The
astonishing success of the Twilight series of vampire novels written by
Stephenie Meyer ranks second only to the Harry Potter series in
publishing history, and the two films released to date also repeat this
pattern. [1]
Meyer’s series builds upon the foundation of older novels and cult
films, themselves based on the European legends of vampires. The legends
predate even these, for there is a long tradition in ancient religions
of supernatural beings who are predators on humans, consuming the blood
or flesh of the living, tales that can be found in Babylonian, Greek,
Persian, Hindu, and Hebrew lore, as well as throughout Africa and the
pre-colonial Americas.
The European legends appear to have
been in wide circulation during the Middle Ages in the oral folk
culture of numerous Christian peoples, sometimes in the writings of
ecclesiastics (though this was rare), and began to be collected only in
the 1700’s. This branch of vampire legends thrived mainly in
South-eastern Europe, where the tendency to superstition was greater
than in more developed urban societies, but also appeared elsewhere, for
example in Russia and Germany. The verbal lore of several ethnic groups
commonly depicts the vampire as an “un-dead” being possessed by an evil
spirit, sometimes a suicide or a witch but often a corpse that had been
bitten by a vampire. It is conjectured that the word “vampire” derives
from a chain of linguistic adaptations that can be traced back through
French and German (vampyre and vampir) to the Serbian vampir, Polish wapierz and numerous Slavic variants in other countries, such as upir, upyr, and upior. According to some etymological theorists the term originates in the Turkic term for “witch”—for example the Tatar ubyr.
The legend was popularized in Western literature through highly successful novels, beginning with John Polidari’s The Vampyre, published in 1819, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
published in 1897. It was the latter that provided the basis for most
subsequent vampire fiction. Other novels of varying degrees of literary
merit have appeared since then, but few, if any of them, depart from the
basic “type.” In addition, there are literally hundreds of films
dealing with the theme. Notable among these are the 1922 German film Nosferatu, and Universal Pictures’ Dracula
(1931), starring Bela Lugosi, followed by a series of eight Dracula
films in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, starring Christopher Lee. Significant
among later films are Francis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), starring Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on Anne Rice’s novel of the same name, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.
There are also numerous media off-shoots such as the British television series Young Dracula, which was first aired in 2006, the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003, and the animated Japanese series Vampire Knight, first aired in 2008, as well as other series such as Blood Ties, Moonlight, Being Human, and True Blood. In a 2009 issue of the SCP Journal, Tal Brooke reflected on the possible causes of this cultural phenomenon:
Vampires as embodied
darkness, are a perfect foil for boundary pushing as we get to know and
accept them. The desensitized audience are the frogs sitting in the
slowly heating kettle. The envelope of moral boundaries is constantly
being pushed, with hardly a pause, and that has been happening since the
early days of black and white TVs with their rabbit-ear antennas.
Whether we like it or not, media is a change agent, earning vast sums
and influencing populations. If a twenty second advertisement can be
opinion-shaping, an hour-long program more so.
It has become clear
that twenty-first century producers are neither respecters of morals nor
vampire lore as they change the rules to fit the times. They clone, mix
and match. The crucifix is becoming inconsequential along with holy
water, removing the power of Christianity from the equation [2]
The theme of vampirism seems never to grow stale. In 2009 alone, seven films have been released, including New Moon, based on the second book of the Twilight series, with the third and fourth films soon to follow.
Vampire themes also figure in landmark end-of-the-world films such as The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price, Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend
(2007), starring Will Smith. Common to these later films is the
deletion of any supernatural content and attributing the evils portrayed
in them to purely physical causes. The zombie-vampires in I Am Legend,
for example, are humans turned into monsters due to a plague unleashed
accidentally by scientists seeking a cure for cancer. The evil is
entirely natural in origins. In this film, as in most other grotesque
manifestations of the horror genre, the monster has superhuman strength
and eerie cognitive powers, is vicious, murderous, and hideously ugly.
