They were monsters who brought our humanity into acute relief, outsiders who opposed human communities on the “inside.” They menaced us by standing against us, threatening not to obliterate us but rather to alter us - to change us into something terribly, appallingly other. Vampires like Dracula and Nosferatu helped us make sense of ourselves by differing from us so obviously, so savagely. The transition from Nosferatu, so grotesque and off-putting, to Mitchell, who is charming and approachable (if somewhat anemic), is striking: creatures of the night, once satisfied to exist on the margins of society, have irrupted into our communities, intent on assimilation. The contemporary British series Being Human goes so far as to center on a vampire named Mitchell whose foremost ambition is to pass for a human being: “I just want something good and normal,” he confesses to his human love interest over a bloodless cup of coffee. Starting in the 80s with films like My Best Friend is a Vampire, The Hunger, and Vampire’s Kiss, we’ve witnessed a host of vampires who seek to fit into society. They’ve infiltrated our institutions ( Twilight’s Edward and The Vampire Diaries’Stefan attend human high schools), and dated - and even occasionally married - our own ( Buffy’s Buffy and True Blood’s Sookie boast a string of vampire boyfriends, and Twilight’s Bella marries hers). From homecoming in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to prom in Twilight, from college fraternities in The Vampire Diaries to Merlotte’s Bar & Grill in True Blood,vampires have rapidly become the life of the human party. In contrast, today’s vampires have traded their capes for fashionable leather jackets, their claws for manicures - and they’ve taken a turn for the social, crashing all manner of gatherings. He was strange, sullen and reclusive - nobody’s prom date. Murnau’s 1922 film of the same name, sported claws, pointed ears, and a hunchback. Lord Ruthven, the protagonist of John William Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyr, had “nothing in common with other men,” and Dracula of the famed 1897 Bram Stoker novel lived in an all-but-inaccessibly remote fortress. He was enigmatic, otherworldly, always a foreigner or a visitor from abroad, maddeningly standoffish and stubbornly impenetrable. Often, he hailed from Transylvania, sometimes from other remote quarters of Eastern Europe - if we never learned just where, it only enhanced his mystique - where he invariably had an estate and a family fortune of opaque origins. Typically the occupant of sprawling gothic ruins atop a desolate mountain, he was pallid, fanged, and obviously monstrous, occasionally distinguished from other members of his cohort by red eyes and other dramatic deformities. AT HIS INCEPTION, the vampire was a solitary figure.
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