The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula - Softcover

Nuzum, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312386176 ISBN 13: 9780312386177

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008

Synopsis

The undead are everywhere. They're not just in movies and books, but in commercials, fetish clubs, and even in your breakfast cereal. Bloodsuckers have become some of the most recognizable bad guys in the modern world, and Eric Nuzum wanted to find out why. He was willing to do whatever it took ―even drinking his own blood―in his quest to understand the vampire phenomenon. And he found the answer in Goth clubs, darkened parks, haunted houses, and . . . chain restaurants.
In The Dead Travel Fast, Nuzum delivers a far-reaching look at vampires in pop culture from Bram to Bela to Buffy, and at what vampires and vampirism have come to mean to us today. And the blood? Let's just say it doesn't go with eggs.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric Nuzum is a recovering pop culture critic, VH1 pundit, and author of Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. He was awarded the 2002 National Edward R. Murrow Award for News Writing and his work has appeared in a few publications you've heard of and many more that you haven't heard of. He works for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Watching my own blood drip down the bathroom mirror, there’s only one thought running through my head: In a lifetime of questionable decision making, this is not one of my finer moments.
Like many things in life, it started off with the best of intentions. It was an experiment—a quest, actually. When I set out to write about the history of vampires, I decided to pursue three specific tasks. It seemed to make sense—in order to truly understand vampires and what they mean, I’d not only have to do the usual research and reading, but I’d have to find ways to experience vampires as well.
The gore sprayed all over my bathroom was the result of the last of these undertakings: to drink blood. The whole blood-drinking thing, as you can imagine, posed several problems.
Most of these difficulties were rooted in the particulars. In my book, to drink something means to take a mouthful of something and to swallow it—“tasting” or “sipping” wouldn’t be acceptable. This, of course, requires a sufficient quantity of blood.
Even though blood fetishists don’t advertise their gatherings in the Sunday paper, they aren’t particularly hard to find. However, anyone willing to let me drink their blood probably isn’t someone whose blood I should be drinking.
Then I got an idea: I could drink my own blood.
I imagine you are full of questions.
It’s pretty simple, actually.
If you look at every culture, throughout history, they’ve all had some variation on the vampire. Very few have been called vampires, but every culture has some type of a supernatural creature that comes back from the dead and draws its power by preying on the living. Are there such things as actual vampires in the world? I’ve never seen one—nor has anyone I’ve ever known or met. Yet you can go to just about anyone, anywhere in the world, mention the word vampire, or show them a picture of some ashen-faced bad guy with fangs and a long cape, and they’d know what you were talking about.
Vampires are a lot like Santa Claus—each culture morphs the lore to fit its own needs and values. England has Saint Nicholas, Greece has St. Basil, Holland’s Sinterklaas arrives on a ship, French children wait for Père Noël, Italy has the good witch La Befana, and in China, Dun Che Lao Ren brings presents to children every winter. That said, St. Nick doesn’t have a fondness for sucking blood out of the necks of virgins. Well, if he does, he’s done a good job of keeping it on the down low.
This all started one morning during breakfast. I was pleasantly munching on a longtime favorite, Count Chocula, while CNN played on the TV. A story came on about energy costs and President Bush was offering a solution: destroy all vampires. Energy vampires, that is. The president was blasting cell-phone and computer manufacturers who used power chargers that drew electricity regardless of whether the device was actually using or storing it. These were commonly known as “energy vampires” and the president was urging Americans to solve the world’s power crisis by unplugging their cell phones once they were finished charging.
Looking away from the screen and down toward a magazine I was pretending to read, I turned the page and saw a vodka ad featuring a woman with a cape and long fangs. The ad encouraged potential vodka purchasers to “drink in the night.”
Even in my early-morning sleepiness, I stopped to consider this for a moment: Within a five-minute period, I’d encountered three references to vampires, of all things. This might make sense around Halloween, but it was early July.
Why vampires?
As I pondered this over the following days, I began to realize that I saw direct or indirect mentions of vampires everywhere—in an interview in Rolling Stone, during an episode of Seinfeld, a song lyric, a conversation on a plane. Vampires are invoked as metaphors all the time. It’s hard to go through a single day without seeing some reference to vampires.
So if the vampire is that ubiquitous... how did this happen? Why did it happen? I wanted insight.
There are two basic ways to experience history.
Basic Way #1: Sit in a dark library and read old, smelly books that put you to sleep. I am not an advocate of this Basic Way; it isn’t very fun. Plus, this is definitely not one of those books.
