VINOs

I admit that I'm a man who takes my monsters seriously. I'm not so far gone as to decry, say, fast zombies, but there are certain set elements which I feel are integral to the inhabitants of horror's menagerie. And the inviolate rule of vampirism is that they're creatures of the fucking night. Given the sheer number of rules, limitations and powers ascribed to bloodsuckers in various incarnations, you invariably have to break a few - I love the internet argument that their inability to cross running water would render them comically useless the moment someone invented indoor plumbing. But darkness is the point on which I will not budge. If it can go out in daylight without going up like a roman candle, it's not a fucking vampire. And this applies double if sunlight only serves to make it prettier. I don't know what you have there, but it's definitely not a vampire.

And Meyer's heroic vampires don't just fail this simple rubric. They fall at virtually every hurdle which makes vampirism interesting, which makes a vampire story worth telling. Their bloodlust is manageable and directed at non-humans. Their unlives are happy and well-adjusted, certainly in comparison to their miserable pasts and the merely human lives that surround them. If they are an affront to God, they've been cursed with strength, speed, beauty and immortality - We should all be so cruelly afflicted. The vampire's appealing characteristics should be a shell, a charming facade and aristocratic air which conceals a soul dead and rotting. They're the nobles who charm the peasantry as they devour them, feudalism or capitalism or Maoist communism* embodied and evil. The Cullens, in comparison, are what it says on the tin. They are exactly as wonderful as they seem.

This isn't just dull, it's baffling. The vampire is a timeworn trope, actually any number of tropes: The Thing Which Should Not Be, the apex predator, the friendly rapist, the dead thing that mourns its own lost humanity**. Ignoring all of these, or playing them down, and still calling the result a vampire is just dirty pool. Nor am I particularly enamored of Meyer's excuse that she didn't do any research on vampires before she wrote the book: In-depth research is not required to get an idea of the cultural circumference of the bloodsucker. The most damnable part, though, is that any number of writers and creators have avoided the 'vampire' label when their vampires are much closer to the traditional monstrous model than Meyer's. The British TV series Ultraviolet refers to them as "Code Fives"*** or "leeches", while the Swedish tabletop RPG Kult uses other culture's terms for vampiric monsters to avoid the connotations that mainstream readers have for "vampires" and to impart a more refined idea of what kind of monster is being discussed (The Nosferatu and Lorelei being quite different beasts). Meyer's use of vampire thus irks me, probably far more than it should.

Next: Why vampires are not a persecuted minority

* Has there been a vampire book set during the Great Leap Forward? Deceit, terror, despair and an unthinkable body count: It seems a natural fit. Of course, the Chinese vampire is almost universally depicted as completely silly, but as I've said mythology is a flexible thing.
** Must... not... make... White Wolf... joke...
*** 5 = V, geddit?