The Humanization of Modern-Day Film Vampires Essay -- Movies

The Humanization of Modern-Day Film Vampires His thirsts have not changed. He craves the taste of blood, the warm, life-sustaining liquid that flows so gently from the necks of his victims into his make offensive mouth. He continues to hunt in the night, cursed forever from the purity of sunlight, and his eonian body still remains ageless, untouched by the rugged sand of time and trauma. Yet somehow the vampire is different than he at one time was. He is richer, more benignant in color. His clothes ar no longer binding and elaborate as the capes and suits of old he often opts for simple denim or leather pants and coats. In fact, the ultramodern vampire can often be mistaken for any opposite man or woman out for a midnight stroll. These observations all shew evidence of the humanization of vampires in pop culture, an evolution from the soulless, purely malevolent animals they once were to merely darker versions of man. As humans struggle to control their own inner desi res under the burden of society, increasingly protagonist vampires question and budge to suppress their own dark thirsts. It is this denial of nature un live onn to the rigorously evil vampires of old that identifies the modern-day film vampires more closely with their human counterparts today. Vampires, in retrospect, werent always the socially in-tune creatures that they are today. For what reasons did these changes occur? correspond to social critic I.C. Jarvie, if we look again at the movie foregone . . . we find that the critical posture, the portrayal of society, has long been an important subtradition of the American movie theater (Social Criticism xiii). Thus, if we refer back to some of the earliest vampire films, we index receive some clues about the nature of the society that bir... ...to pursue it. As Benjamin Hoff remarks in the Tao of Pooh, when you know and respect your own Inner Nature, you know where you belong (41). Perhaps, in modeling what were once se en as beasts after us, we are learning to accept rather than shun our own primitive natures. Our ready in the world is as creatures that are human.Works CitedDay, William Patrick. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. LexingtonUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2002.Hoff, Benjamin. The Tao of Pooh. New York Penguin Books 1982.I.C. Jarvie. Movies and Society. New York Basic Books, Inc., 1970.I.C. Jarvie. Movies as Social Criticism. Metuchen The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1978.Ursini, James and Alain Silver. The Vampire Film. Cranbury A.S. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1975Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead. Chicago University of Illinois Press, 1986.