Based Vampirification

A Piece of Bonus Content for Not Quite Dead.

OTHER NQD TRANSCRIPTS
Episode Content Warnings
Please bear in mind that this show is a work of horror fiction and frequently places characters in situations which jeopardise their psychological and physical health. This episode contains:
– mentions of blood and blood drinking
– mentions of sex and discussions of sexual imagery
– references to relationship abuse

Transcript

Hi! I’m Eira, creator of Not Quite Dead and the voice of BOTH Alfie and Neige! I love vampires, as you can probably tell from the fact I’ve made a whole damn show about them. This is a little essay-type thing which discusses the vampire media which inspired my vampire obsession, and the queer themes I read into that media.

I have put a little reading list together of some things you might want to look at as a small jumping off point if you’re interested in exploring the topic of queer vampires further in a more literary way.

That’s in the description for this episode (EDIT: or, if you’re reading the transcript, right now!)

I want to start off by talking about my own first experiences of vampires in media. To my memory, my first exposure to vampires was through Sibella Dracula, the character in the 1988 made-for-TV movie ‘Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School’. She’s an odd character, given she’s meant to be a child it’s strange she’s given this almost sultry sounding voice. I was fascinated with her, and I liked her stupid puns. I also enjoyed Mona the Vampire a lot as a kid, and read a few novels with vampire characters in them, but my real obsession with vampires probably started when I was about seven and I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The vampires in Buffy absolutely captivated me. I liked that they looked beautiful right until the moment they were about to bite. As an adult reflecting on this, I actually really love this as a metaphor for the way violence, especially sexual violence, tends to work in society. We think we can spot the people who are most a threat to us, but they don’t look any different from anyone else, they just look like ordinary people, and you only realise you’re at risk until it’s far, far too late.

I liked that despite being destined to kill vampires, most of Buffy’s significant love interests are vampires. Her duty is to kill in order to serve her community and the world; it’s a huge and significant burden upon her. She doesn’t have time to date. It makes perfect sense, then, that her relationships end up being essentially ‘office romances’, with the very creatures she’s supposed to be wiping out.

Combining these two aspects scratches a particular itch in my head. Vampires are necessarily violent; the way they eat is consumption with all layers of distance and propriety scrubbed away. They feed from living creatures, drinking sustenance directly from them. The places vampires bite are extremely intimate because they’re some of our most vulnerable points. The throat is the most exposed: this is the most classic location vampires are shown to bite from.

Fear of the vampire, then, is a fear both of violence – in the biting; the sucking; the draining of blood – and of intimacy – the pushing of part of one body into the flesh of another; the touch of lips against vulnerable places; the surrender of will.

For Buffy specifically, we can think of her attraction towards Angel as representing her desire both for freedom from duty, but also for surrender. One of the most notable things about Buffy is that she’s incredibly strong. She can easily match a vampire in a fight, and fights with non-magical creatures are extremely easy for her. She walks through life unable to be harmed by it. The only time she’s really physically vulnerable is when she’s fighting vampires, and even then, to really be at their mercy requires a kind of surrender. I don’t think you can have intimacy without some kind of vulnerability. I think that goes for all kinds of intimacy, too, not just sexual intimacy.

Buffy’s vampire fighting is also working as a metaphor for her obligations to her community and the expectations the world has of her as a young woman. She’s supposed to have a great relationship with her mum, do well in school, have good friends, set up for life in college. But how can she do that when she’s fighting vampires all the time? That’s kind of how it felt for me being an adolescent, even though I wasn’t fighting any vampires. Everyone and everything seemed to have all these expectations of who I should be and how I should go about that and very little understanding of who I actually was and what the day-to-day reality of my existence was like.

Buffy’s attraction to Angel, and later to Spike, serves as this very direct way of talking about emergent sexuality, and through that discussion, it touches on some incredibly queer themes. The most obvious of these to me is that Buffy is not supposed to be attracted to vampires. Her initial response to realising that she even has the capacity for that attraction is horror. These are monsters; they’re not intimate partners. But she doesn’t want to stake Angel. She wants to kiss him. He’s a whole nuanced person with interests and doubts and feelings, and that totally floors Buffy. Of course she’s upset that she likes him; she ought to want him dead.

To any of my fellow LGBT+ folks who grew up in communities or environments which weren’t very accepting of queer identities, you might have been raised to think that LGBT+ people are just as monstrous as Buffy believes the vampires to be. Realising your own queerness in the context of that fear and hatred is complex not just because you’re deviating from the norm but because you’ve been villainising people who are like yourself. It’s a realisation not just that you’re different, but that you’re other.

