The Appeal of Vampires: a Sensual Awakening

I’m no longer sure there is an appeal to vampires that’s any different from the appeal of other antiheroes, such as pirates or cowboys/girls or folks in uniform or witches and warlocks.

One reader says the appeal of vampires is the heightened senses conveyed in their stories, another says it’s the bad boy allure, another says it’s their immunity through power, and still more call it the aspect of danger or the tortured soul or the gift of eternity.

Vampire as the Antihero

Couldn’t most of these appealing traits be applied to any antihero? Someone who is set apart whether by job or by personality or by general essence? There is something different about them. A challenge to the norm. We have to step out of ourselves and what we know, take a chance, take the risk in following them.

The desire to take a risk isn’t necessarily the same as liking the “bad boy” or “bad girl.” Look how many have fallen in love with the good vampires of Twilight. But vampires do offer something different and, perhaps, on some level, also recognizable. Is that what makes the desirable antihero?

What is it that makes one reader develop a passion for the vampire antihero and another the pirate and another the lone space cowboy? Maybe it reverts back to people’s first awakenings of sensuality or first taste of adventure.

The Sensual Awakening

When I was fairly young, my older sister sat me down to watch Christopher Lee as Dracula. I saw something I’d never seen before—a man bent over a woman who leaned her head back willingly, opening her neck to his lips. I saw something in their eyes that I’d never seen in kid-TV. Sensuality. Heightened pleasure. It looked a little dangerous but irresistible. A bit like sex.

For someone else, it might have been the cowboy sweeping the wild-haired woman up onto his horse. Or maybe that look on the pirate’s face when she saw the reward of his travels: adventure. Maybe a lifelong passion derives from our first taste of something new, something that sets the adrenaline pumping and imprints in our memory.

Stories imprint in our memory. Something sticks. I’m not sure we always realize where our desire comes from, but our peculiar passions are part of our growth. Vampires have not only grown into our different cultures, they have grown into our individual psyches. Vampires are frightening creatures of the night, on the one hand, and also the night’s intriguing potential.

Like the werewolf, vampires have held a lasting appeal. I imagine all antiheroes do, in whatever dress they wear. They offer something different though recognizable, something to take us out of ourselves while seeing further in. They require a step away from safety, with the promise of adventure, the promise of good or of wicked pleasure—which perhaps comes in knowing more of ourselves.

Patricia is author of the vampire novel Beside the Darker Shore.

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