MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 2012, the Pew Research Center conducted a study that considered the rise of “Nones,” or people who cite no religious affiliation, in the United States. Vampires, Nina Auerbach argues, are monstrous personifications of their time, and the growing secularization of the United States plays out in vampire film and fiction surrounding the millennium. Vampirism, generally, can be read as a bastardization of Christianity, with its focus on blood rites and resurrection. The American vampire, which has found itself in the spotlights of popular film and fiction in the decades surrounding the new millennium, has always been tied closely with the nation’s largely Christian population. From Interview with the Vampire to Twilight, vampirism in the States is quite often a reaction to, and part of, the Christianized culture of America.

This paper will consider the ways in which the immortal creature has morphed into the new millennium, one that threatened to be the Biblical end-times. Considering reactions to atheistic communist governments, a highly secularized University system, and the millennial rise of “Nones,” this paper utilizes Elizabeth Kostava’s 2005 novel The Historian as an example of ways that the vampire has shape-shifted into the 21st century. The vampire of the middle-ages, a similar creature to Stoker’s Count Dracula, was a monster that inspired fear due to a strong belief in Christian doctrine. Kostava’s Dracula, on the other hand, causes fear in its secular readers, begging the question: “If vampires are real, then what else could be?” Vampires, like those who admire and fear them, utilize the new century and millennium as a time for reflecting on self-identity, the future, and - most horrifically - the past.