Lilly Bechtel: You write in the conclusion of your thesis that you became inspired to write about Twilight after being exposed to the “religious rhetoric and factually inaccurate medical information” of anti-abortion clinics in Austin TX. Can you say more about the connection for you, between your exposure to conservative propaganda and your interest in Twilight?

Julia Pearlman: My time in Austin was extremely formative; my experiences in Texas Crisis Pregnancy Centers cemented my belief in the importance of comprehensive sexual education. I was charged with the task of visiting Texas CPCs to understand the information they offer to girls in need, girls looking for answers. I am lucky—I had a strong education and the knowledge I needed to form my (strong) opinions. As I listened to the medically inaccurate information these centers propagate, I was struck by how terrifying the “information” would be to a girl who did not know that abortions do not cause breast cancer. I was struck by how scared I was, even knowing that what I was being told was, simply put, propaganda. I began thinking about how beliefs are formed and where teenage girls go for information. I began to really look at television programs, movies, novels, music etc. targeted at teenage girls. My search, inevitably, led me to the insane hysteria surrounding the Twilight Saga and from the first page, I knew had found something worth investigating.

LB: And had you seen any of the Twilight films at that point?

JP: At that point, I had not seen any of the Twilight films. I was fairly unaware of the craze surrounding the series (in fact, my little sister once asked me if I had been living under a rock when I sheepishly admitted I didn’t know who Robert Pattison was). I was studying abroad in Sweden when the series really became popular and missed the beginnings of the Twilight craze.

When I began to really dig in to the Series I felt a strange dissonance because I was at once appalled by the values the series enforces, yet completely enthralled. I think it was this internal struggle that really compelled me to focus my research on the series. What is the intrigue, the connection to the narrative? Why is it so engrossing? Why can’t I put it down? (and more importantly, why am I embarrassed when I bring it out into public?!)

LB: What correlation do you see between a teenage girl who visits an anti-abortion clinic in Texas and the character of Bella? What do you think these two girls have in common?

JP: Bella represents a return to conservative ideals and very rigid gender roles, yet at the same time demonstrates a certain strength that I think many young girls identify with. She describes herself as very average; young girls see themselves in her—Bella’s being is not unattainable. She is not a movie star, she does not represent an impossible body image (though of course, all that changes when she becomes a vampire and we know that Edward sees something in her she perhaps does not see in herself). Bella’s self-description, her totally relatable life creates a deep connection between narrator and reader. The lines are blurred between Bella and those who participate in the Twilight craze. The correlation, then, becomes unavoidable. The twilight readership who allies herself with Bella is also the girl who visits a Texas Crisis Pregnancy Center or a Planned Parenthood. She is still searching for herself, still striving to define herself in a confusing and over-stimulating world. The information she is presented, whether it be through a novel, blog, tv show or crisis pregnancy center has an extreme power to shape the girl’s ideology.

LB: You discuss the ways that Stephanie Meyer has subverted vampire myth in order to create a conservative American fairytale. You note this shift as a kind of vampiric gentrification when you write: “the vampire is no longer a monster, but a hero.” How does Edward transform in Meyer’s Twilight and how is this change significant in what you claim is a patriarchal story?

JP: Though the vampire has evolved over time, the figure had always represented deep social anxiety. The vampire was dirty and immoral. In Twilight, however, Meyer subverts these commonly held beliefs when she creates a vampire that is strong and beautiful. Edward becomes the archetypal heroic figure, the knight in (literally) shining armor. Edward is not a monster but the man who gives meaning to Bella’s life and who by-and-large instructs her to become a woman. His extreme manhood laces the narrative with conservative ideals that enforce a stifling model of womanhood, a model to which young girls subscribe.

LB: But even though Edward isn’t as raunchy as some of the other vampires in pop culture, Bella’s attraction to him, in the context of the film, is dangerous. Do you think that her decision to be with Edward challenges her powerless role as a female or confirms it? Is there value in the risk she takes?

JP: Bella’s attraction to Edward is certainly dangerous, but represents the danger of pre-marital sex rather than the danger of the vampire. Bella’s decision to be with Edward does offer a glimpse of her ability to exercise power, but that power is limited within the confines of Edward’s power. That is, Bella exercises as much power as Edward allows. In the end, they do not consummate their love until they are married. The risk she takes is significant, but it is that risk, the unknowing willingness to sacrifice her body for the ultimate gift—her baby—that allows Bella to become a woman (according to conservative social mores that a woman is only complete once she is mother). Bella exercises her power only in an effort to secure her womanhood and ultimately give her power over to husband and child.

