When Did Vampires Stop Being Scary?

[Spidey Revivey]

Been thinking about this for quite some time this month, with it being Halloween time and all.

We've seen vampires done to death, pun intended. They've been on our cereal boxes and have taught us to count to 10. There's no escaping what these once terrifying creatures have done for pop culture. The sex. The promise of immortality. These things have crept into our psyche ever since we read our way to Transylvania.

But what was it that made us stop checking under our beds for them? I can't imagine a more terrifying monster to fear with such a rich history of scaring the shit out of us. Ever since Nosferatu, these things have been pretty much the go-to monster in the movies.

Was it really the Twilight books that did it? I personally don't think so, but they sure did help. Anne Rice's Lestat books I feel are partially to blame (and I'm a Lestat fan if ever there was one). She told us the story of what it was like to be an immortal beast in Interview with a Vampire. She gave us reason to not be afraid. Backstory sort of does that sort of thing.

How do you feel about this? Was the Lestat story the true last nail in the coffin? Or is there another story out there that we can examine as the reason why vampires stopped being scary?

Hell, maybe we can chalk it up to oversaturation. That's kind of what's happening to zombie movies. Though I'm the kind of guy that likes to get a bead on where such a horrifying mythos specifically went wrong. Thoughts?

 

[Dagger Dias]

I'd say it was when Twilight became popular. Vampires went from being scary monsters to cheesy teen drama characters in 2008 or so. Twilight may not have been THE series that did it, but it was one of the biggest contributors to the downfall of vampires in the monster villain category and by far one of the more "popular" (using that term loosely) series among those that portray vampires in the new not-so-scary way. It will take years of media with vampires being portrayed as MONSTERS again for them to ever be taken seriously in movies, books, or even video games again.

 

[Spidey Revivey]

I'd say it was when Twilight became popular. Vampires went from being scary monsters to cheesy teen drama characters in 2008 or so.

I don't know if this is a fair argument to make, brother. Now this is not me defending the Mormon monkey crap. I'm an English Major with a conscience after all. But those cheesy teen drama vampires appeared way before 2008 on a little known show called Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And on Dark Shadows generations before even that.

Twilight may not have been THE series that did it, but it was one of the biggest contributors to the downfall of vampires in the monster villain category and by far one of the more "popular" (using that term loosely) series among those that portray vampires in the new not-so-scary way. It will take years of media with vampires being portrayed as MONSTERS again for them to ever be taken seriously in movies, books, or even video games again.

This I agree with. Twilight was what finished it for many people, but I still feel there was descension before that, and I'd like to figure out what show or movie was responsible for making us want to screw the vampire more than run away from it.

 

[Kodo Sawaki]

Twilight was just the final nail in the coffin. In "Buffy" they were still scary eventhough cheesy with teen drama(in season 2 evil Angel is just scary as Hell and is great heel character of that season) but as far as I can tell its not "Interview with the Vampire". Its sequel that its called "Queen of the Damned".

"Interview" was cool movie, it shoved us human side but you are still scared of vampires. Its from "Queen of the Damned" that you can see decline in scary part and just pandering to teens. "Twilight" and shows like "The Vampire Diaries" are just extension of that influence.

 

[John McCass]

You lookin’ for this?

Go way back into 80s and see this. I used to watch this show 2 years ago and this made me laugh all over the condition of ghosts that were meant to be scary. Monsters, ghosts, vampires etc were buddies of an elementary school student.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

I think it's generally when they began turning vampires into sex symbols. One of the first instances that I personally saw was a 1979 remake of Dracula starring Frank Langella as the vampire count. They went the whole sex symbol route there and I was maybe...I dunno 15 or so when I saw it late one night. Langella had a great presence and had the tall, dark, handsome thing going on, but they went more for eroticism than horror.

Stephen King's portrayal of vampires in Salem's Lot was scary in that it was a more traditional story; and by traditional I mean more of the old folk tales rather than the Stoker interpretation. There was a little of the Stoker stuff there but, for the most part, it steered away from it. After all, in most cultures, vampires never ran around wearing 19th century Victorian style clothes and looked like dreamboats. They came off more like the vicious, inhuman monsters they were portrayed as in old legends. I always enjoyed The Lost Boys and how vicious they portrayed the vampires which was, again, a departure from the whole romanticism thing that'd become cliché.

When Anne Rice's novels came out, I think it did monstrous damage to the image of the vampire. It took vampires from being more fiendish, inhuman monsters and really propelled them down the road of being "sexy" far more than anything before it or really since until the Twilight novels came out. When a vampire becomes a teenage heartthrob in books aimed towards high school girls, then that's pretty much obliterated the notion of the vampire as a fiendish, undead ghoul.

To be fair, however, it could be argued that vampires stopped being scary decades before since movies about vampires were all over the place in the 50s, 60s and even the 70s whether they were made in the United States or brought in from abroad. There's been such a massive over saturation of vampire material in the last 50-60 years, whether it be vampires on cereal boxes, in cartoons, comic books, t-shirts, posters, big budged animated films that, coupled with the portrayal of vampires as heartthrobs, it's almost impossible to make the vampire scary.

 

[X]

It's not that vampires stopped being frightening, it's that vampire movies stopped being frightening. Well, the mainstream ones you see dominate the multiplex like the Twilight films, which seems to be the obvious inspiration for this entire thread. The vampire genre has definitely been watered down and damaged by that series in the public eye as far as taking it seriously in a horror sense, but that doesn't mean the vampire mythos has stopped being scary. Let the Right One In and Thirst among other films have done a great job of continuing the legacy of top notch vamp flicks.

Anything can be scary if the writing is creative enough.

 

[tdmoon]

I think Jack-Hammer did a fine job of summing it all up. The Salem's Lot and Lost Boys vampires are the type I enjoy as well.

To me, seeing Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as vampires really made them seem less menacing.