But the monstrous is not always
portrayed as this kind of tragic aberration. With increasing frequency
the monster is presented as a new and advanced breed of human who evokes
our sympathy—and even our identification with him. In the most alluring
manifestations, he possesses superhuman strength and intelligence, he
is more moral than his predecessors, and he is physically beautiful. In
the earlier stages of vampire fantasy, the reader or viewer was shaken
by terror and rewarded with the thrill of escape. In the present stage,
we are stimulated by a combination of fascination with the mysterious
paranormal and rewarded with the thrill of sensual desire.
A number of authors have pointed out in
their studies of this genre that the thirst for the life-blood of others
is a metaphor of lust. It is important to note in this regard that the
vampire of legend only sometimes kills his victim; just as often, he
infects the victim, turning him or her into a vampire. E. Michael Jones
has written that at the root of the phenomenal rise of horror culture is
suppressed conscience. Tracing the pattern from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (first published in 1818) through to Ridley Scott’s film Alien
(1979) and its sequels, Jones argues that the denial of moral law
produces metaphorical monsters that arise from the subconscious of
creative people and spread into society through their cultural works.
The monster in the Alien films, for example, is a ghastly
abomination of the feminine, and salvation is possible only through
expulsion of the offspring it implants and incubates in humans—a
subconscious eruption of internal conflicts (and guilt) over abortion.
As Jones points out:
By following our
illicit desires to their logical endpoint in death, we have created a
nightmare culture, a horror-movie culture, one in which we are led back
again and again to the source of our mysterious fears by forces over
which we have no control. [3]
Even though modern man denies the
authority of moral conscience, he cannot escape it. He is created in the
image and likeness of God, and deep within the natural law of his being
the truth continues to speak to him, even as he adamantly denies the
existence of God (in the case of atheists) or minimizes divine authority
(in the case of nominally religious people, the practical atheists). In
order to live with the inner fragmentation, which is the inevitable
effect of violated conscience, he is driven to relieve his pain through
three diverse ways:
a) He makes open war
against conscience and all its moral restraints, and pursues with
radical willfulness an aggressive consumption of sensual
rewards—generally a plunge into various kinds of addictions and a life
of sexual promiscuity;
b) More passively,
he simply ignores the inner voice of conscience and distracts himself
from it by sensual and emotional rewards—generally the search for love
without responsibility and a restless striving for worldly success;
c) He tries to
rationalize a self-made form of conscience for himself, based in values
such as “tolerance” and “non-dogmatism.” Generally this produces a new
kind of perverse moralism, a self-righteousness which is, paradoxically,
quite intolerant of genuine righteousness. Its anti-dogmatism is its
dogma. Here there is no absolute rejection of morality, but rather a
rewriting of it according to subjective feelings.
None of the foregoing coping mechanisms
need be conscious. Indeed they tend to be largely subconscious processes
through which a person feels that he is finding his personal identity,
is living out the principle of freedom, discovering his path in life,
and getting from it a portion of happiness. Though he is afflicted from
time to time by a sense of the inner void, he presumes that the remedy
for these dark moments will be found by increasing the dose of the very
drug that is killing him.
The Twilight series, it would appear,
follows the third coping mechanism mentioned above in c), the one which
appeals to the broadest possible audience. The books have won numerous
awards, notably the British Book Award for “Children’s Book of the Year”
and the 2009 “Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Book,” and to date have
sold more than 85 million copies and been translated into 38 languages.
This, despite the fact they are poorly written teen romances, pulp
fiction with a twist of supernatural horror combined with racing
hormones and high school boy-girl relationships. As with the Harry
Potter series, blood is a crucial theme, connected with life itself and
inextricably bound to the theme of immortality. But where the Potter
series is only secondarily romantic, in the Twilight series romance is
primary, with vampirism as the thrill that gives it spice.