LB: Why do you think a writer with such conservative sexual ideals as Meyer is attracted to the character of the vampire?

JP: The vampire has incredible power and incredible intrigue. Meyer uses the vampire as a metaphor for the intrigue of sex, but more significantly of the pleasure of sex within the confines of a loving marriage. Edward is desirable and has unbelievable sex appeal, but he also has Victorian morals and a strong sense of conservative gender identities. He represents the intrigue of sex, but as a vampire represents conservative sexual ideals. Meyer subverts the traditional use of the figure to market her own conservative agenda.

LB: You write in your introduction: “The myths proliferated by the (Twilight) series instruct the reader on how to be an American.” How do you see a series that glorifies a vampire instructing readers on how to be American? What are the instructions?

JP: Myths have the power to shape a national culture; the myths proliferated by the series instruct the teenage girl readership how to be American, namely to be wife and mother. The teenage girl who consumes Twilight in all of its manifestations, who is subject to the influence of cultural artifacts (the literature she reads, the movies she consumes), is searching to find her place in the American social order. In trying to define herself, the teenage girl looks for examples of womanhood and finds, in Bella, the ultimate example.

The glorification of the vampire is the vehicle used to reinforce the traditional ideals of American gender identity. The reader idolizes Edward, longs for him and wants to become like him. The reader similarly wants to be like Bella, the woman who captured Edward’s heart. When Bella marries Edward, and ultimately becomes a vampire, the reader sees that Bella has achieved her fairy tale ending, her ultimate happiness as wife and mother. The series, glorifying the love between Edward and Bella, instructs the teenage girl that her greatest achievement in life is to become a wife and mother.

LB: You write in your thesis: “The series indoctrinates the young reader into the realm of desire, abstinence, motherhood and a very narrow definition of morality. She is told that any power she holds should we wielded to obtain her end goal, her highest form of happiness- motherhood.” Given this statement, how do you interpret Bella’s apparent choice between Jacob or Edward? What does this choice represent?

JP: This statement describes the implications of Bella’s choice; the reader sees Bella exercise her autonomy to choose Edward and thereby choose the life of wife and mother. The reader sees this as the choice she too should make. Though Bella is “free” to choose, the narrative is constructed in such a way that Bella really has no choice, for Edward is her true love and to deny him would be to deny her own happiness. Though she loves Jacob, we find that her love for Jacob is maternal and couched in paternalistic discourse.

LB: Yet despite some of the ways that Meyer’s story idealizes a classic gender dynamic, why do you think the result is a story that is oddly sexy?

JP: One of the more interesting aspects of conservative gender roles, the very 1950’s gender dyncamics, are that women—wives, rather—are incredibly sexy and sexed. Their job as wife is to please their husbands, hence the corsets, bras and other female enhancements of the 1950s. Girls are allowed to sexy, when it’s in a marriage. Once Bella marries Edward, the series becomes incredibly sexual, but it’s okay because Edward put a ring on it.

LB: Since completing your project, what vampires have appeared on the news or on the screen have you been drawn to?

JP: I must admit that I am a die-hard True Blood fan. In some ways, Sookie is very much like Bella. They are both complicit actors in the performance of femininity, in the dominant ideological formation of the female in American society. Sookie is very sexual, blonde hair, short shorts, sundresses—always in peril, always in need of saving, Sookie is the ideal female for her vampire savior, Bill. I find the show completely entertaining.

LB: What would you say is the most significant thing your project has taught you about the relationship between a society and the monsters it creates?

JP: This project has given me a greater insight into the extreme power literature, entertainment and dominant cultural trends have over individuals. Young teenagers are looking to find their place in the world and over-whelmed by competing forces telling them what’s in, what’s cool, how to live their lives. It is a powerful opportunity to play a role in the creation of those identities, in the ideologies of our future leaders. What I find to be most significant is the ever-growing need for education. We need to give children the tools to be critical of their world and question everything.

