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Vampires: The Earth, Their Moral Struggles & Ours

Starting as a meditation on mortality after the illness and death of her late husband, Margot Adler began to obsessively read vampire novels. She has now read more than 240 vampire novels - from teen to adult, from detective, to romance, from gothic to modern.
Although it started as a look at issues of mortality, none of that explained the seven billion dollars Hollywood spent on vampire movies in the last two years. "Every society creates the vampire it needs," wrote the feminist scholar Nina Auerbach. England in the 19th century had the largest ports in the world, so Stoker created his version of Dracula in part, because of England’s own fear of outsiders, disease, and immigration.

In the last fifteen years, but possibly going back to Dark Shadows, in 1967, and the vampire Barnabus, our society has created the a very different kind of vampire from what went before. Take Spike and Angel from Buffy, or Bill Compton, Eric Northman and Jessica from True Blood, or Edward, Alice and all the Cullens from Twilight, or Damon and Stefan from The Vampire Diaries, Mick St. John from
Moonlight and the vampires in the British and American versions of Being Human. Here’s what they have in Common: they are all struggling desperately to be
moral despite being predators. And they often fail, As so we. Our blood is oil; our prey is the planet. This change in our vampires most likely came about around 1968, when we saw, for the first time, our own planet from space – fragile and vulnerable. We saw our own role as morally compromised. It is issues of power, choice, identity, the fate of the earth and the sense of teens as outsiders that give vampires their current traction much more so than sex, or even repressed sex.



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