Jason Gardner comments on our vampire nature in the West

Jason Gardner

Vampires, spawn of the night, enemies of all that is decent and good, victimising the young and the innocent, vicious beasts with a feral appetite for the red stuff that can't be sated and a nasty tendency to spread their lethal plague to others.

And we can't get enough of them.

Not just countless films but now at least a couple of current TV series to boot: Moonlight - kind of Miss Marple with fangs and True Blood a show about a fictional southern town in America where vampires and humans co-exist, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

So why the love affair with a bunch of long toothed leeches? Well for one thing they keep evolving, getting better, stronger. Once upon a time all you needed to beat off a plague of blood suckers was a bottle of Vittel blessed by a local padre, a couple of garlic cloves, crucifix, cross and a pointy stick. And if that failed hope the Vampire hadn't set his alarm for just before daybreak.

Nowadays they're downright invincible. Crosses don't work (hmm. A comment on the waning power of religion in the west??) and they'll just shove garlic in a Bolognese. And, as for the vampires in the hugely popular Twilight series, daylight doesn't even give them a tan let alone turn them crispy.

Then there's the living forever thing; the super strength; shape shifting into different animals and the ability to seduce anyone with that foxy east European accent.

All around - if pop culture is anything to go by - Vampires are not monsters we want to avoid so much as become. Blame John Polidori and Bram Stoker for that, before these two writers came along Vampires were legends based on mythical creatures like the chupacubra - 'goat sucker' in Spanish.

It was Polidori who turned the vampire into a fop with fangs in a short story in 1819. Eighty years later Stoker cemented the idea of the vampire as an aloof, suave aristocrat with Dracula.

So vampires became a cut above, sophisticated, gents and ladies with a passion for indulging their baser appetites - very much a play on the well to do of Stoker and Polidori's day who's wealth meant that they could indulge any vice they so chose.

No wonder Vampires have become an ideal. For mere humans indulging in vice brings severe consequence: an addiction - pretty much any addiction - will bring wrack and ruin to body and soul. For Vampires indulging their addiction only makes them stronger.

And, of course, they don't just live forever but remain forever young. No wonder many a vampire is accompanied by 'familiars' - human slaves who serve their blood thirsty masters in the hope of becoming vampires themselves.

Of course Vampires (apart from the vegetarian type found in Twilight who only drink animal blood) are morally repugnant. Their life comes at the expense of others. But that just makes them an even more fitting icon for contemporary society. Aren't most of us obsessed with trying to stay young at any cost?

And when it comes to consumption aren't we all parasitic? Doesn't our quality of life in the West come at the expense of not just the life of the planet but the life of those who live in abject poverty around the world?

I heard a statistic that is as frightening as an encounter with a vampire: that if the West stopped buying ice cream for a year, the money saved could wipe out what's owed by heavily indebted countries.

The problem then is perhaps not that our society longs so much to be vampires but that in some ways we already are.