Image 1: letterstotwilight.com

Image 2: enikrising@blogspot.com

Image 3: squidoo.com

The post Bella Goes to the Clinic: Sex Ed in the Twilight Era appeared first on The Faster Times.

Indeed. But it’s not as bad as you think. What helps me is to look at how, for example, a whole culture of vampire lovers have emerged by morphing Slavic superstition into American icons, and look at how well that project is going. The vampire-obsessed sure know how to have their bright lights and cheap thrills and leave it at that. And I mean really, there’s no reason why vampire-lovers should be able to accomplish anything that Christmas lovers can’t. That just seems wrong. So I’ve taken the time to look at what the vampire craze may have to teach us those of who don’t know when to let their guard down and leave a holiday alone.

In lieu of 12 days of Christmas, let’s look at twelve things that Jesus and Vampires have in common. I hope you’ll excuse my rashness, but I’m about making the holiday spirit accessible.

1. Both Jesus and the Vampire are misunderstood loners with superhuman strengths.

2. They have the shared experience of being hunted down and staked.

3. They are both high profile celebrities who make terrifying guest appearances.

4. Both have conception histories that are a bit shady.

5. Both of them have inspired best-selling books.

6. Both have a knack for attracting women who are in it for the long haul.

7. Both have some followers who seriously consider their existence.

8. Both of them consider their flesh being eaten a compliment.

9. Both encourage us that what dies wants to come back.

10. Both of them only get more popular when you try to kill them.

11. Both of them make sex unnecessarily complicated.

12. Both have inspired special occasions that entail blood drinking.

Hopefully now we can get words like “ritual” out of the way and guiltlessly puncture the myth that you have to be loyal to just one tradition to have a good time. As the Twihards have taught us, having a good time on Christmas depends on just how much of yourself you are willing to mindlessly give. How hard can it be?It’s all about laying awake in the dark wondering whether or not a strange man will show up at your house; half-hoping he will be distracted by the food you have left him and half-hoping he will stay. It’s about telling our kids stories that will make us seem more mysterious. It’s about buying stuff. It’s about eating. And in some twisted, roundabout, heavily disguised way, it’s about love. If the Edward Cullen stocking wasn’t enough to get you loose, here’s some other gifts that might help the process. And if all that doesn’t satisfy, there’s always lady Gaga vampire biting the head off of Santa Claus.Happy Holidays, everyone. And to all a good bite.

Image 1: blog.beliefnet.com

Image 2: mondomonkey.com

Image 3: myconfinedspace.com

The post Lady Gaga Vampire-Bites Santa Claus appeared first on The Faster Times.

Melissa Rosenberg, as it turns out, considers herself a committed feminist, which is surprising to consider in light of her task to adapt Stephanie Myers’s conservative and Mormon story into something that everyone can enjoy. Rosenberg professed to the audience that any head on disagreement between Myers and Rosenberg had been avoided, for the most part, thanks to the cardinal rules of script writing. Because of the confines of Hollywood narrative arch, which state that it is any central character’s job to keep the story afloat, Bella’s demure on the page demeanor has, by necessity, benefited from a little added snap. While this character shift is interesting (even if just trying to consider Bella being more of a pawn in the book than she is in the movie), and while it is nice to know that it has spared Myers and Rosenberg from a few head on aesthetic collisions; can we call this character shift from page to screen a revival? Not exactly.

Matt Reeves, director of “Let Me In” continued in the tradition of confessionals when he shared with us that he is just as terrified of horror films as most of the people who don’t watch them. He still responds viscerally to anyone’s even shoddy imitation of the possessed girl in the The Exorcist, and proved it to us by shimmying his shoulders around just thinking about it. Given that this is the director of the biggest vampire film currently out, I was surprised that one of his most sincere comments about his work was that it was much less scary to make horror movies than it was to sit through them. The other, to his credit, was that the inspiration for the movie’s title had to do with breaking down the old myth that a vampire must be invited in order to enter a human’s home. His interest in demystifying this tenant appears in his film when its’ young vampire star, Abby, is in emotional need and enters the room of her young friend without his permission. The humanization of vampires is a steadily occurring theme in the stories of this revival, yet this doesn’t mean that the artists behind these stories have to have a reason. When Reeves was asked by the panelist why he wanted to challenge this rule of vampire lore, and let a little vampire come right in, he shrugged “I mean, why not?”

