MOVIES

Fangs bared: a vampire expert bites into the undead mythology

UT professor Thomas Garza takes the pulse of 'Twilight, 'True Blood' and other vampire-related pop phenomena

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, November 21, 2008

Not too long ago, vampires became so handsome and gorgeous — so toothsome, if you will — that the monster-victim equation flipped. That is, vampires got so steaming hot that potential victims wanted to sink their teeth into them before the parched undead accomplished their jugular repast. She swoons, he slurps.

Crafty artists put a modern spin on a musty fable that's at least 800 years old. It was as though vampires, loathed and vilified, had hired powerful publicists to burnish their bad rep. Suddenly, the bloodsuckers, for eons regarded as hideous and murderous, were made over. They were bestowed iridescent blue eyes, powdered-sugar flesh tones, swooshes of wavy hair, mountain ranges of musculature. They treated their fangs with Crest Whitestrips and shopped Armani.

Do we need more proof than this: Literally, as I tip-tapped that last sentence, this e-mail dropped into my inbox: "Top 10 Sexiest Vampires at Hollywood.com."

With the opening of the tweenie "Twilight" today, as well as the success of HBO's Southern-gothic "True Blood" and the Swedish art house hit "Let the Right One In" (playing the Alamo South and Arbor), our minds, if not our hearts, have drifted to vampires. We wonder why these latter-day monsters look so human, like the rest of us, blending into small towns and the suburbs — neither known to be overly friendly to outsiders and "others" — with nary a double take. We wonder whatever happened to the batty, freak-show vampire that hissed and stretched its talons like spider legs. When's the last time you saw a vampire with a sleek widow's peak?

At times like this, plans are required. So you tap the local vampire expert to unsnarl the skein of big ideas, bloated metaphors and blood ties that enshroud the venerated mythology.

We called Thomas Garza, chairman of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas, who teaches the popular class "The Vampire in Slavic Cultures" and consulted on the 2007 vampire movie "30 Days of Night." We asked him a few questions about the evolution of the vampire since Irish writer Bram Stoker lofted the story into the pop-culture imagination with his 1897 novel "Dracula," which is itself rooted in epochs of Slavic folklore. We asked him about the latest plague of vampiria, what's good, what's bad and in what direction the myth should move next.

"In shows such as 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' a new notion came about," Garza says. "It's this idea of making the vampire human, while keeping the monster qualities, the blood-drinker qualities. It's making the vampire more appealing to a new group of viewers for a new generation.

"A lot of the post-modern vampire films retain an original kernel notion, which must be true to the old story for (the new one) to work at all," he says. "And that is: There has to be a predator creature that derives its sustenance from another creature and in doing so weakens it. But the new works get a chance to spin off in directions that are precisely what keep the story continually watched and read. The films and book series coming out in the late '90s through today have a particular take on youth."

\• On 'Twilight': Garza has read the first "Twilight" novel by Stephenie Meyer, but says, "I'm not a big fan of it."

Meyer's series addresses teenage sexual frustration and the sting of ostracism and "throws a big smarmy layer of classical, canonical English romance novels — with a capital 'R' romance — on top of it."

It's pure soap opera, with a gummy streak of Harlequin-novel treacle. "Meyer returns to the classic tropes we learned in lit class," Garza says. "That's where these stories, as vampire stories, fall short. A good vampire story has to harken back to a real embedded past, a real tradition and backstory. It's what Anne Rice does well. There has to be a significant backstory. Your hero can't just suddenly pop up in your hometown.

"It's so superficial, so much more about that vampires make pretty boys and pretty young women. They're beautiful and have this romance around them, the frills and the lace and the trappings of the vampire that have more to do with Meyer's interest in things like the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen's 'Emma.'

"I saw the trailer online and immediately thought, 'Oh my God, they've made Mr. Darcy a vampire!' It's all of this brooding, heavy, syrupy romance. It doesn't fulfill what a good vampire story does."

\• On 'True Blood': A fan of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse book series, Garza says the author is "a born and bred Southern woman and she really writes in the Southern tradition of Faulkner. She tells a story that does have a backstory, and she tells us where her characters come from."

Harris employs the vampire metaphor as "overtly about race and minorities and sexual orientation," he says. "The TV version has all these wonderfully developed micro-characters, microcosmic characters who are representative of larger populations. And that includes the vampires, who are now coming out of the coffin. It borrows its lexicon and the way (the vampires) are being talked about from the gay rights movement. Things like 'coming out of the coffin.' . . . It's an interesting interpretation of the myth. It is about race and sexual orientation. But essentially it's still about the unknown."

\• On 'Let the Right One In': Garza is a fan of this poignant, atmospheric import, despite early misgivings about the vampire being a young girl.

"It's taken the story to the level of innocence. The notion of naivete works very well with evil genres. That's why 'The Exorcist' and 'The Omen' work so well."

He likes how the film depicts "small children who should be completely naive, but there are evil forces dancing about them. It plays with that tension of the innocence of childhood with the potentiality of evil very nicely."

\• On books and movies making vampires more human-like and easy on the eyes (or: What's wrong with today's vampires): "It's exactly the antithesis of where we should be going with vampires. We've been trying slowly but surely to get them away from this count (Dracula) from a faraway country and making him a guy down the street, sort of Joe the Plumber, only a vampire.

"As a movement of the whole mythology of the vampire, it's wrongheaded. The vampire had to be created out of what is not of this earth. These are mortal men who have moved to another plane of existence, another dimension. What made that first great vampire movie 'Nosferatu' so incredibly uncanny was that there is nothing about this creature that's of this world. There's nothing about him we find attractive. He's horrific. That to me is the myth and where the story begins. It's the Dracula story. It's the epitome of how creepy this creature should be.

"As long as we can tap into our xenophobia, then we get into the kind of vampires that make us squeal and jump."

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649