In the first volume, Twilight, a
young high school student named Isabella (Bella) Swan, the daughter of
divorced parents, moves to the small town of Forks on the coast of
Washington State in order to live with her father, the town’s police
chief. [4]
She has not seen him since her childhood and finds that he is a kindly
but uncommunicative man—the quintessential absent father. Enrolling in
the local high school, Bella is drawn to a mysterious, handsome boy in
one of her classes, Edward Cullen. Burdened with a poor self-image,
Bella wonders if Edward is attracted to her, or hates her, since his
behavior toward her is erratic and full of confused signals. Then comes a
day when he rescues her from an impending car accident, using what
appears to be superhuman strength to deflect an oncoming vehicle that
would have killed her. She probes for an explanation, and as their
relationship develops little by little he reveals that he is “not like
other people.” Gradually she realizes that he is a vampire, and Edward
confirms her suspicions when he tells her:
“I’m the world’s
most dangerous predator. Everything about me invites you in. My voice,
my face, even my smell… I’m designed to kill… I’ve wanted to kill you.
I’ve never wanted a human’s blood so much in my life… Your scent, it’s
like a drug to me. You’re like my own personal brand of heroin.”
This is delivered in the low, breathless
voice of an impassioned lover. This is sensual desire, this is barely
restrained lust. This is definitely a new kind of vampire. There are no
fangs dripping blood, no black capes, no ritual commerce with the dead,
no terror of daylight, just an aversion to direct sunlight because under
its rays his skin glitters like diamonds. “You’re beautiful!” exclaims
Bella when Edward opens his shirt and reveals his sparkling flesh.
Bella is then introduced to the members
of the Cullen family, whom we learn do not eat normal food or sleep at
all. They appear to be intelligent, cultured people, sensitive and
“caring.” They also have astounding physical strength, can run faster
than horses and run up the trunks of trees at top speed. Most of the
Cullens also have paranormal psychic gifts of various sorts. Edward can
read minds, his adoptive sister Alice has the ability to see the future.
We learn that the head of the family, a local physician named Dr.
Carlisle Cullen, infected Edward with vampirism after the First World
War, when the boy lay dying of influenza, both his parents already dead
from the epidemic. In order to save his life, Dr. Cullen had taken his
blood by the traditional bite on the neck, thus infecting Edward,
turning him into a vampire. Now the boy is perpetually seventeen years
old, and immortal. But Dr. Cullen is no Dracula. The family he has
collected around him, his wife Esme and the five young people of the
household, have all been “adopted” in similar fashion—for humanitarian
reasons.
Edward and Bella fall in love, but soon
the family encounters another coven of vampires nearby in the forest.
Among them is a sadistic vampire named James who sees in Bella nothing
more than food, and is excited by the prospect of a challenging hunt,
because he realizes the Cullens are protecting this human prey. Edward
and the other Cullens defend Bella, helping her to escape to her old
hometown of Phoenix Arizona. But James tracks her down there and
tortures her in preparation for killing her. She is seriously wounded,
but Edward and the family arrive just in time to rescue her. They kill
James (by ripping him to pieces and burning his body parts), and then
they all return to Forks. The story ends at the high school prom where
Edward and Bella dance together and realize they are hopelessly in love
with each other. Bella whispers that she wants them always to be
together, and Edward refuses to do what would make this happen. As they
cling to each other with the vampire question unresolved between them,
they are secretly observed by the deadly vampiress Victoria, a member of
James’s coven. Victoria is now intent on revenge, setting the stage for
the next book and film.
In the second novel, New Moon,
Edward and the Cullen family throw a birthday party for Bella.
Unwrapping a gift, she loses a drop of blood from a paper cut, and
Edward’s adoptive brother, Jasper, frenzied by the scent, instinctively
attacks her in order to kill her. Edwards stops him in time, but he now
concludes that it is too dangerous for Bella to associate with the
family. He and the Cullens leave Forks in order to protect her from
themselves. Because of his absence, Bella falls into a deep depression,
until she develops a strong friendship with a native-American youth
named Jacob Black. Jacob is in love with Bella, and we later discover
that he is a werewolf. He and the other werewolves in his tribe try to
protect her from Victoria.
