1.  One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
2. Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
3. Vampires selling unsafe sex?  looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
4. Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

Vampire roots: immortality & the religious price to be paid

 The long term interest in vampirism dates back well beyond Bram Stoker’s creation to blood sucking demons that feature in nearly every culture on earth, from Eastern Europe, to Phillipines and Malaysian vampires sucking on the blood of foetuses.  

What if we didn’t have to worry about death or aging?

As personal experience of death has retreated out of the house over the last century and into the hospital ward it is more mysterious and probably no less scary. Vampires in many films now are not the decrepit Nosferatu types but frozen in the flower of Hollywood youth, or sometimes even their teens.

At a simple level the vampire genre of course enables an audience to experience the ever-popular idea of eternal life (the 80% of the population professing religious beliefs can hardly be wrong can they) but at a price. Because of course there is only one (depending on your religion) respectable route to salvation via God. 

It’s not clear that readers of the genre are more religious than anyone else but it’s amusing to note  Twilight author Stephanie Meyer’s Mormon background and Anne Rice’s subsequent conversion to Christianity.    

A bucket-load of religious iconography

There are of course religious trappings threaded all through the vampire story in terms of their operating in darkness and aversion to light, the Cross, and holy water. People become vampires after being excommunicated and of course there is the redemptive end to Coppola’s version of Dracula (1992) where Dracula reunites with God by having Mina behead him.    

It it perhaps not unexpected that in the Christian church you drink the blood of Christ at Communion!

True Blood the HBO television series even makes drinking the blood of vampires a drug gateway to a semi-religious rapture. 

So what happens if you take away the fear of death for the reader or perhaps even scarier in our culture the fear of aging (always assuming of course the vampire can obtain an adequate blood supply and doesn’t come across anyone athletic with a stake)?    

For side-stepping God there’s a price

As one would expect given the often annoying moral calculus in fiction and drama there’s a heavy price. At the root of it all vampire tales perhaps  reinforce the taboo against cannibalism in most cultures.

Tragedy and tortured loneliness is well-explored in Frances Ford-Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and in Interview with the Vampire you can almost imagine Tom Cruise sitting on the therapist’s couch as opposed to next to the narrator.     This is the Greek fear and pity cathartic angle: the tragedy of the vampire who is semi-human but cannot enjoy human things like real food or sunlight (or maybe, as we’ll explore shortly, sex).    

In the thoughtful 1987 vampire flick Near Dark and in Rice’s Interview with the Vampire the price of vampirism is perhaps most poignantly expressed through the characters of the small boy Homer and the girl Claudia who are effectively adults frozen in time in children’s bodies, the theme of forestalled development.

It will be interesting to see which  fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or TV series. Place your bets below.

What’s all the buzz about curation?

Over the last couple of years there has increasing interest in the concept of curation, the idea that as the amount of content on the web expands exponentially, it may not be the availability of the content itself, but how it is organised and prioritized for you that matters (check out Google Trends on the growing use of the term ”curation”).

Whole new business models are springing up involving web sites who don’t employ journalists but rather act as hosts and curators of good quality blog posts.

A remarkable example in the financial world is SeekingAlpha.com where most of the good articles you read there every week have not been paid for by the site, and are written by people only loosely affiliated with it.

Added to that  kind of traditional editorial curation via websites is curation occurring in spades on social media services like Twitter, where by following experts or enthusiastic amateurs in certain areas, you have a high quality pre-selected flow of news delivered to you by people who you trust (but might have never met).

Personal curation

However the concept of curation that is of interest to me personally at the moment is (oddly enough) ‘personal curation’: content organised for my own personal purposes and not for an external audience.

The concept of personal curation is kind of odd really, surely with Google around the idea that you would want to retain and organise information for personal purposes is perhaps redundant?

There’s no need as you perhaps did 30 years ago, to print or photocopy documents that interest you and stick them in a filing cabinet never to be seen again. 

Why not simply search for them again? Or even just build bookmark lists?

In such a search-driven world a large part of your personal worth in the workplace as a domain expert, for example, might consist of your ability to understand the language used in relation to a certain concept, and with some ok syntactical search skills to be able find that information using the mother of all search engines.

Finding information does not seem to the issue. The personalised newspaper is here today and we’ve previously written about apps like Calibre that enable you to integrate the full text of literally any RSS feed out there on the web into your e-reader on iPad, Kindle, Nook, or whatever it might be.

