Why Vampires Suck (and Why We Need Them) - part 1/3
From Bloodthirsty Monsters to Timeless Mirrors
Hey, Slick!
This is the first of three letters I’ll send you on vampires. Consider it an invitation - not to bite me in the night, but to come and hunt vampires with me.
We’ll hunt them in their castles, where shadows lurk behind velvet curtains. We’ll hunt them out in the world, where they trade cloaks for power suits and drain society dry. And finally, we’ll look for a cure to break the curse.
Let’s hope there is one, because after this exploration of the shadowy depths of vampirism, we might not see our reflections in the mirror the same way again…
But first things first.
Are you a vampire?
I need you to do something for me, Slick. Get in front of a mirror and take a long, hard look. Do you see a reflection?
…
Great! That means you’re not a vampire.
… or does it?
I know you like a good plot twist, Slick. So how about this: what if vampires don’t see their own reflection - not because they don’t have one, but because vampires are the mirror?
“The instant after, his face vanished from the window as though some trick of the light had made it disappear. It was like a shadow passing.”
-Bram Stoker, Dracula
To understand vampires, let’s first look not at Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but at ideas that started to circulate around the time it was published.
Like a Shadow Passing
Let’s invoke another refined, sinister Victorian figure: Freud (don’t worry, he doesn’t bite). Freud believed much of what we bury in the unconscious - forbidden desires, fears, and traumas - eventually find its way to resurface. The vampire is a return of the repressed, emerging from the darkness to remind us what we’ve tried to forget.
Vampires are also uncanny1. Unsettling, both familiar and strange: vampires look human, but they’re not; they live, but they’re dead. Vampires blur the boundaries between opposites we want to keep separate.
Jung developed a concept for that part of us we want to repress: the shadow self, the darker aspects of our personalities, those we don’t see in the mirror and that we project onto others to avoid facing within ourselves.
Vampires are a projection screen for our fears, desires, and the darkness within; when we’re encountering a vampire, we’re really encountering a piece of ourselves.
Ouch. I know - I said there was a plot twist, and you thought the vampire was the mirror and that was it. Not quite. The vampire is also you.
Don’t worry: I know a cure. But first… Let’s have another look in the mirror.
If vampires are a mirror for our fears, what do they reflect?
What we See in the Mirror
“It is the man himself! He was the Count, and this was the same tall, thin man, with the beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard. His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s. As I looked at him, his lips curled back over his gums, and the long, sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely.”
-Bram Stoker, Dracula
There’s a lot to unpack in this quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
But even immortal creatures evolve: vampires reflect different things at different times - and that’s what makes them so interesting.
Pestilential Fangs of Folklore
Before the vampire became the suave predator of Victorian nightmares, it roamed feral in the pestilence-ridden country. European vampires used to be more zombie-like2.
Not the pale-ish, but sensual Count Dracula: bloated corpses, ruddy and decaying, coming back from the dead to harm living relatives and neighbours they had beef with.
Driven by hunger, instinct, and grief, folklore vampires were beast-like - often associated with wolves, bats, and other nocturnal predators - and went around spreading disease (like plagues), not vampirism. They didn’t even bite, they just drained the life force and contaminated others in their proximity.
Folklore vampirism is somewhere between a curse and pestilence; not quite the vampires we know and love, with their refined, sinister appearance. Those are an invention, a projection of the Victorian, Industrial Era.
The Victorian Revamp of the Vamp
Vampires shape-shifted in the 19th Century into the sophisticated, sinister, sensual creatures we know today, mirroring new fears of aristocratic exploitation, repressed sexuality, and psychological decay in an industrializing world.
Even before Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), literary vampires like John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven (The Vampyre, 1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) are more elegant, sophisticated, aristocratic, and have pretty much defined vampires to this day.
Let’s take a closer look at a vampire - literary, not literal - and unpack the coffin. If you want to take notes, Slick, here are my…
11 Vampire Trends to Watch for in 1897
#1 First things first: vampires bite, and drink blood. They sustain themselves by draining the life force of others - projecting our fear (or repression) of exploitation, parasitism, and greed. The vampire is fundamentally a predator, a metaphor for systems who thrive on (and drain) the energy, vitality, and resources of others.
#2 The vampire’s bite leaves more than these two red dots on your jugular: it turns you into a vampire. A vampire, like trauma, can turn its victims into abusers and oppressors; toxic behaviours spread, infecting and corrupting others. It’s not a lineage of trauma; it’s a vampiric curse.