What’s interesting in Buffy specifically is that the two vampires which are treated as love interests are each in their own ways exceptional. Angel has, through long suffering, come to restore himself to a pre-vampire state. Spike has received medical interventions which prevent him from exacting violence against humans without feeling intense pain. Neither of them represents the vampire population at large, then, so although Buffy is confronted with the persoonhood of both of these men she’s attracted to, it doesn’t mean she then has to reckon with the personhood of vampires more generally.

This is because it’s a show about killing vampires and it would significantly alter the show’s premise if we as the audience were forced to consider the personhood of the vampires. That’s why Spike and Angel are exceptional in their capacity for personhood. It would totally kill the mood otherwise.

Still, this does troubling things to the way this can be read as an allegory for queerness. This brings us fairly neatly to the next vampires in my list of obsessions; the Cullens from Twilight.

I got into Twilight in late 2006. The second book had already released but the series was yet to become the cultural phenomenon we know it as today. That wouldn’t really start until 2007, and when I first got into the series I was the only one of my friends who knew what it was. I read the first book and was immediately obsessed. I remember absolutely sobbing at the final chapter when Edward refuses to turn Bella; my heart absolutely ached about it. I was furious.

To call my feelings about Twilight ‘love’ is a bit of a misnomer. Even in my early readings of it, I found myself deeply critical of the text and the writing. I’d spent my childhood reading a lot of Dickens and I could tell this was not quote unquote ‘good literature’. But I was obsessed. It was like someone had peeled out the bits of Buffy I loved the most and written a book about them. I had not felt so utterly understood by a book before.

The thing about Bella in Twilight is that she is just totally and completely obsessed with Edward. He’s a creep, a total stalker, an absolute freak, we’ll discuss that shortly, but for now I want to think about Bella and her own obsessive weirdness because I feel like it’s so rarely discussed and I need to. I need to discuss it.

Bella Swan is an absolute fucking weirdo. She sees this boy, right, and she’s like ‘oh he’s hot’, and then she realises he doesn’t like her for whatever reason, and this gets stuck in her brain. Stuck like a grain of sand in an oyster. She’s wrapping it in layers and layers and layers of thought, going over and over and over it in her head. She cannot stop thinking about this boy. Why. WHY. What is it about him? He doesn’t even like her. Does she like him? She thinks he’s rude and she’s thinking about his face a lot but does she like him? When she dreams about him, she doesn’t dream that they’re kissing or getting married.

Bella’s first dream about Edward comes the night after he saves her life. This is that dream:

‘In my dream it was very dark, and what dim light there was seemed to be radiating from Edward’s skin. I couldn’t see his face, just his back as he walked away from me, leaving me in the blackness. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t catch up to him; no matter how loud I called, he never turned.’

This is not an ordinary high school girl’s dream about her crush. She doesn’t dream of kissing him, holding his hand, having sex with him. She dreams of him as a cold and distant figure, the one solid thing in a world of nothingness, which is where he leaves her. She sees him as fundamentally other, but rather than revulsion or horror, she longs to reach for him.

Bella doesn’t objectify Edward in the sense that we usually use that word. She isn’t sexualising him and indeed although they kiss, it’s not until the third book after their separation and reunion that Bella thinks about having sex with Edward at all. It’s almost like her attraction to him as a sexual partner is entirely secondary to her attraction to him as a thing. As an other. As, specifically, a vampire.

This is heightened for me by Bella’s desire to become a vampire herself. Although her self-justification for this is that she doesn’t want to be vulnerable and human anymore, her real motivations are plain in the text; she wants to be a vampire so she is more beautiful, so she doesn’t age, so she can be more like Edward.

Therein, within that impulse, that need not to have Edward but to in a sense become him, that is what made me so weirdly obsessed with Twilight. I remember as a younger person having these odd, desperate longing feelings for the boys in my class. I didn’t like them or have a crush on them; I had felt that too, sharp and keen, and it was different. This longing felt very near to hate, but it wasn’t that either. I can look back as an adult and pretty reliably identify those feelings as envy. I wanted to be them and resented them for everything they were that I wasn’t.

This screams out of Twilight for me in Bella’s attraction to Edward, and in particular those moments where she’s describing interacting with him in proximity. She focuses on the hardness of his body in comparison to the softness of her own, his measured temper with bright bursts of rage in comparison to her own more moderate moods. She is interested in Edward because of what he is that she is emphatically not. She envies him.

