6 Mind-Blowing Ways Zombies and Vampires Explain America
Here's the weirdest graph you'll see all week. It's graphing the popularity of zombie movies versus vampire movies, split out by whether the president at the time was a Republican or a Democrat. There are exceptions, but in general when a Republican is in office, it's all about zombies. When it's a Democrat, it's all about vampires:
Via mrscienceshow
And apparently all our apocalypses started with Eisenhower.
Night of the Living Dead shambled into cinemas during the Nixon era. Carter gave us two adaptations of Dracula. See that massive red spike in the '80s? That's when conservative superhero Ronald Reagan occupied the highest office, and a Night of the Living Dead remake, one sequel, two Return of the Living Dead movies and Reanimator occupied the cinemas. Then Clinton gave us Anne Rice. The connection is confirmed by academics who study the subject. What the hell?
Actually, it makes perfect sense. Horror plays off of social anxieties of the times, and it's all about what the left and right are afraid of. For instance ...
#6. The Right Fears Vampires Because They're Immoral Sexual Deviants ...
Vampires represent a combination of all the things the right fears about the left -- a breakdown of traditional morality and sexuality, a rejection of religion (there's a reason you can ward off a vampire with a cross), and the seduction and corruption of the innocent. It's everything Mom and Dad fear when their little girl goes off to college. When a Fox News viewer sees this:
They're really afraid of this:
Via Time
To be fair, we're pretty sure this crew could whoop the cast of Twilight hard.
It's the sexual seduction aspect that's driving the whole vampire phenomenon right now, so let's start there. Vampires are so damn sexy right now, advertisers have even started using vampire imagery to help sell their shit, from razors to cologne.
Via mydisguises
No, vampires wouldn't need razors. Let's not start that argument.
The idea of the sexy vampire is something Bram Stoker essentially invented -- before that, vampires in folklore were basically walking corpses. Dracula reinvented the vampire as someone whose bones you would walk over your mother's grave to jump. It worked then for the exact same reason they work now -- they were the absolute inversion of conservative Victorian ideals. Prim and proper English ladies, after being bitten by the Count, became oversexed slutbags who abandoned their maternal duties to indulge in depravity. The motive of the vampire invasion was to turn England into the Jersey Shore.
A fate worse than crumpets.
And it's never about traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships. From Buffy to Anne Rice to Twilight, part of the whole concept of vampires is that they're not just sexy as hell, but aren't too picky about which warm hole they decide to probe.
Count the number of characters in True Blood who are gay, or at least display bisexual tendencies. You'll see our point when you run out of fingers. There's pretty much nothing about the vampire that doesn't directly oppose the conservative ideal, and although being conservative doesn't necessitate being Christian, a hell of a lot of American conservative ideals are rooted in religion, as they were in Britain in Bram Stoker's time.
"We believe in love, forgiveness and staking the shit out of vampires."
And that brings us to the fact that ...
#5. ... They're Foreigners ...
Bram Stoker's Dracula was the book that first took a bunch of campfire stories and cultural myths and constructed the modern incarnation of the vampire. It's about a guy from Transylvania (which we're betting you probably couldn't place on a map) who decides he wants to leave his dark, lonely castle at the edge of some obscure European village and enjoy the comforts of Western society.
But when he arrives in England, he starts "converting" people into the same kind of monster that he is. What really stirs the heroes into action is that the new legion of ex-humans are aggressively loyal to Dracula, not to Britain. Shit, if Dracula had been written today, he'd be wearing a turban.
"Sure you can go out with that murderous vampire. Wait, is he a Muslim?"
Daniel Bernardi points out that vampire movies tend to crop up whenever immigration becomes a hot-button issue in the United States (along with alien invasion movies). In the late '80s and early '90s, an important era for the immigration and multiculturalism issue, we got a crop of movies such as 1989's Vampire's Kiss, in which the vampires were all model minorities like African and Asian Americans (on an unrelated note, it contains some of Nicolas Cage's finest moments):
Vampires tend to have their own language (as in the Blade universe), and their own weird rituals and government (True Blood). But in every incarnation, a vampire is not one of us.
"It's agreed then. We like drinking blood and talking in unspecified European accents."
#4. ... And Parasites.
When Rush Limbaugh said that "individualism, to a liberal, is like showing Dracula the cross," he wasn't just making a random analogy. He could easily have said that it's like showing Superman some kryptonite, or like showing Ke$ha a bar of soap. No, commentators like him love the vampire analogy. He often says "vampire" is just another word for a Democrat -- a parasite, who "sucks the blood out of capitalism."