To the left of Reeves sat Stephen King, infamously referred to as the father of horror, who was the most exciting this about this panel and whose most surprising trait was that he couldn’t keep his hands off a good joke. Reclined in his “American Vampire” t-shirt, his grey hair slicked up to a teenage hair geled twirl, interspersing dead pan one-liners with spot on observations; he possessed the casual charm of a convict. His sole interest appeared to be having a great time. This is always refreshing, but I found it particularly interesting coming from someone who has made a life out of his profound ability to horrify. Considering the very thin thread that connects the world of the hilarious to that of the truly terrifying, one finds that both comedy and horror revolve around situations where we don’t get what we want or we lose what we have. King, with his shifty eyes and side ways grin, is someone who not only understands that, but seems like someone is the strange kid next door; the exact kind of person who loves to show us how rickety that white picket fence really is. This is perhaps why Mr. King has no interest in making vampires “nice” and whose recently released first series of comic books, American Vampire created with Scott Snyder and Raphael Albaquerque is a deliberate throw back to the unbridled grit of the vampire as one creature that you do not want to sleep with. (And is definitely one take on the vampire worth checking out.)

Because these days any vampire can pass for normal if they’re cute enough, a process of discernment and discrimination and dare I say it surveillance is needed in order to root them out. This process, when taken out of context, easily parallels the hilarious and impossible hunt for a “true” American identity, and our faulty efforts at establishing safety. It is this human urge of ours to maintain total control that is of prime interest to King, whose stories are inspired by pinching that nerve right where it hurts. As an artist who has made a life long career out of providing us with graphic visions of vulnerability, King could be considered a renegade in the context of this current revival, where so many vampires just aren’t scaring us. And yet, looking at Stephen King -the master of horror- make funny faces and bad puns all, the thing that I considered is that perhaps our created creatures of the dark really aren’t all that scary, but just a little weird. Perhaps it’s only our obvious fear of them that makes them want to kill us. In this light, it makes sense that one of the main blood hungry villians in American Vampire is an escaped outlaw; one who has rejected and been rejected by mainstream society.

Yet the real question remains: What’s the deal with this revival? Why vampires? Why now? While Mr. King was the closest thing to an answer (and a vampire) I left feeling hungry for a wider lens. We can’t possibly be invaded by these monsters for no reason. Is anyone aware of the danger of this? The impending doom of wide spread inexplicable freakishness? And in that moment of panic I decided to get to the bottom of this phenomenon if it’s the last thing I do. That’s it. I’m tired of fangs glaring down at me from Billboards without knowing what’s going on. This Halloween, I’m going on a vampire hunt. If I make it back alive, I can tell you what’s to blame for this whole revival thing so that we can band together and parade around with stakes and torches and some confidence for a change. I mean, why not?

Photos by: Joe Kohen and Eammon McCabe

The post The Vampire Revival: Who’s to Blame? appeared first on The Faster Times.

What happens when your worst nightmare saunters up to you in black denim and tells you his name is Bill? The HBO series ‘True Blood’ takes the hardened image of the vampire as a menacing creature that lurks outside of town limits, and brings him right into the bar. He sits down on a stool, orders a synthetically manufactured blood brew, and assures you he is pleased to meet you. So no wonder the resulting three seasons of this show run on the chaos of identity that ensues in a world where the fine line between the normal people and the freaks is as penetrable as skin. ‘True Blood’ creates a world where moral codes are torn and punctured with as much frequency as the characters who try and stand by them, so that by the end of the third season, what they are ‘for’ and what they are ‘against’ is as wonderfully muddled and inconsistent as the one-liners they exchange.

While the winding plot of ‘True Blood’ is ultimately human in its violent search for a bad guy everyone can agree on, it is a worship of personal freedom that makes it a campy, neon-blood spilling crusade of a truly American caliber. The consequences that we may face in our daily lives when attempting to fulfill our deepest desires are in ‘True Blood’ dulled by glam leather and sandpapered southern accents, that assure us that we don’t have to choose between life and death, raunchy sex and the higher ground, the ability to sleep safely at night and the urge to walk on the edge; that instead we can have it all. You don’t have to move to the other side of town to try out the realm of emotionless carnal drives if you don’t want to; you can just visit for a while. (Or you can follow the lead of the show’s main heroin Sookie Stackhouse and vacation with the male vampire of your choice frequently, trusting that you can recoil from him every other episode with the help of some feigned sentimental indignation.)

