I thought of this question after going to see Renfield (2023) in theaters in April. Not only was I watching a bastardization of the Dracula name on the big screen, but I had seen a similar bastard child earlier that summer. The Invitation gave more to the Drac fanatics than Renfield, which at best had simply given
us Nicholas Cage’s Drac in all its Cage-ishness. On top of that, while at the movie theater, one of the previews was for a film titled The Last Voyage of the Demeter, or something to that effect, which was about the boat which Dracula traveled on. On top of these three, we’ve had a reboot of The Interview with the Vampire and countless other vampire media which isn’t uncommon, but it's forming a much larger web than I would have expected.
The easy answer seems to be the growing wealth gap revamping the aristocratic distrust that was popularized by Bram Stoker’s novel, but it feels deeper than that. I’ve been exploring American Gothic theory most recently written in the 2010s and many theorists argue that the zombie is the most popular American monster, which makes sense considering the popularity of The Walking Dead and even Warm Bodies (also starring Nicholas Hoult). Zombies in the American context have always been connected to war, first popularized by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a critique on the Vietnam War. I’d like to highlight a quote from the film which speaks about it:
“There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins. The murders are taking place in villages and cities, in rural homes and suburbs with no apparent pattern nor reason for the slayings. It seems to be a sudden general explosion of mass homicide. We have some descriptions of the assassins. Eyewitnesses say they are ordinary-looking people. Some say they appear to be in a kind of trance. Others describe them as being misshapen monsters.” (The Night of the Living Dead)
In the film, the zombies are the American soldiers, killing without a real goal and not caring who they kill. The aspect of them appearing in a trance also comments on the power that American nationalism had at the time both in and outside of the military. The Vietnam War was also the first televised war so American citizens saw the carnage and destruction from the safety of their living rooms. Then, with a new common consciousness of the effects of our intervening government, zombie movies seemed to shift to look at the failure of our government’s administration in dealing with crises. Zombie apocalypses usually cause the breakdown of bureaucratic order that not even the Titan American government can survive. New governments emerge, usually just as corrupt as the one it replaced and borders implode.
So where do vampires fit back into all of this? Well with a lack of confidence in our government and a global pandemic wreaking havoc on everyone’s sanity and our country’s politics only further polarizing itself, it makes sense that a monster birthed in the fear of miscegenation makes its return. Yet, the vampire as we understand it is nothing like the scary villain the 19th century saw, but has softened its edges and become r/Romanticized.
In my work, I hope to do further research which explores this hypothesis and uncovers more about our culture which I may have not even considered. As Jeffrey Cohen writes in his seven theses on monsters, monsters are cultural, first and foremost. Any psychological readings only further individualize a psyche which believes itself to be isolated and alone, even before the pandemic. Why is the vampire so popular? Are the answers as simple as we want them to be?