Vampires vs. werewolves

CuckooTuli · 08-30-2011, 05:03 AM

Just some shit banged out while stoned, in the "no such thing as wasted writing" spirit when I couldn't come up with any ideas for fiction. Sorry - I couldn't be arsed to actually post all the pictures so they appear as links (blatant attempt to rip off the Cracked.com format with the captions), but most of the captions are pretty self-explanatory. It's basically just a stoner rant with no schloarly value whatsoever - I was blocked up with wriing one night and started thinking about the kind of TV I like to wacth, and comparing shows. I'm a massive nerd for monster shows, like many people here, so I figured this might be a good home for something that will otherwise just sit on my hard-drive.

CuckooTuli · 08-30-2011, 05:04 AM

Virtually all folk and fairy tales deal with issues of good and evil. Hansel and Gretel for example explores the limits of human morality under starvation, and a series of set-pieces are strung together based around the theme of food: a mother and father driven to abandon their children during harsh famine by leaving them to starve in the woods, the children are forced to make their own way when birds eat the trail of breadcrumbs they left to lead them home, lost in the woods they discover a house with gingerbread walls and sugar windows and are so hungry they literally eat through the walls; inside is a witch who wants to eat them, culminating in her being cooked to death when they realise her plans and trick her into her own oven. When they return home, bearing the stolen witch’s jewels they will use to buy food, their stepmother is dead; perhaps she too was vanquished when the witch who tried to devour them died in the oven, this imposter in the home who refused to fulfil the most basic biological function of the mother-child bond and feed her children. The impersonal violence of nature, as symbolised by the birds, is contrasted with the human evil of the witch and the stepmother (who are metaphorically the same figure).

And in many of these older tales, there is a greater level of moral sophistication than the passive, pallid heroines of Disney movies might suggest.

http://goo.gl/SZN4i “Okay, my ugly sister just snail-trailed period blood all over the floor again. I fix this mess, someone’s got to sense the despair engendered by the action and drag my ass away, or the universe is a bad, cruel, godless void of horror. That is all.”

It’s nice to get a little more than Disney’s “bitch scrubs the floor dreaming of a happy ending until an effeminate hero with a stupid voice breezes in at the last minute and take over the goddamn movie” approach. And you can apply the same reasoning to the folk tale’s offshoots, modern-day adaptations of their good-versus-evil pattern. According to my current stoned musing, these would be the inundation of popular culture with all things vampire and werewolf-related, through which writers from various mediums explore the dark side of the heart of man.

The most common contention of vampire lore is that once turned into a vampire, a person begins to lose human conscience, growing increasingly predatory as the craving for blood overtakes the hangover of their human selves until they ultimately become a monster. Werewolves, on the other hand, commonly retain their human selves and struggle to contain their condition, losing their consciousness in monstrosity only once a month under the full moon. They will not live forever, and are not in a constant state of physical craving for blood and violence like vampires. As essentially mortal creatures who are utterly consumed by a demon within, beyond all hope of controlling it with willpower, their human selves are forced to cohabit with the darkness, to avoid being consumed by it.

And this, surely, bears more interesting and real, honest parallels to the issue of human evil which is really at the heart of all of these tales. Some folklorists suggest the spread of folk tales about monsters was aided by serial killers, which may help account for such discoveries as series of mutilated or eviscerated corpses found around villages. Superstitious peasants saw monsters all over Europe, from the savage wolf-men of Romania tales to the foul, bloated vampyres of Germany.

Werewolf myths abounded most consistently in countries where wolves posed a very real threat to survival, and going into the woods unprepared could cost people their lives - it is no coincidence that the dark forest is often an inherently frightening place in European folklore. The fusion of man with wolf betrays an anxiety regarding human nature, which must be aided in its expression with a reassuring element of the beastlike, the Other. It is here that the most deep-seated fears regarding, if you like, the soul of man, can be most honestly faced. Is a character like Dexter, a serial killer who has learned to channel his violent urges into the collective good by killing only other serial killers, so very different to the werewolf who locks himself in a disused warehouse at every full moon, to avoid ripping innocent people to shreds? Both are, after all, monsters with enough humanity left to realise and fight against their own monstrosity.