Yet despite some of its sloppy references to freedom, with a blurred sense of the enemy and the occasional glimpse at the vampire underbelly, this show is most markedly American in the way that it uses a product to harness a population that is feared. The synthetically made vampire beverage, true blood, which looks smells and tastes a lot like blood but didn’t take any veins to make, invites vampires into the towns’ midst where they can masquerade as threatening teachers of the unknown, while sucking on their dark red pacifiers. In this attempt to turn an ominous group into a controlled market there is an element of magic that is perhaps far more appealing than any speed- of- light flips, bondage outfits, or shape shifting bartenders. Instead, the truly intoxicating elixir that ‘True Blood’ offers is a gripping appetite for the forbidden, coupled with a wilder promise that the forbidden, while dangerous, will never actually come right out and kill us.

If you missed a recent cover of ‘Rolling Stone’ let me do the honors of filling you in. Three naked actors, interlaced and adorned in blood, stare directly at you. Beneath the Billboard of their bodies, reads the caption: ‘True Blood: They’re hot, they’re sexy, they’re undead.’ Only Vampire Bill, played by Stephen Moyer, embraces the drama of his butt naked predicament with an ominous look of threatened ownership, squeezing the tit and torso of Anna Paquin from behind, as he scathes you with his looking- up- from- his- meal- of –wolf- meat- stare. Paquin, in contrast, wears her face as noncommittally as her blood, with one hand grasping back for Bill’s thigh and another leg slung up into the suggestive grasp of Bill’s rival, Vampire Eric. Poised between two men, with an expression devoid of character and a body that screams controversy, Paquin floats between the engaged world of the living and the detachment of the dead. Next to her, vampire Eric looks out at us with his bemused Norweigan movie star eyes, as if to say: “Can you believe this?”

If you are a viewer of ‘True Blood,’ then yes, you can believe it, and even for those who are not, who came across last week’s issue of Rolling Stone, the show’s desperate accommodation of gritty gore and seamless glam was made abundantly clear. In the fantastical world of the un-dead, as displayed on this unbelievable cover, you can have it all. Even your blood can be a costume, and you don’t have to have any lasting wounds to wear it. Like this truly shocking image, the appeal of this promise lies somewhere between the grotesque, the hilarious and the fantastic; as does the entire unreality of ‘True Blood’ that has attracted twelve million inhabitants a week who keep coming back to be fed everything they could possibly want- and more.

Photo: lasnark.com

The post Wanted: Hot and Undead appeared first on The Faster Times.

Of all the vampires prowling the screen these days, the thirstiest creature of all isn’t a vampire, it’s a teenage girl. In “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” seventeen year old Bella pins her one hundred and four year old vampire boyfriend to the bed and finally just pleads with him. She’s sick of hearing about her soul, she’s done with fending off red-eyed armies. By this scene in the trilogy she has reached a point of desperation, and when in one of the films pivotal moments Edward pauses yet again, having made it only one button down on her button-down shirt, she says, wincing: “just try.”

What ever happened to count Dracula seducing a young girl in a low-cut dress somewhere in Transylvania? I guess chivalry really is dead. The twentieth century is to thank for slaying a lot of the discrimination inherent in worshiping a woman, but this attack on tradition definitely has taken some of the fun out of things. Courting a lady used to take more time than most marriages do these days, and that fact isn’t lost on Bella. “Being with me would be like breathing” Jacob the werewolf assures her, putting her hand on his brawny chest. “That’s blood and breath and warmth, Bella. That’s life.” Yet our main character is not so turned on by all that. She’s not interested in a lover who doesn’t hold for her hoops of fire, brimstone, or otherwise. She doesn’t want to be loved for who she is and what she knows but instead wrangled through a process of becoming. That’s first love, isn’t it? Vertigo, terror, head rushes, the works. So what better person to witness the job than an effeminate, old school vampire with all the time in the world? Edward offers Bella the kind of chivalry that allows her to lean out over the threshold of her own darkness, and marvel at the risk of its depth, without immediately falling. Her passion takes place on the periphery of sex, in a kind of supernatural Petri-dish perfect for teenage audiences. With Bella’s neck tilted back, Edward’s mouth an inch away from her throat, there is a definite magnetism at play but also a choice. Edward will not force Bella to marry him. He is enough of a monster to attract her, man enough to take no for an answer, and gentleman enough to make it all very difficult to decide. He is a dark knight of the highest caliber, in the most modern and classical sense, offering women and girls all over the world the best of their modern and old fashioned desires. No wonder he is a best seller.

