The Genocide of the Vampires

Lack of moral nuance in a popular genre threatens to make us the monsters

You can’t see a vampire in the mirror for the simple reason that the vampire is your reflection. Vampires onscreen are projections of human desires. Hammer audiences lick their fangs with Christopher Lee at all the delicious bosoms beckoning. Dracula pierces the exposed neck with a phallic oomph, just as the vampire hunter drives his rigid stake into the nubile beauty’s trembling form. Lust and blood drive both the living and undead; the population of Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot is murdered by proliferating vampires, and then murdered again by the heroic vampire killers. First the vampires rage through the town like a consuming fire, and then, at the end of the book, they are themselves consumed. The same townspeople are destroyed once, then again — as if the first time was so much fun it needed to be rewound and watched again.

In King’s Salem’s Lot (1976), the fact that we are the vampires is the point of the novel and its horror. King hates the people of Jerusalem’s Lot, and loves that hatred with the same vicious delectation of his vampire antagonist, Kurt Barlow. The people in the town cheat on each other, loathe each other, lust after each other, betray each other and beat their children. They are squalid, loathsome, mean-spirited and ugly…