Picture from Wikipedia "Barnabas Collins" Page

At a conference recently, the conversation turned to a discussion of vampire fans. I have been thinking about the idea since then; asking myself the question: Is is creepy if I, and older female, ogle the young "vampire" characters trotting across my small screen?

 I remember when Dark Shadows arrived on our small black and white television (the picture was delivered in black and white for those of you who have never experienced it). All of us very young girls were "in love" with Barnabas Collins. He was the topic of lunch conversation, and the bane of teachers who had to endure the continued whispers about him in class. We giggled over him as he suffered the angst of having been made a vampire through a curse cast upon him; he did not choose to become one. He did not choose eternal blood-sucking, undead life.

For many of us, if not most, it was our first real experience with a vampire (discounting the vamping of Bella Lugosi's Dracula which was the stuff of Halloween costumes, and the vampires of Abbot and Costello).

Did you note above that I said that we were in love with Barnabas Collin? We KNEW that he was a character, an actor pretending to be a vampire. We were hot (well, as hot as elementary girls could be) about the character -- I doubt many of us were attracted to the actor himself. I will grant that given the age difference between a post-pubescent child and the actor, our fandom had elements of creep even when not considering that our real attraction was to the character of a couple-of-hundred year old vampire. But our gaze, our fan-mentality, saw the power and attraction of the character.

I am not sure, and this is true speculation and my thoughts are ongoing, but I have to wonder if the issue is less the age of the person gazing at the character (remembering that the actor playing Barnabas was Johnathan Frith who was certainly waaaayyyy older than much of his fanbase), and more about fans who fail to understand that the actor is not the character -- and then behave towards the actor inappropriately? Does "reality TV" have anything to do with our cultural loss of the separation of actor and character? And why shouldn't an older person enjoy the attractive vampire, such as Eric Northman, trotting across the screen? I think all these issues and questions need answering since they, in part, concern the sort of society we live inside of.