Vampires as Myth

Written for Vampire Fest by Vanessa Wolf of Vanessa's Vampire Erotica

Misdirection:  a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another.

Let’s say that there is a group of immortals who require blood or life force from mortals to live, who wish to stay anonymous, and who have the means to influence mainstream civilization in any way. What would they do to achieve that?

If I were a Vampire and needed to be left alone, I would create a mythology about my kind so frightening and gruesome that I would be actively shunned by any who knew the story. Normal mortals would run the other way. Townspeople would leave me completely to my own means, while fearfully giving me whatever I wanted to spare their own lives. Creating an environment of fear and subservience would have been a major coup for me, knowing that I would walk the Earth for all ages.

Now let’s postulate that I was an immortal, living in 17th century England, with the means to do what I pleased through centuries of smart investing. I would have found an author who could spin a tale so fearful and wrong that nobody would ever suspect me of being an immortal. I would also somehow involve the Catholic Church, who would have been my greatest thorn and who would have stopped at nothing to see me perish.

I would have hired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

Bram Stoker did a masterful job of several things: he scared the English-speaking world nearly to death, he made the main character an enemy of the Church, and he gave Dracula a shred of humanity for those sensitive enough to see it. He also took alliterative freedom enough to completely bury the real story. He misdirected, and did so quite well.

Skip forward in time to the 20th century and Anne Rice - another wonderful author and another masterful job of misdirection.

Once she published her first book vampires were now considered sexy and scary. If I were an immortal living in the 20th century, where social mores allowed almost anything to happen, where young ladies walked the streets almost naked and in better physical shape than ever, I might want to be considered the baddest of the bad boys, the epitome of sexuality. From a vampire’s point of view, Interview with a Vampire would have been the best thing to happen to me since Bram Stoker’s story. New culture, new myth. Perfect.

Look at “modern” literature through the perspective of an immortal who wishes to be left to live as he or she pleases, and you’ll see that it has done an impressive job of misdirection. Immortals have cloaked themselves in their own myth, causing millions of people to think exactly what they wish them to think, just as they have done through the ages, which may (or may not) be the truth. As times changed, immortals changed their delivery, but myth is just that: myth.

What is the real story, then, the one we aren’t allowed to know?

For that, you’ll have to ask an immortal.

Written for Vampire Fest by Vanessa Wolf of

Vanessa's Vampire Erotica