Violence and Vampirism: Part 1

The first part in a series of posts about the connections between two of the big V's: Violence and Vampirism.

Looking for hot leads on happenings in the V-world, I came upon this story, via Sci-Fi Wire:

BloodRayne Was Too Bloody

Uwe Boll, director of the upcoming vampire movie BloodRayne, told SCI FI Wire that his initial cut was so bloody it earned an NC-17 rating and had to be recut for its theatrical release. But, Boll added in an interview, the original cut will eventually find its way onto DVD.

BloodRayne, which is based on a video game, will carry an R rating when it hits movie theaters on Jan. 6, 2006. The Motion Picture Association of America ordered Boll to cut several particularly graphic scenes, the director said.

"We will have the original version released shortly after on DVD, but we had to take out the parts where we were cutting people in half," Boll said. "We did some really, really good effects and things I've never before seen in movies, and many of those effects stay in, but some of the most shocking things have been taken out, and that's OK, because it takes you out of the movie."

---

What connects vampirism to violence immediately in the minds of studio execs, producers, directors, screenwriters? There is a definite tradition of constantly taking things to the next level, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, feeding into perceptions of what the general populace will buy into -- and yet, in terms of vampirism and its own traditions in folklore, mythology, and literature, vampirism seems to be one of those dichotomous concepts, invariably paired with its own death. That is to say, it seems you can't really have vampires without vampire-slayers. From Dracula and Van Helsing to Buffy and Spike, vampirism has set its foundation firmly in antagonistic relationships, much like the almost-mythical concept of the "Terrible Twos," that year of infancy in which children are supposed to be grouchy, mean-spirited, and generally destructive.

I wonder what Freud would have to say about that one -- there's the anal stage, the oral stage, but what about the vampiric stage?

Side note: BloodRayne was a terrible game and will almost definitely be an even more terrible movie.

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:

(image removed due to bandwidth usage)

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.