Vampires … Shmampires!
How much of this vampire nonsense do we have to put up with?
The whole thing started with a decent novel by John Polidori called, are you ready for this, The
Vampyre. Published in 1819. Then along came Bram Stoker with Dracula
in 1897. And that Dracula took the ridiculous old folk
stories and superstitions to a new height of the absurd.
Now I gotta say
these guys could write. I mean they
could really write in a style that
just pulls the reader into their darkest thoughts. And before movies and, worse yet, television
and even worse than that a huge waste of resources on modern digital special
effects.
In my mind
though the work of Mary Shelly and her novel Frankenstein is the best
written of that whole horror
genre. Shelly’s prose is just
wonderfully done.
Still, back to vampires – blood sucking chacaburas and other such brain compost
has gotten wa-a-ay out of hand. Vampires
that are beautiful and fall in love and stop sucking blood because their lu-huv-vy-huvy love love is so strong.
And they become some kind of born-again
humanists who fight any number of new baddies
that are supposedly even worse.
On the
flip-side, I love the superhero comic
book genre. Superman and Batman,
Aquaman, etc.. Those comic books are
what actually taught me to read. And the
supervillians in those superhero
comics were actually believable to me (as
a kid).
I mean those bad guys were evil and crooks and baddy-bad-bad without all the bloody
horror stuff – which I hated as a kid.
Those superheros
and supervillians were so over-the-top, even as a boy I knew none of it was
real. I just thought it was cool.
I never put a towel around my neck and jumped off the roof of the house
thinking I could fly. Maybe my
imagination was stunted, but I wasn’t stupid.
I did want to be super-strong
and see through girls clothes, but I
never had any desire to bite somebody on the neck so I could become immortal
and turn into a bat.
Later in life,
kind of biting a pretty girl’s neck did become inviting and a nice experience,
but I wasn’t trying to … like … break the skin and suck blood. Actually that never crossed my mind –
really. I have bitten my own tongue and
other dumb moves where I have had to taste my own blood. Blood, to me, is not very tasty. I find it mostly not something I could ever want to have to do on a regular
basis.
Years ago, when
I ate meat (which I haven’t done for
decades and decades) (now, don’t judge … I am very healthy, have been all
my life and for over half of it, I haven’t eaten meat) (live with it) - - -
Anyway, when I did eat meat, I was always a well-done
kind of guy. Pink, bloody meat really
was not my first option.
So we have our
handsome, beautiful lovey-doveys running around, living forever and doing good,
these days. The origin of the
super-di-duper evil villains, such as Dracula
and Vlad the Impaler , has gone all
cutesy and those guys are now the good guys. What!
I hate
that!
Did you ever
read up on Vlad the Impaler? There was real person who is sometimes credited with starting the whole Count Dracula thing. And ole Vlad was beyond evil. That guy was truly truly nasty and nobody made him up – he was very real.. It would be almost impossible to invent a fictional villian who was that bad.
But with all the
vampire nonsense coming out these days, writers are doing their best. Even Hannibal
Lector is a cutey-pie next to ole Vlad.
They’re all trying to out-bad
the bad guys by turning the old bad guys into good-guys. Hollywood even
tried to pull that off with nasty Hannibal.
Can you say, “retread?”
So I say, “Lay
off the vampire schtick. They have their
coffins to roll around in. Leave ‘em
there.”
{{All of my
in-depth research was done on Wikipedia.}}
Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014
Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw
without looking) at:
It’s free – all I ask is that you post a review.
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