Through a misunderstood vision, Edward
comes to believe that Bella is dead, and he travels to Italy where he
decides to commit suicide from grief over losing her. But he is stopped
at the last moment by the arrival of Bella, accompanied by his sister,
Alice. In a meeting with the Volturi, a powerful coven of vampire
“royalty,” Edward is told that according to vampire law Bella must
either be killed or changed into a vampire, because she has discovered
the great secret that vampires exist. The Volturi govern the world of
vampires with self-protective rules, much as does the Ministry of Magic
in the Potter series, and they must be obeyed. The Cullens return to
Forks and vote in favor of Bella being transformed into a vampire.
Edward is not happy about this, for he loves her as she is. But he
offers her a choice: either she lets Carlisle transform her into a
vampire after her graduation from high school, or, if Bella agrees to
marry him, Edward will change her himself.
In the third novel, Eclipse,
the story opens with a series of unsolved murders in Seattle,
Washington. Edward suspects these are being committed by an unidentified
vampire who is unable to control his thirst for human blood. As Edward
and Bella apply to colleges, Bella explains to Edward her desire to see
her friend Jacob Black again. Although Edward fears for her safety,
Bella insists that neither Jacob nor his werewolf pack would ever harm
her, and she begins visiting him occasionally. Meanwhile, Alice Cullen
has a vision that Victoria has returned to Forks. A few days later,
Edward proposes marriage to Bella and she accepts.
Bella and the Cullens learn that the
murders in Seattle are being committed by an “army” of newborn vampires,
controlled by Victoria. The Cullens join forces with the werewolf pack
and prepare to combat Victoria’s forces while Edward, Bella, and Jacob
camp in the mountains, in order to remain hidden during the battle.
There, Jacob becomes upset when he overhears Edward and Bella discussing
their engagement and he threatens to join the fight and let himself be
killed. To stop him, Bella kisses Jacob and realizes that she is in love
with him too. During the battle, Victoria tracks Edward’s scent to
Bella’s hiding place in the woods, but Edward successfully defends her.
After Victoria and her army are destroyed, Bella explains to Jacob that
while she loves him, her love for Edward is greater. Receiving a wedding
invitation from Edward, Jacob runs away in his wolf form, angry and
heartbroken at Bella’s decision to become a vampire.
In the fourth novel, Breaking Dawn,
Bella and Edward are married, but their honeymoon is disrupted when
Bella discovers that she is pregnant. Her pregnancy progresses more
rapidly than normal and severely weakens her. Edward, fearing that a
monster is growing in her womb, wants Bella to have an abortion, but she
refuses. She nearly dies giving birth and Edward injects Bella with his
venom to save her life, transforming her into a vampire. The newborn
baby is a daughter, half-vampire-half-human. Edward and Bella name her
Renesmee. The Volturi heard about the baby, who has been reported to
them as an “immortal child” (a child who has been bitten by a vampire
and survived). Such children are not allowed to live because their
continued existence would violate vampire law. The Volturi tribunal
travels to Forks in order to decide on the case, but the Cullens gather
vampire witnesses who testify that Renesmee is not an immortal child.
They succeed in convincing the Volturi that Renesmee is no danger to
vampires or their secret, and the family is left in peace to continue
their new life together. All is well.
One might ask how such a thinly plotted
bloody mess has managed to obtain such an enormous worldwide following.