Via billingsgazette
Well, this can't possibly be a political cartoon. Where are the labels? We don't know what this means.
Or, consider the 2009 vampire movie Daybreakers. In it, vampires have taken over the world, and installed their own society and government. But with no more humans to bleed out, the people begin starving in the streets, leading to harsh, Soviet-style rationing and mass vampire riots. It's the exact kind of bleak, dystopian hell that people like Limbaugh imagine will become reality if the Democrats win another term in office. No one in society is producing, everyone is just bleeding their neighbor dry.
Or, you have Vampire Nation by novelist/Ayn Rand aficionado Thomas Sipos, which just openly makes the vampire/leftist connection (the cover features a blood-drinking Lenin).
Or as they say in Russia, better vampire-Lenin than zombie-Stalin.
Even True Blood, where the good guys are vampires, puts them on that side of the equation, the heroes always being denounced and hunted down by gun-toting conservative caricatures.
Via arynstary
"Say NO to brooding, dangerous and sexually attractive young people!"
So, let's take this from the opposite side now. The more conservatives come to power and prominence, the more zombie novels/movies/ video games people buy. Why? Well ...
The fun thing about this whole analogy shows something that is seen if you step back from the partisan feelings of Republican vs Democrat, Right vs Left. The supposedly "Communist" Left/Democrats are much more the individualistic "go-your-own-way" spirit that exemplifies Capitalism, despite wanting to help the needy and curb abuses of the wealthy (things that supposedly Christian people should be a hundred percent behind). While the supposed bastions of Capitalism Republicans/Rightists want to remove all controls on the wealthy and their companies while placing more and more controls over the personal lives of individuals (sounds like the way every fascist dictatorship is run doesn't it?). The vampires are the perfect example of individualistic hunters out for their own profit and interests, living and profiting as they wish and can. While the zombies are a horde of faceless mindless beings (sometimes followers of an individual normal person or company that uses some means of directing them) lifeless thoughtless drones living only to make more of themselves and consume, no individuality no choices, just existence, that inevitably will collapse in on itself.
ReplyZombies are all the same both physically and mentally. Generally a republican is white and conservative christian who has the everyone for themselves mentality. Their only focus is reaching their goal, food. Who cares if that other zombie can' reach the food, you take what you can before it's all gone. And yet they require that everyone be for themselves in the same way.
ReplyVampires are alike physically but each retains their own identity. Since they retain their own identity they can have various beliefs, like democrats who steriotypically have more diverse backgrounds than republicans. They have a more good for the group and keep your individually sort of thing. The group vs individuality thing does not always stay balanced and swings between two extremes. So the individual can choose to cooperate with the groop reach a goal or they can try to reach a goal on their own. For avampire the goal and the method can vary because they don't only act survival instincts.
Just trying to connect things...silly I know
Interesting read!
Replynosferatu not sexy scary as all hell actually
ReplyTwilight doesn't really fit into this, the vampires in Twilight are the embodiment of ultra conservative, patriarchal, hetero-normative, white, Mormon ideals...which explains why they're so f**king boring.
ReplyWhat are Mummies? Let's see; foregn like vampires, otherise very similar to Zombies, want to bring back ancient beliefs and monarchy, I know! Islamists. Werewolves? Werewolves have split personalities and don't even know what their wold half is up to. Nonvoters? Maybe. Ghosts? Barely there at all, Minor parties. Gremlins? Anarchists.
ReplyMummies are a type of zombie. Instead of rotting, they're dried like beef jerky or fruit roll-ups. Because of better preservatives they retain more intelligence than a typical "moist" zombie.
write an article that equally compares both sides to monsters, guess which side complains about "Liberal Bias".
ReplyThe biggest problem is it's lack of accuracy to the theory, which offers none of these comparisons because the rise in movies of that genre is actually based on opposition to the monster, not being the monster.
Downvoted for blatant political bias. Seriously: "leftists" is not any more correct a term than "rightists."
Reply"Leftists" is thrown around allot by Limbaugh and Fox News and other conservatives. The "Evil Leftist Agenda" or "Communist Leftist Extremists" are both really popular themes for thier shows for the past 8 years, before that it was "Left-Wingers".
