creature came to Stephenie Meyer in a dream. Meyer, a conservative Mormon, dreamed of a vampire in love with a girl. The vampire also thirsted to drink the girl’s blood. Originally, Meyer wrote the book for her own enjoyment, creating it as something on the order of Internet fan fiction. Submitting her work to fourteen agents before finding someone interested in marketing the book, her Twilight series had, by 2008, sold over one hundred million copies and been translated into thirty-seven languages. In 2008 Time magazine included her on its list of the “100 most influential people” of the year.48
Twilight tells the story of a romance between teenager Isabella (Bella) and Edward Cullen, a century-old vampire who masquerades as a teenager in a Forks, Washington, high school. Edward and Bella are typical star-crossed lovers, kept apart less by circumstance than by the fact that Edward’s attachment to Bella includes a strange mixture of lust and predatory hunger, a desire to literally fuck her to death. Readers are asked to empathize (indeed idealize) Edward for his effort to keep himself from ripping Bella apart and eating her.49
Over the course of four books, readers watch Edward become Bella’s protector and eventually her husband, introducing her into a secret world of supernatural creatures. Maintaining sexual purity until their marriage, the rather flat characters managed to hold reader interest with the titillating conceit of whether or not they would ever consummate their love. It also gave the opportunity for Meyer to endanger Bella repeatedly, allowing Edward in turn to save her.
Notably, Edward and his fellow vampires are an odd set of monsters, missing almost all the trappings of either traditional
folklore or Hollywood legend. Edward is part of a nuclear family, a loving, highly traditional family that seems representative of 1950s dreams of domestic bliss. Unaffected by crosses or holy water, these rather bourgeois vampires can even walk in the sun (sunlight makes them “sparkle” rather than burst into flame). Moreover, many of them are termed “vegetarian vampires,” a particularly silly misnomer given that they use their speed and strength to hunt, kill, and feed on various woodland creatures instead of humans. Perhaps most notably, Meyer’s creatures are shorn even of fangs, the most basic accoutrement of vampire mythology.
Meyer’s reworking of the vampire mythos, to the point that Edward and friends are best thought of as another fantasy creature entirely different from the vampire, reflects a culture of conservatism from which the book came and to which it appeals. Stephenie Meyer’s deeply conservative religious faith worked its way into her dream of vampires. In a time when conservative religious organizations waged “abstinence only” campaigns, Edward fought to control his appetite for Bella’s blood while simultaneously refusing to have sex, since the act itself would likely overwhelm his self-control and lead to her brutal death. Meyer contains the imagery of alternative sexuality almost always associated with vampires, first by completely ignoring the homoerotic dimensions of the vampire present since Stoker’s novel and, second, by only allowing Edward and Bella to consummate within the confines of a highly traditional, hyper-heterosexual marriage.
Meyer’s books, and to a degree the films based on them, attempt to reconstruct the vampire legend as a tale of the struggle for “family values.” Christina Seifert of Bitch magazine coined the term “abstinence porn” to describe Twilight in a 2009 article. Seifert shows that the first three novels in the series are really about the pair’s successful “struggle to keep their pants on” and a celebration of the patriarchal family wrapped up in literally sparkling supernatural elements. The final book, Breaking Dawn, sees the pair finally married when Bella becomes a teenage bride of nineteen to the significantly older Edward. Their marriage replicates traditionalist assumptions about marriage with Bella offering her body to Edward and subsuming herself into the power relationships within his family. When not being brutalized in bed (she is covered in welts and wounds after her first session of lovemaking with Edward), she is making dinner for his mother or engaged in other domestic chores.50
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