Designing the Undead

Suzy McKee Charnas

Once upon a time, very long ago and in another country, the European vampire — the grand-daddy of them all, so far as Western civilization is concerned — was born, among rural cottages and fields. This creature was a smelly, flush-faced, bloated, dead peasant who got up out of his grave at night and trudged through the village looking for a meal. A rural monster, product of the fears and superstitions of isolated, overworked, undernourished peasants, our undead Johann was said to suck the blood of his nearest and dearest for nourishment, and to die truly only with the complete destruction of his corpse (usually by fire). Well, times change, and that clod is dead now, really dead. Our current model of the beast, Farmer Johan's gentrified descendant, prefers fainting virgins on his plate, beautifully cut suits on his back, castles and titles and lots and lots of money, or maybe credit (in the true style of actual nobility), and is a lot more delicate, being killable by staking, decapitation, and other mutilations. There is no resemblance between Farmer Johan the brute and this classy modern guy who can even turn himself into a wolf or a fog at will.

Let's consider the generic creature as a marvel of imaginative evolution, developed down the years from Farmer Johan to my own Dr. Edward Weyland or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germaine. Who has he become? What circles does he, er, fly in? How does he look to us? How does he manage the cumbersome baggage he has inherited, containing all the traditional bloodsucker's requirements and handicaps — running water, garlic, native earth in the bed, that sort of thing? And lastly, the question of gender: must he always be a he, and what about his, or her, or its love life?

Roots

To start with Farmer Johan, he who lumbered home from the graveyard each night to nibble on his wife and kiddies: most of the time nobody even knew why or how he had become a vampire. The Church, the only source of explanations around at the time, offered the following scenarios, which were generally accepted (you didn't argue with the Inquisition): the deceased was a suicide, which was Not Allowed, or had made a Deal with the Devil, which was worse. His bite turned some of his kinfolks into vampires too, until the neighbors got together and put a stop to it in the approved, if gruesome, fashion.

After a couple-three hundred years of this type of panic cropping up here and there (including a case or two in America that included the European remedy of digging up and drastically mutilating the poor deceased), the original, rough-edged folk-bogie was taken up by the media of the day — books and stories in the 19th century, film in the 20th — and popularized for maximum appeal to the widest possible audience. Since few among the literate classes were interested in reading about some dead, dirt-encrusted peasant draining his in-laws, the first Western authors who took up the concept wrote about vampires more recognizable and acceptable to readers — vampires like themselves: gentry, for the most part still rural but with advantageous connections in town. Varney the vampire and Carmilla visit country seats, not peasant huts.

By the time we get to Dracula in the late 19th century, our vampire is an aristocrat very sensibly eager to abandon his unswept, isolated castle on its barren crag for the teeming streets of a metropolis — advantageous connections in place, of course. A Continental count will certainly make his way on a higher comfort-level than would Bob Cratchett, say. Class has always been of central concern in vampire literature; oddly enough they like their creature comforts, the undead do.

Over the last hundred years this figure has acquired a variety of embellishments, among which a vampirically inspired modern author must make choices. The first question about the modern literary or filmic vampire becomes, how did he come to un-die?

The favored method is induction by an older, wiser vampire from an earlier century, creating a sort of unbloodline of undescent. But this pattern implies exponentially growing mobs of vampires running around making newbies, so to speak, as the fit takes them. Since it's scarcely in the interests of predators to multiply until they outnumber their prey, there must be a reason why any particular victim was "brought across" into Fangland, when the majority of bite-ees have not been and cannot be; a compelling reason that the newbie's sponsor can present convincingly to economically savvy members of his vampire local.

It's a matter of more than species survival. If vampire-reproduction is too easy, we also run the risk of fatally diluting the traditional aristocratic style that is so vital to vampire glamour. After all, there haven't been serious numbers of real aristocrats to recruit from for some decades now. A plebian majority in the toothy ranks is not unknown in modern vampire novels and films, but it strongly alters the flavor, as it were, of the fictional mix.

What else can we use to explain our protagonist's interesting condition? The suicide theory of the Church doesn't have much bite in the day of Dr. Kevorkian. Dracula himself seems to have "come over" by sheer will-power and natural meanness, while some of his fictive kindred are explained as victims of a more or less well deserved curse. Writers of a scientific bent posit a virus or other physiological factor that produces vampires, but it's hard work to make this credible to readers familiar with medical thrillers and SF. Not surprisingly, our present-day vampire is just as likely to be an alien from another world, or a parallel universe, or a secret branch of the evolutionary tree.

The commonest literary variety of the species, however, is still your basic inductee, with a vampire mommie or daddy (see TV's Nick Knight being haunted and taunted by his vampiric papa) with whom he or she has a deeply conflicted psychological relationship.

