Vampires: Fiends of the Humanity

Vampires: Fiends of the Humanity
An Analysis on How Media Presents Vampires to the World
With Anne Rice’s The Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat

by Sto. Domingo, Rosalyn Mae P.
06-11360 BA CommRes
Submitted to Comm 140 1st sem 07-08 Dr. Paz Diaz


Vampires are immortal creatures dubbed to be “undead” that sustains their immortality by drinking human blood. This is how the world views these “children of the night.”

But then again, that is only the most general concept often integrated with the word vampire. From Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and New Tales of the Vampires, these blood-sucking creatures have been described in a lot of different ways that often creates puzzles for the humanity.

In this simple analysis, I will be delving in the different ways these vampires are embedded to the mind of humans with respect to their culture. And to do this, I’ll be focusing more with Anne Rice’s vampires versus the “common vampires” with the help of Social Action Media Studies.

Social Action Media Studies

A theory by Gerard Schoening and James Anderson, this talks about how media content is interpreted within the community according to meanings that worked out socially within the group, and individuals are influenced more by their peers than media. (Littlejohn, 2005: page 282) A community –based approach, this theory is outlined into six premises: (1) meaning is not the message itself but is produced by an interpretative process in the audience, (2) meaning of media messages and programs is not determined passively, but produced actively by audiences, (3) meanings of media shift constantly as the members approach the media in different ways, (4) meaning of a program or message is never individually established, but communal, (5) actions that determines a group’s meaning’s for media content are done in interaction among members of the group, and lastly, (6) researchers join the communities they study, if only temporarily, and therefore have an ethical obligation to be open about what they are studying and share what they learn with those studied.

Comes with these ideas is the “increasingly popular way of approaching media which is to think of the audience as numerous interpretative communities, each with its own meanings for what is read, viewed, or heard.” (Littlejohn and Foss, 2005: page 282)

An interpretative community when a group of people starts to develop their own meaning of things viewed, seen, or heard. They have common understanding of contents that sets a common outcome of ideas. Thus, if one is to know or understand how a community views things, you have to know their cultural background. Any person may be a member of any interpretative communities

Thomas Lindlof presents three dimensions of an interpretative community. The first is content, which says that a community must share the same meanings of the media messages or programs they consume and also share some common meanings of the content. The second is interpretation, where members of the community must share similar ways of interpreting messages but do not necessarily share the same meaning. And finally, the third, is social action, where members of the community share common sets of behaviors towards the media in question and how the media affects them.

With this theory, I’ll analyze how different people view vampires according to how the media presents them. There will be two media used, one is print (The Vampire Lestat) and the second is from the big-screen, the movie Interview with the Vampire compared with the general perceptions and the ancient presentation of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula.

The Interviews

Before I set out to collect different sources about how media presents vampires, I conducted some ambush interviews about how my peers view vampires and why. Following are some excerpts.

Q: So what comes to your mind when you hear the word vampire?
A: Hindi ba yung sumisipsip ng dugo? Yung katulad nung Dracula…
(Aren’t those the blood suckers? Like that of Dracula…)
Q: Ahmm... So how do you think they survive? I mean in the sense of population.
A: Kapag kinagat ka nila. ‘Di ba vampire ka na nun.
(When they already bit you. You’re already a vampire then, aren’t you.)
Q: How can you say so?
A: Wala. Sa tv tsaka sa books ‘di ba. Ganun.
(Nothing. In the television, or books. That’s how.)

In this particular interview, the interviewee was not really exposed to vampiric talks or media. Her only basis was the general perception of people to this specific topic and thus she was considered an audience from the community who bears no care for the topic at hand. The meaning then of the word vampire to her, is as simple as the phrase blood-suckers.
In the second one, another one who was not as versed with the topic as the first was interviewed. Same questions were issued and the following were her answers.

(Q1) A: Ahmm… Yung parang kay Mary Tudor ‘yun ‘di ba? Yung tinawag na Bloody Mary kasi nagpapapatay ng mga protestants. If I’m not mistaken, impaler ata tawag dun.. Siyempre pati na rin yung kay Dracula.
(Q2) A: I think pwede naman silang manganak…I mean, sa Dracula, they can have sex, so maybe they can also procreate.
(Q3) A: Wala, yung Dracula nga. Tsaka when I read kasi history books, especially that of Europe, medyo lumalabas yung word na vampire. Yun lang talaga yung alam ko since I don’t read anything about vampires.

Using the first premise, I can then conclude that the audience in the first interview interprets the message in a simple way different from that of the second one who was also lacking in education about the topic of vampires who integrates the word vampire to that of impaler and of course, Dracula. The most striking difference is that the second one seems to have more logical explanation about the word by connecting it to the violence in history.

Count Dracula

Count Dracula, a character given life by Bram Stoker, is supposed to have been from 15th century Transylvania; a tyrant noble with the name of Vlad III Dracula.