As a nineties kid, I was and am a huge Buffy fan. Something I really admire it for since I started writing my own crap is the tightness of the mythology: no clever plot twist is without a satisfying explanation; the rules of the universe are clear, simple, as plausible as they can possibly be on a show about a teenaged vampire slayer, and an effective aid to some genuinely great storylines. When a person becomes a vampire, they lose their soul and become a creature of pure darkness. The only exception is Angel, who fucked with the wrong gypsy clan many years ago and got himself cursed with a soul, doomed to suffer the crushing weight of his sins for all of his immortal life now that his human conscience is back. He fights for redemption throughout the show and beyond into a mostly well-made spin-off, while brooding a lot and swishing a Matrix-style leather jacket during well-choreographed fight scenes filmed when Neo was just an itch in the Wachowski brothers’ pants.

http://goo.gl/ekZTi Spike rocked a similar look, while not brooding and being generally better than Angel.

TV series Being Human dealt with the good vampire issue interestingly: when Mitchell asserts that he does not feed off of humans, and his new flatmate Annie, herself a ghost, asks him if he doesn’t need blood to survive, he replies, “Nah – it’s just a question of willpower.” Working as a hospital orderly as he attempts to find a place in the human world, he tells his co-workers his hands are shaky because he has given up smoking. For a while, we see him renouncing the predatory existence of his kind to team up with fellow outcasts Annie and George, a werewolf.

However, after a series of losses and betrayals, Mitchell gives in to his darker nature (as virtually all of the new wave of friendly vampires must do at some point, to remind us amidst all the humanity and intense teary hugging that it exists). And as he begins to kill again, it becomes clear that blood to vampires is a drug, the alcoholic’s black rum; the more he consumes, the easier it becomes to drown out the remnants of his human conscience, and the further into the shadows he moves. The metaphor is underlined further when a newly-reformed Mitchell, saved from the darkness by George and finding the vampires looking to him as leader after Herrick’s death, runs AA-style support groups to help them stop killing, detox from blood, and lead quiet lives.

In further support of werewolves, I’d like present you with a song called, coincidentally, “Werewolf” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLgAEpOsek ]. This song will probably ruin all other music for you forever. It’s an a capella tour de force, with a schizophrenic build-up and startlingly beautiful harmonies: part-folk tale, part-gothic setpiece, part-demented hillbilly ballad. Just when you think it can’t build up any more, can’t get any more haunting or demented, it says “Fuck that”, throws a bar of soap in a sock, and has a pain-party over your doubting face. The good kind.

http://goo.gl/MZuUL

http://goo.gl/Ecfom

I’m thinking less Pulp Fiction, and more Blue Velvet. That’s normal, right?

It’s an awesome display of talent, and if listened to under the right conditions - i.e. stoned, by lamplight, in a small cosy womb-room on a cold winter night - you will call it master. Anyone who wouldn’t has no soul, much like vampires, who I believe we’re currently trying to establish are raging cocks.

http://goo.gl/597ul Seriously, what?

My biggest bug-bear about vampires is that everything always has to be all sexy, when everyone with taste knows the love interest angle is a vastly overused trope which many films would be better off without. I don’t want to see some winsome Keira Knightly lookalike’s pout taking over the screen as her lover lets her down again, being too busy saving the world to call and placate her, nor do I have any desire to eavesdrop on their private affairs while she tries to pull him into a normal life, back from the brink of a fall into his dark, vengeful urges. I genuinely don’t care. If I’m watching a movie about good versus evil, I’m here to see some villains’ shit getting ruined , sharp one-liners, memorable characters, and if there’s the occasional effect that has my inner twelve year old punching the air then Jurassic fucking Park. Look, basically I do not require a token love interest with no bearing on the central plot in ANY film, but it’s particularly offensive in ones containing any of the following: pirates, zombies, superheroes, mutants, robots, aliens, or supernatural beings of any kind. There are more but I’m too pissed off to think now.

A few exceptions: the episode of Doctor Who where Rose is trapped in the parallel world and can never come back, Buffy and Angel circa series 2, George and Nina in Being Human (Nina is a great character), Oskar and Eli in the brilliantly ominous ending of Let the Right One In. It wasn’t too bad in 28 Days Later, although the woman was a bit shit, and so was the man, come to think of it. And the incessant product placement. Actually, fuck 28 Days Later.