Upon first glance “Eclipse” satisfies some unfortunate cravings for entertainment: Jacob the werewolf or Edward the vampire; what’s a girl to do? Yet a vein has been struck, for lack of a better term, and the mythic quest of becoming oneself has been reborn on a twenty first century screen. In a time when young girls are facing more and more freedoms and fewer and fewer obstacles to sex, Bella’s certainty makes her an interesting heroine, not just for teenage girls and twenty somethings (like me) but my thirty something and forty something friends. When Bella pulls a vampire onto the bed, her desire for him is a result of his charm, his baggage, but mostly the risk he entails. After the good old fashioned, up-hill-both-ways path of struggle, she is sure of what she wants. Her assurance in this scene is rare in a current climate that so highly values the power of female choice, yet places a dwindling amount of importance on the taxing road to its discovery. For those of us who have followed Bella, after just a few stressful years of courting a vampire, she’s ready to sink her teeth in. She has never been so confidently herself and so wholeheartedly starved.

While the conservative, (and religious) elements in this story are not hard to find, there is an undeniable and refreshing reversal of gender roles that makes “Eclipse” a new take on an old story. And regardless of what you were hankering for, the whole thing is mixed up with just enough messy vampire politics, chic off-grey athletic gear, and Black Keys appearances on the soundtrack, to not only accommodate but thrill an enormous audience. For the time being, and perhaps forever, the old vampire myth has gone stale for the new blood army of movie goers and been usurped by a story of human thirst. It’s Dracula’s turn to lay awake at night and worry about what young girl, on fire with certainty, awaits him in his chamber.

Photo by Sparkle in the sun

The post Bella Swan Wants It: The Vampire Role Reversal appeared first on The Faster Times.

I thought this was a spoof. Until a vampire endorsed McCain.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULUb98TNwk&feature=player_embedded

The post Vampires Invade Republican Senate Race? appeared first on The Faster Times.

Thursday night during Cheese, Crackers, and Checkers, Tina told a dicey joke that I thought was in really poor taste. Now, I can never remember jokes correctly (Tina loves to pick on me for this), so I don’t recall exactly how this one went, but the punch line might as well have been: “Isn’t it funny that vampires are a weird inferior race with gross alternative lifestyles and special needs that are fun to ignore!” Luckily, not a single one of my confirmed guests showed up that night, making me the sole witness to her disgusting outburst. I first tried explaining to Tina that I didn’t think the joke was funny and that she should think twice before passing that kind of toilet material around, but without a thought, she abruptly disagreed. Thus began an epic conversation turned probably-breakup argument which revealed a heart sick with hate, as black as a Sharpie marker, and, I fear, just as reliably permanent.

The mask really came off when I asked Tina to elaborate on her idea of a typical vampire. I’m not kidding, verbatim, this is what she said (her words not mine): “They all wear black capes and slick their hair back. They live in castles, and they kill people.” WTH! I sleep next to this maniac?! Hearing how casually the hate-spew flowed from her foul mouth made me wonder if I had somehow fallen through a time warp and been sucked all the way back to 2002–when vampires were “monsters” and the world was still an idiot.

It is astounding to me that after four or five whole years of progressive work towards vampire civil rights across all mediums of entertainment, despicable attitudes like Tina’s are still around. She went so far as to say that she “would not want vampires living in her neighborhood!” and her most pathetic line of defense was to continually scream, “Vampires are not real you dipsh*t!” I feel like that excuse has worn quite thin, as we all know now that minorities, vampires, aliens, homosexuals, mermaids, robots, werewolves, and pirates are all like the rest of us–just a little “different”. Well, real or unreal, natural or supernatural, on a great HBO show or living just down the hall, it doesn’t matter to me, there is no gray area, intolerance and bigotry are 100% unacceptable. I’ll bet that every crooked notion that Tina has about vampires is based on old movies she saw or weird books she read from a least six years ago! How was I supposed to react to this?

