14. Vampires Wrap-up

Here we go with the vampire wrap up! It's been a bloody first season at the Desire of Horror podcast, and that's how we like it! Blood has always had a central place in the History of Religions. Almost every form of sacrifice, pact, and praise has involved either literal or figurative blood as the primary representative of the mysterious life force that courses through our veins but somehow doesn't seem to belong to us. Its mysterious doings are beyond us because blood, like life, is something that is given without our asking for it, and its many necessary life operations are performed mostly in the darkness outside of our conscious awareness. And when it flows are lost, often by similarly unmanageable circumstances, life is irrevocably lost as well. The vampire's dependence on blood for its strange form of life, if what is undead is in any sense "living," renders the vampire a total dependent on it, which often puts it in situations in which it must face its own impotents. Whatever sinister pact had to be entered into to obtain eternity, the vampire inevitably ends up on the losing end because the conditions for the continuation of un-death are an endless yearning for whatever it is that is in the blood that can't be gotten from it by the ritual transfusion of blood that vampires must perform to feed. They may get to be apex predators wielding uncanny power, but this strength is tempered by the misery of its many limits, not the least of which are extreme loneliness and ennui. Join us as we discuss how these advantages and their limitations are played out in each of the films that we viewed this season.

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