This is not just a story about a high school girl in love with a vampire to me. This is, to me, a story about a high school girl who wants to be a fucking monster. And that? That I can empathise with.

I never had much interest for the teen vampire romances that followed Twilight to the YA section of bookshops because they emphasised the part of the story which had compelled me the least, and missed that yearning to become which for me is such a crucial part of what Twilight is. From Twilight I pivoted into much more ‘grown-up’ vampire stories, beginning with the film versions of Dracula and Interview with the Vampire, then the novel versions of both.

Of the vampires in Dracula, only the count himself is truly a cognizant agent. The wives are near-feral. This fascinated me. I enjoyed how Anne Rice’s vampires lingered on the act of blood drinking as inherently intimate, lingering on the sexual connotations of penetrating one’s skin. The intoxicating toxicity of Louis and Lestat’s envy of and lust for one another, like a snake devouring itself. They want each other but they hate each other. It’s delicious.

In both cases (Dracula AND Interview), we can read the vampire as representing repressed sexuality in a similar way to that we see in Twilight and Buffy, but rather than it being the emergent, vulnerable longing of an adolescent girl who is coming of age in a world where sexual predation is considered a liveable reality rather than a reprehensible, morally repugnant horror, in Dracula and Interview, primarily we focus on the sexuality of men.

In Dracula, we also explore Mina and Lucy’s sexualities, too, and I think it’s interesting to think about the nature of their relationships given Dracula is written three decades after the novel Carmilla. But precisely because of that, it’s fascinating to me that we begin our journey into the world of the vampire through Jonathon Harker.

Notably, Jonathon, unlike Bella, is primarily the object of desire, the desiree rather than desirer, if you will. There are lots of reasons for this. It’s important to frame Jonathon as a victim to Dracula’s affections. The attraction of another man is pressed upon him: he does not seek it out. Notable, too, however, is Jonathon’s extremely modern attitudes to marriage and women. To a modern reader it might escape your notice that his thought on tasting paprika hendl is to get the recipe to give to Mina, but the fact he’s considering her work in the household in this way would have stood out to readers contemporary to the novel’s release. He’s also enthusiastic about Mina’s skills as a typist and not worried about how her interests might impede her ability to be a good wife. All of this is very forward thinking for a Victorian gentleman, and these are in fact examples of Jonathon performing his masculinity in a very non-typical kind of way.

After he falls victim to Dracula, Jonathon is extremely weakened. He’s frail, frightened and diminished, and he’s allowed to be. He is not derided for this state by the text or by those around him, at least not beyond thinking it’s kind of sad. Nobody implies he is less of a man for being weakened, and this is interesting in the context of this being a Victorian novel.

This is all worth mentioning even though of course the idea that queer men are any lesser or weaker than our cis- heterosexual counterparts is bullshit. But people still struggle to understand that in the broader culture now, in 2024, and this was an even more prominent idea at the turn of the last century, over which Dracula was being written.

Further from this, it is the weaker, more submissive Louis with whom we are meant to sympathise in Interview with the Vampire. Although Lestat maybe flamboyant and more overtly camp, he is also more violent, less remorseful and less considerate, all things which are stereotypically associated with masculinity. Louis, by contrast, cares about reading, about parenthood, about feelings. These are all more stereotypically feminine traits.

Undoubtably though it’s Louis we’re meant to empathise with, Louis who we are meant to see as morally superior.

I think the real tragedy of Louis as a character is in how he is different from Bella. He is attracted to Lestat primarily through desire, through lust. He does not yearn to be like him. He doesn’t want to be a vampire, he just wants to fuck one. But Lestat can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be just like him because he thinks he’s the best thing that’s ever existed.

I could go on about this relationship but I won’t.

In all of these stories, the vampires and the people they interact with, they can be read as deeply queer. It is, to me, an essential part of what vampires are and what they do. It is both beautiful and fascinating to me.

Once I’d got to this point in my obsession, I slipped sideways into more strange vampire stories like Carmilla and Let the Right Ones In, and more, and beyond.

It was around this time that I started working on my own vampires, which would eventually wind up being represented in Not Quite Dead. I loved Underworld’s gesturing at the science of vampire bodies but found it frustratingly lacking in detail. I loved the implications of something like He Is Legend but found aspects of its myth-making to be frustratingly limiting in scope.

I have talked, and will again, at length about my vampires, the mechanics of them and how I developed those traits. For now, I’m going to leave off this little audio essay. I hope enjoyed coming on this little journey through the vampire stories that made Not Quite Dead into what it is.

I’m looking forward to bringing you the Q&A next week!

Until then, live, laugh, bite.