Holly Horrorland has invited all of us Goth bloggers to a Sanguinary Soiree for V-Day. So this post will be about the hominoid leeches of the night. Specifically since it's Valentine's Day, I'd like to ask: Are vampires sexy? Why or why not?
Vampires definitely weren't sexy before the 19th century. They were little more than reanimated corpses returned to haunt and decimate their families and loved ones. Ghoulish revenants. Impure but simple.
Then the Romantics did what Romantics do and romanticized them. Turning the creepy grave crawlers into dashing and debonnair and terrifying blood-sucking men of quality. Vamps became tramps. Undead sexy. And that is now the norm.
An exception is 30 Days of Night. These vampires are truly horrifying. Not just plain vanilla scary. But scary in a completely unearthly and inhuman way. These vampires aren't sexy at all. And that representation suggests something about the twisted sexiness of vampires in general. And us, as we shall see...
Are any of the other vampires in our Gothic multiverse sexy either? Dracula and Lucy Westenra sure weren't in any normal human way. Indeed, Dracula is often read as a psych eval of Victorian sexual hang-ups. Like it is all about the fear of sexuality. All-consuming and implacable lust. Are vampires then representations of the dark side of sex?
That would seem neatly Gothy, wouldn't it? Vampires as explorations of forbidden sexual urges and practices. But that doesn't quite fit...? It is too human, all too human. Too warm and soft and yielding still.
Sex and sexiness have a definite social context. These most private of acts are very much social acts. We don't decide how to have sex on our own. We learn how to do it. Just like sexiness is a collective product, a collaborative project. Sex and sexiness are about human connection and the production of humans both directly through actual physical reproduction and spiritual reproduction. Sex makes us 'humans' in all kinds of ways.
But vampires are something else. Something other. Something, even totally Other. And that's where the disconnect begins...
Vampires seem to ooze sexiness. But the context is all wrong. The vampire isn't sexy like a person because the feeling and presence isn't there to liven up or inspirit the performance or the body. Vampires are just body. Purely physical unending mortal flesh. But cold cold cold reanimated flesh.
This reanimation breaks the link between the body and the human. What returns isn't human at all. The vampire looks human. And even acts human. But it is an uncanny imitation. It's just not right. And we know it isn't right. And that's what's so terrifying about them. They aren't alive but they appear that way. And mere appearances are very deceiving. And unsettling.
Horror writer Thomas Ligotti explains why supernatural creatures like vampires are so terrifying in his nonfiction book of philosophy titled The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He uses vampires as an example of the 'uncanny', that eerie sense of pseudo-familiarity that is so alienating, 'because their intrinsic supernaturalism as the undead makes them objectively uncanny things that generate subjectively uncanny sensations. They are uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function--to survive for survival's sake (p. 91).' Reduced to mere 'mechanisms' they are terrifying in themselves but it is their effect on us that is truly horrifying: vampires 'also inspire a subjective sense of the uncanny in those who perceive them because they divulge the "dark knowledge" that human beings are also things made as they are made and may be remade because they are only clockwork processes, mechanisms, rather than immutable beings unchanging at their heart (p. 91).'
Vampires reflect our worst fears about ourselves. That we don't exist as selves at all but as zombies or 'human puppets--things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were (italics in original, p. 84)' or...that we are just like vampires ourselves. Empty husks fulfilling externally imposed drives without purpose or meaning. Lust and hunger. Lustand hunger. Lustandhunger. Hunger-lust.
And what does that say about sex? Ligotti writes: 'As uncanny mechanisms, vampires...usually perform the mechanical act of reproduction with no weighty deliberation, or none at all--the replication [of] their kind being epiphenomenal to the controlling urge that drives them (p. 91).' Which also tells us way too much about human sexuality, too. Through the 'sexy' image of the vampire, the human gloss over sexuality is sucked right off of it, as it were, and replaced with the purely physical mechanism of bumping and grinding. And the alienating feeling porn often produces--that the sex is nothing but geometry, physics and motion--is here repeated in the vampire whose sexiness and sexuality is nothing but mindless and mechanical repetition in the pursuit of mindless and mechanical repetition indefinitely as it was, is and ever shall be.
Sex is no longer sex. It is no longer human. It is no longer intimate or spiritual or even pleasurable. It is something terrible. Destructive of selfhood in a completely negative way. And its relentless and compelling nature makes it only more terrible. The vampire and its horrible drives as representative of our secret nature turn pleasure into jouissance and sex into a living death.
So vampires aren't even a parody of 'sexiness' because they reveal the very non-existence of 'sexiness'. There's nothing there to parody.
Happy belated V-Day, my pretties!
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