The New Black – Vampire Love

Brandi DeLancey

Those of you who know anything about me know that this one was bound to be written sooner or later. Seriously, what is up with all of the vampire love moving their way around the entertainment world? The writers of these stories are categorizing them as escapist dramas, like soap operas and reality TV, but they are nothing I’d like to escape to.

The big three I’m aware of are the Twilight series, the CW’s Vampire Diaries and HBO’s True Blood. Each, at its core, is supposedly some sort of lust-worthy love story. What, exactly, is it about the undead that makes for good love story material? Personally, I like my heartthrobs tall, blue eyed and ALIVE!

I understand the appeal of the bad boy. Lives life on the edge, never knowing what will happen next (good or bad) and spontaneous as the day is long. I can get behind the daydream there. I can even see the draw of superhero boys. They have secret identities and save countless lives. There’s something vaguely sexy about a guy that looks equally hot in a fitted t-shirt and jeans as he does in tights and a mask! What girl doesn’t swoon when said superhero chooses her to plant that kiss on just as he banishes the last bad guy to the netherworld? But vampire boys? Come on!

From what I’ve seen of these vampire escapist dramas (and admittedly this is very little), the vampire always leads the life of a playboy. All the girls want him. He drives some really sweet car and lives in only the most posh mansion in town. He somehow manages to have heaps of money all without having any sort of job to speak of.

He plays the bad boy superhero of the underworld, only he’s still in the world of the living. How is this fair to all of those warm-blooded boys just trying to find love? Those poor guys just don’t stand a chance.
I am, as I’m sure you all gather, a female. And every female worth her weight in chocolate can’t lie and say she doesn’t like a good lusty love story on occasion. I do. I’m down for a good chick flick from time to time (happily placing myself in the role of the heroine who gets swept off her feet by the hot guy du jour that has never fallen in love, but somehow manages to be swayed by my overpowering awesomeness). And as cheesy as these dramas always end up being, I don’t always walk away wishing I hadn’t wasted the last hour and a half of my life.

This is not the case for the vampire crap.

For the sake of this column, I’m going to focus on Twilight because it’s the only one I’ve had the actual misfortune of viewing.

Not by choices, of course. One night, after a bottle of wine had been split and some good quality girl talk had been laid down, my sister managed to sneak one of the Twilight movies into the DVD player. Unbeknownst to me, of course. So here we are chatting away and who should appear on the screen, why none other than that Kristin girl and her sickly looking vampire boy toy Rob. I only use their real names because I, and I’m happy to report, have no idea what their names are in these movies.

While I was reluctant to even give this film the time of day, I wanted a chance to see what everyone else sees in it. So I sat through the droning on and a few thoughts ran through my mind …

First of all, could they not find someone to do their special effects that wasn’t still in film production school? Don’t these movies make enough money to warrant a decent special effects budget?

On top of that, the whole thing was awful with a capital A! It was totally unbelievable. I didn’t buy even a minute of it! It’s supposed to be an escape, but I couldn’t escape how awful it was! All of it! The acting, the effects, the props, the sets! It was like watching a very bad middle school play. I was very aware that I was watching a movie … and not a particularly good one.

I am a realist, but I can appreciate a good fantasy movie when I see one. This, my friends was not it!

I don’t get the whole falling in love so hard with a vampire that when he banishes himself away you wake screaming and convulsing as if you were detoxing in some sort of methadone clinic. Dude, he’s dead! In the real world, you’d NEVER see the guy again … he wouldn’t hide out for the next half hour of the movie and then come back just to ask you to marry him and live happily never after in the land of Oz. And quite honestly, why would you want him to?

Okay, so the guy’s that “play” these vampires are hot … in your humble opinion. But is it BECAUSE they play a vampire that you find them so irresistible, or is it because they’re hot? Let’s be honest with ourselves. Are we marketing hot bad boys to our high school aged daughters? Or are we pushing some morbid ideal that can never be achieved?

I, for one, would rather have my daughter falling in love with Iron Man than some vampire guy. At least the special effects are better.

Brandi DeLancey lives in North Carolina, where she is taking over the Internets one website at a time.