First of all I needed to catch up with True Blood which is quite possibly my favourite thing on television at the moment (especially if we're not counting children's programs). The glitzy, HBO-funded mixture of fine acting, well-formed characters and civil rights allegories all to the heady soundtrack of blusey rockabilly and sultry Southern accents has me utterly hooked. (Incidentally what is it about Lousiana and horror? Rice, Brite and now Harris have all crammed the state with their own brands of vampires and then there's the New Orleans voodoo and the ghost stories from the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. Is there something about fabulous accents that just attracts fright?) Now I know its based on a series of books and I know the second season is already out in the states, but shh! don't tell me what happens. I have to admit I feel a little guilty for not reading the books. I read the first one way back when I was still a member of the SF and Fantasy Book Club, but I never found the time to read the others because you see as much as I love the vampire genre, this sort of thing I prefer to watch than read and Charlaine Harris' style isn't really my sort of thing, it's more mystery and romance than horror and fantasy.
In fact until a month or so ago, I'd rather gone off vampire literature, which is a terrible thing to say considering that's what I write but it's true. Anne Rice got a little too involved in her cod philosophy and started going off the rails, to my mind, half way through the third in her Vampire Chronicles, Brian Lumley's work is a little too bleak and epic for me and the Anita Blake series wasn't dark enough. Now we have the "paranormal romance" genre muddying things up and skimping on the gore. Until very recently the newest vampire novel I'd read and enjoyed was Poppy Z Brite's utterly perverted Lost Souls which came out in the mid nineties (of course I didn't read it then, I would have been about six) simply because violent gay goths rather appeal to me.
Thankfully now I've got my grubby hands on a copy of Let the Right One In by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindovist, having seen (and adored) the movie, and I'm pleased to say that I'm enjoying the book just as much as I did the film, despite a few sections in which the translation from Swedish is a little clunky. It has that unsettlingly dispassionate air that splatterpunk had but uses it in a way the splat-pack could never have done. There's a frankness and a realism to it that's just as disturbing as the violence. Yes it's grim, yes it's disturbing, but it's so refreshing to find something so innovative and affecting is still being done in literature.
Because, you see, that is whatmakes the vampire such an enduring and fascinating creature. It's so much more versatile than, say, the ghoul (don't call them zombies, zombies are corpses reanimated by magic, those shambling, contagious creatures so beloved of George A Romero are technically ghouls) or the werewolf. Vampires can be metaphors for sexual dominance, transgression, AIDS, addiction, repression religious fervour and the power of faith, or... well... practically anything. They're still being toyed with in film but literature had become a little stagnant. Well, let's hope Mr Lindvist's incredible efforts breathe a bit more life into the genre again. Or should that be undeath?
(Oh and a quick word on the upcoming remake of "Let the Right One In". I'm swimming with mixed emotions on that. On the one hand hurrah Hammer are making a vampire film that doesn't involve rave music, on the other hand why remake a perfect film? I don't buy into this trend of remaking foreign language pieces or older films simply to "give the original a wider audience". Let's hope Hammer's 2010 offering "The Resident" will be more original.)
Speaking of the wonders of the vampire on film, my vampire day is reaching its peak with low-budget New Zealand action flick, Perfect Creature, which I'm watching as I write. In a way it's the inverse of True Blood. Where True Blood has a society in which vampires are "coming out" and trying to be accepted in society while most of them still act like Lord Ruthven (fiction's first decadent aristocratic vampire, beating Dracula by nearly a century), Perfect Creature is set in an elegant neo-gothic future in which vampires are a race evolved from humanity, respected as a benign and friendly fraternity until one loses his marbles and dashes about killing people and infecting them with his own polluted blood. The script is messy and the acting often below par, but the special effects are incredible and the concept is fascinating. It combines the two main disparate directions the vampire film went in the nineties; the artier, high-concept styles of The Addiction and Nadja and the adrenaline trash of Underworld and Blade along with aspects from wider fantasy, with a dieselpunk twist that reminds me of Dark City and sequences reminiscent of Hammer. It even has Zeppelins. Zeppelins!
The vampire may be one of the oldest figures in fantasy (in all senses of the word) and it may be one of the most popular, but these three pieces I've been looking at today have proved that it's not going to die out or stop evolving, and that's a reassuring thing for a vampire fan like me. Twilight and it's ilk have given the genre a bad reputation in recent months, but, as Lestat would put it "There's still life in the old lady yet!"
I'll leave you with a nicely splattered still from Perfect Creature (pilfered from the truly brilliant blog Taliesin meets the Vampires, if you love fictional bloodsuckers do check it out: Taliesin's reviews cover everything from the obscure to the mainstream and does so in a fair but interesting way). Although looking at it, I'm now terribly tempted to include "pretty men covered in fake blood" as a regular feature. Hmm.
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