CuckooTuli · 08-30-2011, 05:10 AM

Terminator 2 was an awesome film. It also contained no love interest whatsoever. Nowadays, Hollywood’d probably have Sarah Connor riding Arnie’s T-800 joystick before tech could manage to fumble the boom-chicka-wow porn music on as the door swings open and Sarah looks up guiltily, pants around her ankles.

Dog Soldiers is probably best described as a modest modern classic, boasting such lines as a soldier’s heartfelt cry of, “I hope I give you the shits!” as he gets his head bitten off messily, and the immortal, “Oh, it’s you – learned how to lick your own balls yet?” during the protagonist’s climactic showdown with his human antagonist in werewolf form at the end. The move toward a romantic angle with the home-owner was annoying but mercifully brief.

I’m not going to go into one about Twilight, because that dead horse has been flogged ten ways from Sunday in writing on vampires, and frankly, it isn’t worth the room – although some of the parodies are, admittedly, pretty funny n(at least the first 200 times). However, to bring it in line with other vampire writing, onscreen, onstage and on the page, the endless sexualisation of everything vampire-related is frustrating, speaking more to the slickness of consumer culture than the mythology it came from. The German spectre, the Vampyre, was hideously bloated and discoloured about the face and hands; Dracula himself was an ugly and frightening monster. They are pure predators, not brooding male model types. Modern vampire lore emphasises the potential for a human side, putting a new slant on the vampire’s essentially dark and violent nature. The older vampires retained no human side when they turned; the new ones have consciences and friendships and even human other halves. Buffy and Being Human have it both ways by showing both garden-variety evil vampires and good, human-likes ones, with plausible explanations for why these latter are different – and this final point is the crucial one. Many modern vampire stories do not account for certain vampires’ unusually non-predatory nature. This makes them suck, not like a vampire or a hooker, but like a sucking chest wound sapping you of the will to live.

This goes back to my original point about werewolves cohabiting with the darkness within, whilst simultaneously resisting it. The good vampire does just this: not by locking itself up, because its nature is permanent, but by continually denying its violent urges expression through harm to humans. When a satisfactory reason is provided for why the vampire does this, the good vampire attains one of the werewolf’s more interesting aspects. The trouble is, it’s really easy to fuck it up if the reason given for why this vampire’s different to the others is either non-existent, or doesn’t fly. Edward Cullen is definitely one of the biggest failures in this respect, but if it makes Team Edward feel any better, by no means the first. Yeah, Ann Rice, I’m looking at you.

The problem with vampires in modern versions of the myth is that they’re just a bit too beautiful and deep to truly identify with. Staring down the barrel of eternity is ultimately difficult for us to imagine, and that’s why we’re so fascinated with it: why we return to it again and again, in religion, ghost stories, supernatural legends, tales of the Greek gods, science fiction and more. David Tennant’s Doctor pulls off the burden of eternity without the usual stereotypical angst by being engaging in a completely non-sexual way, funny, interested in and appreciative of everything, clever, an idealist, a pacifist, a man of learning, and everything that’s beautiful about the humanity he can’t keep away from. He ‘s a nonviolent nerd and he’s brilliant. He carries his burden lightly and we are kicked in the balls with it only once or twice per series as a rule, by which time we have come to give a shit because of the other stuff, and possibly cry like babies.

The Angels, Mitchells, Spikes, Edwards, Louis, Gary Oldman as Dracula in a bastardized deformity Frances Ford Coppola had the front to name Bram Stoker’s Dracula – well, they give into the dark at the drop of a hat. Moreover, these characters, according to a quick poll of the female viewers I know, become instantly sexy.

http://goo.gl/Pe0fj Based on the best Google has to offer, you’re just gonna have to trust me on this.

Yes, that’s right – they find the bloodsucking creatures who’d eat your heart in a beat more attractive than their brooding, morose, do-gooder, ensouled selves. Actually, wait – that makes sense. Never mind.

http://arcticboy.arcticboy.com/view2...7/hippies1.jpg Good vampires. [fangs to be shopped on]

But my point is, werewolves are the opposite – there’s no inherent glamour attached to them, because they are not especially subject to the sexy factor in and of themselves. An American Werewolf in London epitomises the inherent dehumanisation of the werewolf’s transformation. David Kessler won’t develop killer cheekbones, a heroin-chic pallor and a beguiling air of mysterious power which will draw those vulnerable sexy bitches to him like a moth to a flame. He will get green glowing eyes and a snout and tear out the colons of those around him as a hideous beast trapped in an animal frenzy. When the afflicted transforms in a werewolf film, high production costs may or may not be involved, but the finished product is almost always grotesque and reached by way of agonising pain of the part of the transform-ee. There is rarely much that’s sexual about the fully-changed werewolf, which frequently resembles some unnatural bastard child of a baboon and a hyena.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...dnyJ7uTVG834rx When you’re Stephanie Meyer, a radical departure from existing werewolf lore means bringing sexy back. That’s about it.

