Sweet Goth has been lucky enough to get to vamp out every Tuesday night with a group of like-minded students. We have been looking at the representation of child vampires (and the motif occurs with all ages of vampire in literature) as they morph from human into vampire. In the Claudia section of Interview with a Vampire -- the film -- she changes from a scruffy human child into a beautiful child vampire. I never really wondered about the function of this oft-depicted change, writing it off as just offering the vampire better access to food sources (prey). Then one of my students' speculated that this alteration in appearance, this metamorphosis, could function as a de-humanizing moment, marking the transition from living human to undead human. It was a good catch on the student's part, and one that bears considering. (Perhaps my next conference paper?)
Of course, there is nothing to say that both could not be occurring -- access to prey and dehumanization. We see these "make-overs" all the time on television as a "sow's ear" gets turned into a "silks purse" as the Cinderella sheds her old tattered and torn clothing and changes into a bright shining gown fit for the handsome prince and the ball. This metaphor is of course flawed since it likens the living human to a "sow's ear" and the newly emerged vampire into the "silk purse." And attractive folks do get preferential treatment in society -- you know, the 4 doesn't go out with the 10 sort of treatment. As a vampire, I'd like to move closer to a 10.
Then randomly throw in the even more modern vampire representation in which one is stuck with the body one "died" in. And toss in the newish MTV series Teen Wolf where new-made werewolves not only are healed of any preexisting illnesses but are turned into 10's, and one sees the werewolf genre appropriating the idea even as the vampire genre releases it.
So this week I am offering no answers, just a pool of sort of random observations, and ask, are vampires an attractive nuisance (like a dangerous swimming pool in the neighbor's back yard), or is this "death" and "rebirth" a representation of dehumanization?