Timeshifting your personal reading

You can also help organise information by ‘timeshifting’ the flow of links coming at you to save them for later  using something like the web-based bookmarking service ReadItLater (RIL), which will track which articles you have (and have not) read, and synchronise across multiple devices like your Desktop browser or your smartphone.

RIL works via Bookmarklets on your browser which add any pages you’re viewing to your personal list at ReadItLaterList.com (what we’re reading at Drivelry at the moment here), so you don’t have to interrupt your current piece of work to read that interesting item that just surfaced on Twitter. 

But what you do with an article after you’ve read it?  How can you retain and organise that information?

Retention of information you’ve read

Bookmarks, while easy to use, can rapidly fall prey to idiosyncratic folder taxonomy.  I’ve personally got 92 different folder categories under my bookmarks, and over 1100 favourites saved going down at least 4 levels.

Ouch.

The flow of email coming at you can be partially tamed (for retention and relocation purposes at least) through use of a full text search system running on your desktop such as Microsoft’s freebie Windows Search add-on.

My Desktop PC currently has almost 20 years of files and emails indexed this way via Windows Search.

An added benefit is that Windows Search will recognise sub-types of files and (providing you’ve used an appropriately keyworded bookmark name) enable you to search through your bookmarks as well, along with Office documents and even external network drives.

Saving e-book documents for later reference

On something like the Kindle you can ‘clip’ individual articles that you read to save for later.

However the Kindle saves them into a single text file which can be searched only very clusmily on the Kindle itself using the Kindle’s built-in keyboard.  You can periodically export it as a text file using Calibre and save it to your desktop where it will be picked up by Windows Search but as a single very large file on your Desktop PC it is not very useful for search purposes.

You can also use Calibre to automatically (say once a week) extract the full text of all recent articles in your ReadItLater list and load to any E-Reader.

Despite preferring the E-ink display of the Kindle over the backlit screen of say an iPad, one of the drawbacks of the Kindle is that if you see a link on the Kindle which you would like to read later  you cannot easily add it to your favourite social bookmarking service, and neither can you bookmark a current article so it becomes part of your personal searchable archive (see below).

In the medium term it’s likely therefore that I will give up using the Kindle for anything but books unless it starts to support this sort of functionality. 

Build your own Google Custom Search Engine from your favourite social bookmarking service

To be able to search the full text of  articles that you previously read and bookmarked there is another way to do it aside from saving the full-text of all web pages you read to your Desktop.

Essentially you export your entire ReadItLater bookmark archive and saved Desktop bookmarks and load them into a free personal Google Custom Search Engine (although you may not want the full-text of a lot of your Desktop bookmarks as they will often point to pages like your online banking application).

A reasonably straightforward process for creating a Google Custom Search Engine from your RIL bookmarks is described here (a 20 minute process to complete assuming a good working knowledge of say Microsoft Office).

Even better, by registering for the RIL Digest service (which produces a single web page with a magazine style layout of all your recent bookmarks)  you can point your Google CSE at the Digest and it will automatically crawl and index all your future bookmarks.

You now have  a cloud-based ‘memory‘ which learns as you read articles on the web. Drivelry’s memory is here.

1.  One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
2. Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
3. Vampires selling unsafe sex?  looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
4. Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

Does the vampire live forever?

Northrop Frye the Canadian literary academic had a theory that there are only a few plots that get endlessly recycled in different stories.    

Looking at the vampire genre  it sounds pretty plausible because there are just so many vampire story and film variations.   

IMDB actually includes 685(!) vampire-related movies dating back to the silent era around 1910 (including foreign language and ‘straight to video’ releases) some of which are tempting just because of the sheer ridiculousness of their titles. Fancy ”Batman Fights Dracula’ (1967) for example? Or in an equally light-hearted ‘vein’ how about the recent  “Vampires Suck” parody complete with its ‘Team Jacob’ and ‘Team Edward’ (the two male protagonists in Eclipse & New Moon) references?   

Even if you just stick to more major titles you end up with about 284 vampire movies  (based on a list at Washington State University, Updated) made over the last 100 years. AND about sixteen vampire movies scheduled for 2011. 

