Are Vampires Cliché?
Vampire suducing a mistress.
Vampire this vampire that? Twilight over here, House of Night over there.
I am not saying vampire stories are bad. But have they become to cliché? You hear about them so often. You see Twilight a lot, there are lots of fans of that. I don't think it is a bad thing that there is so many vampire novels, but they are everywhere, they are written so often they seem sort of used up and cliché.
I use to write about vampires a lot more, but the idea's just seem kind of dried up to me. After three or four I was getting sick of them and the idea of them. They had the same storyline, same plot, but different events.
Vampire stories often revolve around these situations :
- Highschool romance
- Vampire in, around, or involving a highschool
- Vampire hunter falls in love with vampire or visa versa
- Vampire dresses from his time period often without being noticed by people
- Human girl forced to marry him and later finds out he is a vampire
- Girl kidnapped by vampire
- Girl falls in love with vampire who can't figure out how to not kill her while loving her
- Vampire is dark, secluded, but very popular with a tragic past
It is not bad, no, it is not bad at all, but it is all repetitive. They all have the same plot line, they have the same idea. They are found often and written often.
Let’s try the axe murderer or something uncommon. Something you don't read about often. Something different.
I mean vampires, get a little corny, hearing about them so often.
Let us look at 'corniness', shall we? Why is something corny? Because it is overused and predictable. Why is it overused and predictable? Because it is classic, it is something that works and therefore has been used repeatedly. Why is that always a bad thing? You can only be original so many times. The best we can do is to make our 'corniness' fresh.
To be honest, I don’t read that much horror. My preferences are dark fantasy and vampire fiction rather than straight out horror, mainly because I don’t tend to like common horror themes. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary was good, it made me think, but it’s not a book I’d want to read more than once because it was depressing, and this has been my experience with much of horror.
I’ve had the difference between horror and dark fantasy defined to me as this: In horror, generally speaking, the monsters are the bad guys; in dark fantasy, the monsters aren’t necessarily so. I tend to write my “monsters” (vampires, weres, demons, etc.) sympathetically, and the real monsters are more often than not human. (I suppose that really ought say something about my outlook in terms of humanity.) I just cannot identify with a close-minded human character whose first reaction to something non-human is “kill.”
That said, I do like books in which said character is forced to confront said viewpoint and change; Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake is a good example of this.
But, back to cliches.
I find vampire fiction to be chock-full of cliches. Most vampire fiction relies at least some on traditional vampire legends and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and while I realize a superpowered character needs some weaknesses and drawbacks... I honestly find it a cop-out to focus solely on traditional myth.
For example, garlic and crosses repelling or actively damaging vampires. I’ve never understood this, because... Well, why? Just because you’re undead doesn’t mean you’re susceptible to harm by random items, and I find the vulnerability to crosses to be, in a sense, offensive. See, why just crosses and not all religious items? Granted, you could argue that Christians view reaching for their cross as reaching to God for protection, whereas people of other religions might be likely to take a more active stance, but this doesn’t really hold water. In LKH’s books, her vampires were susceptible to, I believe, all religious items, as she had a scene in one of the early books where she showed people on the cop squad wearing Stars of David and miniature Torahs for protection, and mentioned that it was the belief, not the actual item, that protected them.
However. This does bring up an important question.
Why does religious faith harm vampires? Life beyond death does not imply to me lack of religion. I can’t imagine that all vampires are atheists. It’d make an interesting story, or at least part of a book, to have a new vampire question religion, and perhaps have his prior God turn on him because he’s no longer human.
There’s probably a few others I’m forgetting about at the moment, but these are the biggies, in my opinion. My vampires don’t have these weaknesses. The closest thing that I have to the coffin is that my world-walking vampires wear a small leather pouch around their neck, or someplace else on their person, containing soil from their home world. And there’s a reason behind this. A lot of my vampires are mages, and their home soil contains blood energy, such as the soil of our planet contains earth energy. The soil doesn’t affect their ability to survive, simply enhances their magical ability.
I’ve also had a problem with the susceptibility to sunlight and the reliance on a coffin. Look. In most vampire fiction, you’ve got the clues right up in front of you and it would take an idiot not to figure it out. (Or someone who flat out doesn’t believe in vampires, but that’s almost a cliche in itself in terms of vampire fiction. A little bit of unbelief is fine, but if you’ve got strange shit going on, and all it takes is to put 2 and 2 together... No. That’s when it starts becoming character stupidity.)
Fear is fundamental in horror, and to a certain extent in dark fantasy. If the only reason the character doesn’t know what the fuck is going on is because he’s a moron, he loses reader sympathy and there is absolutely no fear involved. But if the common vampire clues aren’t there and the characters have no reason to assume “vampire,” it seems to me it’s a lot scarier.
Yes, because I don’t conform to the cliches, I end up with very high-powered characters. Some might say overpowered because at first glance, there aren’t any heavy drawbacks. Thing is, I depend a lot on the strengths and weaknesses of personality, probably more than many other authors. Sure, you can be stronger and faster than a human, but if you’re arrogant about it, you may well slip up and not realize a cunning trap. Also, you can be outwitted. Brute force isn’t always the answer.
That said, I often do run my vampires as the main/side characters, and, when that’s the case, I don’t give them an easy out because of their advantages. I still depend just as much on personality, and there’s an important factor to keep in mind: No matter how big you are, there’s always someone out there bigger than you.
I think I end up with a bigger story with a larger scope when I avoid the cliches and easy outs, and... I have a lot more fun with it.
And I hope it’s a lot more enjoyable to readers, too.
