I named this blog, The Good The True and The Beautiful, not only because they are the well known trinity of absolutes in God, but because they serve as the perfect arch-categories for my posts. In the short time since I began posting here, we have dealt handily with ‘The True’ and ‘The Good.’ I have decided that it is time to turn, at last, to ‘The Beautiful.’ After taking a secret poll of my readers, I have decided to tackle the subject of vampires, and why they suck.

Reader: I don’t know whether to be angrier about that pun or about the obvious lie behind your secret poll.

Author: Trust your instincts on this this one, kid.

Anyway, back to vampirism. I think that anyone with discerning taste recognizes that the quality of vampire fiction has fallen sharply, be it in books or in film. This video from Cracked.com has a very interesting take on it. * Language Warning * * Crudity Warning (I mean, it is about vampires as sex symbols…so obviously. (Of course so is most of this essay, so think about that too)) *

If you do not want to watch the video, here is a pull quote:

“At some point we stopped wanting to slay vampires and started wanting to, ya know, brush our fingers across their glimmering torsos until our tender womanhood aches with the temptation.”

I think they are mostly spot on…at first, but vampires have always been sex symbols, and one only needs to have read the Mina scenes in Dracula to know this. But there is one other pointthat they completely missed. Vampires used to be demonic, soulless monsters. There was no humanity left in them at all. In today’s stories, we have humanized our vampires; they are moral agents choosing to be good or evil as they like. But the point is not that we have humanized these devils, it is that we have vampirized ourselves.

What was the first vampire movie to loose the soulless monster? Lost Boys. By the time 1987 came around, the sexual revolution had decided the course of the West for generations. Hollywood accepted our fate and made the sex symbols from hell cool hip kids partying. Now, they still want to eat you, and the hero is still the guy who kills lots of vampires. But we see the shift with the idea of the Half-Vampires, who merely have to avoid killing humans themselves to be saved. The trend continues with Angel in ‘Buffy,’ until finally we get to the Cullens, who apparently are completely normal, except for the immortality and blood sucking.

(I chose Angel and not Edward for the pic here, out of charity to my readers.)

As we see the genre change, we also see it loose all credibility as a serious subject for film or fiction. This is because when we humanized them, we did only take away the stigma of sex, we also took away the stigma of Anti-Christ. Despite our secular agnosticism, demon movies still make loads and loads of money. From the Exorcism of Emily Rose, to the aesthetically-poor-but-thats-another-subject Paranormal Activity movies. Morally ambiguous vampires are boring because we can get all of the supernatural moral ambiguity we want in comic book movies. Vamp movies just pour into that already crowded market, and they fail as art over and over and over again.

That is why the world needs the Church to save Vampire movies. Just one story about a good man who goes toe to toe with decidedly and obviously evil monsters, bring back a Christian morality in regards to the sexual overtones, allow good to conquer evil (with good writing and my best friend as director) and vampire movies will return to their rightful place in horror flicks. Besides, nothing is cooler than watching an all powerful monster cower beneath the image of the Crucified Christ, the Anti-Vampire, the all powerful being who gives us his blood freely; not to take life, but to bring eternal life to all.