Count Dracula would find all this a hoot, but we modern readers just lap it up.

Society, High and Low

Now, what circles does our venerable corpse move in? If there are "master" vampires going around biting new ones into being, some sort of vampire society must exist secretly alongside our own human one. The common models, taking their cue from the antiquity of the master-vampires who started it all, are Conservative with a capital C: a mafia-like mob of gangs, a feudal hierarchy of nobles and peasants, a partriarchal extended family of clans and ilks, a law-firm or governmental agency, or a version of the equally stratified worlds of rock-bands or biker-gangs. Sometimes there is a counter-society of "bad" bloodsuckers opposing the good-guy crowd our hero belongs to (or vice versa).

How such societies are organized internally and how they find ways of fitting into the larger human society around them can give rise to ingenious and entertaining permutations. In general the chosen model is followed much too closely, creating deeply boring and predictable patterns and stories that might as well be taking place in a drug-subculture or a police-subculture for that matter, and in that case, why bother with vampires at all? Or maybe this repetitiveness is a product of over-exposure and over-exploitation, leading to the dearth of original ideas that signals the decline of a sub-genre. Except this one refuses, like its subjects, to finish declining and die, already.

Generally speaking, though, and this fits in with the Conservatism of the vampire tribe if not the vampire tale itself, vampires run with the rich, being rich themselves. They often begin with stashes of ancient loot that they buried centuries ago against a rainy day, have had a long time to learn how to play the stock-market, and have a natural flair for the sharky waters of big business and government shenannigans. And modern readers, panting after more or less real possibilities of staggering wealth themselves, are not much interested in your hobo vampire, or even a modest shopkeeper type or blood bank attendant. The glamor of gold is in, and it's a bold author who ventures into the danker strata of poverty and failure.

Generally, vampire societies exist to do nothing more than perpetuate themselves, to come up with increasingly bizarre and extreme forms of entertainment to keep themselves from perishing of sheer boredom, and occasionally serving some further mission. We read of ages-old undead conspiracies, plans to take over the world — or else the world has already been taken over, and we poor humans just haven't noticed yet. In the anthology Under the Fang (in which I have a story, "Advocates," written jointly with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro), vampires are simply the ruling class and the rest of us must cope as best we can (not too different from many folks' reality, when you think about it).

Personally, I find the vampire protagonist interesting enough in himself not to need a society of equals; human society itself provides by far the richest, most resonant setting for such a creature. My very own Dr. Edward Weyland is a unique and hardy product of evolution at least as ancient as human-kind, and he don't need no stinking kinfolk. He does very well on his own, interacting solely with his prey — us. But a tale can always come along with a new twist that will change my mind about this. That is why God created more than one writer.

Image is Everything

So much for our vampire's lineage and social standing; but what does he look like? Unless we're doing gross-out disgusting horror or outrageous comedy, the short, bloated peasant vampire of yore is definitely out. He isn't even part of most people's mental reference under the heading "vampire" any more. Readers or viewers wouldn't recognize him if he climbed in their window at night and bit them.

We have instead lots of movie images, from Bela Lugosi on, for the most part of handsome, young-to-middle-aged men with the clothes, accent, and bearing of a headwaiter in a posh restaurant. Most readers bring these shadowy memory-images to any vampire story even if they don't mean to. So how is a modern vampire to stand out as his own (dead) man? He can get by as a mere clone of Christopher Lee or Frank Langella, but there are so many other choices.

Maybe he's the leader of a gang of punks in outlaw drag, as in The Lost Boys; or a deadly young woman in mirrorshades like Nancy Collins' Sonya Blue; or a young black woman like Jewell Gomez' Gilda of The Gilda Stories, carrying into the future grim memories of slavery in the American South; or Pat Elrod's Jonathan Barnett, scion of a Tory family in the thirteen revolutionary colonies. These days, there's all of history and society to choose from, the whole world of race and ethnicity, and the entire range of human occupations. Time (and the inventiveness of authors desperate for some new approach to an old trope) has wrought a kind of Vampire Liberation.

But even a beautiful vampire has got to do something about those fangs. Only in a culture where nobody smiles, ever, could a vampire get by with those tiger-teeth we see in films (well, they were designed for visual impact, after all). Some vampires now have teeth that fold away out of sight when not in use (like the old Murphy bed, that folded up into the wall). This particular design holds the same place in current vampire fiction as Faster Than Light drive holds in science fiction: it's a convention invented by somebody sometime, nobody is sure who, which suits the genre so well that it has become accepted as a given and only needs a word of description these days, rather than anything like explanation. Ordinary teeth with very sharp edges will do too; these are dangerous to the mouth that holds them, but as vampires don't chew their, er, food, they aren't likely to bite their tongues or the insides of their cheeks while chowing down in a hurry.