Part of the answer lies in the power of romantic fantasy at any stage in
history. In the modern age, however, romantic fantasy in both text form
and visual form is charged with powerful stimulation of the senses. In
the Twilight series the main characters are highly attractive young
people. For example, Bella describes Edward as “excruciatingly lovely
and forever seventeen.” In the two films released to date, Edward is
acted by the “narcotically beautiful” Robert Pattinson, as one feminine
commentator put it. Jacob Black’s handsome face is matched by shirtless
exposure of his muscled torso, as is the case with others in his
werewolf pack. Bella, acted by Kristen Stewart, is very pretty (though
not quite as much as her vampire friends). The Volturi look like exotic,
exceedingly pale fashion models.
Physical beauty is the glue that holds
the whole banal tale together. If one were to dim down the prettiness
and subtract the horror from these four novels and their films, there
would be little left. They would become no more than mind-numbing
Harlequin Romances for very immature teenage girls. The sexual
attraction and the appeal to romantic feelings, combined with the allure
of mystery, all obscure the real horror of the tale, which is the
degradation of the image and likeness of God in man, and the false
proposal that consuming the lifeblood of another human being bestows
life all around. As E. Michael Jones writes:
Both Christ and
Dracula deal with blood and eternal life. Vampirism is, as Renfield
makes clear, the antithesis of Christianity. Whereas Christ shed his
blood so that his followers could have eternal life, Dracula shed his
followers’ blood so that he could have eternal life; Dracula is a
reworking of Christianity according to the canons of Social Darwinism.
The monster is simply the inversion of Christianity that was taking
place throughout Europe as once again the Enlightenment was implemented
through one of its pseudo-scientific ideologies. … In a satanic way
typical of the reversal of Christian order that the vampire creates, man
achieves immortality through immorality and by infecting others—that
is, through lust. Christianity exalts love; vampirism—Darwin’s survival
of the fittest pushed to its extreme—exalts the hunger of desire. [5]
In the Twilight series we have a
cultural work that converts a traditional archetype of evil into a
morally neutral one. Vampires are no longer the “un-dead,” no longer
possessed by demons. There are “good” vampires and “bad” vampires, and
because the good vampire is incredibly handsome and possesses all the
other qualities of an adolescent girl’s idealized dreamboat, everything
is forgivable. Recall at this point that Edward has told Bella that he
has killed people. Recall that he has struggled with himself not to kill
her. Recall, as well, that when the “good” vampires catch a bad
vampire, they rip off his head and tear his body into pieces with their
hands and then burn the remains.
But this does not matter to Bella,
because Edward and his family are apparently dedicated to reform—though a
very selective kind of reform. They do not want to be monsters. They
are what might be called vampire vegetarians—they hunt in the forest and
drink only the blood of wild animals. Throughout the four novels,
Edward has trained himself to resist his desire for Bella’s blood, even
as she increasingly desires that he bite her and infect her. Edward, we
are led to believe, is outstandingly “moral,” his self-denial resembling
heroic chastity. It is all so tender and touching until one recalls
that this is a story about savage killers who have infected normal
humans and brought them into their “family.” But readers and film
audience are conditioned to forgive this too, because they have been
shown throughout the series that infecting others can be a saving act.
Referring to the vampire television series, True Blood,
Tal Brooke notes that vampires are presented as a misunderstood
persecuted minority who must fight for their rights against the
intolerant churches.
The church service in True Blood
is about as unsympathetic a portrait of Christians as any Hollywood
director could hope for. It fits the carefully developed caricature of
hooting ignoramuses—simple minded idiots calling out for more blood,
fire and brimstone than their vampire counterparts. The public does not
miss it, storing away the image.
In a double-minded
gambit, the audience knows vampires are evil and yet is compelled to
support vampire “rights” as the latest underclass. Killing vampires is
seen as a hate crime driven by bigoted intolerance. Yet they [the
audience] have seen the dark side of vampires in which mortals are
despised, slaughtered and drained at whim. Like a co-dependent mother
constantly making up excuses for her serial-killer son and immune to
reality, the audience has been enlisted to see them in a permissive and
apologetic manner—a backdoor covenant with evil and Orwell’s
Double-Think in action.