(Incidentally last fall, in a similar situation, I was forced to part ways with a very close friend. In a crowded cafe he kept loudly describing the refugee characters from the film District 9 as “big creepy insects.” I was severely embarrassed by his insensitivity concerning Apartheid in South Africa. I haven’t seen him since.)

Tina even refused to understand how not being able to go out in daylight constituted a physical handicap for vampires. She didn’t care that they couldn’t mail a package or open a checking account. Tina might have great hair and a full-time job, but her appalling attitude towards the disabled was the last straw. I left the house that night to clear my head, and I’ve been sleeping on the streets since. I assumed that I’d just crash on my yoga coach’s couch, but his secretary told me that he had actually died in a car fire literally just minutes before I called! A real shame because I felt like he really listened when I talked to him about this stuff.

Photo: mediamemo.com

The post My Girlfriend is a Raging Vampophobe appeared first on The Faster Times.

[imagebrowser id=1]

The post Lovers & Biters: The Most Interesting Vampire Couples appeared first on The Faster Times.

[imagebrowser id=1]

The post Lovers & Biters: The Most Interesting Vampire Couples appeared first on The Faster Times.

Maybe it’s all in my head, but lately I’ve been feeling like the vampire genre has been sitting too long in its own bath water. Combing through the 60+ vampire movies that are, according to IMDB, threatening a 2010 release, is a task in itself. Sure, I am very excited about the March release of the comic book series “American Vampire,” and I suppose the new season of “True Blood” will also be fun, but when it comes to the vampires of the big screen, what I’m feeling right now is nothing short of ambivalence. It seems like the grossly enormous success of the “Twilight” franchise has convinced studios far and wide to pump out as many blood sucking sucky movies in a mad dash to cash in. But as L.A. Times movie blogger Steven Zeitchik points out, when it comes down to it, “Twilight’s” box office triumph can really only be seen as an isolated phenomenon:

Since the supposed vampire revival began several years ago, no non-Twilight film (and there have been plenty) has come close to breaking out. “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant” was an unabashed failure. “30 Days of Night” had one decent weekend and faded faster than a bloodsucker at sunrise. A more auteur-driven attempt, “Thirst,” couldn’t even muster $500,000 at the domestic box office this summer.

Truth is, most vampire movies lately have all been huge underperformers. Which is not to say that they have all been spectacular disappointments. To be fair, Park Chan-wook’s “Thirst“–with its disturbingly weird imagery (sipping blood through IV drips=majorly creepy), its squirm-inducing blood slurping sound effects, and its imaginative and perversely sexual take on vampire mythology–was both deliciously campy and stylistically complex. But none of these qualities draw a crowd. Teenage girls just don’t flock to the theater these days to see a homely vampire priest drinking blood in order to suppress a deadly virus that covers his body with oozing boils. Sure, “Thirst” is very much a love story, but with all its sado-masochistic, lusty toe-sucking, armpit-licking sex, it’s definitely not that of the Edward and Bella variety.

Of course there are many factors that bring a movie monetary success, but as much as I’d like to, I can’t ignore the fact that to a large extent audiences have a hand in determining which movies flop. Which is exactly why I have a hard time believing it’s vampires that sell tickets to the “Twilight” movies and not Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson. When it comes down to it, true vampire horror films like “Thirst” just haven’t had the power lately to reach a wider audience. Which depresses me to no end because this is the kind of movie I’d like to see more of this year. I’m sick and tired of feeling dissatisfied by so much of what I see in theaters (and this goes beyond the vampire genre). 2009 really f-ing sucked for a whole lot of people, and if anything, the last thing anyone needs in the New Year is more dissatisfying vampire movies.

Dear Hollywood, here’s my 12 dollars. Now make me really feel something. Terrify me. Seduce me. Disgust me. Confront me. Break my heart. I don’t care. I’m just ready for something new. Give me a vampire movie this year that will not only breathe new life into the genre and sell tickets, but transcend the genre altogether.

(Grand expectations, I know. But I’ll keep you posted.)

Photos: movieroar.com, rottentomatoes.com

The post Staking Vampire Movies in 2010 appeared first on The Faster Times.