Handicapping

Then there is the nuts-and-bolts question of vampiric powers and limitations, most of which come not from folklore but from the visual effects first seen on stage (remember, Bram Stoker was by trade the theatrical manager for the great turn-of-the-previous-century actor Henry Irving, who was famous for his smoky Hell-scenes as Mephistophiles), then on screen: the power to change into a verminous animal or a patch of weather, the power to become invisible, to raise storms, to crawl down a castle wall headfirst, to cloud a victim's mind and compel obedience, the power of superhuman physical strength, etc.

But all power and no constraint makes Drac a dull boy. If he can remember at any crucial moment that he has the ability to dissolve into a mist and float away, there's no earthly reason why a vampire can't simply elude danger, preventing a story from happening. The author must resort to elaborate and unconvincing contortions to get such a vampire into situations where his powers are nullified so that something can threaten him (rather like Superman and that stupid but essential Kryptonite). No challenge, no story. My own feeling is, why not be modest in bestowing supernatural powers in the first place, and then have the fun of cleverly working things out within your chosen limitations? This can be a deeply entertaining exercise for both writer and reader.

The other side of this coin is the question, which among the traditional vampire-banes is our story's vampire subject to? Sunlight, silver bullets, crosses, running water, holy water, fire, garlic, bibles, prayers? If too many, it's a simple matter for his enemies to escape, contain, or defeat him (again, no story). If too few, he stops being a vampire at all and becomes a tiresome nut with an odd dietary obsession. The trick is to find a good balance between power and weakness, threat and vulnerability.

If you lean toward tradition, you have some special details to attend to. For example, you need some way for your vampire to keep a bit of his native earth about him. Does he wear it in his boot-heels, sleep in a backyard full of it, never wash his ears, or what? In The Ruby Tear I came up with what I hope is a novel solution: Baron Ivo von Cragga (a traditionalist) has a tattoo made with bits of his native soil mixed in the inks.

What will they think of next?

Sex: Need I Say More?

Of course I do. If there's one over-riding quality that typifies Farmer Johan's literary and screen descendants, it's erotic glamor; in many cases, eroticism seems to be the whole point of the exercise, the reason for trotting out yet another vampire in the first place. These guys are smooth, they're courtly, they talk a classy line, and they're drop-dead gorgeous. The only ugly ones are fake vampires, generic scary pop-out-and-say-boo monsters who have been given vampiric attributes but who might as well be giant killer ants or alien invaders with tentacles (see the guys with the Klingon foreheads in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," a series I love — except for the silly vampires, James Marsters' Spike excepted). The real thing, the suave, powerful seducer we go for, is always some kind of hunk.

But is it all surface appearances, or does it really, ahem, work? That is, an author must decide whether blood-drinking replaces intercourse for her vampire, or is an adjunct to it (and usually an enhancer; I took advantage of this notion with Baron von Cragga, since he's a fox and I wanted my heroine to have some unforgettable fun with him).

The folkloric vampire was seen by the Church as impotent and infertile, since a walking cadaver mobilized by a demon or damned soul could not (theoretically) partake of the healthily generative power reserved only to God and godly creatures. In this view the vampire is only a form of mock-life with no purposes other than to feed and to infect others with its sorry state (not an erotic idea, really; the total absorption in appetite is pretty off-putting, way too reminiscent of the soul of a corporate CEO or a rock or rap star for most tastes).

Writers with this purist approach have successfully shifted the vampiric location of ecstasy from sex to dinner, the human being in the equation playing the role of plat du jour. Our undead hero's dining habits become the erotic center of more than one vampire tale. Some authors have created compelling intimacy between vampires and victims by leaving out genital sex entirely and concentrating on wooing, petting, and winning the affection of the longed-for food-source-cum-companion. It says something pretty sad about our society that many female readers rejoice in the spectacle of that kind of attention from any male figure at all, even if he's dead.

But Eastern European peasants, being earthy folks by definition, often attributed sexyness to a vampire, claiming that the dead guy was coming back to sleep with his pretty widow and that he might easily impregnate her with a child that would be born either a vampire too, or, peculiarly enough, a talented hunter and killer of vampires. So even at the start, there was an element of prurience included here, complete with possibilities of mixed human-vampire offspring.

And modern readers have gladly followed authors writing about very sexy vamps indeed, for a very good reason. The essence of vampirism is the domination of the prey by the predator. Most moderns, unaccustomed to the imposing and ubiquitous presence in society of vastly powerful males whose sexual aspect is repressed and denied (eunuchs or Priests/monks/cardinals), can't even imagine an overbearing predator who can't get it up. So, many of our present-day variations on Dracula both sup and screw, which is why their victims are almost always women: the idea of a bisexual vampire is just too much for some readers and some authors. Still, many vampire tales exploit an added frisson by depicting a vampiric nonchalance about just whose neck is the yummiest, a pretty girl's or a pretty boy's. This doesn't alter the basic dynamic much, so long as the vampire himself is male in form.

