The Vampire: An Evil Monster or a Troubled Beast?

            The vampire is a monster that serves as one of the earliest monsters to scare children and adults alike as they may possibly walk into the night. The earliest vampire stories show vampires as these mythical beings that do everything in their power to find victims in order to consume them and drink the blood of the living, but the modern-day vampire has changed very much from the vampires of the Victorian era.
            Vampires motive for why they do the things they do has been one of the things changed about vampires. The old Victorian era vampire had two simple goals, to feed and to take over the world be consuming all living humans into an army of vampires. The modern vampire never truly has any such goals of world domination or any malicious intent, rather simply feeding to survive in a world that doesn't want them. One reason for this change is because readers have grown to be accustomed to dynamic characters and villains in their story, although a villain with a simple motivation can still work, many readers wish to see their monsters with more human aspects, and writers wish to flex their ability on writing interesting monsters.
            Another major change in vampire stories is the human aspects added to them. Bill Compton is an example of this change, as he cares about Sookie and loves her. When compared to Dracula who in the novel has no interest in love or any other human emotion but to simply seek power and rule. Yet Dracula also received the modern take in the Coppola film as he is shown as previously having a wife in his human life, and he seeks Mina because she looks almost exactly like his dead wife, making the Dracula in the film and novel, seem very different even though they are the same in every other way.
            The biggest change in vampires is their sexual desires. In Victorian eras there was a clear pattern of only male vampires biting women, as at the time a male biting a male was considered something that should never be done, and women had the strange role of only consuming children to get the point across of the non-mother they would become. The Victorian vampire had a small selection of people they could bite in the stories, which reflected the social standards of the time. As we have grown more open as a society, so too has the vampire. Now in literature and other mediums vampires consume all people with no regard for gender, as males bite males and females bite females, such as with the fangbangers in Dead Until Dark, not care about the gender of the vampire just if they can get bit.
            Vampires are one of the most changed monsters through the course of literary history. Starting off as another mindless beast seeking world domination, to sympathetic figures that didn't ask for their state of undead. Vampires are now a cultural icon in the western world and will continue to change and evolve as long as societal views continue to change and evolve.