In looking at my notes from last week and comparing them to Cohen's theses, two things jumped out at me: it was perfectly clear that the most direct correlation between my personal fear, Vampires, and any single thesis was to Thesis V (Border Patrol): and despite the vast majority of my monstrous conclusions falling squarely into this theory, not a single one of them was the reason why they're so frightening. So I turned to another theory - Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis.
It's easy to see why the vampire could be (and has been used) as a cautionary tale - you have to literally invite the evil in for it to have power over you - but from the inception of the vampire, the terror it inspires arises from its liminality and its rejection of definition, to begin, specifically the definition of the border between alive and dead. It is a dead person, come back to suck the blood of the living, and the more blood it drinks, the healthier it becomes.
There are quite a few other category-destroying aspects of vampires. They turn friends into enemies, they are predators that people WANT to be killed by (not just in vampire stories, which is the really scary bit) and my personal favorite, there are a variety of specific ways to kill a vampire (do you have to put garlic in its mouth? how about a lemon? Cut off the head or does a stake work by itself?) though perhaps that's just areflection of Thesis II.
The part that really scares me, though... is my own quite solid (if I do say so myself) sense of self, and my own desire to control my actions and my body. With seduction, with hypnosis, and with eventual resurrection as a vampiric thrall, the vampire is a monster perfectly suited to take apart the boundary between self and non-self, and it does it ostensibly without the victim being aware of it, sans some nearby Van Helsing.
"In the face of the monster, scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble," wrote Cohen, which I dare say is what I'm afraid of in the Vampire, in a very real way.
It's easy to see why the vampire could be (and has been used) as a cautionary tale - you have to literally invite the evil in for it to have power over you - but from the inception of the vampire, the terror it inspires arises from its liminality and its rejection of definition, to begin, specifically the definition of the border between alive and dead. It is a dead person, come back to suck the blood of the living, and the more blood it drinks, the healthier it becomes.
There are quite a few other category-destroying aspects of vampires. They turn friends into enemies, they are predators that people WANT to be killed by (not just in vampire stories, which is the really scary bit) and my personal favorite, there are a variety of specific ways to kill a vampire (do you have to put garlic in its mouth? how about a lemon? Cut off the head or does a stake work by itself?) though perhaps that's just a
The part that really scares me, though... is my own quite solid (if I do say so myself) sense of self, and my own desire to control my actions and my body. With seduction, with hypnosis, and with eventual resurrection as a vampiric thrall, the vampire is a monster perfectly suited to take apart the boundary between self and non-self, and it does it ostensibly without the victim being aware of it, sans some nearby Van Helsing.
"In the face of the monster, scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble," wrote Cohen, which I dare say is what I'm afraid of in the Vampire, in a very real way.
Great post, Nathaniel! You've done a great job showing the ways in which the vampire might challenge the boundaries and categories that stabilize human experience.
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