Bram Stoker and Dracula’s children

Thinking back even just over the last 20 years there is an amazing range of variations on the standard vampire plot:  

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) based closely on the the 1897 novel that really started the modern vampire film. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, with Keanu Reeves and a certain amount of thinly disguised moaning from Winona Ryder, the more sophisticated film took double its US box office takings from foreign Box Office earnings and is still one of the biggest vampire blockbusters of all time.
• other  thoughtful vampire flicks like 1987′s underrated Near Dark cowboy version or 2007′s Rise (might be described as ‘intellectual vampire movies’)
• race exploration crossovers like Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), itself a remake of a 1972 black Dracula movie Blacula,   (a nice attempt to re-colonize the ‘whites only’ vampiric world) or True Blood’s (2008) strong references to race issues in the American South.
• vampires in space and Alaska: 2007′s 30 Days of Night embedded in a claustrophobic snowbound world
• splatter-fests/martial versions like 1996′s From Dusk Till Dawn set in a stripper’s bar, or 1998′s Blade with Wesley Snipes and its equally commercially successful sequels
• Tom Cruise’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on the Anne Rice novels, an imagined less European (and more American) history of vampires (“we can  have cultured vampires in America”)
• adolescence and vampirism going back to 1987′s The Lost Boys,  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Twilight (2008)  
• combo horror with Vampires v Werewolves: Underworld (2003), and the New Moon (2009) and Eclipse (2010) instalments of the Twilight series
• borderline zombie/vampire variations (zombies are not ‘undead’ but infected with a bloodborne virus): 2002′s 28 Days Later or 2006′s Ultraviolet
• ‘bleed-through’ vampire sub-plots in TV series like Supernatural, Doctor Who, Smallville, Charmed and The Simpsons to of course being the main plotline in series like True Blood (2008) or The Vampire Diaries (2009)

Take your fangs off my wallet

Huge interest in vampires equals huge earnings at the box office and in associated merchandizing (Amazon is currently even selling ‘Bella Swan Replica Jewelery’). Box Office Mojo estimates total vampire flick box office earnings at almost $2 billion since 1978 and puts the average takings of each vampire movie at over $35m, making a vampire film one of the safer bets a movie producer can take.    

The rising tide of blood

 Based on Google Trends data (going back to 2004) the level of search interest in the term ‘vampire’ has more than doubled over the last 5 years, with significant peaks coinciding with the Twilight phenomenon (major vampire title release dates and their level of box office takings shown in green). 

Both Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and Daybreakers might well have done better had they not coincided with the two Twilight Saga release dates.   

The Twilight series has also joined another select group: that of films where the sequels have grossed more than the originals such as the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Why do we (and Bella Swan) love vampires?

No doubt having a decent looking lead actor like Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner is helpful but vampires also play to our obsessions about disease, mortality and sex. It’s a potent mix and one that will be considered in the next article in this series.

Love them or hate them, the vampire theme is important in our culture.

It will be interesting to see which  fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or TV series. Place your bets below.

A couple of years ago I managed to loan my television to various friends who were broke or in transient accomodation or both.

My TV-less period lasted 3 years in total.

It’s surprisingly difficult to lend your TV to people actually. In the end my TV was found wanting because there were too many other people out there also trying to loan out their TVs, and their TVs had better specs than mine, a bigger screen, built-in DVD, etc.

In retrospect I find it interesting that all of us were loaning rather than giving our TVs away. It’s as if we couldn’t cut the umbilical cord, we could bring ourselves to part with it but deep down knew that like a straying pet it would probably keep coming back to feed on our brain (if that sounds a bit ‘un-pet like’ take a closer look at your cat) .

Look out for my new venture, ‘LoanYourTV.com’: there are thousands of people out there wanting to part with their TVs if someone would just help them through this difficult transition, find a new place for their beloved TV, and not allow them to back out of the deal at the last minute.

What television and toxoplasmosis have in common

There’s some Japanese horror movie out there whose name escapes me (probably sucked out by the aforementioned pet), I think it was ‘The Ring’, where the plot involves a video that kills you when you see it.

The Ring does seem a bit of an extreme metaphor but on the other hand it’s hard not to think that television does something to your brain…

Television doesn’t always entertain – or not in the way we know it Jim

How else do we reconcile that so much of what we watch is simply so bad? We’re not just talking morally or intellectually it just doesn’t entertain. Yet, we still watch it.  

