Prophet Hour: Vampires on Supernatural
People’s fear creates the most vivid images, legends and fairytales and Supernatural effectively plays with these fears.
Vampires have been degraded into loveable, misunderstood outsiders for quite a long time in modern media and for now Twilight is just the cherry on the pie. Even the books and movies that don’t generalize Vampires to be rather harmless creatures compared to original lore have the tendency to portray the main-character as the “one big exception”, a vampire that is actually a nice guy that doesn’t want to hurt anyone and eventually gets the girl. Where vampires used to be a threat and something to be feared, they have become the promise of eternal life and love, perfectly serving the unfulfillable image of love and romance portrayed in contemporary media. Adding up to this is the fact that vampires are hardly used as the bad guys in horror-movies and thrillers anymore.
I read a book-series that I personally really loved (Midnight Breed) because it described vampires as dangerous and serious threats. It was full of blood, sex and violence but even as dark as the books were, they were still love-stories in the first place and I think this is a problem we have with how vampires are presented to people, especially young girls. People have added up to and changed aspects of traditional lore A LOT over the last couple of years and over that vampires have lost their danger to people.
Vampires and other monsters have been the reason people didn’t get out in the dark, they have been the reason parents told their kids to be careful about who they talk to. In nowadays’ society, girls don’t only get told that love has to be forever (preferably the first love even) but also that it is okay to be in love with the dangerous and I am talking about girls at the age of 13 to 15. You can’t expect 100% rational decisions from girls that age that aren’t set in their own identity, not to speak of their sexuality. They still need to find themselves and are confronted with unrealistic expectations of love as well as partners. People who seem dangerous to you often are dangerous and telling young girls otherwise, can lead to serious problems.
Now finally coming to the way vampires are portrayed in Supernatural, there is an episode that deals with exactly that and that is “Live Free or TwiHard” in Season 6 (Episode 5). I am going to talk about that aspect of this episode for a bit and then go through the important episodes, which feature vampires chronologically.
In “Live Free or TwiHard” Sam and Dean investigate a series of missing persons, all of them teenage girls and find the last victim to be an extreme fan of the Twilight-series. At the beginning we see the girl talk to the vampire that abducts her later on who uses exactly the same lines you would expect to hear in a vampire-romance-story. This is exactly the kind of naivity that I was talking about earlier and I don’t doubt for a second that there are girls out there who would believe someone if they told them they are a vampire.
In general Supernatural has taken a lot of effort into making vampires dangerous and scary again. Supernatural’s vampires are ruthless, violent and egoistic, however, they are not directly what I would call plain evil, they rather do what the original lore was supposed to do: They show the abyss of human kind.
Supernatural shows us a huge variety of vampires that differ not only in their character traits but also in their opinion on humans and how they treat them. With a lot of them you get the impression that they’ve forgotten they have been humans once and that, although they don’t act that much different from humans.
In “Dead Man’s Blood” (1x20) vampires make the first appearance on the show when Kate steals the Colt from the hunter Daniel Elkins to please her lover, Luther. The vampires in this episode abduct humans and keep them as their victims to feed on them whenever they like. They don’t show any mercy or understanding. They simply don’t care about the well-being of others. That was back in the days when there were still “monster of the week”-episodes and the vampires fit perfectly into it.
The next time we are confronted with vampires is in “Bloodlust” (2x03). These vampires have decided on a “vegetarian” lifestyle and that might remind some people of Twilight but there is one huge difference, because the vampires in SPN still couldn’t care less about humans and not harming them. They do it because they want to protect themselves and no-one else. They want to live in peace but that doesn’t make them harmless. They would kill a man without hesitation if they threatened them and they got the chance. They just let Sam go to make a statement but after Gordon didn’t care, I am convinced that Lenore would have slaughtered him if she hadn’t been too drained and exhausted.
-The most terrifying episode including vampires for me is “Fresh Blood” (3x07) but I think this also has to do with the fact that Gordon scared the crap out of me as a human already. It is the first time we are met with the full force, unfiltered. Because the one person that really doesn’t give damn about others is Gordon. He is practically the worst case scenario of a vampire.
Coming back to Live Free And TwiHard we get to see the beginnings of a vampire first hand through Dean. This is a very interesting point of view we didn’t get before. Dean tries so hard not to hurt anyone (especially of course after he hears of the cure). But even before that he fights down his hunger and bloodlust to keep Lisa and Ben safe.
Therefore we can conclude that not all people who turn into vampires are necessarily and directly self-centric, aggressive people who would fit the general image of vampires, but they turn into this kind of people over the time. Newly awakened instincts and the general toll a long life takes, makes them into the vampires we mostly see on the show.
With Benny, it happens what happens to pretty much every other monster on the show. He isn’t harmless I don’t want to say that he isn’t as much of a threat as vampires were before. Even in “Blood Brother” (8x05) there is this underlying sense of Benny not being the dangerous one here, which seems kind of off since he spent decades fighting monsters in Purgatory. Anyways, this just emphasizes the fact that Benny represents another type of vampire, one we haven’t seen on the show before that. I’ll get back to that again soon.
In the 2nd November show I called Benny a big cuddly teddy-bear. This of course was a mistake since that statement isn’t quite true. He is still a fighter, strong, determined and dangerously efficient. Nonetheless he doesn’t appear as dangerous as for example Gordon. Even if some of us (myself included) might have doubted his good intentions until the very end, he never seemed to be a serious threat for the Winchesters. To be honest, Dean as a vampire scared me more than Benny at any time during the show.
However, Supernatural still presents vampires pretty close to the original lore (at least as far as I can judge it basing this on German lore). The problem we/I have with vampires in the more recent seasons is definitely not one of particular presentation but is caused by loss of threatening attributes associated with monsters on SPN in general.
So, to end this little meta, everything I have left to say is that- as we discussed sufficiently on the show- we can only hope that Supernatural is going to get back to the monster-of-the-week episodes at least partially. We have already gotten hints to that in Season 9 especially in Slumber Party and Dog Dean Afternoon and I am confident that we will at least get a glimpse of the old mythological basis of the show as the Season goes on.
