You can have a dozen different vampire fans in the room, and they’ll all tell you a different reason why they like them, why they’re attracted to them.” “The cool thing about is they’re a dozen different things to a dozen different people. “ there’s nothing wrong with exploring that kind of vampire,” he adds, describing himself as a “massive fan” of The Vampire Diaries and firmly “Team Delena” when it comes to the love triangle at the show’s center.
“Over the course of the last 20, 30 years they have evolved into something very different,” Kristoff says. From The Vampire Diaries and True Blood to the Twilight franchise, recent mainstream pop culture has embraced the idea of the vampire as a version of the ultimate bad boy boyfriend, a secretly romantic figure still searching for true love after centuries of loneliness.
Those aren’t generally the sorts of vampires we tend to see in much contemporary fiction nowadays, however. Those were the vampires that I grew up with.” “I grew up reading books like Salem’s Lot and watching films like The Lost Boys and Near Dark. They were the scary things that were trying to eat the good people,” Kristoff explains during a wide-ranging conversation with Den of Geek. “When I was a kid, vampires were the monsters under the bed. In this story, the first in a new epic fantasy trilogy, vampires are 100% terrifying again, vicious monsters who kill violently and indiscriminately, and whose powers mean that few humans are capable of standing against them for long. Published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula may have sparked a particular vein of horror story that continues to this day (looking at you, American Horror Story: Double Feature), but Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, changed how audiences relate to bloodsuckers forever and plenty of contemporary vampire tales have continued to cast the creatures as broody, desirous, long-suffering anti-heroes burdened by the weight of immortality.īut don’t expect bestselling Australian author Jay Kristoff’s new book, Empire of the Vampire, to follow this modern trend. (The earliest references to blood-drinking creatures date back to ancient Mesopotamia, believe it or not.) But the way we relate to these creatures has shifted throughout the centuries, as legends, folklore, and popular culture have adapted to the needs and fears specific to respective societies.
As a species, humans have more or less always been obsessed with vampires.
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