It’s the vampire instinct

She loves the taste of blood, hates the sun, and will tell you she died in a train accident back in 1892, meet Seregon O’Dalley, a would-be vampire living in New York. But she’s not the only one; vampires are in fashion across the United States, encouraged by the hit TV series “True Blood,” and “Vampire Diaries”, and the Twilight saga. Stories about feeding on blood are greedily consumed and eagerly published.

For a pastime with dark, anti-religious overtones, vampire fashion has itself become like an organised religion. There are rules, priests, private gatherings and large-scale celebrations with hundreds of “vampires” attend balls every few months.

Believers in this sect-like lifestyle range from teenage devotees of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight to adults who got hooked on Ann Rice’s Vampire Diaries in the 1970s.

In the very un-Transylvanian setting of New Jersey, O’Dalley keeps her apartment well curtained from the sun and decorates it with bat motifs. O’Dalley actually enjoys garlic, the traditional weapon against vampires, and her blood consumption is modest, to say the least.

“Every once in a while I drink blood. I make a prick on my finger and take the blood,” she says.

And there’s no chance of leaving nasty marks on her neighbours’ necks. “We don’t bite. That should never be done. Everything should be consensual,” she cautions.

Joaquin Latina, who claims to be 2,744 years old, even if his passport puts him at 35, said he has been fixated on vampires since childhood. He’s read all the literature on the subject and never misses an episode of “True Blood”, which he rates far above the more anaemic Twilight.

“Vampires are not monsters as such, they are more beautiful than the average persons, and they are immortal. It’s a dark ideal of mankind. Today they are more like rock stars,” Latina said.

Sociology professor Robert Thomson, who teaches at University of Syracuse in upstate New York, said “the vampire culture has been around for a long time, long before Twilight and ‘True Blood’.”

However, “Twilight has completely domesticated it. It got rid of the Eastern European monster.” According to Thomson, vampires are surprisingly marketable. They are “mysterious, dark and very, very attractive,” he said.

The Twilight Saga books and films, soundtracks and dvds of television series “True Blood” and “Vampire Diaries” are readily available in Pakistan. There are varying opinions as to whether vampires are more popular than before. A manager for Liberty Books told The Express Tribune recently, “Vampire books are very popular amongst teenagers and we have seen a definite increase in their popularity after Twilight has become an international trend.” However, the salesman at Muzika said, “I do not think the sales of other (vampire) movies and television series have increased after the popularity of Twilight, and I would say that vampires aren’t more popular than before.”

WITH ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY NEWS DESK

Published in The Express Tribune, July 23^rd, 2010.