I first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I was fourteen. I was shocked how Christian the book was (which should tell you something about how deeply I thought about books written by white Irish guys in the 19th century). I underlined, for instance, when Van Helsing insists, “Thus are we ministers of God’s own wish: that the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He has allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more. Like them we shall travel toward sunrise; and like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause.”
I underlined this passage because I was a Southern Baptist youth group kid. A religious kid who loved horror, but a religious kid all the same. Even buying my mass-market paperback edition of Dracula felt transgressive. But here, near the end of the book, I was reading lines that would have sounded right coming from any minister or missionary’s mouth. I had known, of course, that the Church was the enemy of the vampire—holy water and crosses (and garlic because, uh, Rome is in Italy?) are potent weapons against this fanged menace. But Stoker’s enigmatic slayer was explicit. He was practically evangelistic in his fervor.
In his now-classic essay “Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen posits that monsters are cultural creations. They are “born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy… A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read.”
In their book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, Jude Doyle reads the anxieties (and desires) to which Dracula—and by extension, the vampire as monster—point. Doyle meditates on the scene where Jack, Quincy and Arthur (under Van Helsing’s guidance) must strike down Lucy, the woman they all love. Doyle observes,
We finally see her, in all her hunger: The girl who took three men’s love, drained three men’s bodies, and went out at night looking for more. The monster… Lucy Westenra raises a possibility that is apparently even more alarming than rape, torture, and fatal tanning-bed malfunction: consent. Desire, even. Dead sluts are forcibly penetrated and tossed aside; the Final Girl survives, but only by erasing her own sexuality. It’s when a girl leans into the violence of desire, goes out to let a stranger eat her in the pale moonlight, that she becomes a monster.
For all that sexuality was implied in Stoker’s novel, it’s been made explicit in vampire fiction of the last several decades. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation not only captures the sexuality of Lucy’s murder, but includes a kiss between Lucy and Mina. Two years later, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire brought sexy vampires to the mainstream. Edward cannot resist his desire for Twilight’s Bella. Blumhouse’s latest vampire flick, Black as Night, uses vampires to comment on colorism—the heroine, Shawna, is too black for the boy she likes. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican vampire novel Certain Dark Things imagines ten separate species of vampires (a clever accounting for the world’s varied vampire lore). An elder vampire observes to a lovestruck teen, “Don’t deceive yourself, my boy, this is not a love story… Vampires, we are a diverse lot. So many differences. Yet we are united by one simple unavoidable fact: we are our hunger.”
Vampire stories are always about desires.
It was no accident that I was so moved by Van Helsing. Stoker conjured him and sent him to wage war against a monster that had been created by the very institution to which he and I both swore allegiance: the Church. Vampires—as Stoker and Rice imagine them—are monsters that arose from Christianity’s particular fascination with desire, particularly sexual desire.
The Evangelicalism in which I grew up was obsessed with desire—particularly sexual desire. We were encouraged to pledge True Love Waits—a commodified movement that encouraged teens to sign cards promising not to have sex before marriage. “Purity weekends” often ended with parents giving female teens a ‘purity ring’ they would (ideally) one day exchange for their wedding ring. One massive conference featured a speaker who styled himself as a latter-day Van Helsing: God’s knight raising an army to wage (culture) war. The denouement of his campaign for sexual purity and evangelism involved reenacting one of the most misogynistic stories in the Christian canon (Judges 19).
Scholars, activists and practitioners have rallied around the term ‘Purity Culture’ to describe this Evangelical obsession with controlling (especially female) sexual behavior. As author Linda Kay Kline describes it, “gender expectations are based on a strict, stereotype-based binary… Men are taught their minds are evil, whereas women are taught their bodies are evil… Purity culture also teaches that women are responsible for the sexual thoughts, feelings and choices men make, and so must dress, walk and talk in just the right way so as not to ‘inspire’ sexual thoughts, feelings and actions in them.”
Purity culture is rooted in white, hetero, cis-gendered patriarchy. As such, Purity Culture defines sex, sexuality, marriage and family narrowly (ironically, not through the lens of the cultures found in the Bible but through the lens of the modern nuclear family). And thus, desire is dangerous. Desire is, we might say, monstrous.
Enter the vampire.
The vampire is in many ways a perversion of the Christian story (as Coppola ably demonstrates with Dracula’s temptation of Mina). He offers a form of eternal life as Jesus does, but only through the consumption of his victim. Rather than the Spirit’s dove, he transforms into a bat. It’s easy to stop the critical analysis there, to clutch cross and holy water close and whistle past the mausoleum.
