Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World

CHAPTER ELEVEN. Vampire Cyborgs

CHAPTER ELEVEN Vampire Cyborgs They’re everywhere. Vampires. The Hominus nocturna. We hunt ’em, you see. whistler to dr. karen jenson in BLADE (1998) Vampire Anatomy 101. Crosses and running water don’t do dick, so forget what you’ve seen in the movies. You use a stake, silver, or sunlight. You know how to use one of these? [Hands her a gun.] The safety’s off, round’s already chambered—silver hollow point filled with garlic. You aim for the head or the heart. Anything else is your ass. blade to dr. karen jenson in BLADE (1998) Hominus nocturna; virus; disease; genetic mutation; genetic experiment; a genetically engineered superrace. In the vampire films of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, these terms have come to replace classic descriptions of the vampire: bloodsucker; revenant; succubus; shapeshifter ; fiend. Vampirism is increasingly explained through the language of science, described as a disease, and in cases such as Near Dark, The Forsaken, Vampire: Los Muertos, and the Blade trilogy (Blade [1998], Blade II [2002], and Blade Trinity [2004]), a treatment or cure is discovered. This choice of language, however, goes beyond reading vampirism as a disease or specifically as an AIDS allegory. In particular, the Blade films, Underworld (2003), Van Helsing (2004), and Underworld: Evolution (2006) have contributed to a reconception of generic conventions and iconography that undermines the laws of religion and folklore in favor of the laws of science and technology.It is not simply the transmission of vampirism that is treated scientifically, but the methods of hunting and killing a vampire. 198 CelluloidVampires As such, this has led to a new understanding of the vampire body and its strengths and weaknesses.While the vampires in John Carpenter’s Vampires and Vampires: Los Muertos turn to the church and its religious rituals to enable them to walk in the daylight, these later films show them using technology and developments in genetics to improve their physical condition . Furthermore, the manner in which the vampires embrace new technologies is mirrored in the way that these films have moved away from physical makeup effects in favor of computer-generated effects in their representation of the vampire.This change in technological method has equally contributed to the reconstitution of the vampire body on a representational level. They are no longer defined by the boundaries of their bodies but are often able to transcend and redefine them at their will. In this chapter, therefore, I will explore how, like in Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire hunters embrace new technology while the vampires come to embody it, as they are transformed, both narratively and aesthetically, into vampire cyborgs. John J. Jordan argues that Blade has reimagined vampire mythology through the lens of science by making Blade a vampire cyborg: “‘A hybrid of machine and organism,a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,’representingamysticalfiguresurroundedinternallyandexternally by science.”1 Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor see cyborgs as not simply the product of the physical fusion of machine and flesh, but as the product of a technologically-dependent society. “Even if many individuals in the industrial and postindustrial countries aren’t full cyborgs, we certainly all live in a ‘cyborg society.’ Machines are intimately interfaced with humans on almost every level of existence not only in the West and Japan but among the elite in every country of the world.”2 This technological dependency is conveyed in recent vampire films through the reinvention of the modern vampire-killer. First, their tools have changed. As Blade explains in the quotation that opens this chapter, the rules from old vampire films have been abandoned, and religious artifacts such as the crucifix, holy water, and holy wafer no longer have any effect on vampires. This alone is nothing new as, with the increasing secularization of society, films from Martin to Near Dark had already detached themselves from the codes of the church.What distinguishes these films is that scientific and technological tools have replaced the artifacts. In the Blade films, in addition to Blade’s signature samurai sword, he and his fellow vampire hunters use modern weaponry such as technologically enhanced crossbows, shotguns, silver nitrate bullets, lasers, ultraviolet Vampire Cyborgs 199 lamps, grenades and bombs, an anticoagulant superagent, and a biological weapon called Daystar. Similarly, in Underworld—a film that replaces the genre’s conventional confrontation between the living and...