Vampire fiction saved me

After seeing the promotional music video AMC+ did for season three of their Interview with the Vampire series, it reignited my love for something I’d forgotten over the past several years; vampires. My love for Anne Rice’s kind of vampire made a huge impression on me from an early age, and it was an early fantasy of mine not just because they were attractive, but because vampirism would have saved me from everything.

Since PTSD took its choke-hold on me during the start of the pandemic in 2020, I’d forgotten how to enjoy life, and I became consumed with my trauma and every dark memory it resurfaced. It was all I could write about, and I feared for the longest time that I was incapable of writing another book without traumatic themes of some kind. All I could blog about were darker subjects.

My first two published books were about my past and how I came to cope with it, and I’m trying to break free from that. I’ve, unfortunately, fallen in love with darker things, as this blog has shown, and it will always be a part of me and my creativity going forward, but I don’t have to leave the darkness when not writing about trauma.

Horror was an early love of mine that brought me comfort, and it still does. It’s a part of that darkness I flee to when I want to escape. Another is the Gothic side of fiction, and I don’t mean Goth alternative culture, which I am also a part of. I mean, more specifically, philosophical and melancholic vampires who exist eternally and imperfectly within the morally gray area of the human psyche.

When I was about twelve, I had already been through a lot of trauma. I’d been severely bullied at school for years, groomed by a strange older man who continued to sexually groom me, and I was verbally abused at home. I suffered from dissociative spells that brought on concerning thoughts, I was suicidal at ten, and I had a disabling panic disorder with agoraphobia that left me homebound often and afraid of everyone and everything. I’d often faint from panic attacks being so intense.

During my twelfth year, while my parents were away for the afternoon and I was home alone, I dug through their cabinet of VHS tapes to find something interesting. I can’t remember why I chose Interview with the Vampire, the film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Lestat and Louis. I was already into horror, as I had been for as long as I could read, so maybe the edgy vampire aesthetic is what drew me in, but I quickly popped it into the VCR and settled in, aware that if I was caught watching it I’d be in big trouble.

I was entranced. Lestat became one of my first loves, and I adore him still.

Anne Rice’s vampires gave me an escape I didn’t know I needed at the time. I thought of how freeing being a vampire would be; I would no longer have to fear anyone or anything. I wouldn’t have to fear sickness, as I had been sick for a lot of my childhood. I wouldn’t be afraid of people anymore because no one would mess with me, and my disabling panic disorder would be an afterthought. I would have an excuse to be up all night instead of being ridiculed for it, as the night brought safety with it. I’d always felt secure in the dark where no one would bother me and the world was quiet. Nothing was expected of me. I wouldn’t miss the sun.

I was made fun of by some for being the atypical Goth in school who was obsessed with vampires (I got laughed out of a literature class because I was the only person who wrote their own original poem, and it was about a vampire. Thankfully, my teacher stuck up for me, but I never did that again). None of it deterred me because my friend circle also loved them. The Queen of the Damned film starring Stuart Townsend as Lestat was something we worshiped. The soundtrack was my religion. I wrote my own stories as I was inspired deeply by Anne Rice.

I still feel the same today about it all as I did back then. There aren’t any other vampires quite like Anne Rice’s, and the reason I strayed for so long from the genre is because of what it became. I hated it.

Vampires became sparkly high school boys who were hundreds of years old, or they were Nosferatu-like monsters out for destruction and gore. These are fine for those who love them, and no shame to anyone who likes either one of those, but I missed the darkly romantic adult vampires who fell into deep introspection about life, who struggled with their need for blood while wanting to remain human, and the complex nature of determining what was good and evil while being something mostly inhuman.

Moonlight was a vampire show that brought me back around to what I loved. Mick and Josef were a different kind of vampire, in a way, and it was set in modern times, but they still had that something I’d missed so much from Anne Rice’s stories. It was mature, and it brought back that struggle between trying to remain human while being something inhuman. The hiding, the fear that you’d hurt someone you loved without meaning to, the philosophical questions raised about good and evil. The superhuman qualities beneath it all.

I was sad when the show was cancelled during a strike and it never came back. It was one of the few shows I was able to enjoy with my mom, who didn’t like horror or vampire stories. It was a testament to how good it was, she binged it with me. It always gets to me that we’ll never see anything about it again, and that it’s been all but forgotten, left to the year 2008 to fade into obscurity.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, the phenomenal game by Larian Studios that came out in 2023, we got a taste of that kind of vampire again. Astarion has become another love of mine, and I related to him and the trauma he went through, which made me cry after I completed his story. He’s like Lestat, in a way, with his glamor and sexuality, and his bloodlust. Although vampires are usually thought of as evil in Dungeons and Dragons lore, Astarion challenged that in a way that sticks with you; that fight between losing yourself to the ‘monster’ or remaining human is real, and it’s written so well.

More recently, when I gave AMC’s Interview with the Vampire a chance, I’d come home again. I didn’t mind that the year was changed, as it better fit the story of the show that had evolved into something greater. Louis, played wonderfully by Jacob Anderson, was a Black man living in New Orleans, and we finally got the gay love story between him and Lestat, played by the talented Sam Reid, that was always meant to be. I’d known they were in a gay relationship even from a young age; two men making a daughter to create a family, to stay together? Not really straight-coded.

I hope vampires will save me, again, from the kind of darkness that was eating me alive, and instead reintroduce me to the darkness I once loved, that saved me from myself. I can adore again the kind of vampires that made me dream as a child, of being free of all of my ailments and no longer fearing everyone and everything. Being a vampire, while often portrayed in a negative light, felt like an escape to me rather than a curse, and I still feel that way.

I suppose you’d have to be really unhealthy physically and mentally to see where I’m coming from, but I’m glad I can dream again and get lost in this Gothic fantasy world.

©2024 Shane Blackheart