But monsters are products of cultures, which means the Church (and by extension, Christian Europe) made the vampire. He (since Dracula, they’re almost always ‘he’) embodies the Church’s fear of desire—desires that are unbound, that spill out of the narrow confines of the pews and want that which is forbidden.
It’s telling, then, that the vampire appears not terribly dissimilar from the very religious leaders who claim to offer us protection from our desires: A charismatic, older man with an air of authority. And here is the true danger of the vampire: by externalizing our fear of desire into a (fictional) form we can exorcize (by way of a stake to the heart), we imagine we have defeated the monster. Just as by externalizing our fear of desire into a (female) form we can control (through purity rings, one-piece bathing suits, and calls for modesty), we imagine we have conquered desire.
But we have learned to our pain that the real danger lies not in vampires or the female form, but in those charismatic men in the pulpits and positions of authority. In 2002, The Boston Globe broke the story of rampant sexual abuse by a priest in the Boston diocese, abuse the diocese knew about and went to great lengths to cover up. In the wake of the Globe‘s reporting, parishioners across the country began to come forward with similar stories, exposing a widespread culture of abuse and denial.
In 2019, the Houston Chronicle published a six-part investigation of the Southern Baptist Church (the largest Protestant denomination in the US) that spanned 20 years and included more than 700 victims of sexual abuse that echoed the patterns uncovered by the Globe.
At time of writing, neither the Catholic Church nor the SBC have made structural changes to their organizations to combat sexual predation of minors. And though these organizations are the largest, they are far from unique. Regardless of denomination, religious organizations that unquestioningly embrace and perpetuate patriarchal values are havens for sexual predators. These organizations routinely place men in positions of authority without accountability or oversight. They frequently prioritize the words of these men, diminishing or ignoring the testimony of the women and children under their authority.
Monsters are omens; they warn us something isn’t right. The vampire has, for centuries, been warning us that the Church has a problem with desire. That rather than do the difficult work of discerning how we might rescue a message of liberation from the forces of oppression that pervert it, we have settled for demonizing those we’ve shoved to the margins, the easier to cast them out. In doing so, we have become the very monsters from whom we claim to offer protection.
It’s perhaps telling that vampire narratives are more popular than ever at this moment, with director Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu moving forward, and both a current TV series (Chapelwaite) and a big-screen adaptation (’Salem’s Lot) based on Stephen King’s vampire fiction in the works. There are also upcoming TV adaptations of Let the Right One In and Interview With the Vampire in production, not to mention Netflix’s recent miniseries Midnight Mass, which brings the religious elements of the vampire mythos to the fore in disturbing and compelling ways.
For fans of horror and vampire fiction, there’s much to look forward to, but at the same time, it’s important to ask why these stories still resonate so strongly within the culture, and why they continue to feel so relevant. As revelations and reports about sexual abuse in the church and other patriarchal institutions continue to surface, it’s time to heed the omens and be mindful of the reality behind the layers of fiction and fear.
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If you have been the victim of abuse at the hands of clergy or other church leaders, you can find resources to report, heal or protect yourself at GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) or RAINN (a secular anti-sexual violence which operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, 800-656-HOPE).
JR. Forasteros cut his teeth on Goosebumps books and Sword of Shannara. These days, he’s a pastor, author of Empathy for the Deviland scifi/fantasy junkie in Dallas, TX. Once he makes it through his to-read list, he plans to die historic on the Fury Road. Find him on Twitteror Instagram, or on the Fascinating Podcast where he is a co-host.
An article that makes an interesting observation regarding Count Dracula as a literally diabolical figure – well, it’s in the name – although I always feel that analyses of the Vampire Westenra (as opposed to the mortal Miss Lucy) being the Embodiment of Naughty, Naughty things Proper Victorian Gentlemen aren’t supposed to even dream about and who must therefore be destroyed because Patriarchy (a take so very prevalent in adaptations) always strike me as paper thin (or worse) when applied to the novel itself – which very explicitly depicts The Count as ‘date raping’ a sleepwalker (Miss Lucy) and effectively raping the only other living woman with whom we see him directly interact.
That and the fact the late Miss Lucy/Vampire Westenra exclusively targets CHILDREN (and quite small children to boot) – along with one or two other details – always leave me convinced that notions of the essential sexiness of vampires is a purely cinematic conceit. I blame the late, great Bela Lugosi but can’t really blame audiences for knowing what they wanted.
