Hating the Twilight franchise has been a major pastime on the internet since the mid-2000s. Social media commenters were incensed that vampires (bloodsucking night creatures modeled loosely on Vlad the Impaler) would appear as teen heartthrobs. While I never delved into the Twilight franchise or the hatred thereof, teen heartthrob vampires seem like a natural evolution when you consider how vampires have been depicted across the past two centuries.
While vampires and other blood-drinking undead have existed in folklore for millennia, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) mark two of the most definitive literary depictions of the creatures. These works and their later adaptations would establish many of the classic “vampire rules”: aversion to garlic and crosses, sleeping in coffins, weakness or death in sunlight, the inability to enter a home unless invited, and perhaps most famously, death by a wooden stake to the heart. These works also canonized the vampires’ standard powers: defiance of gravity, control over (and transformation into) nocturnal animals, limited mind control, and maintaining youth with the consumption of blood. While all these abilities can be traced back to European folklore, I want to focus specifically on vampires from Stoker’s Dracula onward, as these modern vampires display a distinct trait: irresistible seduction.
The literary Dracula is both figuratively and literally a lady killer. While he doesn’t adhere to all the modern vampire rules —he walks in sunlight, enters homes uninvited, and can die without a stake to the heart—, his power of seduction borders on otherworldly. While initially old and reclusive, Dracula becomes youthful and dashing as he consumes blood, with characters Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra feeling inexplicably drawn to him. While Dracula exerts psychic control over some men in the novel, he feeds exclusively on young attractive women, charming and seducing his way into their lives.
Post-Dracula, it’s hard to think of media portrayals of vampires that don’t display this attribute. While there’s a lot of variety in the vampire rules across Buffy, Interview with a Vampire, Underworld, Blade, True Blood, Being Human, and yes, even Twilight, the vampires all exhibit seductive traits, enticing their victims to their doom. This also explains how the vampire comedies Dracula: Dead and Loving It and What We Do in the Shadows work so well; these films leave all the vampiric powers intact but remove the vampires’ most dangerous attribute (their suave charm). By highlighting the monsters’ seductiveness, the best vampire stories even encourage their audiences to sit and consider: “Would I have the mental and emotional strength not to be seduced, or would I too fall to the vampire’s charm?”
Vampires aren’t scary because of their flight, animal transformation, or even their habit of drinking blood. The horror of vampires lies in how they court their prey as lovers; vampires seduce us and excite us until we invite them in, and in doing so, we invite death.
That’s why vampires are scary.