Vampire Fight (edit)

^ I still love this picture even though bears don't factor into this column at all. Why is the bear fighting the vampire in the first place? Who cares--sick him, bear!^

I revised this one recently for the October issue of a local paper that I contribute to.

Since the month of October climaxes with Halloween, I decided to write something about ghouls—vampires, in particular. Unlike zombie lore, vampire lore doesn't appeal to me, and so I didn't bother to watch a minute of True Blood or Twilight for an answer to the confounding question about vampires I'll soon be posing. The vampire flick that really sent my mind motoring in circles was the TNT original movie The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice.


The Librarian is awful, but that hardly matters. It depicts the sci-fi adventures of a witty scholar who vacations in New Orleans, where he encounters a plot-line that's basically Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code. The main character shares the wry cleverness of Indiana Jones, but unlike Indy, he lacks prowess in both hand-to-hand and whip-to-sword combat. The librarian relies on a French vampire chick to save him from the attacks of the ex-KGB henchmen who factored into the plot somehow.

The film climaxed with an airborne tussle between Mademoiselle Vampire and Russian Dracula in a New Orleans bayou, and all the while, the librarian just bit his fingernails, shin-deep in a hurricane-ravaged puddle of his own urine. As the vampires grappled with each other, vanishing and reappearing twenty feet aboveground and exchanging punches, I became baffled by the nature of a vampire fight.

When two vampires duke it out, are they determined to sink their teeth into their rival's throat, or do they try to plunge a stake into the heart of the other one? Vampires kill by chomping throats, but they are killed by a stake through the heart. The paradoxical question is: When vampires fight, are they driven by their instinct for killing, or driven by the instinct to kill their opponent? Are they concerned with the only way they know how to slay, or are they concerned with the only way to slay their opponent? For my money, a vampire fight is a real mind-fuck of a stalemate.

It seems fruitless for a vampire to gorge on the jugular of another vampire because the ultimate goal of jugular-gorging is to convert a human into a vampire. A vampire on the hunt is basically an active recruiter for his own kind. There is no point in trying to convert somebody who has already been converted. That's why Jehovah's witnesses leave each other alone, choosing instead to pester all the rational heathens in their neighborhood.

Hypothetically, had Russian Dracula succeeded in turning his enemy's jugular into a geyser of Hawaiian-Punch, his victorious smack talk would've went something like this...

“Yeah, I sucked on that, bitch! Hope you enjoyed those centuries of devilry because I have delivered you from the eternal life of a vampire to...more of the eternal life of a vampire. Dammit, could we just arm-wrestle or something to settle this whole thing? Because I'm CONFUSED.”

Even zombies, the inept brethren of vampires, are smart enough to realize there is no sense in neck-gobbling one of your own. These vampires craning for each other's throats are just tracing the check-mark in a box that has already been checked.

Since I've provided reasons why a vampire biting another vampire's neck is preposterous, you might suspect that, by default, those Transylvanian terrors must break out the wooden stakes when they've got a score to settle among themselves. But that idea, too, can be refuted.

In simplest terms, do you know what sort of a vampire keeps a wooden stake handy at all times, stashed away in a pocket inside his cape or tucked into her lacy garter belt? A SUICIDAL vampire! A vampire brandishing a wooden stake is not a threat to innocent people; it's a monster's cry for help. Next to overdosing on bulbs of garlic, self-inflicted heart-staking has got to be the most common way vampires say goodbye to the cruel underworld.

If a vampire with a wooden stake is not suicidal, the alternative is that he's really stupid. When you've got superhuman powers, it's senseless to always lug around the thing you're vulnerable to. Underneath his red Speedo, Superman does not wear a nut-cup made of Kryptonite. The Wolfman is not equipped with holsters to hold revolvers loaded with silver bullets. The hero and villain in question value self-preservation, unlike a vampire with a wooden stake tucked behind his ear like a pencil.

It seems absurd to have a serious debate about non-existent creatures, but I vaguely recall that I once did that. A devout fan of True Blood and Twilight and probably the Eddie Murphy flick where he plays a vampire in Brooklyn told me that vampires can be killed by decapitation, too. She added that vampire fights typically end in this ghastly fashion.

The notion of killing a vampire by beheading it is nonsense. All make-believe ghouls should have but one fatal vulnerability, and decapitation is the hallmarked method of (re-)killing zombies. The creator of the vampire mythology screwed up when he declared that a bloodsucker can be killed by both a stake through the heart AND decapitation.

The vampire's susceptibility to beheading is worse than just unoriginal; it's also damaging to their stature. As the number of ways a monster can be destroyed goes up, the power of said monster decreases. The main reason why the expression “Life is fragile” is so profound is because death is caused in a multitude of ways for humans. From faulty parachutes to diabetes to backyard wrestling to jerking-off with a noose around your neck like that dude from INXS, we're a very eclectic and creative species when it comes to dying.

Monsters are special because they are so much more elusive of the Grim Reaper than we are. When we hear the somber news that someone we know has unexpectedly passed away, the first question we ask is, “How did it happen?” When a zombie is informed of the (second) death of a fellow zombie, there is no reason to ask this question because they already know how it happened: Decapitation, or obliteration of the brain, if you want to nitpick. When you double the number of ways a creature can be snuffed out, the creature becomes less frightening, more human-like, and more inclined to bitch about how fragile life is.

All this is to say that although beheading one's opponent is probably the ultimate goal in a vampire fight, and even though I'm disappointed in that conclusion, I'm happy to offer some evidence that vampires rank below zombies when it comes to fragility. Vampire lovers, if you insist that your favorite ghoul is also vulnerable to beheading, you're tacitly admitting that zombies—who are typically regarded as dumb and inferior monsters—are in fact tougher and more resilient than vampires.

So, the next time you read about Bram's Dracula, stick THAT in your heart and Stoker it. Logic rules. Zombies drool. And vampires suck.