Basic Way #2: History isn’t static. Most history reverberates through time, making things different than they’d otherwise be. Therefore, it’s important to understand it as it survives and resonates today. According to this Basic Way, to experience living history one needs to... live it.
So to truly undertake my quest to understand vampires, I’d have to go out in the world and encounter them firsthand. This required a little prep, which led me to these tasks.
Which led me to drinking my own blood.
Which led me to vomiting all over my bathroom.
Which led me to the first thing I’ve learned in this quest: I am a total fucking idiot. People are afraid of the dark.
It isn’t the absence of light that messes with your head, it’s the possibility contained in darkness. In the shadows you can find anything. You could step right up to a grizzly bear, evil marauder, or four-hundred-foot cliff and never know it’s there. Not knowing is what makes your heart beat faster.
That’s where monsters come in. There is no evidence that monsters exist—vampires or otherwise. Yet despite this, we all cringe in scary movies. Clearly, there is nothing hiding in the closet, but we still make sure the door is closed before going to bed.
Monsters always start off in darkness: a strange noise, a feeling of presence. We imagine them at their most horrific. That’s why good horror movies never show you the monster during the first act—what we imagine them to be is infinitely scarier than what they actually are.
Eventually, the monster leaves the darkness and comes into full view. And what do we see?
Ourselves.
We create monsters for all kinds of reasons. They’re often the result of our own misguided ways. They offer vengeance for our follies. They are metaphors for our worst fears: The Blob represents concerns about pollution and the spread of Communism, the Swamp Thing symbolizes the cultural separations between the North and South, Frankenstein stands in for our fear over the clash between medical innovation, ethics, and religion. King Kong embodies the fear and helplessness of the Great Depression. Godzilla signifies concerns over the danger of nuclear technology. The most ubiquitous monster of all isn’t the one who fills the darkness around us, but the darkness within ourselves: the vampire.
The vampire is the only monster that people actually want to be. You won’t find much desire to be a mummy or zombie. You’ll never experience envy at the powers of the Frankenstein monster. No one ever wants to become a ghost or werewolf. Becoming any other type of monster is a curse, becoming a vampire is a key to power and a way to control what we fear.
When I started on my quest’s first task, it wasn’t fear I felt, but dread.
This questing nonsense started out as an attempt to discover vampires the way that most people do, through movies. I decided to watch every vampire movie ever made—all six hundred and five of them. It surprises many people that not only is Dracula the most adapted story in film history (there have been forty-three sequels, remakes, and adaptations of the story), but Count Dracula recently surpassed Sherlock Holmes as the character portrayed in film more than any other. On top of all those, there are several hundred films and TV movies featuring other vampire characters. All told, six hundred and five—and I planned to watch every one.
I started with the easy choices that everyone knows, Dracula and Nosferatu, along with some more contemporary fare like Interview with the Vampire, Near Dark, and Blade. However, only thirty-six movies into my viewing the quality of the movies was becoming a bit thin, including such gems as The Little Vampire, My Grandfather Is a Vampire, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. To compound things, as is my usual idiotic style, I announced this task to almost anyone who’d listen. While I may have been able to back out if I’d kept my mouth shut, on this one, I was committed.
Today’s selection: the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter, which seems appropriate since yesterday’s selection was Son of Dracula (the 1943 ham fest starring an aging Lon Chaney, Jr., as Count Alucard, the son of the infamous count). Dracula’s Daughter was the sequel of the 1931 original Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, literally picking up where Dracula left off. In Dracula’s Daughter, a mysterious countess, named Marya Zaleska, arrives in London to claim Dracula’s now completely dead corpse. When the authorities go to retrieve Dracula’s coffin, it comes up missing. At the same time, bloodless bodies are discovered nightly around London. It’s the countess—who, once discovered, hotfoots it back to Transylvania in a 1930s version of a high-speed chase with Scotland Yard. The countess eventually takes a wooden arrow through the heart and all are safe once again (though no explanation is ever given for what happened to Dracula’s corpse and coffin).
Dracula’s Daughter was one of the original horror movie sequels and is on about the same cinematic level as Halloween 5 or Bride of Chucky. On almost any aesthetic scale, Dracula’s Daughter bears no similarity to the original. Gone are the originality, dark gothic imagery, eerie passages of silence, and subtexts of sexual repression and fear of technology. Replacing it are campy attempts at humor, melodrama, and painfully obvious sexual innuendo. The pacing is slow, with long bouts of over-the-top dialogue. The so-called...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0312386176
• ISBN 13: 9780312386177
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256