Week Two: Interview With the Vampire
Vampires make up one of the largest horror motifs found in horror literature. They represent darkness, lust, blood, and the mystery of night. While vampires still embody the evil and repulsion of other villains (i.e. werewolves and monsters), they embody an alluring tendency that attracts both readers and the characters that they surround themselves with. This makes the vampire a more complex symbol in literature than meets the eye.
Without having known anything about Interview With the Vampire, I have to say that it was not what I was expecting. I’m more familiar with vampires like Nosferatu, and Christopher Lee’s adaptations of Dracula. Anne Rice created a new type of vampire paved the way for a new generation of vampire fanatics. A demographic that can appreciate the intrigue of horror with the lust of an evil gentleman.
Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire helped to change the way that the public viewed vampires. She introduced a character that comes off as being suave with elegance, poise, and charm. It becomes hard for us in this day and age to even begin imagining a time when vampires were “evil,” thanks to Rice and novels such as the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Of course, Meyer’s vampires could not have existed without its ancestor, Rice’s vampire. We see vampires desiring more than just blood, we see them desiring love and happiness. Their circumstance has trapped them in a world of misfortune and misunderstanding.
The evolution of the vampire continues, as the audience shifts from adults to young adults looking for books that peak their own interests. Rice created a vampire that, while evil, is still human. They still have human emotions and thoughts and want things that humans want.
The dynamic of the vampire shifted after this. Horror was no longer meant only to instill fear in the reader’s minds but to introduce other emotions, emotions forbidden from normally being associated with such topics; lust, romance, and curiosity; all paired with the already established evil nature of vampires and villains themselves.
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