Vampires and the Other
Be me a little. – John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In
What is the Other?
I first discovered the concept of the Other when I started university, when we did a year-long course on Romanticism. What’s the relationship? Well, in the Long Nineteenth Century, with burgeoning empires and a growing interest in all things ‘exotic’, writers and philosophers began exploring the idea of people ‘not like us’, i.e. the Other. Sometimes treated sympathetically, even admiringly, the Other can also be seen as a threat.
We even use ‘to other’ as a verb to describe how society can marginalise groups who are deemed to be different in some way, such as gender identity, sexuality, race, religion, disability, and so much more.
Literature and media as a whole often filters personal and societal anxieties (such as the Other) through particular lenses, and what better lens than horror? And when it comes to horror, yes, there are zombies and werewolves and ghosts, but there are also vampires, which have symbolised so many things over the centuries…
Another short history of vampires
The vampire is a classical representation of these neuroses: from the sexual repression and xenophobia of the Victorian era to vampirism being treated as a virus in a post-Aids world, what should just be a fantastical figure holds so much more.
The very first vampires (in Europe, at least) were more zombie-like: dead peasants supposedly climbing out of their graves to feast on their neighbours. Now, that’s an easy fear to understand, that of there being a threat within your own community in a time of villages and serfdom.
It’s interesting to see, then, that the first literary vampires, such as Carmilla, Lord Ruthven, and the legendary Varney the Vampire, are a bit more noble, with the implication that they’re financially driven. I’d argue that the likely readers of these were at least middle class and since all three of these vampires pop up in the century after the French Revolution (along with the stirrings of class consciousness), it’s a reflection of how easily the better-off could lose their standing.
Then there’s Dracula. Taylor Kern describes him as ‘having physical, spiritual, and cultural otherness’. The Count may be nobility, but he’s also from a different land, and singlehandedly sets so many vampiric stereotypes. But after that, the diversity of vampire representation blossoms like a drop of blood on a white nightgown…
And that’s where it gets complicated. And interesting.
The vampire as the Other – first threat, then sympathetic figure (sometimes)
So, as we’ve already established, the Other is a Bad Thing to Be and vampires reflect our anxieties – so what are the big examples we can look at?
Obviously, Dracula. You can tell how fin de siècle the novel is by the sense of decay that imbues it. Yes, the British Empire was booming, but was it really? War was always looming on the horizon, the Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological surge was having growing pains (see: inner city slums), and everyone was very, very sexually repressed. And then along comes a European nobleman who wants to know all about our land in order to infiltrate it and eventually conquer it. And who are his main targets? Our ladyfolk, of course. He threatens to plunge us into a dark age of superstition like those ‘backwards’ Eastern European lands and have us lose all sense of rationality – again, Romanticism and the Gothic had already had their heyday and, to quote Roger Luckhurst in Horror: A Literary History, there was a ‘Victorian crisis around the competing authority of science and religion’.
Salem’s Lot continues with this theme of the literal outsider wreaking havoc on the small town (and I would also throw Midnight Mass in this category too) – again, there’s a sense of decline as young people leave both the Lot and Crockett Island in search of better opportunities. In the case of the Lot, there’s also the strong whiff of corruption, which Barlow and his familiar Straker can so easily take advantage of.
But then we start to see a shift, with the likes of Buffy and Interview with the Vampire – yes, vampires can be evil, but they can also be tormented, feeling, almost sympathetic. The Otherness now shifts to these characters being people out of time and therefore, out of step – after all, how can someone who’s three hundred years old relate to a college student?
If I dare mention Twilight, this also fits. The main vampires are socially integrated but there’s a distance there too: they all have their own trauma and histories that simply render them different to a seventeen-year-old worried about getting their driver’s license and passing the SATs. In fact, they become quite attractive and aspirational, in a world in which often heroines ‘actively seek a sexual relationship with their vampire counterparts and are even willing to abandon their identities and constantly risk their lives for a chance to become part of the vampire world’ (Kate Buckley).
Not only this, but the portrayal of the vampires begins to say something more about being Othered – now, it’s not necessarily their creator going ‘ew, look at this monster’, it’s more ‘who made this monster’? As Del Sandeen points out in this excellent article, the likes of Eli in Let the Right One In and various of Sinners are marginalised against their will thanks to societal mores.
Even portrayals of Dracula are changing – often, he’s now desperately in love with Mina or has been cursed in some way. He’s no longer just a predator (see my previous Dracula post for my complaints on that).
Coldharbour: Are Vampires Real?
I’m not going to say just yet what kind of ‘Other’ Coldharbour’s vampires are, so here’s Alex and Elizabeth, together again:
The café was still empty, except for Elizabeth, who was sipping an espresso at Joe’s table.
Alex slid onto the seat opposite with a wince, nodding at the piping hot cup of builder’s tea waiting for her. Cup hovering below her lips, Elizabeth asked if everything was alright.
Her stare was as sharp as ever.
Maybe Alex could’ve just made up some ridiculous lie as her anxiety, her fear, her rage rushed through her, but then …
Then she remembered that she had last felt such indignation, such insistence, when she’d faced down the likes of Barrett and Eleanor and her own uncle, and instead, what slipped out of Alex’s mouth with strength and certainty and solid conviction was:
“Vampires are real.”
Coldharbour II: The Dead Land comes out on Halloween. Read the first in the series, Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, now.
For more on the vampire and the Other, take a look at:
The Evolution of the Vampire Image
Gothic Fiction and the Vampiric Other
The Evolution of the Vampire Other
