Vampires seem to be the latest craze in literature and entertainment, although they’ve actually been building popular momentum for the last forty-odd years. From Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, from Ann Rice’s books to Twilight to Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, the vampire phenomenon has grown to the point that it’s already considered by some to be passé.

If agents and editors are bored with vampires, the public is still devouring the possibility of being devoured. As a student of myth in popular culture, I’m always fascinated when a theme or image arises that captures our collective imagination. The love of vampires, rising now to a fever pitch, raises some questions of mythic resonance: What human mysteries are we wrestling with in our vampire stories? How do they illustrate or inform our search for meaning? What calls us to dabble in blood lust and long to be seduced by creatures of the night?

One fascinating aspect of vampire lore is the re-forging of the powerful connection between food and death. Our society has, to a large extent, lost touch with these two primal mysteries and the connection between them – the food that sustains life, and the dark forces that take life. Civilization and technology have not only elevated us to the top of the food chain, they’ve allowed us to pretend we’re no longer part of it. In the last two centuries or so, we’ve all but eliminated large predators, the manhunters and death-dealers, banishing them from our landscapes and psyches. Not content with that, we have largely moved our food sources from the backyard to the sterile, faraway factory and the brightly packaged supermarket. Most of us who enjoy rack of lamb or Chicken Kung Pao balk at the thought of slaughtering a helpless baby sheep or wringing a chicken’s neck. The less we have to know about the dirt, blood and mess involved in feeding ourselves, the happier we are.

Some of us tell ourselves that the answer lies in eating only vegetables, as if plants aren’t alive. (Some fascinating scientific experiments indicate that they may even have a certain amount of sentience.) Or we hope that technology and synthetically engineered foods will absolve us altogether of the need to kill – despite the toll that such foods take on our bodies and ecosystems.

Food and death are inseparable. All life lives on other lives, and humans aren’t exempt, no matter how much we’d like to be. According to Joseph Campbell, noted scholar of comparative mythology, this is one of the basic mysteries that the human psyche must grapple with:

“Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. . . when you look at the beauty of nature, and . . . it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. . . Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon. This is one of the mysteries that these symbolic, paradoxical forms try to represent.” (The Power of Myth)

And it seems to me that one of these symbolic, paradoxical forms is the vampire. Human in form, visually indistinguishable from ourselves, but with the strength, speed, and heightened senses of the wild predator. Capable of reasoned intelligence, civilized manners, compassion and even love, but relentlessly primal in its hunger – hunger for the hot, pulsing, sweet-salty stuff of life. Human blood. Ours.

And in one fell swoop of bat wings, we’ve gone from masters of the universe to somebody’s dinner. Just like that, we’re back in the food chain – if only in our nightmares.

Of course, there are other monsters of page and screen that feed on human flesh. But vampires hold a special place in our psyches – there are no nightclubs full of Goths pretending to be werewolves or zombies. Vampires are almost like us; in fact, they are us – only better. Possessing supernatural power and beauty, untouched of the ravages of age and time, unfettered by the need to pretend that they aren’t killers by nature. But they’re also the stuff of nightmares. Wolves in sheep’s clothing, infiltrating our communities and places of safety, burning with a  hunger that can only be assuaged by murder. Like us and yet not like; superior and debased.

Primitive hunters reconciled the guilt of killing and the necessity of eating by revering the animal gods and ritually thanking them for their sacrifice. Our culture has settled on denial as a coping strategy. But questions about the eternal mysteries of life don’t go away. They whisper to us out of the shadows of our collective unconscious, and work their way into the stories we tell ourselves about violence and death and the price of survival.

So the vampires come to town. Disturbingly human, seductively Other, they embody the eternal tug-of-war: our desire for an end to violence, and the knowledge that we must kill to live. They’re our dark gods, reminding us that life and death go hand in hand. 

And in the end, vampires offer the final paradoxical temptation – the cheating of death by becoming its instrument. In the last gasp, when all other hope is lost, we can choose to become like them. They will elevate us to immortality, if we accept the dark truth we cannot reconcile – that the need to kill will never leave us, and we will always be dealers of death. Or, perhaps, like certain heroes of vampire stories, we can save our humanity by accepting our mortality – learning to see ourselves once more as part of the cycle of life, neither greater nor less than the life that sustains us and the life that feeds on us.