Vampire Hunter pt. 1

I crept into the cemetery after dark through a narrow opening between the fence and the bushes. It was creepy, but my rent was due and my landlord was not too fond of people of my persuasion; vampire photographers.

I stumbled over the rough ground past tombstones which glowed pale under the strobe of the moonlight filtering though the threatening clouds. It was a bad night to be entering such a place, but I'd heard rumors through the Twitterverse that vampires frequented this particular mausoleum. And if they were there, I needed to immortalize them in digital to pay my rent. The tabloids paid well for "authentic" vampire pictures, even if the vampire was not the hunky sort.

The skull partially buried in mulch but still managing to grin at me gave me pause; and I wondered if this was the right profession for me. But in my biz, it was produce or perish, right? So I crept on as stealthily as possible between the decaying gravestones while trying to find my location on the little map of the cemetery the kind lady at the desk had given me that morning. I kicked myself now for not having taken the time to figure out the right spot in daylight, but the map had made it look deceptively easy.

I almost died when I heard the eerie moaning sound of squeaking metal. I froze in place unwilling to alert any listeners to my presence, even while knowing that if it were the vampire I sought, my heart-beat would be a loud pounding bass drum in the otherwise deserted area.

Tune in again for the next segment.later this week.. (copyright Leslie Ormandy)

Bad Endings Bite

Spoiler Alert and Bad Ending Warning: Forever Knight's ending, well, bites!

Sweet Goth has just spent some serious time watching the 1990's three season series Forever Knight, a television series produced in Canada. It took awhile before I adjusted to the 1990's hair and clothing (and on a side note, the producers might have varied both the hairstyles and clothing of the female mainstays), and adjusting to the glowy green vampire eyes, but the story-lines mostly were good enough that those could be shuddered at, but ignored.

What I can't ignore, and really resent, is when writers and producers are so desperate to end the series that they have the characters break character. (Oh, and the constant injections of the past clips as filler is also resented, but really.) The viewers have watched though 69 episodes, they have invested in the characters as they have behaved throughout all those episodes. So Nick, is anguished at being a vampire -- 800 years of "oh, damn, I'm eternal?" -- but he is trying really hard to not drink human. His friend Natalie, a Medical Examiner, is helping him in his search to become human. Over the course of the series, we have found he's brought several people "across." But when the time comes to split with his best bud and creator LaCroix because LaCroix declares it is time, Nick promises his non-girlfriend girlfriend Natalie to bring her "over" because he doesn't want to leave her behind. And instead of bringing her "across," he kills her? Why? Was she somehow chained to the city of Toronto and unable to leave the border? Could she not have traveled with them as a human? And then LaCroix who has been established as being a totally amoral and selfishly vicious alpha, kills his son because Nick wants him to. Again, why? Nothing in the character has established him as willing to kill his son.

Yes, I'm upset. I sat through 70 repetitions of the theme blurb "... endless, forever night." (Endless IS forever -- chose ONE and stick with it!) I deserved a more coherent ending.

Humans in a Vampire World

Lately I have been working with students in Tales of the Vampires, a compilation of stories in graphic novel form collected and organized by Joss Whedon. Each story is written by a different writer who worked with him on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. Each world is totally different; each story focuses on a different vampire, often telling the story of his/her/its creation. And in most of the worlds, most humans walked around totally unsuspecting that there were vampires in their midst.

Why, one wonders, look at the "normal" humans? Because doing so lays stress on many things:

• Vampires look like us. This is important because it reminds us that the monster -- as Pogo long ago said, is us. We carry the seeds of monstrous-ness within us when we place our own survival needs over those of the other creatures around us. This comes into play when the banker who recently foreclosed on the unemployed soldier's home goes home, driving his Beemer to his Million dollar McMansion. Comes into play when the boss tells the worker that they need to take a pay loss due to economics, while giving themselves a 11%, $11,000 per year raise. Yet not only do we not recognize the monster; we want to be that monster.

• The humans, too often, are totally oblivious to the vampires among them. They simply don't want to accept that such "evil" can exist. And since vampires don't really exist and are figments of literary license, there is no need to even worry about them. Criminals from some cartel are taking revenge on some other cartel through beheading and burning them. And "why doesn't someone do something about those people?"

In this book it is usually the marginalized: poor, homeless, unwanted, who become the victims -- and it is so much easier to not notice the disappearance of people who have never been noticed to begin with. So the humans go about their day to day in blind obliviousness to the vampires among them. Lambs only if they, themselves, get an unlucky economical broken leg.