Stoker did NOT invent the sexy vampire. For one thing, "Dracula" was heavily influenced by Le Fanu's earlier novella "Carmilla," which features a vampire who is not only sexy and seductive, BUT A LESBIAN. (Seriously. Look it up.)
ReplySecond, the first REAL vampire in fiction is 1819's Lord Ruthven, who is based on Lord Byron, and both Byron's and Ruthven's MOs involved seducing young, innocent women. (See "The Vampire Archives, ed. by Otto Penzler.)
Thank you! So many people forget that Carmilla was -before- Dracula.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we fear zombies and vampires because they want to eat us. And Buffy the Democrat Slayer just doesn't have the same ring.
ReplyAnd where do werewolves fit into all this?
ReplyWell if you follow the logic of the article it leads to werewolves being "savages", basically indigenous peoples. Or perhaps Libertarians being all wild and uncontrolled.
ROFL I was just rereading this article, and clicked on one of the earlier links, and discovered that the experts being cited actually had their explanations directly opposite to what is stated in this article (Democrats are zombies, Republicans are vampires who want to bleed the country dry).
ReplyThough either way you want to look at it, I still don't see the pattern being upheld in the chart at the beginning. Too many blues under reds and vice versa to even hint at a correlation (and even if there was a correlation, you know what xkcd says about that....).
I for one can say I take pride in being a “zombie”. I have more friends as a zombie. We zombie do good thing for the community (most of the time…) and being a zombie makes me feel like I’m not alone in this world (that and that next to brains, eucharist bread and wine is the greatest food on earth!!!) Anyone interested in friendship, fellowship, and post-death resurrections please feel to visit zombiecomehome.org or zop.gov today!!!
ReplyWell flesh and blood of the Lord is a perfectly suited meal for zombies. Cannibalism rocks!
Zombies ... like ... London riots, Seattle riots, OWS ... zombies ...
ReplyHow about I offer a different political interpretation:
ReplyVampires are like politicians (of any party) who like to suck the blood out of the rest of the country. They in turn see the "lesser-born" (for lack of a better term) as a zombie horde that they can twist to their whim (or at least keep from noticing that they have no power beyond shambling about their routines and trying to eat (or satisfy other fleshly desires) on anything around them that moves)? And if they can get the zombies to attack the other zombies - bonus!
I resent the notion that Twilight vampires are vampires. They aren't. They're fairies hidden in the guise of vampires. They sparkle in the sun for goodness sakes!
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesProtagonist Edward Cullen not only believes in God (he has a giant cross in his house...wtf?), but he REFUSES to have SEX with someone willing. He only agrees to have sex AFTER getting married, 'cause you know... he has "morals" and shiz. If that's not bad enough, he never tries to bone Jacob despite ALL the sexual tension happening between those two (more so than Bella) because he's "heterosexual". Meyer's vampires are the most anti-vampire vampires in the history of vampires. Y'know, they're hardly cool enough to even be considered fairies. Lestat de Lioncart is a much better example of the quintessential vampire, in my opinion.
That aside, great article! Very interesting read. :-)
You .. actually watch that shit?
Read the books. Before I take a dig at something, I like to be informed about it. ;-)
Well it's different because these are Mormon vampires...
I have to give Kathryn Bigelow some credit her Vampire movie Near Dark perfectly personifies your argument.Conservative Cowboy from a Texan Ranch is seduced,bitten and kidnapped by a nomadin tribe of Vampires who just take whatever they want and don't give back.
ReplyInteresting how in this very comments section, all the Conservatives are all upset but you don't see Liberals complaining.
ReplyWho'd complain about being a sexy vampire over a witless zombie?
There already is a book about sexy zombies: The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer. In it zombies are caused by an STD (one so powerful even saliva can carry it). It makes the zombies extra horny, to try to pass on the disease. Also, they can be controlled with whips. It is a hilarious and fairly well written book.
ReplyYES! I was getting worried I was the only one who knew of the phenomena of the sexy zombie. And, quite honestly, I find The Loving Dead far more enticing any of the Twilight books.
....zombie strippers...still cannot believe i watched all of that movie...rediculous...i would much rather be a vampire :)
It's probably hard for me to argue against this seeing as I am a liberal who plays a game called Vampire the Requiem.
ReplyBut I would point out that sometimes the V word is used against conservatives as well.
That political cartoon of Obama is just a rip off of a picture from the Village Voice of Bush sucking the life blood from Lady Liberty (hell the Liberty statue is exactly the same).
Though I wonder if it means anything that they gave Obama much bigger fangs.