How time flies... November 2009 marks what I consider my 20th year anniversary as a vampire fan.I have always been interested in monsters, including vampires, but it was November 1989 when I began to specialize in the undead. I remember 1989 as the year when I noticed vampire pop culture broadening beyond the horror genre. The reason why? That month's issue of Psychology Today, which ran a cover story on the subject. The piece was titled "A Hunger For The Marvelous," and it was written by Katherine Ramsland. Ramsland focuses mainly on criminology and forensics these days, but she is also well-known for her writings on vampires and the works of Anne Rice.
"A Hunger For The Marvelous" really opened my eyes to what was going on with vampires at the time. Sure, I had read books that dealt with vampire folklore or classic movies, but this article was the first piece of (then) contemporary non-fiction writing that I ever read on the topic. It showed me that vampires were, pardon the pun, alive and well in modern society, in a way that no other monsters were at the time. Interestingly, it was also the first time I saw an article spotlighting, as it is worded on the cover, "the sudden, curious allure of vampires." As we have seen, every few years since 1989 the topic is "suddenly" discovered to be popular. But from my experience, Psychology Today was the first mainstream publication to run such an article.
To this day, I can't really put my finger on why the image of the vampire clicked with me and then stuck around. I think a major reason is that few monsters at the time were being treated in the same way as vampires were. There were novels about werewolves and mummies and other classic horror archetypes, but by and large those books treated the monsters as "the other." By the end of the 1980's, you could find more and more books that dealt with what it was like to be a vampire; being an outsider, I have always tended to sympathize with the monsters. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and vampire novels were the only books that I was aware of at the time that dealt with the monster's perspective.
So there you have it - 20 years, and with no end in sight.
3 comments:
As they say, "Once bitten..."
:-)
This is an anniversary worth celebrating!
To another 20!
When I was a young teen, a local grocery shop sold horror comics. Vampires were my favourite always; charismatic and deadly. I don't see those comics in little shops anymore. I write horror fiction. I'd like you to take a look at my blog if you have time.
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