@ed – I see what you’re saying. I’ll admit I shared your reading of the novel until I encountered Doyle’s work. Their analysis was really compelling. But either way, you’re totally right that we have cinema to thank for making what was (or may have been) implicit, explicit.
Minor correction: The Boston Globe Spotlight series in 2002 wasn’t about a single priest — that reporting had occurred earlier in regard to James Porter. The Spotlight series was about several priests, which made the shuffling games the Catholic Church played all the more damning.
@3 I totally forgot about the Castlevania series! Great call! Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to rewatch that one
@@.-@ Thank you for the correction!
As somebody who is both a Catholic (with some baggage and similar critiques of certain parts of the system) and also brushed against fundamentalist purity culture in my youth (when I identified as non-denominational) I think there are some meaty thoughts here (no pun intended).
This is incredibly true “the Church has a problem with desire. That rather than do the difficult work of discerning how we might rescue a message of liberation from the forces of oppression that pervert it, we have settled for demonizing those we’ve shoved to the margins, the easier to cast them out. In doing so, we have become the very monsters from whom we claim to offer protection.” – I also highly reccomend Rachael Denhollender’s work/writing on this topic, who also comes from an Evangelical background, and was instrumental in the Larry Nassar case (a reminder that many secular organizations operate under the same dynamic, especially in sports/entertainment) which was right in my own alma mater.
I spent most of college/grad school reading and studying this kind of thing (as I was reverting back to Catholicism) and there are certainly differences between the theologies there (overall I do find some remedies to purity culture-esque thinking in a lot of the actual philosophies/teachings, BUT I’ve also seen a huge increase in this type of thinking in Catholic circles too) and yes, there is an obsession with desire in part because we recognize the power/danger there. Unfortunately, there’s a huge amount of blindness…planke eye syndrome, fi you will…towards who and where it actually manifests.
In the Eighties, horror fiction moved from good versus evil to evil always wins because good doesn’t really exist, and publishers couldn’t understand why their horror lines were failing. If the fight isn’t remotely even, the book is boring and depressing. Religion versus vampires is good fiction unless the heroes are SUPERNATURAL’s Winchesters who don’t need no stinkin’ religion to kill a vampire.
Vampires have always been a Rorschach Test of current views and world views, and that has changed with the times and the readers’ perceptions. But it’s historically ignorant to say a piece of fiction published in 1897 only means what we think it means now, not what it meant to readers then.
@7 – Lisamarie that is really interesting. I’m amazed at how Evangelicals and large swaths of Catholicism are becoming so synchronous.
Dellhollender’s work is incredible. She’s such a tireless advocate against abuse.
I’m a pastor, so I definitely agree with you that our theologies contain remedies. Now it’s just about getting folks to take them…
@1 Ed – your comment seems to fall in line with an observation I read about Dracula a long time ago, which refers to Arthur driving that stake into Lucy on what would have been their wedding night…
The fatal flaw in making a one to one connection with vampirism and the culture of the Western Church is the legends of vampires and the undead in Europe predate the church (Western or Eastern) by at least 1500 years.
@11 Early legends about undead things and things that might be considered vampires were very different from the Victorian conception of the vampire, though. Far as I understand it, for instance most of ’em weren’t really people, they were much more like any typical “outside” monster, things that went bump in the night. No doubt they had cultural functions in their cultures, and they were no doubt quite different cultural functions, but that doesn’t say much about the vampire as conceived of by Stoker and his contemporaries (he wasn’t really the first, just the one we remember).
This article is interesting. I find myself thinking more about the differences between vampires now and vampires then than about the similarities. Victorian culture was self-confident and fairly one-sided. There was another side to the puritanical coin (the Victorian era was also the first flowering of porn), but it was kept pretty solidly suppressed. And there may be a temptation about the vampire figure in Stoker, but in the end little ambiguity–desire is bad, vampires are bad, both must be crushed. Modern vampires are portrayed with a lot more ambiguity. The temptation is much more explicit, and its rejection much less of a foregone conclusion–not only is it less clear that the temptation will be rejected, it’s often less clear that it should be. They can be at the centre of the story. They can be the romantic lead. And yet at the same time, I think sometimes there is a certain emptiness at the centre of the attraction of the vampire in the modern age.