He is known to be the Prince of Darkness, the very first vampire. He can transform into a bat or a clouds of bat, a rat or a swarm of rats, a wolf, or mist. He can control the minds of his victims by putting then into a trance so they bide his will. He will either kill you by sucking your blood or make you into a vampire yourself in the same way. He is supposed to be a thousand years old for he is immortal, although there are some ways in which he can be stopped or even killed. These are (1) he cannot cross over running water, (2) he cannot abide the smell of garlic, (3) he cannot touch holy water or bear the sight of the cross, (4) he cannot enter a house unless invited, (5) he cannot leave his lair at daytime because sunlight (or even a big blaze) may burn him, (6) you can find him in his coffin and while he is sleeping, drive a wooden stake through his heart and cut of his head.

These are the characteristics known to people today. The basics about a vampire. And this is generally how interpretative communities view vampires. Under the first dimension of interpretative communities, this is the content—meaning—people share about the concept of vampire.

The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat, the Brat Prince of the Vampires, a character from the book of Anne Rice, is an 18th century French noble who was turned into a vampire by force. A fledgling (vampire child) of Magnus, a 300 year-old vampire, who after creating him jumped into a big blaze and ended his immortal life, Lestat de Lioncourt described himself as “almost human” in a way that he still looks the same as he did when he died as a mortal and joined the realm of the undead only that, he never changed physically after that, but instead just grew more white in complexion, almost translucent. The only thing that usually signals that he is a vampire is that his fingernails are like carved from glass that they shine inhumanly. And this description works for all of their kinds.

Like Count Dracula though, they are immortals and really feed on human blood and sleep in coffins, if they like. Out of all the descriptions connected with the mythological Count those were their only distinct similarity.

They don’t turn into bats or the likes. They do not have familiars. They can go inside the church, touch the cross, and even pray the prayers of the devotees, and still they wouldn’t burn. They cannot die just because of a stake through the heart and a head cutoff. And Dracula, in this novel, is not their eldest vampire.

Anne Rice, creating her own legendary vampires created a new definition of the occult word vampire in her novel, specifically this. This is how her media described our human fiends. And her readers used these meanings/descriptions when asked about vampires. Under the first premise, they are the interpretative community who has their own shared interest as well as common meanings. In this case, their common meaning is Anne Rice’s novel.

And their social action media studies premise falls under the fourth one since the tradition the group has is that they are all fans of Anne Rice as well as vampire enthusiast, and therefore, they are already removed from the Dracula Days and now under the interpretations of Anne Rice.

Interview With The Vampire

Interview with the vampire is a novel by Anne rice that was adapted into a movie. In this paper, we’ll focus more on the movie, rather than the novel.

The movie talks about vampires the same way The Vampire Lestat did since it was based on another Anne Rice novel, but, in respect to the media message, it was taken in different ways by different people.

The first one I interviewed is a boy of seven who has seen the film. He said that he knows vampires are only shaped from the imagination and thus he doesn’t believe they exist but he believes the ways on how these creatures were presented in the movie. I asked him if he knows how a vampire is made, believing he would explain the “Dracula way,” but then he explained it to me in this way: “Una, sisipsipin muna yung dugo mo tapos pag konti na lang yung dugo mo, kakagatin nila yung kamay nila tapos ipapainom sa’yo yung dugo nila. Tapos nun, vampire ka na.”

That was exactly how it was shown in the film and that was how he presented the information to me. When I asked him how come he knows such things, he said it was because his sister is a vampire. Fancy that.
This particular interview, the premise at work is the fifth one, where a group’s meaning for media content are done in interaction among members of the community. In this particular part, the community is the family.

The second interview was of the sister of the first interviewee, (she’s not a vampire, just a fan) she answered the same way her brother answered the questions I poured at them but in the last part of the interview, she said that actually, she is quite confused in a way that, in Anne Rice’s series’ says that vampires cannot reproduce the way human do because they are already dead. But in other books, general resources, they speak another different thing. And these things confuse her view of the vampires.

After talking to her, I realized that she was already making an active acceptance to the media messages she received. Thus, her reaction proved premise one and two where meaning is not in the message itself but produced through an interpretative process in the audience and that meaning of media messages and programs are not determined passively, but rather, actively by the audience—that audience actually do something with what they view or read.

Vampires Questionable

After conducting these series of analysis, I’ve come to the conclusion that vampires are viewed in different ways by humans. It depends on how they react to the messages being given to them and to how their already composed meanings of these topics affect their interpretation. But even though a lot of factors turns this vampiric topics into a subjective ones, it ends with what the audience choose to do with the facts they are given.












REFERENCES

Littlejohn, Stephen and Karen Foss, Theories on Human Communication, 8th ed. 2005
Rice, Anne. The Vampire Lestat. 1984
(movie) Interview With the Vampire
K-Zone October 2003, Vol. 2 No.2: pp. 38-41