#3 Vampires have supernatural strength, far beyond that of a normal human. A symbol for the overwhelming force of domination and unchecked predatory power. Exploitative systems and dark impulses, forces that overpower and subjugate, often seem too strong to resist.
#4 The bite typically happens in the cover of night, in the shadows, while we’re asleep; we don’t even really feel it, at least not until the vampire is done and gone. But vampires can’t show up uninvited. Because we enable our own exploitation and domination - through complicity, denial, or passivity. Predatory forces and patterns require a form of consent to take hold on us, reflecting the paradox of voluntarily allowing destructive influences into our lives3.
#5 To get their way, vampires can shape-shift, transforming into bat, wolves, or mist to make their way, undetected, through the shadows. Just like our predatory impulses, behaviours and systems disguise themselves, even hide - that’s the whole idea of the shadow self and its expressions.
#6 But they can also just be cute. Vampires are charming, cunning like the devil, with enough charisma to manipulate and trap their victims. Predation and exploitation are rarely overt; more often, they come under the form of seduction, deception, and psychological manipulation.
Vampires are the masks we wear to hide our true intentions, the allure of control disguised as charm.
#7 All that charm and domination endows vampires with a strong sexual charge. The bite, the blood-drinking, are both primal and intimate, exposing instincts lurking behind out polished surface. Blood-drinking, both primal and intimate, exposes the instincts lurking behind our polished surface: repressed sexuality, transgression, and power dynamics. The predatory nature of the vampire often carries a sensual allure, reflecting the dark appeal of forbidden desires and domination.
Or in the ambiguous words of Bram Stoker,
“His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s...”
-Bram Stoker, Dracula
#8 We’d rather keep all these things in the shadows. So, vampires avoid sunlight - it turns them into ashes (and I thought I had it bad with my sunburns…)
Symbolically, vampires fear exposure to the light of truth and self-awareness, their greatest threat; predatory behaviours and dark impulses thrive in secrecy and denial.
#9 We already checked - vampires don’t see themselves in the mirror; we refuse to confront our shadow self, to acknowledge our own darkness, and in the process, we lose our self-awareness, we can’t or refuse to see our own soul and humanity.
#10 And that’s bad. Because it makes us dead inside. Vampires belong to the undead: they exist somewhere between life and death; animate, yet not truly alive.
This state of spiritual decay is a projection of the part of us that has become disconnected from our humanity, our purpose, our vitality: a hollow existence, driven by instinct rather than meaning. By becoming a vampire, we become like dead to ourselves, soulless. We can’t enjoy human pleasures and joys anymore - so we drink blood instead.
#11 And that brings us to our last vampire trend, Slick: isolation and alienation. Vampires, cut off from their humanity, become incapable of true connection. They live in big, cold, faraway castles and sleep in coffins. The final consequence of the vampire’s predatory nature is the loneliness of exploitation and power.
Vampires Unleashed
But vampires are more than individual creatures, bigger than our personal shadows. Vampirism isn’t just an affliction of the self; it’s a social disease, a relational dynamic. There is always a predator and a prey, a taker and a taken-from. Every bite is a transaction of exploitation—whether your realize it or not. Vampirism thrives in the spaces between us: in the power imbalances, betrayals, and unspoken agreements we make with each other. It’s in the way we drain others to sustain ourselves—and in the way we allow ourselves to be drained.
But the infection doesn’t stop there. Because it’s a social disease, vampirism has also crept into our social systems, where it festers and multiplies. The predator-prey relationship scales up, shaping entire networks of exploitation, greed, and control. The systems we build—economies, ideologies, institutions—become infected with vampiric logic, draining the energy, resources, and vitality of entire communities. What starts as an individual shadow grows into a collective darkness, concealed within the structures we rely on and the norms we accept without question.
As we’ve seen, the traits of the vampire—manipulation, predation, charm, and control—reflect not just the darkness in ourselves, but a shared condition, a pattern of exploitation that we reinforce through our relationships and systems. Vampires may seem like solitary creatures, but vampirism is always a communal curse.
Since the 19th century, vampires have evolved again, from metaphors of the darkness within us to metaphors for the hidden forces that drain societies, exploit communities, and manipulate our perceptions.
Next week, Slick, the velvet cloaks come off. We’ll leave the castles behind, and follow vampires as they slip into the modern world - where they trade velvet cloaks for power suits and drain society dry. Ready to see what’s lurking behind the glamour?
See you in the shadows!
Until then,
Stay Slick
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Das Unheimliche
e.g., Upir (Slavic countries), Strigoi (Romania), Vrykolakas (Greece)
I am not saying here that every predation has our consent one way or another. I am talking about the predation where we are the predator.