Too Damn Many

[Welcome back! Sorry for the extended silence — I’ve been catching up on some long-delayed work, after a summer filled with travel. I have a few topics to write about, but let’s get started with a post on vampires.]

Reflecting on horror and monsters over Halloween, I was struck by the glut of vampires we have today. And it seems that my greatest complaint is that there are just too many vampires. It seems to me that most monsters are best as single, threatening entities; while zombies work best as a horde and werewolves might run in a pack, ghosts and vampires, mummies and golems, the hydra and the Frankenstein creature work best as individuals. So the idea that there’s a subculture of vampires, one existing just outside of our own, strikes me as... well, awkward and unnecessary. The great works of horror literature avoid that. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend works because there are ONLY vampires, but they really don’t have a society. The uniqueness argument I put forth here is turned around –— it is not the monster, but the human protagonist who is alone. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, despite its length, has five vampires total: Dracula himself, three unnamed “brides” in Transylvania (who never leave the castle), and poor Lucy, who’s dispatched fairly quickly. This paucity highlights the threat Dracula himself poses. But now we have “good” vampires fighting against their crueler, animalistic fellows — and often some hierarchy in place to govern them all. Seriously? I’m not sure if I should blame Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire and its sequels) for this subculture, or what. But it’s really getting out of hand. Let me have rogue monsters, unique beings who are horrifying because they break the (taxonomic) rules, not because they are in a category unrecognized by humans (or, perhaps, “prey” would be a better description...).

This is not to say all recent vampire fiction is bad — I really do enjoy True Blood (though I’ve not yet read any of the original Charlene Harris novels), even if I’ve been avoiding the Twilight saga as much as possible. (Though my curiosity was piqued, it was also fairly well satisfied by “watching” Twilight. And I’ve had a number of trusted friends warn me not to read the books.) But neither True Blood nor Twilight are really horror stories — they’re romances with supernatural elements.

Noël Carroll has written extensively on how horror works; that is, how rational people can be honestly scared by a fiction. Rather than detailing his arguments here, the bottom line is that the monster threatens our cognitive categories (vampires are neither alive nor dead), and they present some actual, physical threat. Having a whole society of monsters forces recognition of a new category, and with that recognition comes acceptance. And if the monster is accepted into our world, it is no longer cognitively threatening; the troll in "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" is just part of their world. And it’s not frightening for its troll-ness, but its threat to eat the goats. Lt. Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation is an alien, and a fairly frightening one at that, but he’s a welcome member of the crew, and his potential monstrosity is dissipated by his having a place in the categories the story has established.

The problem with these subcultures, for me, is that they dissipate the threat of the unique monster. I’m also not enough of a conspiracy theorist to accept the premise of a subculture existing just beyond our own, and that makes it hard for me to enjoy these works. I’m not willing to accept that idea. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter series, I often wonder how the two worlds (magic and mundane) can be kept so utterly separate. J. K. Rowling has hinted that there’s a branch of the Ministry of Magic that simply charms Muggles and spins the news with false reports (think MIB using magic, rather than alien technology), but it’s always been a little problem for me. It’s never really in the forefront, the way that True Blood highlights the outing of vampires. Rowling’s wizards exist in a different world; Twilight’s vampires and shape-changers are solely in ours, though normal people are oblivious to their ancient hierarchies and long-standing hostilities. And there are too many supernatural beings for me to suspend my disbelief on that count.