Sucks To Be You

One of my favorite blogs to read each day is Clearly You're Retarded. And, while I generally find the author to be amusing, his last two blogs have left me overly disappointed due to the subject matter. As a middle-aged white dude reading a blog written by another middle-aged white dude, the last thing I expect to find myself reading about is Twilght. Yet, Adam Avitable, the author of CYR, who generally posts on-topic and hysterical posts (and the occasional picture of his testicles) dedicated his last two posts on two independent sites regarding just that.

Now, I know that I spent the other night railing about the plight of Japan and basically pissing in the shoe of every guy sporting a Moe Howard haircut. But, truth be known, I'm not insensitive. I do care about certain things and causes in this muddled world. Honestly.

And, quite frankly, Mr. Avitable, I find your additions to the degradations of a race that has suffered continuously at the hands of Hollywood to be disgraceful. I don't think you have any idea how hard it is to be taken seriously as a Vampire in America today.

When Vlad Tepes became the inspiration for one of the most feared creatures to rise from the grave and feed upon the living, I doubt he ever envisioned his bloody reign of terror spawning a breed of glittery, sexually confused teen idols. In fact, I'm fairly certain that if you suggested he should be on Team Edward, he would have cheerfully decapitated you, drank your blood and placed your severed head on a pike in his front yard as a warning to other Twilight fans.

What Hollywood has done to vampires is sadder than the lack of work midgets have experienced since The Wizard of Oz finished filming. I mean, Jesus wept, someone put Tom Cruise in a blonde wig and the jacket Prince wore in the video for Little Red Corvette and tried to pass him off as a movie monster. Count Von Count from Sesame Street is a more convincing vampire than Lestat or Edward. Come to think of it, so are Count Chocula and Grandpa from The Munsters.

I'm not sure how we went from the dark imaginings of Nosferatu to having vampires parading around as foppish Euro-trash. I'm not certain how a creature that drinks human blood and can only be killed by driving a stake through it's dead heart came to be portrayed as romantic and sexy. When did sunblock become a vampire's go-to against the wrath of a scorned God? Copper Tone, now available in SPF Jesus!How did vampires go from sleeping in the dirt they were buried in to prancing about in the sunlight having West Side Story-ish fights with werewolves over a girl, who in my opinion, isn't even that attractive?

About every ten to fifteen years, an author or film maker decides to un-queer the vampire culture and revive them as the unholy creatures of the night that had Romanians stringing crosses and garlic on their doors at sundown. The blood suckers in such epic works as: 'Salem's Lot, The Lost Boys, Underworld, The Blade Trilogy, 30 Days of Night, and Day Breakers spring to mind. Yet, for every good representation of the vampire, we're asked to suffer through something like:

Is this fucking guy going to rip out my jugular and drain my blood, turning me into one of the walking dead, or is he about to bust out in an opera solo? I can't tell. (Okay, okay...I love John Carpenter's Vampires, but only because James Woods kicks total ass)

If I believed in conspiracy theories (which I do but for the purpose of making my argument better, I'm going to pretend I don't), I might even suspect that this is all a ploy by the Vampire Nation to lure us into a false sense of security. They want us to believe that they're generally harmless, misunderstood creatures so that we lower our guard. And, then, they're going to pounce. They're going to round us up like cattle and put us in farms and have human meat factories... If I believed in conspiracy theories, anyway...

I'd like the book and film industries to leave my monsters as monsters, please and thank you. If the chubby, pimply pre-teen girls of America need someone to idealize or fantasize about, they can turn on the Disney Channel and get all of the meaningless tripe they want. I don't think that fans of the horror genre should be required to exposure to such abortions as Twilight. When I hear the word 'vampire', I want a chill to run up my spine, not bile to run up my throat.

And, before anyone accuses me of not giving the Twilight series a fair shake, allow me to retort: I am unwilling to go the permanent lengths of running head down into a brick wall repeatedly in order to give myself the type of mild brain damage it would take to lower my IQ enough to stoop to such a thing. I have a very cool T-shirt collection that I would rather not obstruct with the bib that I would need to catch my drool. This is a series of books and movies that are geared towards angsty, love lorn tweeners, not grown men. My personal idea of literature extends a bit beyond that type of drivel.

The only thing scary about the vampires spawned by writers like Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer is their fan base.