notbecauseofvictories:

As a preface: I love vampires. 

They’re not my favorite horror trope, but they’re an obvious second place. Vampires are about grief, like ghosts, but they’re also about transgression. (Ghosts aren’t about transgression unless you make them—ghosts are mostly about grief, which is why they’re my first favorite.) Vampires are mostly about eroticism and virulence and what you can’t control; vampires are the corpses that won’t stay dead. They existed before the language of pandemic, but not plague, and that’s what vampires are. If you go back into the historical record? They’re about disease.

What Stephanie Meyer failed to realize and what Bram Stoker knew, is that—in order to be into vampires, you’ve got to already be on a weird page. Vampires aren’t ghosts, horrific but distant, untouchable; vampires are embodied. Sickness of the body and a disease of the flesh; outside your self and still somehow in the physical world. Vampires are about a curse. In that way, vampires about the horror of cannibalism and the body, decay and resurrection and defiance of both. And maybe part of the reason I like them so much is they’re a dark mirror to the backbone of Catholic belief. After all, we’re the only religion that says, this is my body, given up for you, every week, before eating our 2000 year old dead god.

……………and then we turn around and ask our god to subsume us, make us his instrument, and fill us up entirely. 

Say what you want about religion, it tends to get to the point.

(I mean, vampires drink the blood and eat the body, which is what my people do, but—vampires do it transgressively. They’re unsanctified, after all, and their ceremonies darker. Sacrilegious. Where’s that post about how only Italians could have come up with vampires—Catholics without a crucifix, without the sanctified communion, and cursed to exist with no garlic at all.)

All this to say you’ve got to be….kind of into being eaten, with vampires. Even if it’s all metaphorical. Even if you draw the distinction between being eaten and being eaten out….the concept of vampires doesn’t. It wants to eat you. It is not picky about what grammatical proposition exists after that. Vampires are the embodied concept of a confusing nexus of language where “wanting to fuck and be fucked,” “wanting to eat and be eaten,” and “wanting not to die” coalesce.

There’s a lot of romantic and spiritual poetry about the hunter and the hunted, various gods of various pantheons arrowing in (literally) on their beloveds, and that’s very much what’s going on here.

It’s great.