How else can you explain staying up till midnight watching an appalling Manga-adapted subtitled Asian martial arts film called ‘Crows’ largely about the hairstyles of the protagonists with westernized-looking Asian female characters saying insightful stuff to monosyllabic male characters like “am I irritating you?” 

Or what about another gem I’ve been glued and gripped by:  ‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’? In a recent episode John Connor  is being supplied a girlfriend from the future to make sure he is psychologically well adjusted and not too dependent on his mother … hmm … how Oedipal. 

And then there’s the extremely dubious idea of the attractive robot Cameron (played by Summer Glau at left in the picture above) who just stands around looking …errr … attractive but conveniently has no feelings to be offended by John as the adolescent male in the series …  love to have sat in on the marketing meetings on this one. Listening to ‘On the Media’ the other night Brook Gladstone noted that the female Captain Janeway in the Star Trek series was considered too hard to handle for their prime young male demographic so they had to bring in the curvaceous cyborg ’7 of 9′, again a case of a non-threatening good looking but ‘emotionally dumb’ girl for younger males.

Yet applying a ‘high culture’ filter to television might be missing the point. We might just be too dumb to understand what television is really about.

Sure, we know that television provides an illusion of social company for us as social animals.  Sure we know that television has the capacity to relax us – over a lifetime a 75 year old will have sat through 9 years of television at an average of 3 hours a day viewing. There aint nothing else that I’m aware of that can make anyone sit that still for that long. More interestingly there have been suggestions that we like the orientation buzz that the techniques of film bring i.e. the content doesn’t matter we simply are attentive to the pans, zooms, cuts, and jumps, even down to preferring so many per minute.

The subtle benefits of junk television

However there are other more subtle benefits to junk television which perhaps are the tradeoff for whatever it does to our brain. For example:

1. Junk television does not actually require your full attention. That’s a damn good thing. We can eat dinner in front of it or do other things.  Walk away from a television program and unlike the onstage actors in a theatre nobody is gonna care. And the way television fits with multitasking especially on the web is becoming increasingly important:  36% of UK broadband users (aged 16-55) state they have both the TV and Internet on in the same room every day. On weekdays the time when TV and Internet multi-tasking is most likely to happen is around 8pm in the evening (TNS/YouTube Media & Audience Study December 2008).
2. Perhaps for the intellectual snobs amongst us television allows us to feel superior to what we are watching on screen? Who hasn’t sat with a bunch of people watching ‘social’ TV and joked about the predictability of the plot, or character cliches onscreen? Haven’t done this? Try interactive TV by talking about it with kids/friends as you watch it.
3. Or what about television’s ability to seduce the conscious part of our brains so we can avoid the trap of analysis paralysis? It’s hard to take yourself too seriously while writing and watching ‘Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation’, watching junk television stops you from writing something that requires someone’s full attention (because reading stuff on the web is not something anyone gives full attention to!).
4. Another subtly brilliant feature of a lot of TV plots is that they actively encourage channel surfing – it’s easy to follow 2-3 programs simultaneously. Perhaps this is actually good for the television watching surveys run for advertising purposes?  Channel surfing is a little harder with the emotional ups and downs and plot intricacies of, say, ‘Silence of the Lambs’…
5. Or what about the cultural hegemony theory: all those hours of enlightened American drama deluging the developing world have to be reshaping socially backward countries (although perhaps ‘I Dream of Jeannie’  or ‘Bewitched’ could be said to undermine this argument not to mention the way so many TV plots seem to imply that most serious problems can be solved with a handgun).

As the amount of time that we spend reading online ratchets up (according to Nielsen the average person is now spending about 2 and a half hours on the internet a day) I’m inclined to think that the easy non-committal nature of television is going to keep our loyalty.

Excuse me. I have to catch that episode of ‘Heroes‘.

The writing about dying business

It’s hard to be a fan of the celebrity cancer confessional.

 Apart from the similarity to watching a sports match where you  know the likely outcome, and that disease should at least be the great social leveller, you also wonder about priorities i.e. how would you like to spend your last year, doing stuff with people who are important, or writing a book?

27 year old Jade Goody, British Big Brother reality-TV celeb, didn’t face that sort of choice - she had a ghost writer.  However other books like Randy Pausch’s ”The Last Lecture” (below) would have meant a much higher degree of personal involvement.

Before dying in a hail of bullets from JG fans (my autographed Michael Jackson poster is on the wall just left of my framed Princess Diana photo) there’s no question that having a terminal illness would concentrate your mind on the things that are important in life.