Brooke states that the evils which
horrified earlier generations are now embraced by “open minded”
audiences as new avenues of liberation. This, he says, is part of a
larger “retinal circus” in contemporary culture, one that implants
images of depravity into the minds of millions through sensual lures
that bypass normal human instincts of fear and disgust.
Corruption takes
place when images of depravity enter the mind—the younger the mind [and]
the more depraved the images, the more powerful is the impact. In the
case of a young child, an innocent mind can be corrupted readily. A
range of common laws are based on this truth. That’s why we have “adult”
movie channels and “adult” bookstores—at least for now. …
The power of
seduction takes place when an outside influence penetrates down to the
inner layers of the soul and spirit to bring about corruption—for which
there is already an inner component. Potential depravity becomes
realized and emerges out into the open. Evil spreads and infects,
causing irreversible damage. Like a cancer, it can spread through
individuals into communities. At some point a culture can become
corrupt. Those cultures that imploded were in the throes of moral
depravity; consider ancient Rome or Sodom. Consider what was happening
to bring on Noah’s flood. [6]
E. Michael Jones argues that novels
about vampire infection appeared precisely at the time in history (the
1800s) when the dreaded disease syphilis was spreading in the wake of
the initial post-Enlightenment stage of the sexual revolution. Now in
the age of antibiotics, the most horrifying, disfiguring symptoms of the
infection can be controlled, if caught early enough, thus “liberating”
the promiscuous from the immediate consequences of their immoral acts.
In little over a century, untrammeled serial sex has become pandemic,
without the grave consequences that once would have inhibited its
progress. Similarly, in little more than a century, the universal
archetypes of evil have been defused. No longer considered to be
demonic, they have retained only their mystique of exotically attractive
danger. Corruption of the creative imagination always has its roots in
the corruption of the moral order—the order within the individual and
within his surrounding culture. But corruption of creative imagination
can also have its origins in forces beyond the purely social. In this
regard, there is a disturbing inference in Meyer’s account of the
original inspiration for Twilight:
I woke up (on that
June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having
an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people
was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically
beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties
inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other
while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her
blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing
her immediately. … Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making
breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said
children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right
place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so
intrigued by the nameless couple’s story that I hated the idea of
forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your
friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was
just so darned good-looking, that I didn’t want to lose the mental
image.)
Meyer goes on to describe what happened during the writing of the book:
All this time, Bella
and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply
wouldn’t shut up. I’d stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all
the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my
baby still wasn’t sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another
conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting,
so I’d get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a
pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some
freakin’ sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to
try to decipher the stuff I’d scrawled across the page in the dark. [7]
Of course, one might attribute the
foregoing to the inflamed imagination of a sleep-deprived mother,
following up on a powerful dream that had no source other than the
natural subconscious. However, Steve Wohlberg, in his 2009 article in
the SCP Journal, raises another possibility, describing what later occurred in the realm of Meyer’s imagination after the publication of Twilight.
He begins with a reflection on the similarities in the original
inspirations of the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series:
… [The] Twilight saga received its initial spark when Stephenie Meyer had an unusual dream on June 1, 2003. Eerily, the Harry Potter
phenomenon began with a similar “revelation” given to Joanne Kathleen
Rowling in 1990 while she was traveling by train outside London. “The
character of Harry Potter just popped into my head, fully formed,”
Rowling reflected in 2001. “Looking back, it was all quite spooky!” She
also stated to inquiring media that the Potter books “almost wrote themselves.” “My best ideas often come at midnight,” Rowling declared.
As with Rowling, so
with Meyer. When those mesmerizing tales first burst into the brains of
these two women, neither was an established writer. Both were novices.
They weren’t rich either. Now they are millionaires many times over.
Their experiences are similar, with common threads. Both of their novels
are permeated with occultism. Based on this, it’s appropriate to
wonder, is there a supernatural source behind these revelations? If so,
what is it?
