# Vampires as Supernatural Horror

H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

This is quite obviously rubbish. What did H.P. Lovecraft fear the most? Probably immigrants! Were immigrants unknown to H.P. Lovecraft? Hardly! The sort of genteel poverty that Lovecraft spent much of his life in meant that the terror of immigrants was something very near and dear to his heart, the terror of loss of status, the terror of someone else being better than you even though you feel it is your birthright to be better than them.

Great prose stylist, though.

Anyway, I digress. What we are discussing here is a simple, straightforward question: am I afraid of vampires? Yes. All of the rest of this is just a longwinded, roundabout way of saying why.

The conceptual lineage of a vampire is simple, really. There's a lot of eddies and currents, tributaries and digressions. And a lot of the enduring cultural appeal of vampires is tied up with the messy way that vampire lore is wrapped up in sex and sexuality. I am going to do something that is probably counterintuitive, and strip out the sex appeal. Just... leave that aside. It matters, I'm not asking you to act as though it doesn't matter. The sun matters, but unless you blot it out you cannot see the stars in the night sky. Blot out the sex.

When you remove the sex, what is left of a vampire?

Death.

Many cultures, faiths, traditions... they all have answers about what happens to us when we die. The vampire poses a simple, straightforward, and horrifying answer: nothing. Death is final, death is absolute, death is an ending. If it wasn't, why would the vampire endure the cruel half-life it endures to avoid it? Stripped of human friendship, utterly and cruelly alone in the world. Do you know what happens in vampire stories when a vampire creates another of its own kind? Rejection. Conflict. Betrayal. Over, and over again. Lestat and Louis. Dracula and his three brides. The relationship between a vampire and another vampire it creates always leads to betrayal, lack of fulfillment. Vampires are forever doomed to create the only other creatures that can understand their experiences... and to be rejected by them.

So the question the vampire poses is simple: what is better? To live forever, cursed to be alone, unwanted, abjured? To see the world move beyond you, past you? Or to die, and to slip into that black abyss of nothingness that awaits us all in the grave?

There is a quote from perhaps my favorite vampire movie, "Shadow of the Vampire," which has a simple premise. It depicts the shooting of F.W. Murnau's classic vampire movie Nosferatu, with the premise that the vampire at the core of it was portrayed, not by an actor, but an actual vampire. And Albine, the producer, asks the vampire, who is going by the name of Max Schreck, what he thought of the novel Dracula. This is their exchange:

`Max Schreck: It made me sad.
Albin: Why sad?
Max Schreck: Because Dracula had no servants.
Albin: I think you missed the point of the book, Count Orlock.
Max Schreck: Dracula hasn't had servants in 400 years and then a man comes to his ancestral home, and he must convince him that he... that he is like the man. He has to feed him, when he himself hasn't eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And then he remembers the rest of it. How to prepare a meal, how to make a bed. He remembers his first glory, his armies, his retainers, and what he is reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes... when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table.`

It's about the passage of time. It's about all the things we will have seen, done, _been_ that we will never experience again. It is about growing old, and seeing the people you knew die before you. About losing things. Until finally you lose the last thing you have left.

Yes, I do find that scary.