But what if "he" is a woman (or was one, anyway, when alive)? There's no good reason for all vampires to be male (although given the greater number of predatory and dominating social roles assigned to men over those assigned to women even now, I think I may be pardoned for concluding that the vampire "nature" fits the socialization of most males more than that of most females — and thereby hangs a number of vampire tales, my own The Vampire Tapestry included among them). In fact one of our earliest, classic vampires is Carmilla, a female vampire with distinctly lesbian leanings. Yet the idea of a female vampire does raise other considerations.

For the most part, women in popular fiction still have to make all their significant, adult relationships via sex (whereas men can bond over work, politics, war, sport, etc.). This means that female vampires — whatever their inner experience of themselves — must outwardly appear to be primarily sexual beings, and often are shown as hungry for and gratified by ordinary sex (which may even make them wish to be human again, poor things; makes you wonder, does a girl have to be undead to get really good sex?).

If so inclined, dead girls do have more fun; they can't get AIDS (how can you get sick if you're already dead?) and they can't get pregnant (ditto), so why not throw caution to the winds and go at it like demonically kinked bunnies. They're sexy because they have to be in order to attract and then dominate their victims. In an age of embattled feminism, this raises hot (so to speak) issues, unless your female vampire is really dead from the neck up and doesn't notice that the idea of a woman's life being totally defined and dominated by her sexuality no longer automatically goes unchallenged. Those issues in a vampiric context should make good, provocative fiction.

Sad to relate, many female readers say they just aren't interested, maybe because they're reading about vampires in the first place in order to forget the more troubling and disappointing realities of relations between men and women in the real world. For whatever reason, in my own experience as a reader few female vampires can carry the power charge that a halfway-competently drawn male one does.

It's not fair, but in these matters, what is?

Variety is the Spice of Eternal Life

There is, of course, a host of other questions to deal with: Can our vampire drink from other vampires, or from animals, or is he on a strict diet of live human blood? Does he or she have a human assistant to do the paperwork and daylight errands, and if so who, and how, and what kind of relationship is that? Does she like the modern world, or hate it? What does he do for the appearance of making a living (we are better equipped with idle rich than we used to be, but that kind of life makes pretty dull reading)? Do animals love her, or start rolling their eyes and quaking at her approach? Is he lonely for companionship? Does he enjoy towering above everyone else in unique (if well-disguised) splendor and superiority, or does he prefer to socialize with others like himself? Maybe she regrets going overboard as a baby vampire and is trying to do good to make up for it as some sort of health practitioner or law enforcer. Does he yearn to end her existence but not have the will, or the courage, or just the energy (he is dead, after all; a certain amount of lethargy is excusable)? Does she listen to Heavy Metal, Fusion, love ballads from her culture of origin, Eenya, Schubert? The fun is in the details.

Most vampires are endowed by their creators with strong esthetic interests — they love and collect fine art, or music, or antiques — because with all those centuries to fill, what's a poor vampire to do between meals? Probably find something to study or collect — science, art, music, anything to distract her from the daily grind of an interminable life among people who, sloppily forgetting their own history almost as soon as it is made, continually repeat it.

No wonder so many vampires act disgusted and depressed (although a few do attain a curiously angelic compassion for struggling humanity). No wonder they need to take refuge in contemplating human achievements of art and intellect.

Given the many alternatives and combinations of choices, you can see why an author can happily come back again and again to the central concept and write about it freshly each time. I've done three vampire tales and types myself: Edward Weyland, an ancient and literally unique predator (The Vampire Tapestry); Rose Blum, a scared Jewish grandmother who has attained undeadness by committing suicide in her Manhattan apartment ("Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep," in A Whisper of Blood); and my charming, vengeful, and largely traditional Baron Ivo von Cragga, of The Ruby Tear. Still more variations may spring up in my authorial path; once you start with these guys, it's impossible to stop; they're like Bermuda grass, like dandelions, like kudzu — impossible to kill (and yes, there have been vegetable vampires too).

That's because they have evolved from a rude, grubby folk-prototype into a truly Protean archetype. Thus no definitive, perfect vampire tale is possible; there's always another version lurking up ahead that just hasn't been realized yet, on paper or film or in dance or music or in art forms yet to appear. The allure of these suave monsters, for creators and audiences, is the richness of their variety, seducing us into entering the dark domain of fictive vampiric unlife again and again.

So let authors and readers beware. Once bitten, forever enthralled. I give you a toast, in — something sparkling and deep, deep red:

May the vein never run dry!

--SMC
September 29, 2000