This all speaks to me of the flip side of religious puritanism: The current era’s relentless promotion and commercialization of sex, making it not so much a temptation to be resisted as a source of profit. For many of us, this touches our lives a lot more directly than religion does; I myself am an atheist raised in an atheist-to-agnostic household. Nobody among my family or close friends go to church, and my workplace sees religion as relating mainly to the accommodation and celebration of diversity. I’m an extreme case perhaps, but there are a lot of people nowadays who are on a spectrum in my direction; for us, religious puritans are those annoying people who mostly exist far to the south of us and in that one suburb that always votes right wing; we fear their influence on politics, mock the tendency of fundamentalist preachers to be exposed having gay sex with prostitutes while doing drugs, but don’t really engage with their systems of belief. But the endless sexualization of everything from children’s clothes to car ads does affect us directly. I do think that in addition to the older fear of temptation, and for that matter in addition to modern liberated responses that temptation just isn’t so bad (hence the sympathetic vampire), the vampire in modern times also has something to do with the rapacity of commercial sexualization. Of course it’s also just an example of the modern tendency to pretty explicitly sexualize everything–vampires got more explicitly sexy because everything got more explicitly sexy. But I think it also has something to do with the anxieties around the overdoing of sex and a certain uncomfortable realization that this sex, how to put it . . . it isn’t for us. Modern media sexuality is an instrumental thing–it’s there to tempt us all right, but not to tempt us into sin for its own sake, just to tempt us to do something that will make someone a profit. I feel like there has to be a relationship between that and the way the figure of the vampire is imagined in modern media.
I gaurantee you there are probably religious people living where you live, gasp.
At any rate, a lot of my study in the area treats both puritainism and hedonism as two sides of the same coin, and a kind of twisting of how to treat sexuality/desire.
It’s honestly more telling that one of the other major Victorian vampire novels was Carmilla, whose titular vampire’s appears quite young and picks a female victim, and the descriptions of her feeding are thinly disguised lesbian encounters. For that matter, the first of the major Gothic vampire works, The Vampyre, features a vampire based very directly on none other than Lord Byron – a man well known for being other than straight and monogamous. Dracula is the most famous now, but he’s part of a larger genre that predates him.
The problem isn’t so much the Church per se (whichever church – England was Anglican, not Catholic, after all!), but the incredibly repressive culture as a whole. The Jungian concept of the Shadow covers it best: desire, treated as unacceptable in one’s own psyche, is assigned as a trait of the evil Other. Monsters are fundamentally the Shadow given form. So when a culture represses desire, you get… a monster who represents, and commands and warps, desire.
The church was supposed to help people against all that wicked desire, and unnatural beings, so no surprise, it gets to help against vampires, too. Though some of the specifics (stake through the heart, etc) come from older legends. The particular focus of vampires on blood and returning from death makes the interaction with Christianity (especially the sacrament of Communion) particularly good grounds for horror, metaphor, and social commentary about the Church… so authors inevitably ran with that.
If in Dracula, the vampire is the older gentleman, that’s because he’s their Shadow in particular – a monster that preys on helpless young women (and there’s at least hints, perhaps handsome young men) in a twisted echo of desire. And in a culture where women’s only acceptable reason to want sex was to have children, what deeper horror could there be than a woman – presumably now barren in undeath – wanting the children she can’t have in a totally unnatural (and subconsciously sexualized) way instead? Tada, vampire!Lucy gets a feeding preference of her own.
The other way people deal with the Shadow is to project it onto disliked real people, and here’s where we get the Catholic and Southern Baptist clergy (and Republican politicians) who rail against sex in general and homosexuality in particular, and punish women for being objects of male desire – and then use their positions to abuse children or get caught with male prostitutes. The fact that we see this pattern of abuse and hypocrisy MOST in the same parts of society that focus so obsessively on curtailing desire is no coincidence. The Shadow is still part of their own psyche, it’s just a part of themselves they’re rejecting.
As for the more-desired (not just desiring) vampires of today, that’s because our culture outside those particular churches has come a long way in accepting desire; we can welcome it back from the Shadow, and so the monster we made of desire gets new acceptance too. Also because people love to fetishize the taboo; “monsterfucking” is a kink into itself these days.
There’s also a whole cultural THING going on with queer folks and monsters of all kinds. They called us monsters, they wrote us as monsters, they queer-coded villains (for instance, the look of Disney Little Mermaid’s Ursula was actually based on a specific drag queen!)… and so in accepting ourselves, we’ve claimed and embraced the monsters in solidarity and defiance (see: the story of how the Babadook became a queer icon). We love our monsters; “They’re ours, you can’t have them back” is something of a meme.