It’s no surprise that David Kessler loses his battle against the beast within – its presence has after all already transformed the people of the village where he first encountered it into hard, ruthless folk, as though tainted by the very existence of the creature that lives among them. In Being Human, when George describes the attack that made him a werewolf, he recalls, “Even at the time, I remember looking at it, and being... offended. That thing, in this world, it was so... wrong. And the smell of it. Like meat and sweat.” None of the seductive allure held by the bloodsucking creatures of the night: just an obscene slab of meat, carrying the promise of gritty carnage like a hairy extra nutsack. The struggle to deal, in one short human lifetime, with the empty horror of monsterhood.

Vampires, on the other hand, have had literally forever to get their shit straight, so it’s really no wonder that even the essentially “good” ones go through an evil stage at some point, much like teenagers with black metal – they’re bored, they’ve got all the time in the world, and they’re trying some shit out, goddamnit. Zombies and werewolves, however, are like that reliable ex you booty call whenever you’re drunk; they’re consistent in their habits, relatively safe to be around, and just inept enough to stumble enough for you to defend yourself when the night ends in an altercation.

[ http://goo.gl/wq2Zv PICTURED: AN ALTERCATION]

Not like vampires with that graceful super speed that kicks in when they’re pissed off and whoosh up in your face to make a point.

PICTURE: http://goo.gl/kkqr9 Intimidation tactics optional: fans estimate a 92.73 chance Buffy’ll fuck you either way.

Werewolves commonly attempt to manage their condition by locking themselves up on the night of the full moon. Vampires, on the other hand, are basically needy pussies: while the werewolf struggles manfully to control its affliction and protect others from the danger it poses, the vampire is most likely tomcatting around turning people so it won’t have to face eternity alone, choosing instead to impose its suffering on others as it searches for companionship by putting it about like a co-dependent crack whore leaving a trail of unfortunate spawn in its slutty wake. It whines about loneliness, goes around biting people, then when no one wants to hang out with it, it kills your human self and forces the curse of its own twisted being on you. ‘Cause then you’ll totally want to hang out with it.

So vampires are like organ thieves, only instead of stealing your kidney and leaving you to wake up in a bath full off ice, they steal your humanity and leave you to wake up alone, in a coffin, six feet underground. Buried alive. If you do not agree that this is a major dick move, there’s a statistically significant chance that you are a sociopath.

Face it, vampires are assholes. At least the organ thieves do it for money. It’s disturbing, but less creepy than being violated into eternity for no other reason than your attacker’s arrogant compulsion to spread their spawn for a bullshit reason like being a needy pussy. The only reason vampires dominate the supernatural landscape is because they breed with alarming ease, not unlike:
http://goo.gl/9Yfuz . Yeah, doesn’t sound so fucking sexy now, does it?

CuckooTuli · 08-30-2011, 05:10 AM

Becoming a werewolf, on the other hand, is trickier. You have to be bitten or scratched, but not deeply enough to kill you. When you’re dealing with two hundred pounds or so of pure shit that wants to kill you, you begin to realise how much more difficult this is than getting a pussy little bite from some slutty undead reproduction machine, dipping its wick in the giant walking gash that is now your existence. If vampires are the girls-who-have-sex-to-get-love of the monster world, werewolves are more like the discerning dominatrix: she’ll beat any pervert’s ass bloody if the payoff’s right, but the guys she removes the leather gloves for and makes skin-to-skin contact with during a spanking – well, those guys don’t come along every day, and those that do make it will be forever changed by the experience.

http://goo.gl/WnkAC Believe it or not, this guy is metaphorically all sexed out.

This was supposed to be a rant about how were werewolves are better than vampires. Ignoring the reality that I’ve spent much of it sucking Joss Whedon’s dick despite the fact that Angel with a soul was duller than ditchwater, the point still stands.