Finding the Pulse

When was it that I was first exposed to the mythology of vampires? Not counting the Count on Sesame Street (the only fuchsia vampire I can find in the dregs of memory), I think it was in elementary school, playing Konami's Castlevania on the original Nintendo. From the moment those faux-gothic-rock synthesizer tunes kicked in, I was put in control of a vampire slayer who wielded a whip. Pressing in a direction on the control-pad made him walk; he could crack his whip, jump, crouch, and even use various other weapons such as a cross-shaped boomerang, a battle axe, or vials of holy water.

It was simple, but in that simplicity there was something amazing -- when that first giant bat came flying across the screen, nothing more than a formation of colored pixels, I still felt a rush from the first crack of the whip that caused it to explode. As the game progressed, the vampire hunter travels through Dracula's castle and its environs, killing Medusa, the Grim Reaper, and other myriads of beasts and monsters and demons, on the way to Dracula himself. Confronting Count Dracula himself was something of a major achievement for an elementary school kid, even if it were in the confines of a video game.

As I've grown older, more Castlevania games have been released across various platforms. Its gothic influence has shifted from those humble beginnings -- the games still put the player in control of a vampire hunter searching for Dracula himself (as with Dracula's omnipresence in cultural products, he seems to be infinitely immortal) but following the shifts in paradigms of what is considered cool and what is not, the vampire hunter is not simply just another generic vampire hunter; now the protagonist becomes a vampire himself, endowed with superhuman powers that help him in defeating the new-and-improved Dracula and his variegated minions. Character design for illustrations on game covers and inside manuals shows a vision of Japanese gothic inspired by Japanese rock stars and animated pretty boys just as much as the canonical mythology, drawn by the artist Ayame Kojima:

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So it's not just Buffy and its legions of fans, or Anne Rice's novels and the subsequent film version of Interview of the Vampire, that pull the reader or viewer or player into the role of a vampire sympathizer: the idea of associating vampirism and cool seemingly knows no cultural boundaries.