Bite Me! Why We Love Vampires

While she has creative license to take her vampires any place she wants, she admits that there is a little pressure to keep at least some of them sexy, rather than portraying them solely as killing machines. She had to cut a scene from a book in which Sookie Stackhouse, the intrepid telepathic waitress, used a calculator to try to determine the number of people her vamp lover, Bill, had killed before he "mainstreamed" with humans. "It was a funny scene, and an awful scene, and I could see Sookie doing that," says Harris with a laugh. "But I understood that it was really going to be hard to see Bill as an attractive character after Sookie tallied six figures or something."

But it's that potential for death that gives vampires a lot of their sexual edge. "It's kind of like autoerotic asphyxia, except that's real," says Katherine Ramsland, professor of psychology at DeSales University. "In terms of fantasy, the vampire mystique is 90 percent sexual. It's a metaphor for dangerous sex. Because if it goes wrong, you're gone." For her book, Piercing the Darkness, Ramsland spent several years researching the rabid vampire fan, those folks who actually act out the Dracula fantasy. Many are professionals (lawyers, stockbrokers, politicians); some are simply lost. What struck Ramsland as rather odd was that most women wanted to be the victim rather than the hunter. "I think it's kind of weird to be the impaled one, the seduced one," she says. "There were so many women who wanted to lose control. And I thought women had come a little further than that."

If message boards, chat rooms, and fan clubs are any indication, the whole seduction, lose-control routine is a huge part of the fantasy. "I think a lot of women wouldn't mind someone else taking control of things for a while," says Melissa Lowery, 34, editor and co-owner of popular fan site true-blood.net. In the last 30 days, the site has had more than 140,000 unique visitors. And after wading through 3,700 comments, Lowery has noted at least one theme that keeps popping up: "Even if a vampire is your lover and gentle and kind, he still has the power to rip someone's leg off," she says. "Sometimes I think women just want to be protected, and that's not so bad."

That may have something to do with all the adolescent angst we still have bottled up. "I'm a short Jewish guy and I love vampires. It's all about the classic, tormented relationship, the otherness," says Dr. Steven Schlozman, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In his paper "Vampires and Those Who Slay Them," published in the journal Academic Psychiatry, Schlozman argues that the Buffy-verse, for example, speaks to key developmental challenges of adolescents, some of which even many adults have never quite mastered. In the episode "Gone," Buffy teases bad-boy vamp Spike while she's invisible, which Schlozman sees as the "perfect" metaphor for the adolescent longing adults can feel for the vampire lover. "It's like you want to do it, but you sure don't want anyone to know that you are into vampires," he says. "But it sure can be a good time."

Marliese Engel Traver, a 25-year-old publicist from New York City, knows exactly what Schlozman means. She's been a fan of all things vampire since she was a teenage Buffy fan. She's since graduated to Twilight (she's read all the books and seen the movie three times), and on Sunday nights, she and her husband, Tom, watch True Blood. For her, it's the bad-boy connection, what she calls the "forbidden fruit" of the vampire that kind of turns her on. "I like Twilight vampires for romance, and True Blood for everything else," says Traver, with a giggle. "Let's just say that what you see on the screen can often translate to real life. My husband is happy I like this show."

Who knows? Maybe next we'll be seeing vampire marriage counselors.

© 2009