Gothic Vampires and Modern Vampires

The genre of gothic text tends to emerge in times of great social stress or anxiety. For many years, authors have described vampires as wealthy, culturally sophisticated, aristocrats who live decadent lifestyles. Today however, average Americans are faced with hard economic times, and are struggling to provide basic necessities for their families. When watching the movie Twilight by Stephanie Meyers, several details in the story seems to enhance these harsh cultural anxieties of today’s social world, such as, the excessive lengths people will go to achieve financial stability, the lavish life style of the modern vampire, and how themes of the economic issues society is facing, impacts and stresses basic human instinct that society has an unlimited wants.

For centuries, gothic authors depict the vampires as evil, repulsive, and socially secluded “creatures”, leaving the audience terrified by the gruesome details of the murdering and sucking the blood to kill the victims, in order for the vampire kind to survive. However, the modern vampire is drastically pulling away from that negative connotation, and becoming difficult to differentiate amongst the public. Since many Americans are struggling to make ends meet, they tend to seek out alternative methods of achieving money, such as donating blood for a payment. This not only helps struggling families in their time of need, but also helps people struggling with organ failure. This source of saving human blood is represented in Twilight, as the Cullen family of vampires, feed exclusively on animal blood in order to save human life. Though the gruesome murdering of the human victims from a vampire attack has been taken out of today’s stories, the general gloomy and eerie mystique of...

... middle of paper ...

...t the people today admire, such as material possessions. Since they already are living forever, the Cullen family dreams of a normal sense of life and having their own actual expiration date. This sends the message that even the undead, relate to the living, in the sense that people have unlimited wants.

In summary, when watching the movie, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, many cultural anxieties are expressed, the main one being how society reacts to economic crisis. As illustrated above, fantasies of the unattainable frustrate people such as, not being able to provide common luxuries for individual family members, addressing the human desire for money, the excessive life style of vampires, and how the economy highlights and stresses the human instinct of unlimited wants. These pressures are felt not only with the living and the dead, but with the undead as well.