Today’s vampire love is all about cringe losers
10.11.2023 - 16:07
/ polygon.com
/ Robert Pattinson
The allure of vampires is as immortal as the undead creatures themselves. But while vampires have always been supernatural icons of sexiness, what that sexiness manifests as, and how it reflects the aspects of human desire commonly left out of mainstream media, has evolved.
In the Victorian era, vampires like Dracula and Carmilla represented the forbidden. Their monstrosities — from lizard-like wall crawling to long, needle-like teeth — were prominent, but at the same time, there was still something about them that the books’ protagonists found physically compelling. A hundred-some years later, during the midst of the Twilight craze, young adult authors sanded off vampires’ more undesirable traits to make them the ultimate object of adoration for teen girls. Sparkly and occasionally played by Robert Pattinson, these vampires represented a type of desire usually left out of mainstream media: namely, the young female gaze.
Now, just a few years after Edward Cullen, the Salvatore brothers, and other YA-friendly creatures of the night mesmerized teenagers, vampires have a totally different appeal. Their darker traits aren’t amplified to be dangerously sexy, nor have they been transformed into something ethereally beautiful.
No, today’s vampires are more “realistic” in how they actually have to deal with real life. To put it bluntly, they are pathetic little shits.
Being a vampire sucks (pun very intended). Forget tortured Byronic figures or beautiful immortal teenagers; life as a regular person who also has a craving for blood, sensitivity to sunlight, garlic allergies, and other vampire-specific complications is rough. As normal people surviving undead life, they’re actually a bit pathetic, which is exactly what makes them so appealing — and sexy? The creators of What We Do in the Shadowsget it. Through the mockumentary format, vampiric oddities — both good and bad — are treated like mundane everyday experiences. Need to get somewhere fast? Yell “Bat!” and fly off into the distance. Spending the day at a hotel in Atlantic City? Make sure to bring the dirt of your ancestral homeland, or risk a restless slumber. That’s life.
Nandor, Laszlo, Nadja, and the rest of the What We Do in the Shadows gang are a messy bunch of losers. They struggle to relate to humans and modernity, but that’s just part of their charm. They’re also unabashedly horny; a season 1 episode involves them organizing a vampire orgy, and in the latest season, Nadja helps her possessed doll use her body so she can bang energy vampire Colin Robinson (long story). None of it is cloaked beneath dark capes and bloodsucking metaphors — in fact, being DTF brings them closer to humanity. But true to the legacy of vampire horniness, What We Do