Children of the Night

Vampires are constantly in the cultural spotlight. In literature and on the screen, we are bombarded with sexy portrayals of immortal bloodsuckers, and two that stand out to me are Interview with a Vampire and, very sadly, Twilight. Both of these narratives take basic elements of Dracula and mix them with very different versions of what it means to be a vampire.

All of the vampires have some inherent attractiveness that is also seen as threatening, in some indescribable way, either to society as a whole or to heterosexuality or to basic physical safety. In addition, this magnetism allows them to seduce their human prey, as well as overwhelming strength to subdue them if they are able to resist their sexual appeal. The humans that see Dracula and the Cullens remark about the strange colors and fury in their eyes. Dracula and Lestat both feel that they should be masters wherever they go – Dracula wanting to be able to imitate the British upper class so as to not lose his aristocratic standing, and Lestat believing that vampires are the ultimate predators that have the right to anything and everything they want.

However, these other stories delve further into questions the Dracula leaves unanswered. Both play with the idea of child vampires. The female vampires in Dracula only eat children, and none of Stoker’s vampires are pictured having sex with other vampires or with humans. It is also made very explicit through the timeline mentioned in the closing note that the Harker child Quincey is the offspring of both Harkers, not of Mina and Dracula.

In Interview with a Vampire, Lestat turns the young Claudia into a vampire so that Louis could have someone to take care of. At first, everything seems to be alright, but Claudia eventually starts to abuse her newfound power like Lestat does, and spirals out of control when she realizes that she will never change. She will never grow up, she will never be a mother, she will only ever be a doll like girl. In the end, she is destroyed for her recklessness, and because of some trouble with the Paris coven.

In the Twilight series, Edward and Bella consummate their marriage before Bella becomes a vampire, and this results in their half-human-half-vampire daughter Renesmee. She is able to grow and change into an adult, but does so extremely rapidly. The Cullens then find out about the existence of other half children, and a war breaks out with the Volturi, the vampire royalty of sorts that tries to keep vampires from being discovered by humans, because immortal children are uncontrollable and thus forbidden.

Both of these tales show the danger of vampire children, a question that Stoker did not even try to address, and I think that is because of what the question society is facing today is. The Victorians were afraid of reverse invasion, the mysterious, uncivilized, possibly colonized other coming back to Britain and taking over. Today, I think people are more worried about reproduction. The other is already here, our society is (somewhat) more integrated, and now bloodlines between races and religions are mixing, and we don’t know what to do about it. If we don’t know how to classify someone as exclusively one attribute, like black or Muslim, we don’t know what think of or expect from them, and that terrifies us. We like to have clear cut groupings, but that doesn’t exist anymore – so now the vampires in our literature are reproducing for us to look at this new problem through the lens of fiction just like the Victorians did.