Guest Post: a 21st-century vampire

I posit a 21st-century vampire, an internet vampire.

He-- or she-- resides in a tiny coffin-like cocoon, surrounded by his own soil. Like Stoker's original Dracula, he can endure daylight but is weakened by it. He finds it disagreeable. He goes out only at night, and only when driven by hunger-- by appetites-- by an unignorable biological craving for other humans.

He shuns the sun. How pasty he's become! To quote Stoker's novel, "extraordinary pallor."

Count Orlok, the vampire of the German Nosferatu films, was preceded and attended by a flood of rats, plague-bearing rats who were OF the vampire but not, like, physically the vampire. Orlok could also move as a shadow or as fog. Thus, from within his lair, this 21st-century vampire, via the internet, is present in others' lives in a spooky, infiltrating way without being actually tangible. His tapping fingers send forth biting rat-words; he slips through social-media privacy-cracks into others' lives like a clammy mist, observing but unobserved.

Like the vampires of old, this 21st-century equivalent is a parasite, a leech, in the sense that he lacks his own energy and can produce nothing-- he can only consume. He lives to drain the vitality from those who are "alive" and active, perhaps via commenting negatively on their actions and their cultural creations. He is full of hatred for those from whom he draws his own vitality-- hatred entwined with need.

His life force is entirely drawn from others. He has no "self" as such but must suck others' selfhood, acquiring second-hand scraps of self, drinking strength from those more vital. He has a bad smell. He hides ghoulishly in a sinister cave, lit by a computer screen and LEDs instead of candles. Again quoting Stoker, he is someone "without a single speck of colour about him anywhere."

This 21st-century vampire doesn't show up in mirrors. He is not self-reflective, beyond a vague anger-provoking sense that something is wrong with him, that he is sick. He may mourn his sickness or perversely glory in it, but he's unable to really see himself; he's cut off from self-perception. He also cannot "see himself" in others: his alienation makes him incapable of empathy. Lonely and twisted, he is not the controlling and seductive aristocratic Dracula of Stoker's book but the wasted-looking and repulsive Count Orlok of Murnau & Herzog's films.

In the German Nosferatu movies, Orlok is defeated by being distracted by a beautiful woman all through the night. How many squandered nights has our 21st-century vampire suffered the same fate, helplessly hypnotized by images of beautiful young things 'til the break of dawn? What a sad and disgusting creature.

He is bound by complex and ancient rules, he holds himself apart from the masses and yet is less than any one of them, for he is not superhuman: he is subhuman, below human, a dangerous incomplete being... and a plague vector.

Burn him to ash! Slice him, puncture him. Stick a stake through him, a tent-peg pinning him down in the filth where he belongs, ensuring this monster can no longer rise from his grave to upset and attack those in the land of the living. If you cannot destroy him, at least ward him off. He is a 21st-century vampire, a creature of horror whose stale unlife is worse than death: better you die than become him.