In modern consciousness, vampires have made quite a turn
from their monstrous origins. From Dracula
to Twilight, in just a little bit
over a century they have made a near 180 in terms of characterization. As a fan
of vampires –they’re my favorite mythical creature behind mermaids—this change is
a curious one to me.
In the earlier days of vampires, they were basically risen
corpses, zombies that fed on blood instead of flesh. There was all kinds of
interesting lore surrounding vampires—like a baby born with a cowl over its
head was destined to become a vampire. The vampires would be dead, buried, and
then revive into something that appeared human, but was less than human. This was
the case of Dracula, in the eponymous novel by Bram Stoker. Dracula was human,
a prince and a warrior. At some unexplained point, however, he died and rose
again as a vampire. But he wasn’t quite the same—Van Helsing describes him as
having a “child brain”—“He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a
heart that knew no fear and no remorse…Well, in him the brain powers survived
the physical death; though it would see that memory was not all complete. In
some faculties of mind he has been, and is, only a child…” (Stoker 263) He wasn’t
human, and was less than human. He was a monster, something that needed to be
stamped out. He was the villain of the piece, a monster that deserved to be
killed for the mere crime of existing. There was never any intent on making him
anything remotely close to human.
Somehow, somewhere, vampires started to become less of
monsters, and more sympathetic creatures. One only needs to look at Francis
Coppola’s adaptation of Dracula, nearly
one hundred years after the novel was published, to see how. Certainly, Dracula
was still the villain of the piece, but he wasn’t characterized as a monster
and a monster only. He was a broken man, forsaken by God and cursed into
half-existence. His main motivations in the movie aren’t like his book counterpart’s;
in the book he simply wanted to move to London because there were more people
there, which meant more people for him to feed on. In Coppola’s adaptation,
however, he gains a more human motivation: love. As strange as the Mina x
Dracula pairing in the movie seems to be for someone who read the novel, it is
a driving force of Dracula’s motivations. Mina is the reincarnation of his wife
Elisabeta, and he wants nothing more than to be reunited with her. In the
novel, you see him go after a random woman on the streets. He toys with Lucy
for days, draining her to near death time and time again before killing her. In
the movie, he only kills Lucy after he finds out Mina has gone to marry
Jonathan. Not necessarily the best motivation, but not the cat-and-mouse of the
book Dracula. In the movie, he became a romantic figure, driven by love and not
mere hunger.
I've seen this metamorphosis continue on into recent depictions of vampires. They have gone from being monsters to increasingly human-like. This is shown in your comments on the characterization of Stoker's Dracula and of Coppola's Dracula. Now, in the 21st century, vampires have become more human than monster compared to Stoker's complete monster and Coppola's half-monster versions of Dracula. Any monstrous-features, like the demonic form that vampires can assume, are not commonly used anymore in vampiric characters like Edward from the Twilight series. How much has the societal view of vampires being monsters of the likes of demons shifted since the release Stoker's novel and then again after the release of Coppola's film?
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