It’s easy to see the appeal of writing about your moment of clarity:

I’m dying, and these cretins around me are worrying about how to set up the digital video recorder to tape the next episode of ’Heroes’.  So listen, here’s what the view looks like from the edge of the cliff –

The consequences for the author’s family might be not quite as intended (a grandparent I know caused consternation by writing a children’s novel shortly before dying with various thinly veiled portraits of family members and even mixed generations in the same story) but it’s still a family legacy of sorts.

Death is interesting when it’s not someone close

Admit it or not, most people quite like to participate in a tragedy (if not personal) much as we like to watch a good crime TV episode, and deep down maybe even hope that it will give us a bit more perspective on own lives, or at least make them look better… (my own explanation for the implausible appeal of horror movies).

Yet despite the fact that we’ve heard the phrases ‘live each day as if it was your last’  or ‘life is a terminal illness‘ 1.1 million times it’s hard to focus on the important things.  Even where you’ve had a life-threatening illness,  accident or just plain high-risk moment, the effect wears off rapidly within a year or so and you are back to obsessing about whether you are getting the best interest rate on your term deposits.

The things that you really want get deferred (a baby-boomer I know actually plans to start writing their novel at 65  – a lot harder to do the mental rewiring necessary at that age).

And, let’s face it, it is genuinely important to generate the cashflow to support a family, or save the income to support the 20 to 30 years of old age that most of us face. We can’t spend all our time sculpting.

Our own death: not something to think about?

Thinking and reading about other (interesting) people dying like Randy Pausch might well be ok, but thinking about your own death is surely maudlin/depressing/unhealthy and perhaps downright self-indulgent?

After all, a positive mental attitude even makes you live longer?

We…ll (as Samantha on ‘Bewitched’ used to say) maybe a little thought about death could be useful at times.

For example it’s worth being aware that if you’re going to work 6-7 days a week to put together a pile of cash, it is quite possible you won’t be around to spend it.

The age you’re going to die

How possible?

Well there are some rather emphemistically named ‘Life Tables’ (because they’re more like ‘Death Tables’) which give you an idea of what the death risk might really be for you as an individual (see below for 2003 figures for the USA).

For example,  more than 1 in 10 of our aforementioned 65-year-old novelist’s classmates will already be dead by the time he puts pen to paper, and he personally has around a 6% chance of dying between the ages of 60 and 65 alone.

These are quite appreciable risks:  your peers may well do riskier stuff than you do but the fact that 1 in 20 will be dead before 50 bears thinking about. This is not like taking 20 bets on sharemarket stocks and knowing one will be a big loser - this is a bet you don’t come back from. 

Derived from: http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/LifeTable2005.html

As you can see from the table the risk accelerates somewhat from around 55 onwards.

Still feel there’s definitely going to be time later to do the things you want to do now?

The risk of living till you’re really old

A risk also worth thinking about is the risk that you don’t die but end up incapacitated, uncomfortable, or off-your-tree for a considerable period in old age (yeah possibly you can’t appreciate the distinction then) and if you’re 80 to 85, realizing that half your friends won’t attend your funeral (unless it’s in the same cemetery because you’ve already been to theirs). 

There’s a nice little ‘how long will I live’ calculator at Penn U where you can plug in your own characteristics like gender, diet, where you live,  stress, travel etc and be given an approximate year of death for your personal circumstances if you want to delve into personal risk factors (medical information on the internet is ranked inappropriately but that’s another story).

What you might find most scary using the calculator is not when you’ll die (assuming any reader of this sort of article is a risk-averse individual who tests the depth of a puddle before stepping in it) but the odds of living too long… For example, my personal estimate includes a 25% probability that I will live to 95 or longer (the prospect of funding 30 years of retirement … great!). 

Although it’s difficult to buy the argument that with increasing life expectancy we’ll never die (because life expectancy will increase at the same rate we age) the trend is your enemy here as the CDC notes, “from 1900 through 2004, life expectancy at birth increased from 46 to 75 years for men and from 48 to 80 years for women.”

Unlike the risk of premature death it’s difficult to know what to do about living past your sell-by date.  It’s all very well to think that an extra bottle of pills will help you out when the time comes, but even if you’ve got the means and intellectual capacity to carry it out, the will to live is pretty strong even when the quality of life is crap.