Stephenie Meyer herself provides an amazing clue to the answer. After her unexpected rise to stardom, she later confessed,
“I actually did have
a dream after Twilight was finished of Edward coming to visit me—only I
had gotten it wrong and he did drink blood like every other vampire and
you couldn’t live on animals the way I’d written it. We had this
conversation and he was terrifying.” [8]
Who was this “Edward”? Was it the
author’s subconscious telling her that she was attempting to tame what
cannot be tamed? Or was it an evil spirit manifesting through the image,
urging her to give her readers less moralism and more blood? However
one interprets it, the question remains: Why did she not realize that
the second dream was warning her about something? In her interviews she
merely reported it without offering an assessment of what it might mean,
then continued to write more of the same. Why did she respond to the
first dream and not to the second? Was it because the first was
extremely pleasurable and the second disturbing to the point of terror?
Was it because pleasure had become her good and unhappy feelings a thing
to be dismissed as bad? Conscience cannot be entirely eradicated in
human nature, and when it raises its painful, unwelcome truths, the
individual (or the culture in which he lives) must either pay attention
to it or counteract it with a strategy of denial. Attention is
redirected away from the truth about his condition, focusing on
overcoming symptoms and ignoring the root cause of the symptoms.
In the Twilight series, vampirism is
not identified as the root cause of all the carnage; instead the evil is
attributed to the way a person lives out his vampirism. Though
Bella is at first shocked by the truth about the family’s old ways
(murder, dismemberment, sucking the blood from victims), she is
nevertheless overwhelmed by her “feelings” for Edward, and her yearning
to believe that he is truly capable of noble self-sacrifice. So much so
that her natural feminine instinct for submission to the masculine
suitor increases to the degree that she desires to offer her life to her
conqueror. She trusts that he will not kill her; she wants him to drink
her essence and infect her. This will give her a magnificent unending
romance and an historical role in creating with her lover a new kind of
human being. They will have superhuman powers. They will be moral vampires—and they will be immortal.
Here, then, is the embedded spiritual
narrative (probably invisible to the author and her audience alike): You
shall be as gods. You will overcome death on your own terms. You will
be master over death. Good and evil are not necessarily what Western
civilization has, until now, called good and evil. You will
define the meaning of symbols and morals and human identity. And all of
this is subsumed in the ultimate message: The image and likeness of God
in you can be the image and likeness of a god whose characteristics are
satanic, as long as you are a “basically good person.”
In this way, coasting on a tsunami of
intoxicating visuals and emotions, the image of supernatural evil is
transformed into an image of supernatural good.
+ + +
[1] Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, Little, Brown and Co, New York, Boston, 2005-2008.
[2] Tal Brooke, “Vampires Rising,” SCP Journal, Volume 33:2—33-3, 2009, published by the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, Berkeley, CA. Web address: http://www.scp-inc.org
[3] E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Film and Fiction, Spence Publishing, Dallas, Texas, 2000.
[4]
For the sake of brevity in this overview, I have combined the original
story with details that were adaptations in the film version, but
nothing that alters the plot or characters.
[5] E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Film and Fiction, Spence Publishing, Dallas, Texas, 2000. Renfield is a fictional character in Stoker’s Dracula,
under the control of the Count but burdened with a conscience. Dracula
offers him an unending supply of food, if Renfield will worship him.
Renfield refuses and is killed by Dracula.
[6] Tal Brook, “Vampires Rising,” SCP Journal, Volume 33:2-33:3.
[7] Stephenie Meyer, “The Story Behind Twilight.”
www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html
[8] Steve Wohlberg, “The Menace Behind Twilight,” SCP Journal,
Volume 33:2—33-3, 2009, published by the Spiritual Counterfeits
Project, Berkeley, CA. Web address: www.scp-inc.org. The quote from
Meyer about this second dream is from EW.com (Entertainment Weekly).
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